You'll get the most out of this book if you read it with the expectation of finding some great ideas for developing your own short term patterns. The 20 or so he presents are overall fair. A few are actually very good on their own. Analyze and experiment with them. It also provides other good, but general, short term trading info.

Any novice or intermediate level trader can benefit.

I am in thrid grade and just turned nine. I picked this book for a mystery book report. I choose it because I had never read a Wishbone mystery before and I thought it would be fun. It was a fun an exciting book! I was surprised because there were two mysteries in the one book. My attention was held right to the end. With all the clues I could not guess who stole the trophy. I would highly recommend this book.

Michael Reynolds does it again. In delving into the conscious and unconscious motivations of each and every character in Hemingway's first serious novel, The Sun Also Rises, he poses a question about what the expatriates were doing abroad and why they were doing it. Many of the supposed lost generation had personal problems stemming from the Geat War, and Reynolds is apt to discuss why and how this affected eachother. In determining how and why the narrator and his cohorts are imperfect in their own human ways, Reynolds gives Hem well-deserved credit. He proves admiration for the author by pointing out many symbols, motifs, and historical antedotes gone unnoticed by a casual reader. He also lets Hem's genius shine through with a clear and terse analysis. His discussion of structure and values is well researched and designed, but when it came to the last chapter, although compelling, I feel he became highly repetitve. All and all a fast moving read that provides information without trying to convince the reader to agree with all he mentions. I read it in one sitting and believe any fan of Hemingway, and especially The Sun (as Reynolds refers to the book)should pick it up for fun.

After a while you wonder if anyone has a marraige, or pregnancy, that works. These stories, however, are simply outstanding. Chabon's prose uses the English language perfectly, recognizing that every word has its own true meaning, and using those words to paint uncannily vivid pictures. His characters are also true to life, reflecting how unstable and unpredictable we all can be, and he details the relationships betweeen these characters with great accuracy and understanding.

In addition, we are treated to a short story by "August Van Zorn," the Wonder Boys' author who first united Crabtree and Tripp. I don't know if this will become a regular pseudonym for Mr. Chabon, but if it does, so much the better. Not every story hits the mark, but it's only one or two, and they don't miss by much. Now it's just a matter of waiting for his next book.

Michael Chabon is mostly known for his novels (Wonder Boys, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay), but I think his short stories are little gems. The opening sentence of the title story alone is wonderful. His writing sparkles with characters, settings, detail, and vivid turns of phrase. The final story, a Gothic tale written in the style of an author-character in The Wonder Boys, was perfectly done. A perfect book to keep in the car or briefcase for reading while you wait--but you may not be able to stop reading when it's time to go!

I have to admit that the cover of this collection put me off a bit. I'm not usually attracted to Werewolves. But when I realized that the Werewolf in the title story wasn't a supernatural creature, but a child who felt like I did way back when -- isolated,friendless, lonely -- I couldn't help but buy the book. And I was overwhelmed, frankly. Chabon's snapshots of life's moments -- sometimes redemptive, often painful -- touched me in a way most contemporary fiction doesn't. There's a bit of Yates here, some Cheever, Alice Munro, even Lovecraft. And there is something entirely Chabon about it. I couldn't help but laugh at the "reviewers" whose main complaint was that they had to use a dictionary every once in a while. What a great pleasure that was for me -- to discover a word or two that I'd never read before. Isn't that the beauty of the English language? That it contains these mysteries and gifts of little used but fabulous words? How lucky we are to have a writer able to send us tripping through the Oxford English Dictionary while keeping us absolutely grounded in the contemporary American experience.

With this collection of seven stories (three of which are reprints from Asimov's) Lethem continues to befuddle me. I loved Motherless Brooklyn, Gun With Occasional Music, and a short story in the Best of Crank anthologyÑbut I hated Amnesia Moon and another story in Best of Crank. While all the stories in this collection benefit from brilliant premises and Lethem's dexterous prose only the two best two ("The Happy Man" and "Vanilla Dunk," both from Asimov's) have true "endings." The other five trail off into nothingness or incomprehensible weirdness that make me wonder if Lethem's subconscious is bound by the old writer's adage that no ending is better than a bad ending.

