'The Summer House' is the first Alice Thomas Ellis book I read. Although I have read two of her novels since, as well as many of her 'Home Life' articles (not to be missed!), 'The Summer House' has remained my favorite. As anyone who has read her books knows, her prose is unmatchable. Divided into three parts, each with its own narrator of the same events, the author astutely captures the voices of a young, confused woman about to be married, her mother's middle-aged worldly friend, and the elderly mother-in-law-to-be. This book is witty and at times hysterical. I highly recommend 'The Summer House' to anyone interested in reading Ellis' work.

It's a fast fun read that starts in the thick of action, and just keeps finding more trouble to get into after that. ST:TNG gets royally hoisted on its own petard. This isn't lifeless "perfect people" space adventure, but rather a story that stays true to human nature... including its best. Fans of military SF should enjoy it at face value. For current Trek fans it might be like a shock therapy. :)

My immediate reaction after reading SWITCHBLADE HONEY was: More!

I hope writer Warren Ellis has more space adventure stories to tell, whether sequels to this or more completely new ones. And I hope publisher Larry Young invites other name writers to write the space adventures they're inspired to -- that the mainstream comic publishers seem to fear to try that genre new to them -- for his impressive company.

So, basically, it's good. Real good. Read it. And you'll want more, too. :)

I would recommend this book not just to overeaters but to any woman who craves the power of God in her daily living. The stories are short & easy to digest; the writer is open and honest in her sharing. Her vignettes--told from her own experience--are delightful.

Lyn Ellis has a hot page-turner here. The dialogue is snappy and sassy. The subplots will tear your heart and the end will make you cheer!

With a scope as broad 30 years of tank development over two world wars, most books would focus on the most numerous and historically significant models produced by the major combatants. Chamberlain and Ellis have taken a very different approach. Their work describes every known tank model and variant used anywhere in the world through 1945 and illustrates nearly every variant with a photograph. If you want to know, for example, what Argentina's locally-made Nahuel tank looked like, this is the place to come. At the other extreme, you will also find at least 75 captioned photos of different American and British variants of the Sherman tank.

With over 1000 entries, there obviously isn't room for a lengthy description of each tank. Most tanks are described in a short paragraph that concludes with the usual statistical summary: weight, dimensions, armament, armor and crew. In addition, for each of the tank-producing nations, there are several introductory pages describing that country's armor program in general. The book concludes with a brief bibliography and a set of metric/English conversion tables.

For its comprehensive coverage and wealth of illustration, Tanks of the World 1915-1945 is a highly recommended reference work.

The authors have done a fantastic job of presenting general chemistry with a material science flavor. Each chapter clearly presents materials and their effects on our lives as well as demonstrations to help the educator present the material to their classes. We have the students use the text as a reference for a 'materials lab' in our general chemistry course and the students loved it. The text, if adopted for a class, has lab experiments containing clear lists of all parts and equipment needed as well as suggested sources. The experiments range for simple tests to complete property studies or synthetic processes. We found the text compliments experiments from other sources very well.

I would rate this text as a 'must have' for any professor teaching general, introductory, or citizen's level chemistries. There is something here for everyone!

The book is based upon Direct Boundary Element. He uses engineering approaches in steady of heavy mathematical approaches for the derivations. Foundamental solutions are derived from both physical events and integral transformations. The notations and derivations are clear and understandable. It includes a wide area of applications. In spite of all the positive points, it seems that the case studies are not to be sufficient. Some interesting machine elements examples may be more worthwhile

Walter M. Ellis won the coveted 2002 Darrell Award for Best Mid-south Novel of the year for his ME AND THE DEVIL BLUES. He has followed this success with another, THE TERMINATOR'S WIFE, which deals with the same main characters, metamorphosed into a modern university setting and from black to white.

College students enjoy nicknaming the best and worst professors, and those at UCLA are no exception. Sebastian Bateman, who seems to enjoy failing and humiliating those studying with him, is called the "Terminator." Coming up against our villain is Warren Stelling, a young graduate student, who has a low opinion of the status quo. Warren runs into Evie Bateman, the Terminator's wife, at a record store, and it is love at first sight. She moves in with Warren, who must face humiliation at Bateman's hands, the oral exam for his doctorate when he is not doing well academically, and Evie's dipsomania.

In his usual clever way, Ellis adds more seemingly hopeless entanglements as he gradually unravels the knots and moves to a satisfying conclusion. All those who have been through the college system will be drawn to THE TERMINATOR'S WIFE. Students currently living some of this will especially appreciate Ellis's wit. And all who have been involved in the war of the sexes will eagerly follow the love stories in the main and minor plots.

Ellis's flawless style should be noted. Not all read for style. But those who do will heave a deep sigh of satisfaction.

