Open

I heard about this book, so I wanted to read it to see if it was as funny and stupid (unintentionally) as I heard.

I was not disappointed. Few things in life are free, and sex is defintely not among them.

The perfect coda to this book is that the couple got divroced several years after publishing this book. You can't make thsi sutff up.

This book reached its "sell before" date about 25 years ago. Better books have been written, but haven't been hyped so thoroughly, so it keeps getting reprinted.

The "open marriage" concept has -- REPEAT AFTER ME -- absolutely nothing to do with sexual nonmonogamy. Rather, the authors examine the problem of what another author has called "the couple front," where couples feel they must act as if they're surgically joined, & end up feeling confined & eventually hating each other.

If you are NOT interested in nonmonogamy, then read ANY book by Harville Hendrix & you'll find thoughts that are much more practical.

If you ARE interested in nonmonogamy (group marriage, polyamory, etc.), then start with Intimate Friendships (Ramey), Polyamory (Anapol), Honest Sex (Roy & Roy), or Group Marriage (Constantine & Constantine)... or even The New Faithful (Nearing), or Three in Love (Foster).

I usually see ten copies of this book at any thrift store. That's somehow fitting.

A very beneficial and good book, although somewhat boring at places (especially the early chapters). The ideologies and points of view presented just make so much sense! And it's easy to find corresponding cases from your own life (to know what they write about). I'd recommend this to _any_ couple, at least for me it seemed to do the trick.

After a quick glance of my friend's copy, I picked this up, curious to find out more about the current state of affairs for gays and lesbians in Hollywood. While it's certainly encouraging that many lesbian and gay writers/producers/et al are now able (thanks to Ms. DeGeneres) to live their lives more openly, the book itself offers little insight other than Ellen DeGeneres and a couple of other passing (gay) cultural moments, such as Howard Ashman's lover's acceptance of his posthumous Academy Award. Being a supposed historical exploration, the book flips back and forth in time and era, never focusing on one person or subject long enough to discover anything insightful. It's coverage of the early part of Hollywood's gay history is slight at best, focusing mostly on Rock Hudson, and offers little to illuminate that situation. It has the depth and tone of a good magazine article, but as a book it doesn't offer enough: it seems as if it was padded, and interviews are quoted verbatim with every bit of bad syntax and "you know"'s intact. I learned nothing from this book that I wasn't aware of through soundbites on entertainment news shows. I realy don't like writing a negative review, but reading this was increasingly frustrating and ultimately unsatisfying.

The author examines Hollywood like it is a set decoration being used in a movie. He shows us the attractive scenery (the Hollywood that middle America sees every day), as well as behind the scenes: the nails, glue, and sandbags that hold the set in place. In this case, however, the nails, glue, and sandbags are decades of deception, denial, and hushed tones that the industry continues to use. Ehrenstein writes with a knowledgeable pen, yet rarely if ever comes across as smug or elitest. His narrative is conversational, but structured. It allows the reader to understand better many individual stories in Hollywood's past and present while showing them in context relative to time and social acceptance. "Open Secret" is well-written and comprehensive.

This book may as well be a horror novel in that Hollywood is still the same as it was in the 1920's. Cowardace, politics and money are still keepin celebrities in the closet while teenagers are still taking their own lives because they think they are alone. This book details what can happen to a person in Hollywood when they chose to STOP living a lie (Ellen, Geffen et al), but also how being out and themselves can never equal a dollar amount. Great Book!

The review excerpts on the back of this book are glowing and lead me to expect a satisfying and rich character study of some rather odd and eccentric people. Well, the characters are odd but the author's disjointed writing style and uneven storyline left me cold. It was absolutely ponderous wading though this book and I found it quite hard to care about the characters or their lives. I would occasionally be drawn in and believe that the book was finally going to get interesting but was inevitably disappointed.

Wide Open left me cold and disappointed.

i managed to finish this book in the matter of a few hours ... bt not because the book was wildly thrilling -- honestly the book is about a group of very odd people who happened to meet at a point in time and managed to witness a "triumphant tragedy" ...

WIDE OPEN isn't madly suspenseful but it was very addictive. The characters were very queer but you could imagine that there are people like them lurking on the streets. The treatment of the book was mildly disturbing and very intriguing. The most satisfying thing about this book is the fact that it ends -- not like books that you can imagine might recur over and over again. WIDE OPEN is an account of an episode that only happens once and like Nietzsche's theory of eternal return states, this could be the reason why it is so significant and unforgettable a book.

