Beck Books

I'm a Beck fan indeed, but I don't like this book. Actually, I've only read one other Robert Beck (Iceberg Slim) book before, and that'd be Pimp. Pimp is much, much better by a long shot. This book definantly falls short of anything Pimp has to offer. It's not worth the buy, my friends. If you're interested in some great reading, may I suggest you basically choose anything by Donald Goines?

In "Trick Baby", Robert Beck (street-named Iceberg Slim) told the story of Johnny O'Brien (street-named White Folks) and his early days running the short con -- a confidence game designed to cheat the mark (victim) out of small amounts of money. Johnny O'Brien's story continues in "Long White Con". Johnny now calls himself Folks. He has graduated to the long con. Long cons are elaborate confidence games that include casts of rehearsed players plus elaborate sets. In long cons wealthy marks are cheated out of large amounts of money. Folks is older now; he is an experienced actor and has more self-confidence.

"Long White Con" contains some insight into long con games, but periodically Mr. Beck uses sexually-explicit material in place of content. The dialogue is not excellent and only Folks' character is well-developed.

I do not recommend this book.

This book is a slow read. After reading white folks several years back, i was quite excited to run across this book. i expected this book to pick up where the last left off, it hardly does so, and it barely tells a story worth telling.
Too many loose ends in this book. However due to my soft spot for the author it has earned 4 count em 4 stars. I recommend reading dope fiend or mama black widow, truly entertaining and distrubing at the same time, if thats at all possible.

The book attached to the build a bot was nice, informative, and my son enjoyed it... the robotic t rex was the problem... I think toys are just getting cheaper and cheaper and was indeed broken within 24 hrs and not from playing with it.

This is the third kit I bought for my 9 year old grandson. Book is well written and instructions are easy enough for my grandson to follow. A sense of acheivement and a great model at the end.

This is very easy to put together and the booklet is informative and fun to read with your kids. But the robot itself is poorly made and just walks in circles.

Lots of fun stuff and images from Madagascar 1 and 2.
Dreamworks makes more realistic movies. Madagascar is one of fun and cartoon style. I love the characters on this movies and this books show how they changed from the original drawing to the show. Tons of Development stuffs. Although the style is very simple, shows lots of details. my only complain is that the color seems bit dull compared with other Art of books that I have. Printed not on glossy papers, that is why...?

Sadly, I just sent this book back to Amazon. I was really looking forward to this and it was a great disappointment. In no way does this book come close to any of the other "Making of" animation books that I have. This book is more a re-hash of the first movie. Maybe the title should have been "Art of the Madagascar movies". All it seems to be is a description of the characters from the film. Very little of interest is mentioned about the second film. This is the first book from Amazon that I have ever returned. Maybe the studio will make a better one after the film is released. I would not recommend this one at all to anyone who is familiar with the quality of other published "Making of" or "Art of" books.

These are actually books 2 and 3 of a series. The first book is called "Fairy Dust and the Quest for the Egg" and includes all the Disney fairies teamed up in a "Final Fantasy" video-game like quest.
"The Trouble With Tink" is a well written story and is a good sequel to "Fairy Dust". I recommend it highly.
"Beck and the Great Berry Battle", on the other hand, is disappointing because Beck is not really given a chance by the author to do anything but watch events taking place. I do not recommend it.

We bought this for a trip, and the first one was well read. The second one, however, was starting to get on my nerves (I think the reader pulled out every accent she could think of), but my patience may not have been at its highest, either. ;) They've created an interesting world. The stories were ok, though in the first, the moral seems to be - have a problem, better not tell anyone, and better not ask for help! Seemed a bit odd.

Prior to ordering this product I called the customer service department (1-800-818-SAGE) to make sure I could obtain a teacher's guide for the workbook. I was told because I teach high school sociology, not at the university level, I cannot obtain a teacher's guide. Needless to say I will not be purchasing this item. Please be cautious before ordering.

