I saw this book at a small party and immediately orderd six copies. Christmas gifts for my folks and a hard-to-shop-for couple. The tins and packages are beautifully shot and reproduced. As a designer I actually am finding it to be a resource for great retro design and color combinations. There you have it... some really diverse reasons to purchase this wonderful book!!!

Interesting to find that this is the first book of its kind on the history of condoms and their packaging. Not only does it contain information the average person would never have guessed, it is useful to those into the history of graphic design. The tins are miniatue works of art in themselves, regardless of what they contained! The down to earth style of the text is easy on the reader as well. All in all a great bargain - the hardcover of the book in itself is worth the price of admission!

I could not believe the quality of this hardback book. Many pricing guide books for collectibles are printed on newsprint, and they are paperback as well. This book is top class all the way! I hope these guys keep coming up with revised additions, as new and yet undiscovered condom tins and boxes surface. Bravo!!!

Normally, people take "word play" to mean puns. This 64-page book features 18 tales from far corners of the earth--Japan, and the Middle East, China, France and Serbia, India and Africa--offering a different kind of word play. In each one, a central character says something that is at once the truth and a lie.

The last story, for example, tells of four boys in Suriname two of whom bragged that their respective fathers were the best traders in town. The third, however, smiled and said that his father had them beat and the fourth boy agreed: He had with one ear of corn purchased a cow, a horse and a donkey. The father had indeed started with one ear of corn, and had indeed purchased a cow, a horse and a donkey--but not all at once, as the other boys supposed. Rather, he had planted the corn ear, sold his crop, bought a cow, sold it and bought a horse and sold it and bought a donkey.

Similarly, another tale speaks of a poet named Mutanabbi who passed by Zubeida's house one day and decided to return that evening to propose that they be married. Halfway home, he encountered a handsome young man who was on his way to see Zubeida, "the most beautiful woman in the city," whom he also wanted to marry. Mutanabbi was afraid of losing his chance, so he told the young man that he had just moments ago seen Zubeida kissing a wealthy man. The young man left, feeling lost. After learning that Mutanabbi had married Zubeida, he accused the former of lying. After all, if Zubeida had really kissed a wealthy man, why would she have chosen Mutanabbi? Why, the wealthy man she kissed was her father, of course.

Another story features a Muslim holy man on the island of Celebes, who found a dark cave and crawled inside to escape from warring enemies. "If it hadn't been for the spider," he told his friends afterwards, "I surely would have been caught and killed." No one believed him, of course. But he had spoken the truth along with a lie. The spider had spun a web over the mouth of the cave, leading the holy man's enemies to believe that no one could possibly be inside. The man, however, had neglected to tell his friends was how the spider saved him.

(This particular tale reminds me of the Jewish tale of David, who as a boy had questioned why God made spiders. Unlike the Muslim tale, however, the Midrash explains that God gave even the smallest creature a purpose. When David was grown, King Saul became angry with David and tried to kill him. David fled and hid in a cave. A spider spun his web across the cave's mouth. That night, soldiers passed the save. King Saul reasoned that no man could hide there without tearing the web. And David thanked God for making spiders.)

From this book, children learn that different traditions are often similar. They also learn to carefully examine "facts." Things presented as truth may compose only part of the picture. Alyssa A. Lappen

More True Lies has 18 awesome tales that will tingle you. Once you start reading, you will never want to stop. More True Lies is the best story I know. My favorite is number 5, because a person dresses like a bandit and it really was a girl. That's what made me laugh. I like the whole truth because it is kind of weird reading a lie. That's why you should read this book. It's fantastic. I hope Shannon makes another book!

I started reading some of these tales to my 5th grade students as a way to get their attention at the end of the school day. To my amazement, they loved them and kept asking for more. They were so inspired, that they've even come up with some tales of their own and I've had to look for more folktale books.

