Becker Books

This is the book which launched the career of Herbert Becker but it is not as good as the newer ones.

Mr. Becker offer us a collection of inept so called secrets of popular illusions. With the exception of one or two sections, the drawings are of poor quality and the secrets are unworkable. The chapter on David Copperfield is stupid. Who is Mr. Becker trying to fool. Generally badly written. Fail to explain the true beauty of the art of magic. Not recommended. Suggest instead any book by Mark Wilson or in the Dover collection.

Who on earth is Mr. Becker?? He pretends to be a magician. To me he looks more like somebody who had access to some of these secrets but never bother verify them. The secret of the water levitation is obviously stupid. probably Mr. Becker did not have enough money to buy the plans from a real magician, so he invented. A book for voyeurs with nothing better to do in their lives. Could be done so much better. And we are killing forests to print that ?????

You won't find all the secrets of magic in this book, it's more of a David Copperfield advertisement, with a hole chapter of his credits, along with some generic secrets that you can find in library books.

Do you believe that anybody once fooled by a Magic trick should be allowed to wtite a book once he believes he worked out the secret ? Don't encourage this type a behaviour ! Don't waste your money !!! It is badly written. The drawings are of very bad quality. And what about this chapter on David Copperfield ? What is the point !!!

There are a lot of places to write to receive items, but only a handful are free. Most require a $2.00 shipping and handling fee.

I am 11 years old. It was fun to send away for stuff in the book. Some stuff costs money, some is free. Nice links to free stuff on Internet too.

Really what demographic were these people trying to reach. You're better off having a bum teach you how to get free stuff you would get better stuff than what's in this book. Most of the stuff isn't even free, its cheap and its useless garbage. You probably shouldn't waste your money on this book folks it really is not worth it.

There are a lot of nice items to send away for. My Mom and Dad both get ideas and things for us to do from the book. The craft kits in the book, some of which want a dollar or two for postage are nice. Some great stickers, books and other goodies too.

Not only are the things listed in this book cheap trinkets but most everything in the book you have to pay $1.00 or $2.00 for. The stuff you do not have to pay shipping for are useless pamphlets and literature. There are a few things that are pretty cool and possibly some useful information for some folks but most everything is Junk. Plus a lot of the things listed are repeated through the book. Its like the author needed to add stuff and thought nobody would notice that several of the things were repeated. Overall this 31 page booklet was not worth the paper it was printed on. If you are interested in getting free things I would suggest finding "freebie" message boards on the internet.

The most boring Cosa Nostra book I have ever read. Avoid at all costs.

This book's advantage over similar titles is the sheer number of historical insights it offers about four American cities (Chicago, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, and Washington, DC) simply by tracing the extraordinary life of one man, racketeer Johnny Rosselli. Want to know how the Chicago mob hijacked the Hollywood union movement in the 1930s? Or how the Kennedy administration reached out to mobsters to assassinate Castro in the 1960s? You'll find the answers, and much more, in a few hundred lucid, well-researched pages. Many of the same stories appear in Gus Russo's *The Outfit* and *Supermob*, for example, but the extra detail there doesn't always pay its own way, and Russo's conclusions frequently stretch the evidence he presents. Like Russo's more exhaustive (and exhausting) work, *All American Mafioso* shows how interdependent the worlds of organized crime, business, and government could be in mid-century America. Rosselli's grisly murder--he was dismembered and stuffed into an oil drum off the Florida coast after his Senate testimony--also shows how ugly the results could be. Highly recommended.

Essentially a series of newspaper clippings tossed together and called research, most of it wrong or based on speculation. Save your money

ALL-AMERICAN MAFIOSO is a well-researched biography of legendary mobster Filippo Sacco, better known by his alias: John Rosselli. This book gives good insight into his obscure background and career in the underworlds from Boston to Los Angeles, and from Chicago to Havana, Cuba.

It includes a vast "Notes" section with bibliography, which is always a plus when considering the validity of a research book. Obviously, the authors give you a chance to double-check them if you desire to do so. They had access to hundreds of government documents, FBI files, police files, court documents, interviewed countless people on both side of the law, and dug up contemporary newspaper and magazine articles to insert some nastalgic filler into their pie, turning this book into a nice three-course meal in which by the end of it you are full and satisfied.

Very nicely written and well-edited. The majority of books today in the organized-crime genre are filled with typos and grammatical errors. I tend to notice them, and I noticed few, if any, in this book. Those kind of editing errors are always a turn-off for me when I read a book.