In this book and its essential companion, The Instructor's Manual, McKinney, Beck, and Heyl have provided an amazing resource for instructors who use an active learning perspective (versus the old, "sage on the stage" one-way talk method). The student handbook presents instructions and worksheets (when needed) for 50 exercises in 10 topic areas and 2 more general classroom process areas: theory & methods, culture, socialization and interaction, groups and social influence, stratification, organizations and bureaucracy, race & gender & sexual orientation, deviance & crime, collective behavior, social institutions, multi-topic assignments, and course structure & process.

Each set of short instructions follows the same format: rationale, instructions on actually doing the exercise, and how it will be graded. Some exercises require worksheets, which are included. The exercises were contributed by faculty who actually developed and tested them, and so most of the bugs have already been worked out. Instructors who use these exercises can modify them to suit their own classes, but they are so well-designed that I suspect most will just use them "as is."

The accompanying instructor's manual is an absolute necessity. The table of contents gives a short description of each exercise, as well as a chart indicating whether the exercise is for individuals or groups, and how much time is needed for the exercise. Each contributor has provided several pages of background for each exercise, following the same format: history and context, purpose, instructions for facilitating the exercise, other suggestions, and hints about time use.

An entire introductory sociology course could be designed around this book, or entire sections of it could be used for specific courses, e.g. on stratification or social movements. With this book and some rich supplementary readings, your students would probably not need a textbook.

The authors have provided a wonderful resource for those of us teaching from an active-learning perspective. I highly recommend the book AND the instructor's manual.

Since the previous reviewer spent so much time loathing their own inability to understand Kant's writings, I believe a higher rating is in order. From one who CAN understand at least the Prolegomena, I recommend it wholeheartedly to the philosopher who wishes to understand an alternative to Hume and other skeptics.

Kant was a charlatan who misrepresents the great skeptic philosopher David Hume throughout this monument to logical obfuscation. The plot turns on an attempt to redefine metaphysics for the rest of eternity (now that Hume has essentially disproved its usefulness). Will he succeed? You can be the judge, if you like, but please take the time to read Hume's brilliant work before you waste any time (or money) on this scoundrel's scientific-sounding drivel!

Kant is one of the main reasons philosophy and philosophers are today considered boring. He influenced a generation of fools after him, most notably Hegel and Schoepenhauer. I can attest that Hegel's work is no more valuable, equally unintelligible and obscure, it clearly had no positive influence on history. His idiocy is the main reason why later philosophers Marx and Nieszche, for example, come off sounding so angry! As German intellectuals they had to swim in a sea of Kantian nonsense!

Kent Beck is a wonderful writer and has many good points to make in this book, but I can't recommend spending money on it unless the publisher produces a new edition correcting its hundreds of errors. Pages appear in the wrong order, parts of paragraphs are randomly duplicated, code samples are formatted incorrectly and nearly unreadable, and words appear in the wrong typeface making it difficult to distinguish identifiers from prose. Many of the articles appear to have been scanned in using OCR software and not subsequently proofread, or possibly proofread by someone who didn't understand the content. The lack of quality control is simply appalling.

Better organization of the material would also have been helpful. The "Sorted Collection" is sorted by date only. This may be useful to those interested in tracing the recent history of Smalltalk, but not to those wanting to learn most efficiently.

Much of the material in this book is better and more thoroughly presented in Beck's other books. At best, this book can be seen as a haphazard introduction to Beck's ideas that will spur some programmers to learn more about Smalltalk, object-oriented design and Extreme Programming.

This book is quite distinct from Beck's other works in that it provides the reader an intellectual journey: through the reprinted articles, you can see the evolution of Kent's writing style, the beginnings of the "design patterns" movement, and the ever changing opinions about what to do / what not to do with Smalltalk.

There are many classic papers in this work, such as the original CRC-cards paper, and aptly-titled pieces such as "Death to Case Statements!". The code examples are clear and easy to read, and I found the chronological ordering of the papers to be appealing.

