Open

And selling, alas, is what the domestic adoption business boils down to--a business estimated to reap [money amount]per year with an annual projected growth rate of at least 10 percent.

I am neither an adoptive parent nor one who has ever been faced with an unplanned pregnancy. However, there is an adoptee in my family whose agonizing, ongoing life struggles are directly related to her status as a newborn adoptee. My interest in her pain has motivated me to do a great deal of research and thought into the fraught world of adoptions, especially the "closed" variety, and what happens after the teddy-bear-and-pastels of the sales job is over. As the adoptive family forms its bonds, the pointed absence of the child's relinquishing parents hovers, specter-like, over every aspect of the adoptee's growth and development.

Handel's jacket photo shows himself, his wife, and their adopted son all wearing dark glasses. Apart from cute-cute, that says something right there, doesn't it?

This is not a bad book for what it proposes to do--write the pitch. However, the subject itself should give any non-biological parent pause--who "merits" a baby? The highest bidder? The most seductive pitch to a woman or girl in a difficult situation that will alter her life permanently, whether she chooses to abort, parent her child, or relinquish?

Handel's conclusion is that domestic adoption is what it is, and here's how to make the best of what it is. And, unfortunately, airbrushed professional photos, 1-800 numbers, and gobs of cash help.

If you can live with that, this book is for you.

This is an extraordinarily helpful book, full of authoritative research, clear guidance, warm humor, and genuine sensitivity to everyone involved in the adoption triad. It was highly recommended to me by both my attorney and my adoption counselor. In the process of helping me write a letter that truly reflected my heart, it also dispelled many of the fears I had, born of misconception. To judge it without reading it does this book, and the adoption community, a grave disservice.

Unfortunately, I feel that this book was of very limited use to me as an experienced programmer, and suffers from a rather basic flaw (as a topic). The problem is that the art of code reading is really the intersection of a deep and/or broad understanding of programming, in conjunction with a deep and/or broad understanding of the tools and practices employed. One could well assert that this book is about *debugging* unfamiliar codebases as much as it is about *reading* them, since code comprehension is a component of code debugging. This is a rather apt analogy, since many have attempted to describe the black art of debugging just as Mr. Spinellis has attempted with reading, and with no definitive "must-have" coverage to date.

The result is that I felt the book rushed through important programming concepts that were either extremely basic (global variables, while loops, conditionals, blocks), or language-specific (C typedef, arrays, function pointers), or too deep for the book to address adequately (trees, stacks, queues, hashes, graphs). With regard to the latter, I found it odd to be reading a lot of text about basic data structures, when it seemed to me that I should be assumed to already have this knowledge if I wanted to read code that used it. And if I did NOT know about basic data structures, I should be reading a book about data structures rather than a book about code reading. Software patterns are also presented (though not by the name, I think). If I was to encounter a codebase that employed some programming concept I didn't understand fully (for example, red-black trees), then I would first go to a book on data structures -- not a book on code reading.

Following the sections on what I would consider mandatory prerequisite understanding are some brief chapters software engineering concepts (version control, build systems, project organization, packaging, system structures), which might be useful to a reader who had never worked on a large-scale project before.

After all of the coverage of what I would consider prerequisite knowledge, the penultimate chapter finally gets to the topic of tools and techniques for actually reading code. This chapter is in fact what I had hoped Mr. Spinellis would devote the book to. Unfortunately, most of the tools and techniques presented are very basic and quickly encountered by any programmer: regular expressions, that many editors include browsing support, the grep utility, differencing tools, that you could write your own tools, using the compiler to emit warnings and preprocessed code, that beautifiers exist, profiling and annotating printouts. And that's it, in about forty pages, followed by a chapter devoted to an example session.

On the whole, I think this book comes up short. If you have a few years of programming experience under your belt, then you've already encountered the basis tools and techniques presented. If someone resorted to this book to learn about a basic programming construct, then they could read my code, but I'd be nervous about letting them modify it, until they read more focused texts.

I'm rating this book at three stars because there are some good pieces here and the effort was laudable. In the end, though, I really don't think that anybody needs this book on their shelf.

The only problem is that inexperienced programmers, who would benefit most from this book, are unlikely to pick up a book on how to read C programs unless someone tells them to. Experts will find that they have already learned most of these things from their experience, although they may still enjoy this book for confirming what they know. But I think that experts will also enjoy being able to loan this book to inexperienced programmers to transmit the wisdom distilled from experience.

However, the book does not reach its goal, Managing Open Source Projects. The book title is misleading. The core two chapters, Managing a Virtual Team and Managing Distributed Open Source Projects aren't practical and not very deep.

The final chapters are a quick glance on tools and technologies for building Open Source Projects.

The information given in this book is not enough to start and manage an Open Source project. This book however may be helpful for anyone wanting to contribute to an existing Open Source project.

If, however, you enjoy reading, if you like puzzling over plots and taking notes, if you like realistic characters with realistic problems, if you like words and sentences, if you like books...read "Open Secrets."

Munro is "great literature." I suspect that in a few hundred years, Hemingway stories will have withered away under scrutiny and our past century will belong to names like Tobias Wolff, Grace Paley, and Alice Munro. She really is that good. And I think it points to something problematic about the quality of primary education Americans receive that a college student would find Munro's stories too complicated for an undergraduate literature class.

And while I'm ranting...

What is it with disparaging a book - comparing it to a talk-show - because it's written by a woman, with women characters doing womanly things? If a book is about women, does that disqualify it from being great lit? Does there have to be a war complete with trenches before it wins accolades? I also shy away from the term, "women's literature." Why categorize it so? Some people create a new category of literature to put their women into, so that they don't have to defend them from the pinheads who mindlessly laud the "classics" tooth and nail. Forget it! Viriginia Woolf, Toni Morrison, and Alice Monro are great authors and compete against any male writer...

