Josh Webster, Faith Killer (Zebra, 1991)

The best thing about this book by a longshot is the title. If you pick it up, just stare at the cover for a while, then put it down and walk away. Because once you're inside, you'll find there's nothing worth having.

Faith Killer is a serial killer novel written from the point of view of someone very, very heavily involved in 12-step programs. So much so that his characters veer off into long mental dissections of how horrible their lives were before coming to 12-step Nirvana. So much so that the good guy and the bad guy actually have a confrontation on treatment methods for addicts. No, people, I can't make this stuff up. To top things off, the "mystery" of who the killer is is spoiled by... the book's title! A truly brilliant piece of marketing THAT was.

Compared to [Leslie Whitten's] The Fangs of the Morning, however, Faith Killer does have some worthwhile elements. Webster is a bit better at drawing his characters, and they're actually somewhat realistic when they're not being warriors for Bill W. (Actually, in retrospect, they're realistic then, too; I've met a few of them IRL who really do talk and act like this.) The action does move along well enough most of the time, and when you're not waiting for the inevitable recovery-spiel shoe to drop, there are a few absorbing parts. Unfortunately, they all lead to predictable places; guess what happens to the alcoholic cop? heh. * 1/2

NYRB Classics was started a few years ago with the intention of re-issuing neglected cult favorite books which had fallen out of print; though many of their choices have been superb, a very few leave you scratching your head, wondering who is making the choices.

GREAT GRANNY WEBSTER is one such choice. By all accounts, Caroline Blackwood was a fascinating woman: heriess to the Guinness fortune, she counted among her sexual conquests Lucian Freud and Robert Lowell, and was a bewitching raconteur and bon vivant. But she wasn't much of a writer. Blackwood seemed never to have learned the lesson that a good fiction writer must show rather than tell. As a result, in this novel she tells us and tells us and tells us again what a monster the title character is, but Great-Granny Webster herself doesn't actually do much but sit around and show poor hospitality to her guests and relations. Yet still the narrator keeps fulminating against her for crimes mostly implied rather than real; as in Caroline Blackwood's final book, THE LAST OF THE DUCHESS, where she simultaneously weighed in again and again against the Duchess of Windsor's female lawyer, you begin to develop a perverse sympathy for the object of Blackwood's fury.

Even had this book accomplished what it set out to do it wouldn't have been much: the two main characters, Great-Granny Webster and Aunt Lavinia, seem like nothing readers haven't already seen (respectively) in Dickens and Evelyn Waugh. The really interesting story would be to hear who behind the scenes at NYRB brought this dud back into print and under what circumstances: THAT would be a book worth reading.

I am usually Merriam-Webster's biggest fan of its products. Although I have several up-to-date unabridged Spanish dictionaries, I bought this one to see if it portrays the revised Spanish alphabet correctly and if it treated special topics coherently. I was disappointed on both counts. Although the Spanish Academy along with its sister Academies in 1994 decided to ignore the letters CH and LL for alphabetization purposes (including them in the letters C and L, respectively,) the letters CH and LL still remain part of the 29-letter complement of the post-1994 Spanish alphabet. If you look under Z in in Spanish side of the dictionary, it notes that Z is the twenty-seventh letter of the alphabet. This mistake is inexcusable, especially in light of Merriam-Webster's normally stellar quality in its reference materials. My advice is to not buy this paperback Spanish dictionary, but to instead invest your money in the pocket Oxford Spanish dictionary if you want a very good, small, paperback up-to-date Spanish dictionary. I hope Merriam-Webster gets it right in their next edition.

I saw this book on the shelf just when I figured I'd known all there is to know about Object Orientated Programming from "C++ for Dummies".
After a section you get a program exampling the stuff you just learnt. Fine. But then there's this long blow by blow of the code that you just have to skip. It's done even for snippets. This'll have you flippin' pages and wondering what the heck you paid for. If you don't understand the code you aren't ready for this book. Well, the book says you gotta have read "C++ for Dummies". Which'll have you back at the bookstore for "More C++ for Dummies" cause alot stuff in this book isn't covered in "C++ for Dummies". See how money is made?
My advice: Stay away from the 'for dummies' books. They're long, boring repetitive and shy away from a deeper technical understanding of the reading in fear of the reader shelving it and considering themselves a dummy.
Anyone interested in C++ certaintly doesn't want this baby food approach. You can learn all and more free from countless online tutorials. Hey, anything you wanna know can be learned on the net. But if you have to snuggle with a book, the Oreilly collection is superb.

