IN DEFENSE OF TORT LAW is a reasonably safe read for readers who know about tort reform but should not be opened by readers who are less experienced.

Sociology professor Thomas Koenig and law school professor Michael Rustad have created a compendium of defenses against misinformation and disinformation spread by Tort Reform. That compendium is very useful. However, any thorough reader would have to supplement it with readings that make the case for tort reform more effectively and more accurately than the authors do.

Although tort reformers, who distort so often, deserve caricature as a form of poetic justice, the authors crafted no evenhanded approach to guide beginners through tort law. Perhaps the best use of this book would be as a case-study of how adversarial settings bring out deception and trickiness on every side.

Koenig and Rustad were most cogent in their criticisms of popularized arguments for tort reform, but in advancing the case for current law and policy, the authors sometimes imitated tort reformers? reductionism, anecdotism, and sophism.

Koenig and Rustad?s defense may persuade readers that tort reformers have been guilty of false and fallacious argumentation but may not convince many readers that Koenig or Rustad have behaved much better than those whom they critique.

The chapters that addressed gender justice, patients? rights, and product safety effectively raised overlooked issues. Chapter Three showed how differences and disadvantages related to sex condition civil law in general and torts in particular; Chapter Four demystified myths about medical malpractice; Chapter Five stretched a few guidelines for manufacturing safe and honest products into ten commandments for avoiding products-liability suits and judgments. Each chapter, however, overlooked issues that tort reformers must and should raise. Chapter Three celebrated compensation of victims of silicone implants without acknowledging the judgments of epidemiologists and judges that such compensation hinged on poor science or no science. In Chapter Four the authors cited the Harvard Study to show that perhaps one out of one hundred victims of documented malpractice sued, but did not admit that the same study revealed three or four unwarranted medical malpractice suits for every one the study?s experts found to be warranted. The authors supplanted reformers? horror stories about frivolous litigation and outrageous results with their 10 Commandments but should have admitted alarming exceptions to each of the authors? ten commandments.

In sum, not a very balanced presentation. If academics behave like this, why shouldn't legislators misbehave?

The media recently has created the impression that trial litigators often are vultures searching for frivolous complaints from which to extract millions in fees. Corporations seeking to avoid the consequences of policies which may seriously harm the consumer, the employee or the environment join with Republican politicians to reinforce this image. In Defense of Tort Law, Koenig and Rustad superbly demonstrate the reality and the legitimacy of many of the grievances that lead to suits against corporations. However these grievances are seldom adequately addressed because few middle class or working class individuals have the resources to confront multi-billion dollar corporations in long complicated expensive legal battles. The authors do an outstanding job of demonstrating that if punitive damages were eliminated, it would mean the end one of the few mechanism protecting the victims of corporate excess and the power of the corporation would be almost unlimited.

This is a good text in aid for learning to sight sing. Many great excersizes are provided.

Love it, just great. superior book for serious musician wanting to improve their sight singing skill!

I mostly agreed with Eric Ma. There are some areas that Wrox needs to review the whole process of publishing Java-related books. Here are some drawbacks that I can draw from reading recent Java-related books:

(1) Repeated Contents: Materials about Servlet, JSP, EJB, JNDI, JDBC, XML, etc are repeated over and over many books. This could waste time, money, and papers for both Wrox and readers.

(2)Books or Articles?: I asked myself: is Wrox publishing books or articles? Each book is written by many authors and the book's flow is inconsistent. The assessment that it is not a book but a collection of articles may partially true. It is true that a book if written by a team of authors could speed up the process of releasing it, but if Wrox editors and coordinators have to do their better jobs.

I suggest that Wrox should review its strategy of publishing books to avoid the repeating of materials over and over and thus bring down the cost associated with publishing the books. The final result is: readers and publisher will both save time and money. Otherwise, readers will loose their belief with Wrox.

For the past 2 years Wrox has been publishing books dedicated to Windows-based data access (ADO etc.), but the same cannot be said about their Java/database collection. Although you find chapters on JDBC scattered all-over almost all server-side Java related books by Wrox, there was no single volume from them that teaches JDBC first, and then show how it is used by the newer dependent technologies, until this book arrived. After looking through this book, I must say the authors and editors have done a rather commendable job.

Why do I make the above conclusion? Let me give you my general impression of the book first. A theme repeated in several of my recent reviews on books from Wrox is about the problem in coherence associated with multi-author books. Well, having more than a dozen of authors for a single book seems to be a fact of life (for books from Wrox at least) now, as the publication cycle gets shorter. I was rather surprised to find out that the organization and coherence is very good in this book, i.e., there is very little overlap among chapters. Also, this books uses JDBC cleverly to tie other pieces of J2EE together, making smooth transitions from one chapter to another. If you want to know, this factor alone prompted me to add an extra star to the overall rating of the book.