"The Happy Man" features a dead man who is raised from the dead so he can financially support his family, the catch is that his consciousness must reside in hell part of the time. There he has bizarre nightmares that lead to an unfortunately predictable denouement. In "Vanilla Dunk," professional basketball players are issued suits giving them skills of former greats. From this interesting idea, Lethem fabricates one of the best sports stories I've ever read, as an obnoxious white kid wins the "draft lottery" and gets to be the next Michael Jordan and racial tensions ensue. "Light and the Sufferer" follows a crack addict, his brother, and the mysterious alien who follows them around New York. The humans' story ends rather obviously, but the significance of the aliens is left somewhat obscure. "Forever, Said the Duck" is about a cocktail party inhabited by clones of everyone who's had sex with the two hosts. It's promising enough at first, but degenerates into a psychedelic nonsense. The nifty notion of "The Hardened Criminals" is that convicts are physically hardened and used as bricks for a massive prison tower. Lethem seemed totally unable to make anything out of the premise, however, and when a young criminal meets his father in the wall, the result is rather forced. "Five ..." presents the mystery of a woman who has sex with a man and "loses" two weeks of her life. Unfortunately, the story implodes rather than leading anywhere interesting. The final story, "Sleepy People" is simply odd and makes you wonder why it was included.

Lethem is certainly a creative genius, however, he's still pretty hit or miss in harnessing his creativity. Sometimes he doesn't seem to know what to do with it and ends up writing himself into a bizarre corner. Still, I'll continue to read him to catch the sparkling stuff.

I loved _Gun with Occasional Music_ and _Amnesia Moon_ but this collection didn't really do it for me. _The Happy Man_ was great, I liked _And Forever, said the Duck_, _Vanilla Dunk_ was fun even though I hate sports. But like another reviewer said, no real conclusions, more like story fragments. His quirky style is great, he just needs more room to develop it.

It is the sign of a true master that none of these short stories bears any resemblance to another, yet each is in its own way outstandingly audacious.

Some worked better than others, and from reading the other reviews here it seems the selection varies from reader to reader. Yet the range and boldness of his ideas nearly staggers the imagination, and to have pulled this off -- not once, but seven times -- is astonishing.

time to stop reading this book..

I picked this book up in the spring of 1990 while at a Fred Meyer store in Salt Lake City. I had never heard of W. Michael Gear, but the image of the space-suited man on the cover captured my attention, and it looked like a nice thick book, so I bought it.

I was not dissappointed! The Artifact is an interesting mix of deep space war story and political espionage, with alien supertechnology thrown in for good measure. The Brotherhood seem very much like a benevolent Freemasonry seeking to preserve the best parts of human science and history against the tumult of competing human governments that wield massively destructive firepower. Of course, The Artifact itself winds up being an intruiging character, as does Boaz, the female-gendered superstarship under the command of our main hero, Captain Carasco.

I found Carasco to be a sympathetic and engaging main character, not just a little reminiscent of the Thomas Covenant character from S.R. Donaldson's books. Carasco is a tortured soul who has seen too much, made too many terrible decisions, and through much of the book is at war with himself even more than he is at war with the forces around him. I liked Carasco's depth and humanity, and his struggle largely drives the book.

Like most good SF, the key to The Artifact's success lies in the fact that under all the gosh-wow hardware and deep space imagery, there is a very human story taking place here. Carasco, and many of the others, draw us in with recognizable struggles, weaknesses, and strengths.

The Artifact was so good I snapped up the Forbidden Borders trilogy when W.M. Gear released it a few years later. Forbidden Borders is also very well written.

Simply put, "The Artifact" is a page-turner. W. Michael Gear has created a fascinating universe filled with powerful governments, first-rate characterization, and enough 'who-done-it' mystery to keep the reader on the edge of his seat.

"The Artifact" deals with (obviously) an artifact of alien origin found at the edges of known space. This device is so powerful that anyone who contols it could literally conquer the universe. Unknown to the humans that find the artifact, they weren't the first beings to come across this ultimate weapon, an indeed, those who came first ended up completely destroying their civilations.

Center to the story is Captain Carrasco, the youngest and the best captain to ever fly a starship, and the one selected by the 'Brotherhood' to fly the greatest ship ever built, pick up this alien device, and bring it back. The problem is that Carrasco, after losing his third ship, is a jumbled mess of fractured nerves and regret, and here lies my frustration with this otherwise fine novel. While I understand the importance of Carrasco's plight to the plot, one incident after another...after another...after another is drummed into the reader concerning Carrasco fitness to captain a ship. Finally, I wanted to scream out, "Yeah! You told us a hundred times already!!"

