I liked this book because of it's sequential and systematical analysis of human behaviour.

If you are familiar with Lacan, you probably know what you're in for...if not, read on for my own brief understanding in 50 words or less. First of all -- Lacan is well-worth the effort. He is difficult, whooly, interesting, funny, serious, witty. "There's such a thing as One" It is there that the serious begins. For Lacan as for Freud, the child is born into desire. But for Lacan this desire is more than sexual (though also sexual) Desire comes out of the imbalance between what we perceive, language and images, and what actually is the Real. It is impossible to satisfy this desire, because we cannot know what we want. The real is utterly unknowable. Longing is displaced -- we long for everything else instead: sex, food, drugs, alcohol, consumer objects--trying to fill the void of desire. But we are not satisfied by any of these things, because as soon as the desire is fulfilled it vanishes.
Some of Lacan's concepts (as the one above) I read and say -- yes that's IT ... as Lacan said in the lecture translated in this book-- "It's not working out and the whole world talks about it and a large part of our activity is taken up with saying so." Many of the concepts in this book were worth the wading through it -- which I did in one night, entranced, reading through as if in a maze -- or in one of Lacan's Borromean Knots (in which the symbolic, the imaginary, and the real are linked like the rings of a Borromean knot)

In his translation of this, one of Lacan's late and most provocative seminars, Bruce Fink not only clarifies and corrects mistakes in the Jacqueline Rose translation, _Feminine Sexuality_, but offers the _entire_ Seminar XX with careful attention paid to Lacan's multivalent language. Extensively footnoting Lacan's text, Fink aims to open up fully Lacan's references and wordplay, and this proves to be an approach especially helpful for the non French-speaking reader. Seminar XX may not be the introductory text novice Lacan scholars would wish for, (there are some new books on Lacan by other authors that would be more helpful for those seeking an overview of Lacan's teaching and methodology) but this text could be a good place to start with Lacan per se simply because the translation makes it easier to read than other, more widely read of Lacan's translated texts. Students interested particularly in feminine sexuality and jouissance will find this text key, and there are chapters in which Lacan addresses the limits of knowledge, God and mysticism, and the sexual relation. In this seminar, Lacan also offers exegesis on the four discourse structures and the dense but important sexuation graph, which positions the masculine and feminine in relation to epistemology and the Father's Law. People doing work on Jakobsonian poetics might find the early chapters especially interesting for their critical approach.

This is collection of short stories that offers a wide mix of speculative genres. Fantasy, SF, horror, and just plain weird. The stories run the gambit and most are good. "Jeo Defined" and "Moon Warrior" were excellent stories and well worth purchasing the book. Even just the so-so stories were enjoyable and all the authors are names to keep a look out for. In the end, this is a book of up and coming writers and a few of them will no doubt be big names someday.

I didn't know what to expect from this collection of short stories but I was happily surprised. The stories cover a wide range from fantasy, science fiction, and horror to those hard to classify strange stories. Each one is worth reading. My favorites were the one about a radio personality who was singing the Siren's song and the one about a criminal who is forced to undergo "augmentation" to control him. Some wild stuff for a great read.

Although I'm not in sales this is a timely book for me. I have had a lot of problems getting management to take my proposals seriously. This book has opened my eyes to all the mistakes I made in my approach.

Steve Heiman and Bob Miller pick up where they left off with the successful, seminal work on strategy sales called Strategic Selling with a similarly valuable book called Conceptual Selling. Sales today is not about tips and techniques - buyers have become quite sophisticated and expect more than product and service pitches from sales people. Conceptual Selling lays out a logical, approachable process that can be taught, coached, and repeated. What more could you ask for?

"Conceptual Selling" offers a sound and useful approach which should improve results for any salesperson. The authors do a fine job of laying out their philosophy and walking the reader through each step of their customer-focused sales process. This process is neither earthshaking nor mindbending. Instead, it is off-center enough to be innovative and intuitive enough to seem real, even before you implement it for yourself.

Readers looking for alternatives to hard-sell, "close-of-the-week" approaches will consider "Conceptual Selling" a welcome find. The authors do a good job of including check lists, work sheets and high-level summaries of key points and processes. The result is a book you can quickly put to good use and a resource you can easily return to time and again.

The only flaw in the book (the reason for four, instead of five stars) is that the writing was too often overdone and repetitive. To their credit the authors present their concepts clearly. However, it seems they felt the need to oversell a concept which is all about not overselling. Fortunately, the concepts and useful tools they present more than overcome this modest shortcoming. I highly recommend this book.

It was a brief but a very informative book and at the same time was very entertaining to read.

there isn't much written on this subject but here you can find it all in one place!

I remember reading this book circa 1994 as a graduate student at Rice University. It was very interesting, and I found Bruce Sterling's praise of librarians & libraries and the importance of freedom of information very eloquent and uplifting. Hans Moravec, on the other hand, I find to be one sick puppy and scary to boot. He's most famous for wanting to be able to download his consciousness into a computer and attain "virtual immortality". Having read more recent works, such as Theodore Roszack's critical study _The Cult of Information_, I can see that Moravec's ideas are just idle fantasy now...probably never realizable. David Brin also had some very sensitive, cautious words, which I deeply appreciated. I think this book was a rare convergence of librarians & SF writers in the time of the early 90s when Cyberpunk was all the rage (it's not dead yet, but it's not as BIG as it was then, either) and it was easy to be giddy about technology, etc. The internet was still young then. I think we've learned a great deal more and are much more realistic now than when the summary of this conference was put together in book form...This book is now pretty much a historical document more than it is anything useful for a 21st century contemporary reader.