The reader will be additionally impressed with all the rare, never-before-seen photos the authors were able to obtain, one of which is a photo of Rosselli at the age of eight, which I assume they obtained when they interviewed members of Rosselli's family, such as his sister.

All in all, I would recommend this book to anyone who wants to know about John Rosselli and his Hollywood, government, and gangster pals; the glamorous Los Angeles movie scene of yesteryear; and the CIA/Mafia plots to assassination Cuban dictator Fidel Castro in the early 1960s, in which Rosselli played a major part -- and this is not speculation on the part of the authors, this is a documented fact confirmed by various government officials over the years and thoroughly investigated by a congressional committee in the late 1970s.

I don't think anyone who wants to know about Johnny Rosselli, truly a gangster's gangster, will be disappointed when they finish reading this book.

Has he ever heard of the Magicians Code of Ethics? This is the worst thing I have ever seen since Secrets Revealed!

Mr. Becker's work is not far from plagerism. If he chooses to write a book exposing how effects that HE INVENTED are done, more power to him. Harry Houdini himself did this and no one has accused him of "breaking the magician's code". However, to profit by exposing meathods that he had no hand in creating is to profit by the fruit of someone else's labor. This book was not written to teach basic magic or to act as a reference guide any more than the recent Fox specials were. This book was written solely as an exploitation of the achievements of others.

This is a great book for those of you who would like to know how to do some cool tricks at parties to impress your friends and family. Or, if you just want to know how the heck those magicians do all of those great illusions and tricks.

The format is simple and easy to understand, so I would recommend it for just about any and every person who is interested in the subject. This is also great book to start you on your way into further studies of magic if you so choose.

Becker's Bronstein's Children is (to use a cliche) a compulsively readable narrative. Becker dramatically illustrates the complex relationship between the older and younger generations of German Jews--the older having lived through Hitler's Final Solution and the younger not understanding why the past constantly haunts them. The chapters alternate between the past and the present, showing that history pervades the very being of those Jews living in Germany after the horrors of World War II. The past is omnipresent both for those who lived through it and those who did not but must live with its consequences and try to understand it.

Becker, who is known for the book Jacob the Liar, starts out with a fascinating premise: a son of a Holocaust survivor, residing in E. Germany, finds that his father and some friends are holding a former concentration camp guard a prisoner in a cabin. It is the 1970's, and the son wrestles with this information. What, if anything, should he do? Unfortunately, the premise is the only worthwhile thing about his book. It just does not deliver. The characters, especially the son, is superficial, not drawn with much, if any, depth. I couldn't figure out why the son even cared about what his father was doing; he didn't seem to care about much else. This book was a real disappointment.

There are a lot of places to write to receive items, but only a handful are free. Most require a $2.00 shipping and handling fee.

It was ok and suited my purpose but I was disappointed when I received it. I expected more. I also did not realize that there was an expiration date on these items. And I bought it near the end of the year. I bought it so my 6 year old would practice letter writing while getting things in the mail. It also would help with money review. I do not believe I paid that much so oh well.

Read this book...I strongly recommend you do... William
Becker's book is not a theoretical work. It is about the experience
of OD, about the essential conditions that must be adhered to in
order to do it professionally...This is a practical book, with practical
suggestions, helpful lists, and about 40 pages of sample forms,
questionnaires and processes that Becker has found useful
and is happy to pass on to other OD practitioners

Professional, competent, high-integrity, high-skilled practitioners
are relatively rare. Fortunately William Becker is one of them and
his book provides a clear and important blueprint of what OD, done properly, really is. If you are involved in OD it is worth reading."

First to dispel any strange thoughts before they get loose...the OD in the title of this book stands for Organizational Development...but you hopefully knew that already! It was the clever title that attracted me to this book but I have to say right up front that the content was not half as clever as the title.

Much of the content is collected from various other sources and practitioners with any experience will find it familiar. It is interspersed with anecdotes from Mr. Becker's experiences labeled as cases. The book recommends a 7-action model for OD consulting:

1) Determine your degree of readiness
2) Initiate the discovery process
3) Determine whether alignment is by compliance or commitment
4) Diagnose the three domains and your client's degree of readiness
5) Write the Rx and validate commitment
6) Facilitate solution implementation
7) Intervention follow-up and personal reflection

The model seems valid and familiar, yet I could have wished for more detail or recommendations with regard to tools, methodologies, and exercises for each of the steps. The use of a single case through each of the steps rather than bouncing between multiple unconnected cases would have made the book more readable and may have reduced confusion.

