What a great time for this book. Parents are constantly trying to come up with unique names for their newborns. This is the perfect "baby shower" gift. Like the title says, it's complete and offers some truly different alternatives as well as traditional names to parents-to-be. It is the kind of book that will remain in families and be passed on to their newlywed couples.

This book is a beautiful creation, not a mere listing.I think a good subtitle for it would have been: "Magic words and personal histories." Ms. Keister's opus manages to be both scholarly and fun, worth reading on its own whether or not you have a new baby to name. I enjoyed getting the chance to look over the author's shoulder as she recalls conceiving, (extensively) researching and writing the book. Her subjects (every name represents an actual individual) come alive for me. I particularly enjoyed the bits of history and sociology in the "Did You Know" shorts sprinkled throughout the book. The author's perfectionism and nice style add to the pleasantness of the journey through time and language. Who's Minnie Lee Jones, and why did so many African Americans of a certain era name their children Moses? How did the Tiger get his nickname? Make sure you "read the book and find out." It's a little paperback with a deceptively simple cover, full of nice surprises. I wish I'd written it. Cathie O. Schoultz

This book is a find! Most name books read like the yellow pages but The Complete Guide to African-American Baby Names gives you a grounding in the name, its history, its African roots. There are lots of small "featurettes" on the background of some famous people and their names.Keister has done her research. A serious fun book!

I read this book when it first came out so I don't remember much about it & I have seen the true crime show about it many times & everything I remember about this crime is from that show but I just wanted to say the the review by Dennis Littrell was great. He totally wrote what is was all about.

This guy looks like a Kennedy. Indeed, his mother has styled him as a Kennedy. An Irish Catholic nurse born in Ireland, she has devoted her life to climbing up the social ladder of New York society and pushing her very handsome son through the best prep schools, etc. Only one problem. Robert Chambers is a pretty boy loser, a druggie and a sociopathic sickie. He bombs out of prep school after prep school, mainly because he is caught stealing to support his cocaine habit. He just parties. That's about it. Mommie, nonetheless believes her son will turn it around and amount to something. He is irresistible to the girls. They see him as an alpha male. They think his unsavory character is sexy. Along comes Jennifer Levin, a not completely pretty, but sexy, lively girl, who just wants to have fun. She finds Robert and wants to have fun with him. Unfortunately, his idea of fun is to get wasted, and while wasted he chokes her to death, and then realizing what he has done, tries to make it look like a rape in Central Park. Then while being questioned he has a brilliancy. He claims she raped him! And in fighting back he accidentally strangled her to death.

Well. It's a sick scene. All the Studio 54 party preppies and wanna-bes think this is just the coolest scene. They now feel so important and they support Robert, one of their own. Meanwhile Mom hustles up bail and more to buy a high priced lawyer to defend her boy. We get a semi-competent judge, a not really talented ADA, and a "star of the show" defense lawyer. I'll leave it to the reader see how this sad story about the decadence of the New York-preppie scene, circa 1988, turns out.

Of course one might say that the real villain here is, if you will, Mom. She doesn't care what evil things her boy has done. She doesn't care that it is obvious he is a degenerate sickie, all she cares about is he is her Hope. She lies to herself. She self-deceives and even though any idiot can see that her son needs to be put away she continues to let him party and do drugs and rob while she keeps working seventy hours a week to support his debased life style. Of course he doesn't work at all. If she had ever said "NO!" and put him on his own, the earlier the better, say at twelve, he might have amounted to something. But Mom had to indulge her mother...lust.

Linda Wolf does an outstanding job of vividly bringing this tale to life. She has a literary novelist's eye for detail and the narrative control of a best selling thriller writer.

The story of Jennifer Levin and Robert Chambers made headlines in the late 80's and is summed up in this book. Wolfe's inciteful manner brings this story to life from all angles. This is a story of teenagers who live on the edge and do not understand the true consequences of their actions (or do they even care?). Society in it's hunger for sensationalism is seen as the catalyst for this unacceptable behavior. Everyone wants their 15 seconds of fame, don't they? At what cost

This is the greatest books written on female sexuality. If you are a woman, it will confirm you are normal. If you are a man, it provides all of the information necessary to understand the sexual woman. Great! Complete! Informative!