I had to read this book in college. What I appreciated was how it developed its argument based on a different notion of definition. The conventional view, coming from the Greeks, modeled definition on physical characteristics reducible to given structures, e.g., triangles are 3-sided figures with angles adding up to 180 degrees. Ellis suggested definition based on usage. He gave as an example the term "weed." Weeds are plants. Therefore, they have physical characteristics. However, physical characteristics are not important in defining the term. What is important is that we understand the role of gardening and gardeners. "Weeds" are those plants that gardeners don't want in their gardens. In A's garden, crabgrass is a weed because it takes water from his perennials. In B's garden roses are weeds, because they have thorns and B will not tolerate any plant with thorns in his garden. It is the "use" of the plant by the gardener that defines a plant as a weed, not some physical structure or abstraction common to the entire category. This is Ellis's Wittgensteinian move, and it sets up some very interesting consequences when he suggests that literature should be analyzed as if it followed the definitional pattern of "weed" rather than "triangle".

The first consequence is that realist theories of criticism are wrong. They search for the basic characteristic common to all novels. It doesn't exist. Rather, each novel has its own characteristics that the community of readers over time brings to the fore. And, Ellis notes, the characteristics that the reading community admires at one point in time may not the the same as what the community admires at another point.

A second consequence concerns the notion of evaluation. You cannot make the value/fact distinction stick because the the community of critics develops the facts of the structural characteristics base on interpretive values important to the community. Another community could focus on different characteristics.

Finally, one should note that the notion of the interpretive community is central to Ellis's position. He takes this from the pragmatists: Peirce and Kuhn. I have read some of Ellis's other books and I notice that some reviewers consider him a conservative literary theorist. But that is wrong. His politics is conservative. His literary theory is not. Conservative theory is generally neo-Platonic or -Aristotelian, searching for general characteristics and rules of development. Ellis's theoretical approach combines Wittgenstein with Peirce. Its attitude toward the logic of presentation has more similarities with Rorty and Davidson than with metaphysical realists.

Richmond Ellis posits that gay male Latin American autobiography differs from its Spanish counterpart in that homosexuality cannot be divorced from issues of race, gender, and politics. In this book, the author looks at several writers, most gay, but one straight, to examine this topic. The authors he selects are of various races (black, mestizo, European) and numerous nationalities (Cuban, Mexican, Argentinian, Chilean). Most importantly, he illustrates how both the right and the left in Latin American have oppressed gay men. The author uses "gay," "queer," and "homoerotic" selectively, but equally. He thus sidesteps the boring and tired essentialism vs. constructivism debate. He has a great chapter on the newly popular Reinaldo Arenas. Though others have already written great essays on Arenas (Sanchez Eppler, Manrique, Bejel), Richmond Ellis' addition is welcome and unplagiarized. This book is quite academic; however, everyday readers shouldn't be afraid to give it a try. The introductory chapter discusses Bom-Crioulo, the first homoerotic text in Latin American writing, as well as Kiss of the Spider Woman. So, in ways, this is a veritable encyclopedia of male homoerotic Latin writing. Modern Western activists may be disturbed at how few of the texts end with two men walking hand in hand into the sunset. Rape, incest, and gay-bashing do come up in this book. Still, Spanish-language scholars should fall in love with this book as thoroughly as English-language scholars have fallen in love with Eve Sedgwick's "Epistemology of the Closet." I would recommend that every gay Latino man, in the US or abroad, read this book.

However,I have a serious critique that I will later illustrate. You can tell that Richmond Ellis intends this book for a limited audience. He wants this book to sit in university libraries rather than be available to common fans of gay male writing. And that's a shame that he didn't see more potential in this book.

First, the cover is bland and has no artwork. Similar books like "Eminent Maricones" and "Reading the Ambiente" have vibrant covers that lure in readers. Had Richmond Ellis put a photo of a hot Latin guy on the cover, his book would fly off of store shelves.

Second, he translates Spanish into English throughout the text. But at one point, he's discussing a Latin American author who tried to hide a homoerotic moment by writing the details in another language. While Richmond Ellis translates the sentence, he never says the language is French. It's almost as if he assumes the readers are Romance language scholars and not your average monoglot American.

Third, principles from gay studies are left out in many areas. For example, he mentions two slaves who share fruit as a sexual metaphor, but never mentions the homoerotic, Chinese tale of the "shared peach." He describes a Westernized author who has a lover in Egypt and India and never compares that to E.M. Forster. Later, he describes how one man removes the sickly skin of an ill lover and never makes parallels to gay couples in the age of AIDS.

I have no solid proof of the author's race. However, he has a completely English name, he never identifies as Latino (or even mixed-race) in the book and on his university's website he "looks" white. So my guess is that he's an Anglo. I don't mean to wander into essentialist territory for no reason. My problem is that outside of the works he's analyzing, he rarely relies upon gay Latino support. In his intro chapter, he mentions Bleys, Molloy, and Williams Foster, all Anglo writers who write on gay Latin American topics. He also cites Lumsden, Lancaster, Murray, and other Anglo sociologists that discuss gay sexuality in Latin America. However, with the exception of brief mentions of Manrique and Bejel, he cites no gay Latino academics. There is no mention of Almaguer, Munoz, or Longres. Quiroga has written on many of the same authors as Richmond Ellis has, yet he never cites him once. I am somewhat concerned about the author's unconscious biases here.