However, "The Artifact" has so many endearing qualities that my frustration for this one aspect turns out to be a rather minor complaint. Matter-of-fact, I enjoyed this novel so much, that I would readily read it again, and highly recommend it to any sci-fi fan. Between 1 and 10, I give "The Artifact" a solid 8. Do yourself a favor and purchase this novel now!

I had great hopes for this anthology, but to be charitable, it's not a must-read. Michael Chabon wanted to bring together strong genre and mainstream writers to reinvigorate the short story by turning away from the ubiquitous "moment of truth New Yorker-type" story toward the classic generic tale, i.e., the plot driven short. But the mainstream writers in this collection write as if they know they are slumming, and, ironically, they try too hard to elevate their stories above the very genres they are working in. Thus, the stories don't satisfy at any level, because they're neither very good at playing the generic game nor significant in their own right. As for the generic writers like Ellison, King, Leonard, and Moorcock--well, their stories are about what you'd expect, which means they don't really belong here at all. Their inclusion here mainly serves to underline the failure of the other writers to play the generic game with any success. (Not that these stories are particularly memorable either: Ellison's effort, for example, is a story I've read in one form or another in almost every one of his collections, and King's story from the Roland cycle could conceivably interest those readers who have had the extraordinary patience to follow the Roland cycle in the first place.) The bright spots are stories by Neil Gaiman and, surprisingly, Dave Eggars himself, publisher of McSweeney's. The latter is written with a great deal of care and respect for the reader and the genre (which I'd characterize as the Hemingwayesque travel-adventure tale) and it does manage to revivify that genre in a way the other stories all-too often fail to do. The low point is the execrable offering by Chris Offut, whose narrative conceit is that it was written over a weekend in time for the deadline but unfortunately reads is if it was written the night before. I won't say anything about the bizarre offerings by Sherman Alexie and Kelly Link, or the tired and threadbare plots of Nick Hornby and Michael Crichton.

Maybe what this collection proves is that hybridity doesn't always work. Or maybe what it proves is that one must know the generic rules before one breaks them. Or maybe it just proves I like my drinks straight.

This installment of McSweeney's Quarterly Concern boasts the work of such acclaimed authors as Stephen Kind, Michael Cricton, Harlon Ellison and Elmore Leonard. It also includes writers previous assocated with McSweeney's endeavors: Rick Moody, Dave Eggers, Michael Chabon, Dan Chaon and Nick Hornby. With their 10th offering, McSwys sheds some of its indie skin and brings some major leaguers down to their quirky minor league. Or is it the other way around? In either case, it is a decided departure from previous Concerns. Past issues have boasted unusual packaging, hardcover editions and pictures of birds. This collection of tales has none of these things.

What it does have is Michael Chabon for a guest editor; he has put together a collection of experiments in a disappearing form: the short story with plot and action. Chabon claims we are up to our knees in "the contemporary, quotidian, plotless, moment-of-truth revelatory story." These stories flirt with what some would call "artless," or "pure entertainment." In the end, many of these stories are both artful and entertaining, which is not a bad combination.

The collection makes for interesting reading. Stand outs include the stories by Glen David Gold, Elmore Leonard, Nick Hornby, Dave Eggers, Michael Moorcock and Michael Chabon. A diverse collection, to be sure, these stories are all colorful and robust.. Chabon urges short story writers to take head. Genres considered pulp (detective/spy stories, sci-fi, and ghost stories) aren't necessarily formulaic and cheap. Even if they are, they are usually more interesting than a short story that doesn't leave the house.

McSweeney's doesn't usually publish books of superstar authors like this, so I made sure to get my hands on one as soon as I could befor e they started flying off the shelves. I had high expectations for this collection, and I wasn't disappointed. Every book of short stories seems to have one or two that just aren't interesting, but this book is the exception that proves the rule: every single story is wonderful. While they are all truly great, I particularly enjoyed Glen David Gold's "The Tears of Squonk and What Happened Thereafter," Neil Gaiman's "Closing Time," and Nick Horby's "Otherwise Pandemonium." Stephen King fans will be pleased to note that his contribution, "The Tale of Gray Dick," is actually an excerpt from the upcoming Wolves of the Calla, the fifth book in the Dark Tower series.

Every page is filled with apologetics for Islam. This is a waste of time for the objective reader. However, if you are just concerned with building a system of flimsy apologetics for Islam, then this is the book for you. Otherwise, don't read it.