Barker herself once described this as a novel of "cornball perversion," and no one who reads it will ever dispute that! It is filled with the weirdest group of gonzo characters ever assembled, among them Ronny, a homeless man whose real name is Jim; Jim, a hairless man whose real name is Ronny and who works spraying weed killer along the roads; Luke, a photographer of pornography who smells like fish; and Lily, a violent and rebellious teenager who suffers from a clotting disorder and worships The Head. And if these characters were not already bizarre enough, Barker also opens the Pandora's box of their not-in-the-textbook psyches to the reader--showing them to be even more off-the-wall than we had ever dreamed! Providing fertile ground for all the aberrations to flourish, the author sets the characters in a remote seaside resort/nudist colony during the off-season, with additional forays to a nearby boar farm, the Lost and Found Department of the London Underground, and a bat cave in Sumatra, where a character we know only from her letters is searching for a hairy hominid with no big toes. Obviously, not your grandmother's novel.

Wide Open is like nothing you've ever read before-absolutely original, sometimes wacky, sometimes poignant, sometimes violent, and always fascinating. The fluidity of Barker's prose keeps the reader zipping along, despite the fact that we can't always tell when she's putting us on, aren't always sure what's going on, and often suspect there are deep themes here if only we could catch our breaths long enough to figure them out. This is an absolutely exhilarating wild ride if the reader is willing to be "wide open."

This book is only worth one star, or even half. While the authors make a few thought-provoking arguments, these are obscured by the book's snide tone, sarcasm, and name-calling. How seriously can you take what it says, when, for example, one essay likens openness theologians to drag queens? This book is only fit for those who are convinced that the rightness of their doctrine exempts them from the command to love. Any Christian who is trying to make a serious assesment of open theism's claims would be well-advised to look elsewhere.

Classical evangelicalism is to be congratulated for stepping up to the plate to answer the threat of open theism. In the last 7 years or so, nearly a dozen major books and many more journal articles and debates have been produced critiquing the open theist perspective. The result has been a growing awareness on the part of the larger body of Christ that open theism, while appealing to us in our humanness, is a fatally flawed theology of inconsistency that results in a different god and a different view of the world from the one articulated in Scripture.

This particular book is one of the books that have attempted to demonstrate the inadequacy of open theism. As I will mention below, there are several very good aspects of this book, and I believe that the parts of this book that are good are good enough to recommend the book. But on balance, and particularly in comparison to other evangelical books on this subject, it comes up short to a degree that a 3 star rating is called for.

Like other books critiquing open theism, this is a collaborative effort where specific authors are asked to write about specific topics related to open theism. As I will mention below, this approach comes back to haunt this book. But one of things about this that is good is that there are specific chapters written by specific authors that stand on their own as being outstanding and are fairly untainted by the other less than superb chapters written by others.

Of the 12 chapters of the book, about half of them deserve commendation. I found Jones' chapter on metaphor to be the most engaging and scholarly. In this chapter, he demonstrates quite effectively that the hermeneutic of open theism is unbiblical in its selective denial of the legitimacy of metaphor, and that this denial at its core, is the worst kind of illogic since it regularly results in the views of open theists being rampantly self defeating. A number of other books have tackled this foundational weakness of open theism, but in many ways, Jones' contribution here might be the best succinct critique available.

In addition, Frame provides a very good chapter on foreknowledge, although the reader should take Frame to heart when he comments in some of his footnotes that his 'Doctrine of God' book is really the place to go to get a more comprehensive and scholarly critique of the foreknowledge debate. MacArthur's chapter on the atonement was solid, though it could have stood for improvement. Johnson's chapter on impassibility is another very good chapter that attempts to take on what is perhaps the biggest area of theology where open theists believe they hold the best cards. Wilson's chapter on theological knowledge is also good and to some degree, makes up for his rather bad chapter on the loveliness of orthodoxy and the epilogue. Lastly, Ascol provides a good pastoral critique of open theism. These chapters, and particularly the chapters by Johnson and Jones, make the book worthy of purchase.

Given what I've said above, I was most dismayed that the quality of those chapters were comingled with other chapters that were as weak as they are. In many of the remaining chapters, the authors routinely set up strawmen to tear down (Sproul Jr. in particular was guilty of this), played a game of what I call 'scholarly demonization' where they attempted to lump open theists into other groups of thinkers that Christians more easily recognize as threats. And in the end, this fundamentally undermines the integrity of the book. One of the stated goals is that open theism is nothing new, but is merely the latest reincarnation of socinian and enlightenment thinking. A number of chapters are dedicated to attempting to prove this link. Those efforts are only partially successful in large part because other authors undermine this assertion by saying that open theism is actually a product of postmodern, feel-good thinking, which is antithetical to enlightenment modernism. The discerning reader might well conclude that the authors are not only unsure of exactly what they're trying to prove, but actively employ an 'any stick will do' approach to go after open theism, even if such an approach results in assertions flatly contradicting each other from chapter to chapter. I have respect for Douglas Wilson, who is the editor of this book. But he fails rather badly in his role here, and allows the book to become an inconsistent and emotionalistic rant at times, which is quite dubious since in many ways, this ends up only immitating many of the 'scholarly' works put out by open theists.