Let's now run down the chapters of this book quickly. The first 115 pages deals object-oriented and database modeling, and can be skipped by any "Professional" developer. Then after your obligatory intro to JDBC API, the next chapter covers the JDBC 2.0 optional package. This is the best treatment of this topic I have seen. Then another chapter is all about SQLJ, another first. The effort of having a chapter on database performance should be lauded, where connection pooling, prepared statements and stored procedures usage are demoed. The reminder of the book is about applying JDBC in various J2EE components, such as JSP, servlets, EJB, JMS, and XML. For this part of the book, even though I accept the fact the proper stage has to be set for each one of them, I still don't believe the book found the right balance between focusing on JDBC and showing what these other technologies are about. A large number of pages are used to teach basic JNDI, servlets, JSP's, and EJB's stuff (remember there is already a book on J2EE from Wrox!). Therefore, it is up to the reader to discover the real nuggets of gold hidden in this pile, which are far and in between in places. I found that some critical issues are not highlighted or details are lacking, such as how to use connection pooling/data sources in servlets, JSP's, and EJB's, the threading issues related to sharing database connections, and good database practices in BMP EJB's. However, the one thing I cannot complain about is that the book did not forget to teach the transaction aspect of EJB with a good depth (there is a short ans sweet chapter on using JTA/JTS inside EJB). There is also a chapter on the brand-new JDO framework, even though the spec is still in a state of flux. Finally, there are 4 case study chapters in the book - although the design and implementation are limited in scope and as a whole those samples do not teach all you need to do know about enterprise scale J2EE system development, they do provide a flavor of how JDBC is used in real world, together with setting up Tomcat, JRun, Orion, and WebLogic to access MS SQL Server and Oracle databases.

Now my overall take of this book. For VB/SQL and pure back-end PL/SQL developers who are eager to jump on the Java express train and need a suitable platform (especially for the ones who learn best from playing with actual code), I recommend this book as one of several you should own. Compared to other JDBC books from say O'Reilly and Sun's JDBC Tutorial, this book is the most up-to-date, contains the most source code, and has the broadest coverage of related topics. But keep in mind some of the advanced topics such as EJB and JMS can be intimidating for new-comers. On the other side of the coin, people who are advanced in various server-side Java technologies are unlikely to benefit a great deal from this book and should look elsewhere for info (for example Wrox's J2EE and upcoming EJB titles).

I thought that this book was really good. It taught me things that I never knew. I learned about the real differences between blacks and whites. I also had a chance to see out of the eyes of a black boy and it was hard for me to realize that he was put through all of that for no reason. I think that there should not be racism for the things that he had to go through. It also made me see things from a new perspective because living the live that Richard Wright had to live must of been hard. I am glsd that he wrote his book.

I really liked this book. I am in eight grade and we had to read part one for school but it was so good i read both parts.

Laurence Thomas and Michael Levin pose a stark contrast, not because they disagree but because their methods and approach are so different. There's a real irony in how they approach the issue. Laurence Thomas is an orthodox Jew who places much stake in the religious arguments, while Levin has little interest in anything religious. Because of this, Thomas seems more conservative, while Levin seems quite secular. However, it is Levin who is against "homosexual liberation" and Thomas who officially defends it, though his actual position is not very liberal. It is quite nuanced and unusual but would be considered more moderate in standard U.S. political categories.

Thomas argues that gay people should not be treated differently from any other group of people if the different treatment is simply because they are gay. He thinks the government should recognize lover-unions between gay people as much as it should recognize them between straight people. However, he argues that this should not be confused with marriage, which he says should be regulated by religious organizations not under the jurisdiction of the government, where married couples are formed explicitly (though not exclusively) for the purpose of raising a family. This is quite a conservative view, one that accords with the recent interest in covenant marriages.

Thomas is concerned to show that Biblical texts, even if they clearly condemn homosexual behavior, do not give any grounds for the hateful venom directed by religious people against the homosexual community. In this he agrees with many highly conservative religious-right-type people, though many of the public ones seem to disagree at least in their behavior, at least the ones vocal on this issue. I think he goes a bit too far when he suggests that someone who finds homosexual behavior appalling should nevertheless be happy about the union. That seems unrealistic to expect.