Though a short book, the Koran is like all scripture and enormous topic to tackle. For a book as short as this, it is inevitable that the work will only scratch the surface. Cook does a good job of putting in secular language how one can approach the Koran as a book and as the centerpiece to the Islamic faith. He writes in inverse chronological order, starting with the modern and ending with the opaque early history of the Koran. This is neither a guide to reading to the Koran nor an interpretation of its contents, but rahter, an anecdotal presentation of many topics relating to its contents. For an introduction to the Koran, it is rather disappointing in the end in terms of offerring a strong list for further study focusing on various topics. Much of this is not Cook's fault so much insofar as few interesting works address the Koran at a layman's level and usually tend to be quite technical and assume at least a cursory knowledge of Arabic. Also missing unfortunately is a good summary of some of the modern trends in literary and historio-critical approaches to the Qur'an though some mention is made of Wansborough (about a paragraph). Overall, it's an accessible read that is likely to inspire further study... There are good collections of scholarly articles by the polemicist ibn Warraq that one can buy as well if one is looking for something with more details.

Let's face it: most of us who've lately been reading books on Islam and the Qur'an are doing so to understand a religion we for the most part ignored prior to 9/11. We're putting ourselves through a crash course on Islam and Islamic culture in the hopes that we can figure out what Islam's basic tenets are, and how it is that the Taliban and al-Qaida can claim the religion as their justification for repression and terror.

Obviously one of the first places to start is with the Qur'an itself. But to Westerners who've never opened it, the book can be intimidating and arcane. Michael Cook's little volume on the Qur'an is a decent introduction to its structure, basic principles, interpretation, and history.

Some points in Cook's book are of more immediate service to the beginner than others. Cook's discussion of the difficulties encountered in translating the Qur'an's Arabic into other languages may not be of great interest to the beginner. But his overview of the various Muslim schools of exegesis or interpretation certainly will be, for this discussion begins to reveal to the reader that there's no more of a uniform way of reading the Qur'an than there is of reading the Hebrew and Christian Bibles. As a consequence, Qur'anic verses can mean different things to Muslims coming from different exegetical traditions. Cook illustrates this point in Chapter 4 by discussing the "sword verse" (Sura 9:5) and the "tribute verse" (Sura 9:29). These two verses are frequently appealed to by commentators on Islam's attitude to "infidels." Cook does a fine job of showing that the verses can be read either as harshly intolerant or as live-and-let-live, depending on how one parses the text.

One of the many merits of this short book is that Cook encourages us to think about the meaning of "sacred scripture" in general. Whatever else scripture is, regardless of the religious tradition we're talking about, it's fluid and living and multi-layered. To condemn a sacred text on the basis of a cursory reading and a literal interpretation of a few ambiguous verses is a rush to judgment.

If you're a fan of kinky sex, bathroom fun, S & M, and humiliating sex, this is YOUR book. Not my idea of "erotic" stories. Little romance offered for my wife, and not much for me either. Found 2 stories interesting, most was not to our liking. Mostly leans toward S & M activities, so if thats ur bag, this is your book.

...but sadly it didn't keep my interest. There were perhaps two stories out of the considerably sized book that even perked my interest. It may be because I didn't feel the stories got along well enough and the sex, well, left me flat more times than not. Erotica should sizzle, not be a limp noodle...

Novellas are an art form that needs to be explored more. There are many fine examples of this form inside this nifty chunk of a book.

This book really kept me interested. However, it wasn't as scary as many of the other Goosebumps books. The ending is a real kicker and though seems kind of a cop out, it does tie things together nicely. Overall, just an average book that nonetheless is fun to read.

Larry is a kid who has a band, and his friends call him "Hairy Larry". One day he finds a bottle of tanning lotion that is supposed to give the person who weres it a tan. The next day that not only does the lotion not work, but he also finds out that he is growing gross black hair! If you want to find out the rest, read it yourself.

TRUE, RL Stine shouldn't be idolised and reading the Bible's a *GREAT* idea!!! Though this may not be RL Stine's best book its still worth reading, it aint half as bad as these other ppl said it is!!!

So the story goes, a 12yr boy named Larry and his band find an old bottle of Sun Tan lotion that claims to give you an instant tan. They all apply it and soon start sprouting course hairs.

And they don't know why they tell their parents, but they wont believe them. Despite what the others said the ending is the best part and a wicked twist I might add!!! RL Stine never disapoints with the endings, except in some of his books...

To find out the rest READ THE BOOK!!!

God Bless ~Amy