So overall, a mixed bag. A number of quality contributions that definitely deserve reading and contemplation are unfortunately mixed in with several chapters that frankly never should have made it to print. As a result, I recommend this book with the urgent caveat of separating the wheat from the chaff.

This book is so effective at decimating the speculative,
conjectural,unbiblical Open Theory of Bible interpretation that it elicits responses and reviews like the 'consistent non-evangelical' who can't handle Biblical Truth.

The essays of this book examine Open Theory from many different
angles and find them all woefully deficient in properly
understanding the Bible. One only has to check out Open Theorist
Clark Pinnock's 'Most Moved Mover'(see separate review) and the
quasi-mormon view postulated to see where Open Theory logically
and 'consistently' leads.

As has been well said, what good is it to be sympathetic to a
belief system that may seem superficially more consistent and
so-called logical only to find it is abysmally erroneous as a
whole and unable to account for maximum Biblical texts in a fair and plenary way? Such is the fatal flaw with Open Theory which
this book does a great job in thoroughly, almost embarrassingly,
exposing.

Open Theory is a 'consistent' house of cards which collapses in
one breath of fresh air from correct biblical interpretation
and a bit of deeper thought applied to Who God is and What He can
know and When He can know it and how God's Unconditional
Sovereignty is compatible/complementary with mortal agency.

The reactions from liberal,uninformed,biblically deficient
critics who crave 'consistency' over correctness,cogency and
conformity to Scripture are in desperate need of reading
'Exegetical Fallacies' by D.A.Carson. In fact, Carson should come out with Volume II using Open Theory exclusively as how NOT to do Biblical Interpretation!

See Norm Geisler's 'Battle For God' and John Frame's 'No Other
God' for excellent elaboration of many points found in this book.
Bruce Ware's 'God's Lesser Glory' is also a powerful antidote
to the craving of 'new over true' of the Open Theory movement.

You'd have a hard time convincing me to buy an ebook for 800 bucks when you can't preview it, can't return it, can't resell it, and don't even know what the heck's in it. Has anyone actually BOUGHT one of these things?

could have gone lighter on the wallet. The research report complemeted my research on Open Source and it's computing power in the new world.I am not sure about the market size for this book, but it sure did help me in what i am presently doing and to good measure.

I recently had a chance to read though this document. It's not an e-book, it's a research report document that you would use to justify Linux/Open Source to your customers, boss, etc... In the information age we are spoiled to free information, but the truth of the mater is, research firms (such as the one who published this report) spend large amounts of money in the lab proving the case for you. This asking price for such a report is common.

major parts of the caribbean were left out, and hey!, some people prefer not to travel to the big resorts! stick with lonely planet or others that know their stuff!

I rather did not like this book - I think I did a better job researching online, through travel agents, brochures, and family travel forums. There were a number of Caribbean destinations not mentioned in the book. Moreover, the information that was there seemed like abstract info. after my research. I was definitely disappointed that Cancun, Cozumel, and the Riviera Maya of Mexico (all hot spots for family travel and on the Caribbean Sea) were not included - obviously, if you are trying to research all options of where to go in the Caribbean, no stones should be left unturned.
Bottom line - this book is maybe okay if you are not looking at Mexico at all, but if you're online and have a little time to look - invest some time. There is more complete info. out there.

I rather did not like this book - I felt that I did a much better job researching places online, through travel agents and brochures. Moreover, I was a bit disappointed that it didn't cover the east coast of Mexico - Cancun, Cozumel, and Mayan Riviera - all on Caribbean Sea and hot spots for family travel!!
What I did read was basically abstract info. that I had already gotten online - especially through family travel forums. I found that there were also some destinations missing from this book (that I had heard about elsewhere).
So, this book is maybe okay if you are not interested in Mexico and not a heavy price to pay (to lose?) but just not too complete.