Wrestling to Rasslin' provides a straightforward analysis of American Professional Wrestling. Written by two college professors (and rasslin' fans), the book does an outstanding analysis of the psychology behind the success of the sport

I am in awe of George Eliot. She has constructed a narrative that is uncommonly perceptive and literate about both the subtle and quirky level of individual motivation and the larger forces of society which form the arena in which human lives play themselves out. Middlemarch is a provincial English town during Victorian times and Eliot selects a broad range of characters from every level of society to illustrate her themes. Prominent among these themes are the way in which the ambitions of potentially extraordinary achievers can be constrained by a poor choice of affiliation, most notably bad marraiges. She also addresses the role of women, the way that wealthy landowners determine the quality of life for the poor, and presents insightful portraits of a number of personality types. It is often a very funny book as well, as she exposes the foibles of the pompous and self-deluded which subtle and unerring accuracy.

This is not a light read. This is a long, dense novel, but I found something fascinating on nearly every page.

It's comparatively easy to describe things as we wish them to be than to describe them as they really are. With "Middlemarch", George Eliot has accomplished one of the truly difficult tasks in literature: to describe things as they really are and still hold the reader's interest with less than exceptional characters.

"Middlemarch" was Eliot's attempt to describe a pre-reform English country town. Within the novel we run across the typical characters like the wealthy land owners, clergymen, polticians, etc. The book primarily revolves around the actions of two families, the Brookes and the Vincys.

The main characters are Dorothea Brooke and Tertius Lydgate, a newcomer to Middlemarch. Dorothea has an independent mind at a time when women were supposed to be openly subservient to men. She intends to do much good in the world and is constantly drawing up 'plans'. Lydgate is a physician who wants to make improvements in the medical field. He has a solid idea of what he wants to do with his life and how to accomplish it.

Through these two characters, Eliot presents the frustrations and joys to which we can be driven because of an idealistic mind. Both Dorothea and Lydgate are idealists. Both encounter many trials because of their idealism, trials that they overcome in their own ways.

In "Middlemarch" Eliot also makes a statement about marriage. Dorothea and Lydgate's problems stem almost entirely from bad marriages. They each go into their own marriages with distinct impressions of how married life will be and both are very disappointed when the reality of the situation becomes obvious.

"Middlemarch" is one of those novels that it is difficult to explain why one likes it. The plot is predictable, the characters are unexceptional, and the time period isn't particularly interesting. However, Eliot has constructed a masterpiece with this novel that few have matched. Perhaps the genius of George Eliot is that she could do so much with so little.

Middlemarch is probably the best example of nineteenth century British literature. I felt the first book called "Miss Brooke" was long and laborious to read, however after the setting was established and the characters were thoroughly introduced, I had trouble putting the book down! I am a graduate student and I was able to read the novel in 4 nights. George Eliot shows all degrees of human nature and circumstances in this tale. Love does not always beget love and vice versa. Love does not always conquer all. This book will keep you interested from cover to cover with a vast array of characters and situations and you will swear you know some of the people involved! I highly recommend this book for anyone who loves nineteenth century literature!

O'Brien's title references what he terms the "half-truth" that the faculty is the university. His answer is, "of course, but ..." Drawing on his presidency at Bucknell, and his Hegel scholarship, O'Brien argues that an institution represents something else more difficult to identify but just as important: an ethos, a culture, a set of binding ideals, all of which are continually (re)created by the interaction of faculty with institutional tradition. While others like Donald Kennedy have also briefly noted the idea of a greater degree of centralized direction, if not control, O'Brien takes the idea much further both theoretically, and practically, by proposing specific faculty positions intended to strengthen in the long-term an institution's intellectual culture. Finally, O'Brien argues, in an academic version of Michael Porter's doctrine of "competitive advantage," that institutions ought to capitalize on their differences rather than accentuate their sameness. All in all, a provocative, insightful and, yes, even funny meditation on the relationship between institutional structure and institutional character.

I highly recommend this book whether you are a student, parent of a soon-to-be college student, are considering a career in academia or are just plain curious It is very well written, witty and highly informative, not to mention fascinating. Dennis has written other books and has a website ... Granted, I am a little biased (I happen to be his son-in-law), but I would still recommend this book even if he was not my father in law (Dennis did not put me up to this!). I always recommend it to my "academic" friends, especially when the subject of tenure comes up, which he discusses at length. He also discusses the history of the university, which I find very fascinating. All in all, I can't recommend this book highly enough! Excellent read.