The content seems correct but adds little to the repertoire of an experienced OD practitioner and is incomplete as a beginner's reference. To be sure, the book included a relatively valuable appendix with several welcome tools including sample client questions, an operational report card, and a values checklist.

At 155 pages, the book is not a long read but in truth I cannot recommend it if you are looking for a high value OD reference.

While it is true that eBay has all this information online, I spent hours there this monring just trying to find out the simple information in the booklet. EBay should have something like this available on their site for those just wanting the basic facts.
A few more pages on the selling side would have made it better for my uses, but now that I know the basics,I can skip all that.

Nothing new in this book. If you go to any help page on ebay you can find this information not worth the time or money

This book is not worth the money spent. The questions are too easy and the flip book syle is immpossible to use! It is connected at the bottom-left corner with no regard to the bottom questions on each page. In many cases they are cut off and you can't read the question or the answer! They tried to make it compact; however, it is really not much smaller than a book with the same number of questions. Don't waste your time.

This book has all the nitty-gritty questions about movies, from past to present from the mundane to the utterly impossible! Made in a convenient, although sometimes annoying flip book style.

The ultimate vanity project: the writing is borderline incompetent, some of the photography stunningly bad, and there's no organizing principle whatsoever. It's obviously just a hodgepodge of whomever could be persuaded to participate. An altogether shoddy job prettily and expensively packaged, not unlike the subjects. It is amusing, however, as a relic of its time. For one thing, a lot of these couples are now famously divorced. (Others of them never will be because their marriages have been shams from the start.) Bacanovic went to jail and is now jobless.

By the way, love how that Basquiat painting floats from Bacanovic to the Groos's. And how Broome Street is in NoHo.

Don't waste your money and time on this bore. As someone here mentioned, a surprising number of these apartments are ugly. Don't they have decorators? Flip through it quickly in the bookstore if you must. Then go on with your life that is surely richer and more meaningful than anything portrayed here.

Every time a book like this is printed - a poorly edited mostly worthless homage to a sector of social vampires like the trust fund babies of new york, God sheds a tear.

Every time someone actually pays money for one, he mercilessly strangles a puppy.

I went to Duke with Brooke de Ocampo. Back then she was a nice person (probably still is). She is also clever and bright. She never lacked for friends and basically I found her to be non-offensive in any way. Her book is miserable and certainly does not do justice to her intellect and her depth which, back in college she demonstrated herself to have. I am hoping that she was doing a "piss take," (as the Brits say) on herself and her friends by doing this book. To think that anyone of depth and substance would find this book interesting or have any value is, at the least, a massive venture into narcissism. It is absolutely one of the most vapid, self-aggrandizing, pitiful and crass things I have ever seen. This is sad because I knew her as a classy person. Hopefully, she will extricate herself from the mindless, pitiful "snobissimos" she hangs around with and produce something that is reflective of her talent and taste. I hope that people would be willing to give her the benefit of the doubt and separate the person from the pathetic product(s) - I paged through a friend's copy of her Bright Young Things London in the hopes that she had actually produced something of merit - it was equally as limp. In sum, give both books a miss.

According to the New York Observer, this is an "astoundingly vapid text, which intersperses a comical parade of typographical errors throughout its dull drumbeat of name-dropping."
I agree. A friend just lent me her copy and I can hardly believe how terrible this book is.

This book attests to what paying a publicist can do for book sales. I bought the book because I had heard about it, and was sorely disappointed when I opened the cover. Voila! A bunch of nobodys who've done nothing in their wealthy lives to merit being in a book. Either they were friendly with the author or merely flattered when asked to be photographed for the book. The photographs are fine, in and of themselves, but the subjects leave something to be desired. The text is as light weight as souffle... the book would lose nothing without it. Indeed, this is the priciest non-book I've ever seen. Don't be fooled by the hype. Trust me, the only "Bright" thing about this book is the title which Ms. De Ocampo unfortunately lifted from another author's prior book. Shame on Assouline for publishing such tripe. They should have stopped publishing books after their exquisite David Seidner's Portraits. Now that was book-worthy. And Laurence's Private Dreams of Public People.