I don't know anything about the subject matter covered in the later chapters, but the Perl that the authors demonstrate in chapters 3 to 7 is some of the most badly written and buggy Perl that I have ever seen. Many of the example programs won't even compile as they have typos in them that would have been caught if the book had been given the most cursory glance by a technical editor. I searched the IDG (sorry, 'Hungry Minds') web site to see what errata had been made available, but there didn't seem to be any.

i belive this book lacked of information about database information and reference to C

When i bought this book i was looking for a whole sight of the tools that i can find in opensource, not only a few... this book needs a roadmap view.

Why? theres is no reference for C or JAVA. Why? theres no refence to modules for Apache? Why? theres no references to JDBC, DBD/DBI, databases in general....

Anyway a good book? but with a quite good aproach to the problem

This is by far the worst book on the UFO craze I have ever read. I'm up to page 100 and have yet to learn anything about this phenomina that I don't already know. It is poorly written and I have fallen asleep twice while reading it. I'm not going to go any further with this one. I feel like I was cheated out of 5 bucks.

Nick Pope's only claim to fame was that he was the civil servant at the MOD charged with the investigation of UFO reports there. A book that reviewed that time, with a look at the processes and in-depth coverage of one or two cases that happened during his time could have been quite entertaining and quaintly British. Unfortunately Pope believes he was not only the best person EVER in his job, but that it also gave him the authority to pronounce sagely on UFO cases through the ages, from Ezekiel to the Roswell film footage. Littered with inaccuracies of all kinds this book is badly written and a huge missed opportunity. In his desire to be sensational he ignores the lure of the mundane, a subject that, as a low ranking civil servant, he is surely most knowledgeable about.

This book should be required reading for anyone even mildly interested in UFOs. In this book, Pope tells us the story of what he himself calls his three year "voyage of discovery" during which he came to the conclusion that the "Extraterrestrial Hypothesis" was the best (and, possibly, the only) explanation for the twenty percent or so of cases that could not be explained otherwise.

To come to this conclusion, however, Pope had to start with an "open mind." Given the title, the reader should be instantly aware that this is not the way most of officialdom approaches this topic. But, Pope does something most Civil Servants would never do: he takes his new responsibility as the Ministry of Defense's (MoD's) UFO Desk Officer SERIOUSLY! He reads into the topic (which shows up clearly in his knowledge of the history of the phenomenon). To extend his capability to investigate sightings, He develops good relations with civilian UFO investigation groups like the British UFO Research Association (BUFORA) and QUEST International, and actually shares data with them. Not only that, but Pope actually tries to help and comfort witnesses and abductees. When he says "I'm with the Ministry and I'm here to help you," he actually means it!

So, what we have thus far is an MoD Civil Servant who, after three years of dealing with civilian and military close encounters, has come to the conclusion that some significant percentage of these events involve extraterrestrial craft piloted by some form of extraterrestrial intelligence. I cannot stress how important this publically stated conclusion is. It has, insofar as I can tell, happened only once before and that was in the first edition of Edward Ruppelt's book "The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects." In that case, though, so much pressure was placed on Ruppelt's employer that he was forced very quickly to write a second edition with a new chapter that contradicted the conclusion of the previous edition. So far, at least, no such pressure has been placed on Nick Pope. And, that, too, is also extraordinary.

Also like Ruppelt, Pope seems unaware that there may be a UFO cover-up going on in the UK. As we finally learned in America, the best cases never went to Blue Book. Instead, they went directly to Air Intelligence Service Squadrons. And, there is evidence that the best cases in the U.K. did not go to Mr. Pope's office at Whitehall but, instead, went to a secret group at RAF Rudloe Manor in Wiltshire. Yet, despite the evidence, Mr. Pope insists that there is no cover-up in Britain. I am certain that Mr. Pope is not party to one and is not knowingly telling a lie. But, I cannot bring myself to believe that there is none - especially given the close relationship between the U.S. (which seems to follow a strict code of secrecy) and the UK, which would have to agree to follow the same policy if it expected U.S. cooperation and support.

Finally, being objective, Pope broaches the issue no one seems willing to confront. Being a defense analyst, Pope cannot fall in with the "Space Brothers" view of extraterrestrials. He views their deeds objectively, and doesn't like what he sees. They violate our airspace (including restricted military airspace) without our permission. They can, at least at times, completely evade detection by our air defense radar systems. They land on our sovereign territory and proceed to kidnap our citizens and subject them to "medical examinations" that only Dr. Mengele could appreciate. And, last but not least, they kill and mutilate our farm animals and pets in an especially gruesome manner. If people from another nation on earth did all this, we would treat it as an act of war. And so, being logical (another extraordinary trait in a Civil Servant), Pope draws the appropriate conclusion: we are at war right now. According to Pope, it's currently a very secret and quite one-sided war. It's one-sided because we don't seem to know that we are at war. Pope advocates the development of appropriate military contingency plans for use if and when we can't make the Aliens stop these practices by any other means. What's extraordinary about this is that Pope is, again, the first high-ranking Civil Servant I have ever heard draw the logical conclusion regarding the objective implications of Alien activities on this planet, and do so publicly. This conclusion will come as a shock to those who have heard nothing but the apologists for the Aliens, but it's about time they woke up.