yogurt rhymes with -ert, right?
not according to this book. you are better off buying the kindergarten cops' album "once upon a rhyme"

Larry

The reason I give the new CSIS study on Russian organized crime merely one star, is that it fails to meet elementary standards of scientific inquiry. The CSIS shows no interest in theoretical issues, nor does it contain a discussion of the methodological problems that are inherent in any study of crime phenomena. Unsurprisingly, the findings of the research are based in large part on press reports, and perhaps also unsurprisingly, only point in one direction: the US face a serious threat from Russian organized crime. Now, press reports and descriptive, non-theoretical work of course can offer information that may be of use in research, and also the CSIS study in this respectmay be of interest. Nevertheless, the reader can only use this kind of information if he or she has the impression that authors handle information sincerely, otherwise one does not know what to believe and what not. In this respect the CSIS report falls short in a big way. This becomes obvious when one looks at how it handles the study by Finckenauer and Waring ('Russian Mafia in America', 1998), a study that does live up to the requirements mentioned above, but that comes to a quite different conclusion than the one the CSIS reaches. I found only one referenceby the CSIS to this work (on p.22: "A recent nationwide survey of police agencies revealed that at least 34 states have some contact with ROC in émigré communities"). The reference suggests that the survey confirms the image of dramatic proliferation of the Russian mafia, while in fact the opposite is the case. Finckenauer and Waring conclude: "Our conclusion - which may be startling to some - is that the Russian organized crime in America widely known as the Russian Mafia is first, not Russian; second, not a mafia; and third, not even organized crime" (1998, p.xiv). If the CSIS has access to information that refutes this indeed remarkable conclusion, it should have presented it. The only impression the reader now gets it that the CSIS simply did not do its job properly. From an institution on the board of which we find many functionaries from the CIA and other government agencies, and which gives advice to policy circles in the US, we should have expected a more convincing handling of the subject - how reasonable or not the advice given may be. Now the reader is left with the impression that Finckenauer and Waring were right when they wrote that "The label Russian mafia offers a convenient hook for understanding but at the same time sensationalizes matters so as to peak interest. It thus serves both law enforcement and media interests"? (1998, p. 250).

Mr.Levin's thinking can hardly be charicterized as rational. I was in a course of his at UC Davis, in which I experienced his thinking first-hand. His logic and his anything-but-linear mode of thought would drive even the most patient individual absolutely nuts. I dropped his course after 2 and a half weeks, but sometimes at night it still haunts me. This book is not recommended either.

Sorry guys and gals, especially those of you that are looking for a good style guide. There are much better writing guides available. I've been using Strunk and White's "Elements of Style" for a number of years, and, in my mind, it is THE Bible for clarifying English usage (it's so small and powerful, I take it everywhere I go; even to bed). "Webster's Compact Writers Guide" has a number of standard English usage violations and appears to have had the copy-editing portion of the publishing process neglected; it contains a number of blatant editorial errors :-)

This book only has two or three items on every page.
When they say over 100 items (words, phrases, OR
sentences), they mean it. When you buy this book,
that is what you get. The translation for a few words,
a few phrases, and a few sentences. This book is not
worth three dollars. I regret buying this book.

My idea of a dictionary is a book with thousands
of words. The Oxford Starter Chinese Dictionary IS a
dictionary. It's an excellent dictionary for English
speakers to learn Chinese.

I don't usually write too many negative reviews, much less write a review and give 1 star. But this book is more useful as starter paper for a fire. Shame on Webster's for publishing a book.

Here is why it stinks. Whenever I would hear, think or find a word that I didn't know, I would go to this book to get the defintion. Sound reasonable enough? Almost every time, my words aren't even in here. It's like they skipped over so many important words in the English language so they would be able to fit this book down to less than 400 pages. This book would be better for a non-English speaker who occasionally has to look up words such as 'locust', 'ledger', and the like. It's too basic. Don't get this book and expect to learn tough words, because if you are a native English speaker like I am, it's worth the extra money to buy a more expensive, 1,500 page comprehensive dictionary. Heed this review and save yourself money from buying this.