Anyway...

"Open Secrets" is an amazing book. Right off the top, she hits us with "Carried Away," where a small-town librarian falls in love with an unseen correspondent, only to have him die in a factory accident before she ever meets him. Of course, that's where the story really starts. Plagued by longing, the librarian marries another man. Years later, she runs into her deceased lover who introduces himself to her for the first time...or is it really him?

It's a complex story, peopled with multi-dimensional characters. Love is at the heart of the story, and "Carried Away" manages to both disparage and glorify the strength of that peculiar emotion.

I'd go on, but suffice to say, the stories in "Open Secrets" are engaging, complex, interesting, and great.

If you like a bunch of dandies waltzing about, drinking and wenching, then having the hero throwing himself into an altogether stange, socialistic society in the aftermath of a romantic betayal, this is your book; but I found it lacked enough action to keep the storyline moving, and to hold this reader's attention.

I am waiting to read "Earth Made of Glass", in hope that it is more attention keeping than "A Million Open Doors".

When I was reading the book I couldn't decide when it was written. It feels like a 50's era sci-fi novel because so much importance is placed on the culture. But then there would be a reference to a technological idea that was obvious very current (such as "growing" buildings using nanomachines). I guess the true beauty of this novel is the refreshing way that technology--while believable and realistic enough--is not the centerpiece, instead it supports and compliments the plot. Very refreshing to read a novel about the integration of technology and culture that doesn't spend time belaboring the internet and information technology.

Finally, a quick plug for Amazon.com. Although I did buy this book at my local Barnes & Nobles store, their Internet site was clueless on John Barnes. Glad to see that Amazon.com has a better selection so I can explore other works by this author. I can't wait to do so (apparently there is now a sequel to "A Million Open Doors").

McChesney is not a conspiracy theorist. This book is loaded with solid data and analysis that shows how our news providers are owned and organized and allowed to operate. And it is written in plain, clear language that anyone can understand.

The book might be hard to accept for people who think they already have it all figured out, but for everyone else it goes a long way toward explaining how our news and politics can remain so static when virtually everyone is unhappy with what they are getting from both.

Get it, read it, and lend it out to everyone you know.

This is one of Noam Chomsky's most interesting pamphlets (actually a quarter-size booklet of 78 pages). It has a special relevance and importance to citizens in the aftermath of 9-11 because he directly links our corporate criminality ("Justice Department estimates the cost of corporate crime as 7 to 25 times as high as street crime") to our national policies against human rights (poverty pays, for the corporate class that strives to liquidate Third World nations in their predatory roving of the planet).

He pointedly identifies the U.S. arms industry as being among the worst violators, but even more importantly, points out that U.S. policies favoring our arms dealers are opposed by 96% of the U.S. population. While that number might be high, I believe there is no question but that Washington is being instructed by corporations rather than its citizens on this vital point of policy. It is time for citizens to take the power back.

Chomsky notes that in 1996 the World Health Organization characterized extreme poverty as the world's most ruthless killer and the greatest cause of suffering on earth. This ties in with the United Nations finding that human suffering is now a legitimate basis for intervention, and with George Soro's observation in The Washington Post of 24 February 2002, that "We can't be successful in fighting terrorism, unless we fight that other axis of evil--poverty, disease and ignorance."

This little gem of a book also includes well-footnoted observations about how nations seek to carry out trade negotiations in secrecy, in part because they are agreeing to overlook if not actively participate in the looting of poor countries as a condition for prosperous trade among the already developed nations.

The book begins and ends with thoughts from Chomsky on the intellectual discipline he founded, the relationship between linguistics, ethics, and action. He begins with pointed observations on how the most horrible crimes are allowed to go without comment because of *self* censorship, and ends by noting that our citizens do not need to be forbidden to speak of these monstrous deeds that our corporations and government are secretly agreeing to perpetuate, because we have chosen to remain ignorant and silent.

U.S. policy today is *not* founded on moral values, and it is *not* representative of the will of the people in so far as it is carried out in secret collaboration with major corporations and in opposition to the minimal mandatory needs of developing nations for water, food, disease, and economic security.

This is not about political ideology--Ralph Nader, the ultimate spoiler, has one thing right: the parties are irrelevant, this is now about the people versus the corporations. Absent a huge popular turn-out *prior* to each election, to make it clear to candidates that they will be held accountable by the people for keeping all trade and other negotiations in the public domain, and for voting on issues mindful of the will of the people rather than their corporate Enron-like paymasters, then we are the ones ultimately responsible for U.S. policy's misdirection.

As I read the book, I realized that Rutz hit the nail right on the head concerning jammed church schedules, boring worship serves and joyless Christianity. He rightly obverses that if biblical worship and fellowship do not happen during Sunday morning services, they will not happen at all. The greatest strength of this book was the appendix. It was there that he left his irreverent humor behind and made his most effective case for open worship to affect world evangelism.

Although his insights into worship and the church are good, his human and lack of documentation interfered with the book's effectiveness; he makes fantastic claims and precious little evidence. For instance, he claims that pre-Constantine Christian art worked used the feeding of the 5000 to depict the Lord's Supper and that only after Constantine did it show Jesus with the twelve. What are his sources? How valid is the evidence? Although this book did give me insight into the perils of open worship and some commonsense methods of how to handle them; nevertheless, I found the book of little value.

The only draw back about the book is that sometimes the author rants about a lot of historical things that don't really add to the book. Also, it would be nice to hear examples of "open church" services where you had people that were out-of-line. Sometimes this book is just a way bit too positive.

Too bad this book is out-of-print at the time of this review, but I recommend it just the same.

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