I searched for this book in bookstores and libraries to justify the expense. The only place I could locate it was the law library of the U I'm attending. After reading other reviews and sceptic that I am, I checked it out to see whether it is a worthwhile investment. Since I had already created a couple templates on my own without any training or advice whatsoever, I found nothing in this book to enhance what I already know, and concluded it is not a value for my situation; however, for someone with little technical skill or technical understanding it is.

This book is really good for just getting the most basic functions out of the way. However, don't expect to be able to do much more that the most basic functions, and, by all means, don't throw away your big manual. The price was exorbitant for such a thin book!

On the one hand, it's an excellent introduction to HotDocs: clear, concise, easy to follow, and not boring. On the other hand, it merely scratches the surface of what HotDocs can do, and seems written more to the end-user than anyone who wants to develop templates with it, which is where the power of HotDocs can really shine. I've gone through it twice now, and while I appreciate what it does, it's also fairly limited: you're left feeling more conversant with HotDocs than you probably should be; because when you try to write templates, you won't know enough to. (For that, hook up with the tutorial that comes with the software or find a consultant or trainer). There's a GREAT section at the back of the book where Bruce Miller gives the new HotDocs user advice about how to approach automating his or her practice. But as many others have pointed out, weighing in at a mere 5 oz., this book, like sushi, is high priced by volume. For an hour of time to learn about the material, though, with someone like Miller who knows it, it's probably a good value.

Having read several other books by both Gibson and Sterling, I expected something much better than this. The idea of the information age arriving a century early in Victorian England made for an irresistable "what if...?" Well, control yourself because this is a totally unrealized vision. Their eye for detail and potential effects of mechanical computers in the 19th. century are terrific and at times terrifying; unfortunately, this is all the book has to offer because there is little character development and I've yet to identify any sort of plot. I suspect the authors took on far too grand a concept that they either couldn't finish in a saleable format or within the publisher's deadline. In either case it's really too bad, because it's an idea deserving a more complete exploration. I suspect this would also make an excellent environment for a role-playing game. Charles Dickens meets GURPS cyberpunk.

I acquired a copy of this book almost immediately after it was published, partly because I'm an avid fan of alternate histories and partly because I was an acquaintance of Bruce Sterling, one of the cofounders of cyberpunk. That is, I knew him to talk to because he was an Austinite and always came to ArmadilloCon, and he sort of knew who I was (though he made no pretense of remembering my name each year). He was pleased to sign my copy -- and changed the copyright date on the title page to 1855!

And why do I especially like this book? It's the first instance I remember of what soon came to be known as "steam-punk." A technology-based yarn, but with Victorian techno, not computers. Not exactly. There are three principal characters here: Sybil Gerard, daughter of Walter Gerard, the great Luddite agitator and orator; Dr. Edward Mallory, dinosaur-hunter, afficionado of steam-gurneys, and stalwart of the Industrial Radical Party; and Laurence Oliphant, who pretends to be only a somewhat adventuresome journalist-cum-diplomat but who is actually a top intelligence operative and handler for Her Majesty's government. And then there's Inspector Fraser, part of the very Special Branch, as well as a number of nicely realized supporting characters.

But, of course, the story is really about the world of 1855 in which Charles Babbage was very successful in developing his mechanical computer, a marvelous Engine (always capitalized here) of wheels and rods and gears and punch cards that has put Britain well on top of things, and the government in many ways well on top of its citizens. The plot device that gets things going is the theft of a box of punched Engine cards, the purpose of which is never quite divulged -- though we know the program they contain is Important. It's all a great deal of fun in the Idea-as-Hero tradition. Gibson and Sterling (mostly the latter, I think) have definitely got the feel of the times and the city of London, immersing the reader in authentic jargon and cant, but without casting you adrift.

Frankly, I don't understand the antipathy of the other reviewers. It's a pretty good story and most people I know personally, even those who aren't big Gibson fans, liked it. In fact, my only real complaint is in an area where Gibson's hand definitely shows, and that's the ending of the book. Actually, it doesn't really end; it just stops, and with a bit of Gibsonian mysticism regarding the set of cards thrown in.

In contrast to most of the negative reviews, I thought the suprise ending was powerful and not entirely unexpected.Though this book is science fiction, its way of leading up to the suprise ending is similar to the stratigy used in the movie "Sixth Sense." Both start out slow,yet lead to powerfull endings which are foreshadowed with tantilizing clues.This last means that both stories should be seen more than once in order to be better understood.The Difference Engine is, thus, a complex story that requires an open mind and multiple readings in order to enjoy.

This is perhaps the worst guide Prima has ever put out in my opinion. There are no maps and the level narrative is a joke and next to useless. It would have taken no more than a few hours to write the guides, and days to write the information about spells, armour etc, obviously to "pad" up the book. Get your help off the net and save your money.

Do not buy this book! There is no maps for the levels or anything. This is a complete waste of money. The book just expanded on some stuff that was in the manual when you bought the game. \

If you can find the free manual by the Stratos Group you're in much better shape.