Levin, on the other hand, refuses to rely on religious arguments for the view that what is often called "hate speech" or "hate behavior" should be tolerated (excluding physical harm, of course). He argues that those who are made uncomfortable by homosexuals should be able to avoid them, even in public circumstances and in roles of hiring and renting. I find his arguments to be fairly bad in most cases, something unusual for such a well-trained philosopher, whose work in the philosophy of mind is quite respected. These are the sort of arguments I teach my undergraduate students not to use. He makes a few nice points, but his arguments on the whole seem just unmotivated, and his criticisms of Thomas seem to miss the point in many cases. It's unfortunate that someone else couldn't have been selected for the "conservative" view, but Thomas seems to have done a good enough job satisifying this conservative.

This short book pits a gay activist, Laurence Thomas against the iconoclastic Michael Levin. Thomas argues mainly from anecdotal data from the bible, that homosexuals were never that singled out by Christianity or Judaism for condemnation. In fact very little is even said about homosexuality. He then goes on to make some arguments in favor of civil rights for gays, and to me the arguments were weak but sincere.

But Levin as always, one of the most articulate political philosophers, argues some very good points against the liberationists, that is the radical left that wants to force society to accept gays. I am probably fairly unbiased, I am married, I have been around lesbians and gays a lot when I lived in San Francisco, and they just do not bother me one way or the other. Upbringing or genes--I don't know. But I fall in that small majority that doesn't want special rights for anyone, but at the same time cannot sympathize emotionally with homophobes. Christians and Communists alike offend me far more.

Having said that, Levin makes some brilliant observations against the liberationists. First, he points out that these new totalitarians are out to "force" society to accept all gays openly, and if they must they are willing, like the Bolsheviks, to kill those who cannot accept gays. That is, they are hell bent on brainwashing society to think the way they think. Levin brilliantly points out that, just like the liberationists arguments that gays are genetically born gay, likewise homophobia may also be as equally genetic. So how can it be any worse to be a homophobe than a gay? Levin states "Societies respecting the diversity of individual tastes, as ours professes to, let people shun what they find repulsive. Tolerance includes tolerating fences. Forcing people to put up with what they loathe is tyranny." He also comments that as genetic testing progresses, couples may choose to abort children that test for homosexual tendencies. And he also notes that where as the left denies that genes have any impact on the differences between blacks and whites with regards to intelligence, they then turn around and insist that genes cause homosexuality. All and all, this is a very readable book looks at more than just homosexual human rights.

Introduction to world of microorganisms. And it is a whole world with more marvels and revelations than the macro world. The book contains a lot of illustrations, but many of the color photographs are artificially colored and certainly not the newest. They had a lot of work to change the book from two to four colors and one can still see this. Maybe, their newest version: "Brock's Biology of Microorganisms", also available at amazon.com, corrects this. Besides it beeing a propper text book, the main highlights come from nature itself which offers such a vast morphological and functional diversity in the micro world. The chapters range from general cell biology through viruses, genetics, industrial microbiology, immunology, medical topics (diagnostics, epidemics, diseaes) to bacteria and archaea. It's nearly too many topics to have them all statisfactorly presented. But since I knew nothing of those topics at all, the book proofed to be quite benifactory to me.

After purchasing a RC sailboat, I found this book an excellent guide. The author gives the beginner the information he or she needs to get started, as well as giving some in depth "how-to" details for those considering a model from scratch. It's too bad there isn't more in print on the subject. At least this volume satisfies my needs as a entry level novice. Thanks

The first time laid my eyes on this book; to tell you the truth I was a bit frightened. I was expecting a very complex law book that would take me more than one pass over the material in order for me to get the material. This was not the case, the book really made the subjects easy to understand and the writers made the book very easy to read. The tables and diagrams also make the book even better for those of us that are more of the visual learner types. I would recommend this book.

RAND, as usual, produced a first-rate study here. In this text, they looked into commercial SATCOM for Department of Defense use, what roles it should fill, and cost comparison between DoD-owned satellite versus commercial satellites. Many graphs adorn the text, adding useful information to make conclusions clearer and vivid. Anyone interested in commercial satellites and the role they should play for the DoD should buy this book. No hyperbole or propaganda here, RAND's text is useful text and solid conclusions that layperson and communicator alike can understand.

This book had very detailed pictures. Just by looking at the pictures you could feel them. The pictures are just unspoken for. It goes right along with any other black family. NOT that i'm not already proud of my color but see these pictures really make me proud to be black. I like to thank the authors for the idea of this book. The pictures could't be more real.