This book is not just for Smalltalkers - it's for anyone with an interest in object orientation: patterns, idioms, and philosophy.

For an ex-Mormon living in Utah, parts of this book will ring so true it's eerie, and this will provide a nice insight into Mormon culture for interested outsiders. Other parts, however, the author is clearly making up, though it's unclear whether she is simply lying or if she actually believes some of the things she says and is simply deluded--or delusional (for instance, her completely credulous account of her "near-death experience").

This creates a certain problem of trust for the reader regarding the parts that are not obviously true or false: one is not sure what to believe, and cannot simply take the author's word for it. This applies, unfortunately, to the central claim of the book: that Beck was sexually abused by her father, a prominent Mormon apologist. While sexual abuse certainly occurs in the Mormon church, and its officials undoubtedly downplay or even help to cover it up, it's impossible to know whether her specific claim is true.

For one thing, her "memory" of what happened is so bizarre that one ought to be skeptical. Secondly, though she tries to dismiss it, there is such a phenomenon as unscrupulous therapists implanting suggestions in the minds of already disturbed patients, and it is as plausible to think this was the case for Beck (her mantra prayers of "please...please...please..." eventually answered--really--by a talking ball of light are one example of how disturbed she is) as that her memories are genuine. For one thing, it is odd that these memories would "surface" after decades when she begins seeing a therapist--although the phenomenon of repression is also very real, especially when coupled with post-traumatic stress. And while she claims that there is actual physical evidence of abuse in the form of supposedly otherwise inexplicable scarring, the reader is simply told this repeatedly with no evidence given.

Her portrait of her father as alternately befuddled and obstinate is amusing, though, but again no evidence is given for his abuse, in turn, at the hands of his mother. His war-time experiences certainly could have messed him up, though.

I hate to belittle Beck's story, but she really gives us very little reason to believe her, and some reason to doubt her; and besides, she occasionally seems to belittle it herself, as when she inexplicably drops inappropriate jokes in the middle of the most serious moments of her narrative, one example of how obnoxious her style can be.

On the whole, her conversion from Mormonism to a New Age brand of Buddhism is almost a step backward. The search for a rational critique of Mormonism continues.

We know from seeing her on the Oprah show and from her other books that Martha Beck is nothing if not candid, funny, highly intelligent, wise, and self-revealing, and this book is the best of all of these things.

Highly entertaining and engaging, it is a "page-turner" that will keep you up all night. It is unlike anything else I have ever read, and I still think about it often and recommend it to everyone.

Here we find an inside look at what it is like to grow up in a Mormon community where your father is one of the most respected defenders of the faith. Learning about this way of life is enjoyable when Martha is the story-teller.

From here, she goes on to become "America's Best-Known Life Coach."

I believe this collection is probably one of the most useful collections for the mature spiritual practioner available. It includes material from Chinese sources with very fine translations. The Tao Teh Ching translation is better than Stephen Mitchell's, which is saying a lot. I believe the editing has a purpose in helping to speak to the dialectical healing between Love and Wisdom, which is a deeply needed integration in today's world. Dr. Beck is also a peace activitist whose approach to the wisdom traditions is unorthodox but entirely mature and quite accurate. Yes, the book is expensive, but that is because Dr. Beck's foundation is responsible for publishing this work and the price represents the actual cost of publishing. I think you will be very happy you bought this anthology. You will be surprised at what you will find here.

On Page 237, it says: "I think you may be surprised, that being the first of your lovers, the others having stopped, I alone have not left you."

Although not a philosopher but rather a management professor, I found this introduction to ancient wisdom and folly to be written with a wonderful knack for including illuminating details. Reading this with a particular interest in business ethics, I found many helpful things but citation of original sources in the text was often too sparse to properly direct me to the literature on topics that especially engaged me. Visit the book author's site for an e-version of this book: http://www.san.beck.org/index.html#6 .