The Social and Emotional Development of Gifted Children assembles terrific team of well-respected professionals in gifted, and compiles a great set of essays on the social and emotional aspects of growing up gifted in today's world, complete with the research references to back up thier facts. Authors including Neihart, Rogers, Gross, Silverman, Reis, Robinson, and more... the contributors read like a who's who of gifted education today.

Everyone who works with, plays with, and parents gifted children should read this book. Topics include acceleration, the exceptionally gifted, Dabrowski's overexcitabilties, perfectionism, underacheivment, depression (does it really occur more, or less, in the gifted population?). Special populations are not overlooked, including female, male, gay, lesbian and bi-sexual, african-american, gifted / learning disabled and gifted / ADHD students. The book concludes with topics of parenting, counseling, and career counseling for gifted students.

With all the research-based information, the Social and Emotional Development of Gifted Children is still readable and enjoyable. And it's FULL of research-proven techniques and strategies for dealing with the social and emotional aspects of growing up as a gifted child.

This book should be read by everyone in education, gifted, or parenting a gifted child!

easy steps approaching to statistics and good examples to practice the text.

I have read many statistics books but never one I understand on the first read. This book is for the true beginner. Excellent.

This books has great presentations, diagrams, and examples of concepts in elementary statistics and probability. It is thorough, yet easy to read. Students will enjoy examples that they can relate to.

slightly more flagrant than Robert Heinlien...but is defintely in the running for Heinlien's style of writing...a combination of
Mickeyn Spillane meets Heinlien

Although this is not my Favorite of Robinsons books, It still is a joyes read. If You truly enjoy light hearted fantasy fiction with a whole slew of puns mixed liberally in, this is it for you. I await more.

Erotic, funny, thoughtful, Spider Robinson through and through. I can even picture Jeanne hanging over his shoulder as he writes this, both the "Lady Sally" books actually. There is way too much woman in his writing but then again Spider always has had that touch of cross sexual emapthy. Sometimes I think his wife is writing just to see if they can fool us.

The house sounds like such fun and The Parlor is a place not even second to Callahans for wit, tallent and love.

A place like Sally's IS possible within each of us, if we learn to pay attention to the one we are with.

Dont distract the smoke artists, keep your pants on below the 2nd floor, and dont pee in the pool. Talk politely to the dog also, hate to see him pun on you... Meet you at the fireplace.

I'm a Callahan fan and very much a Spider fan, but this book left me fairly disturbed. It's written as a collection of short stories featuring Maureen, a street hooker who's lucky enough to join Lady Sally's house (where I, for one, would love to work, and I never thought I'd say that about a brothel). I love the atmosphere, and I loved being back in it.

However, the villains in this book got to me a lot more than Spider's villains usually do. Two of them in particular seemed so utterly amoral that it really bothered me to read about them -- maybe I was just empathizing too much with the main characters -- and the solutions to their problems didn't really fix anything other than to get the main characters out of their immediate jam. Spider usually does much better than this at conflict resolution. Usually, at the end of one of his books, I'm glowing, and really hopeful and happy about the possibilities of the human race. At the end of this one, I was just glad I don't know anyone like Tony Donuts.

I think in the end I'll say this: Read it once, then go read Lady Slings the Booze instead. That one is worth a re-read, but I don't think this one is.

What if there was a brothel where the employees were treated like artists instead of meat for hire? Where the clients might come just for conversation and a place to relax in a friendly, convivial atmosphere? Where the House is clean, laid out for comfort, and specially designed to handle everyone's own variant of what they desire most in sex? Where the emphasis is on satisfying the psychological needs of everyone, clients and employees, not just the physical ones?

That place exists, somewhere just across the river from the UN building, peopled by a very living set of characters. Lady Sally, proprietress, has some very demanding standards for her employees and just as stiff a set for her customers, though that doesn't mean that talking dogs, cross-dressing multi-millionaires, con men, and KGB spies can't get in. And the Lady has a very empathic heart, picking up a street hooker in dire straits and turning her into a woman that anyone would love to be around. Maureen was that poor woman, and this book is a set of experiences that she has as an employee of the House. Each of the episodes reads like a fairly long short story, including the incident of the incredibly potent man, the lady whose every word is an absolute command to all those in hearing distance, the gorilla gangster, best known for poking donut holes in a certain part of a man's anatomy, who finds out just what friends are good for.

Spider laces each of these stories with his patented brand of humor, from some truly groan-inducing puns to absolutely howling, fall-on-the-floor gags. Shining throughout these stories is his attitude that people are good, and good people go out of their way to help those in trouble. Heart-warming, touching, and yet there is some definite food for thought here. Our society delegates those who engage in sex-for-hire to the very bottom of the social ladder ands treats sex as a given ability rather than an art form than can get better with practice and training, which seems to be a very odd attitude towards an action that is not only necessary but can be one of the most fulfilling exercises of any person's life. Spider shows, by his emphasis on the positive, just why this attitude does not make sense, and just how much it costs in unnecessary human misery.

The stories here are only distantly related to Spider's Callahan's Bar series and can be read with full enjoyment without any knowledge of the other books, even though Mike Callahan is Lady Sally's husband, as here he only makes a few cameo appearances. Though if you find you enjoy this book, then you should certainly try some of the Bar series for some more romps through Spider's wacky, macabre, humor-filled, and endearing universe.

Although this book revolves around the actions in a brothel, Spider never gets graphic in his depiction of the happenings therein, though the subject matter does preclude handing this to pre-pubescent children. But the theme of this book is such that a mature teen-ager really should read this, and see what can be, rather than the dismal reality of what is.

--- Reviewed by Patrick Shepherd (hyperpat)

If you treat this book not as a novel, but as a collection of short stories on a recurring theme with recurring characters, it works much better. As a complete novel, though, Spider lacks a cohesive plot.

The story of the Lady Callahan, wife of the legendary Mike Callahan and time-traveller, is by turns thoughtful and hilarious. Spider makes a whorehouse sound like a great place to spend an afternoon, and an even better place to live out your career. The chapters (that is, the individual stories) tell of grand stories of the exploits of the employees and patrons of Lady Sally's House.

Ever think that a book about a whorehouse couldn't have a happy ending? Think again.

Fans of humourous science fiction will likely enjoy this addition to Spider's popular series of books about Mike and Sally Callahan. For someone who has never read any of Spider's work, "Time Travellers Strictly Cash" is a better introduction to the series. Alternately, the short story collection "User Friendly" shows some of Spider's best non-Callahan work.