The Professor and The Prostitue and Other Tales of Murder and Madness was GREAT! This is a book of short stories of true crime. You never know exactly who your loved ones, your neighbors or your local doctors really are! I have a few favorite stories from this book including "The Professor and the Prostitute", "From a Nice Family", "The Strange Death of the Twin Gynecologists", "A Tragedy on Eighty-ninth Street", "The Transexual, the Bartender and the Suburban Princess" and "Dented Pride". A must for all true crime lovers if you can find it!

If you have not been near a Biology syllabus in a while, this is the book for you. The authors do not assume that you know everything. The chapters cover all the major topics (the only supplementation you may need is diagrams such as those of plants). I found that the practice tests could have been better structured because the Ecology tests are separated from the Molecular tests without the common core section that's used in the actual exam. All in all, a good book - using this book alone I earned a score of 660!

This is a book that concentrates too heavily on the Author's personal thoughts and unnessary lenghty descriptions of bit players looks,weight etc.. There are too many pages that you want to skip while reading it because of boredom.

Arrgh, arrgh, arrgh. "Love Me to Death" made me want to choke someone. Sorry, that's tacky. How about, made me want to slap the author?

There are two reasons. It is absolutely beyond understanding why writers so often want to put themselves in the center of the story when they aren't part of the story. Grr. Yes, sometimes they are, and yes, perhaps a little "me-ism" is appropriate, occasionally, once in a while, when absolutely necessary.

In other words, just a little.

But this story about the murderous path of one Richard Caputo is really all about the writer's experiences in writing about Caputo. That's not to say there's nothing about him, of course, because there is. But I really don't care about how Linda Wolfe had to race across town to get to the lawyer's office just in time. Really.

Por ejemplo:
"The area around most courthouses, except in Manhattan where the courts are cheek by jowl with Chinatown, is a culinary wasteland. So I didn't expect to find a decent restaurant. I just left the building, ran through the cold, stll-pelting rain and entered the first eatery I encountered. It was an Asian lunch counter where the food, precooked and displayed in warming trays, looked gluey and unidentifiable. I ordered something the counterman said was chicken and vegetables and started to put it down on a table, when suddenly I noticed Kennedy (the defense lawyer she's been trying to reach) behind me. He too had chosen this closest-at-hand canteen.
What good fortune! I suggested we eat together. "Maybe we could do that interview about your past," I said.
"My past? I don't think I want to talk about that over lunch," he frowned. It might make me sick."
"Maybe," I laughed, "we can find other things to talk about."
"Sure."

And so on. And so on, semi-remembered details about unimportant moments that put the author into the center of the story. You see, it would be okay if these personal details added something to the story, but they don't. This How I Got That Story approach reeks of self-absorption, and not very incisive absorption at that.

Wolfe is better at other times, even while injecting herself into the story. For example, when she contacts and meets Caputo's wealthy brother and describes her fears--does his sociopathic behavior run in the family?, she wonders--the first-person approach works a little better. In Wolfe's case, there's some legitimate reason for starting on the first-person approach--she knew one of the victims, and sets off to track the killer. But she gets so caught up in herself that we lose track of the victims, and so her hard work in collecting information is buried under the Me details.

Second, there's not enough depth here. A real, live serial killer who committed his crimes through his ability to wine and dine, con, control and ultimately murder one woman after another would seem to be prime ground for writing and reporting. Caputo is a fascinating and frightening character. For the record, Caputo was an immigrant from Argentina who admitted to murdering four women, though he's suspected of committing far more. He moved his Don Juan act around the country and to Mexico.

On his journey, he conned plenty of people, not just the victims but often their families, friends and work colleagues, most of whom fell for his charming styles until his murderous instincts got the better of him. And his killings occurred over a period of two decades, an unusually long time for a serial killer to operate.

Wolfe does come up with some interesting details: Caputo's childhood fascination with rape, his [] attempt to portray himself as a victim of abuse and even a victim of his victims, his charm and the failings of the judicial and psychiatric system to put him away before he could kill again.

But this book just doesn't quite cut it. Maybe, in emulating this book, I could write a book on her book, using the extremely brutal murder of someone I knew to write about what we who knew him did and didn't do, comparing it to what Wolfe thought. Hmm. It would be just about as useful as this book. Notice how annoying it is when I add mine own little non-story. Geez.

This book was very disappointing in that not only was it not typical "catch the killer" narrative that most true crime accounts are. It was hard to read and included too many impressions of the author.