I think it was kind of silly to put the values in a separate book. I have both books, but its a pain to look up values.

This is a very useful pricelist that not only includes values, but also a rarity rating. It also lists variations that are not pictured in the main book, and is helpful in that regard in identification. Like many pricelists, you do need the main addition. To slam this book as others have because it not what it NEVER claims to be is downright silly. A big duh! if you ask me.

This book is essential for the salt cellar (open salt) collector. It must be used in conjunction with 5000 Open Salts : A Collector's Guide. The former gives the price range of each open salt. The latter provides a photograph and description of each individual salt.

I am very concerned with Ms. Hansen's wanton speculation. She holds a view and will make the evidence fit her view. Just because this is a 'popular' book doesn't mean the author can wing it. After nearly reading the first chapter and leafing through the book a little I can already give you the following five representative examples (among so many others):

Example 1 --
On page 8, in regard to those who would object to her using uncorroborated fiction as source material she says, "These critics argue, as a matter of faith, . . . " that literature is not necessarily reality. It seems clear she's the one with faith, allowing fiction, without any support, to stand as history. And while I agree with her when, on page 9, she says that TV scripts would make different historical material than _The Congressional Record_ (though not because the latter is factual), that does not make the former necessarily a valid source by itself.

Example 2 --
On page 27, referring to a single tortoise shell -- out of she says over 200,000, though all other Chinese and English sources I've read use the figure of more than 100,000 -- with both positive and negative inscriptions she concludes "that oracle bones may not have been edited as much as some analysts feared. The largely positive nature of the oracle bone texts, which usually record good weather or victories, suggests that even the oracle bones may have been censored, with the result that only those recording positive outcomes were kept. But this important text [that one shell!] shows that the Shang recorded failed prognostications in addition to their successes." No, unless she can say that she or someone has found a significant number of negative shells (surely more than one), then her comments are groundless speculation.

Example 3 --
On page 109, in chapter 3, after granting that Qin Shihuang did order all but a small number of approved books burned/banned, she works as his apologist saying that since much of that was an oral tradition, the banning "would not have had much effect." Gee, then I wonder why they bothered to write them down in the first place or why Qin needed to destroy and ban the books if everyone had them in their heads as oral tradition or why there have been different versions of the classics or why archaeologists have found different versions of the classics or why there's been endless debate to this very day about which versions of the classics are authentic? In fact, since it was written down, then we cannot simply say it was by that time purely an oral tradition.

Example 4 --
The caption for the picture on page 255 for the rules for a women's association says, "The scribe who drew up the document used colloquial language, which the women may have dictated directly, . . . " They may have, but they may not have. The accompanying text does not tell us either.

Example 5 --
Then on page 111, in talking about some Qin legal code, we get this wonderful sentence: "Because these are the only sections of the Qin code to survive today, they allow us to judge whether Qin law was as brutal as later historians suggested." No, I think that very fact means we don't have enough information to "judge", but merely to speculate. The 15th amendment of the US Constitution gave all persons, regardless of race, the right to vote in 1870. But as we all know, half of the country did not comply with this until the Voting Rights Act in 1965. If a future historian writes about US law based only on the Constitution (which is so well protected in it's 'tomb' it will survive long after most other written records of the US Government are gone) what would they speculate?

Granted, I didn't get that far into the book, but at this point, do I want to continue reading? I might learn something from this book. But I would have zero confidence in what I learned. I would constantly be rereading passages sorting out her unsubstantiated guesses from what is known.

I can recommend Jacques Gernet's "A History of Chinese Civilization" which covers the same time period, in the same introductory manner though with different emphases, with at least as many words -- and it's history.

I think this book is clearly written and is easy to read
and presents some good examples of archaeological finds
and artifacts and their analyses. But I didn't like this book.

The book has a lot of author's own opinions and points of view that often contradict with and deviate from the conventional Chinese history. It seems to me that in the book she is somewhat biased and too opiniated and often tries to convice the readers with such strong word as "... we must therefore conclude that..." to make her own opinions and points of view of history look like proven facts without very persuasive arguments to
support her own assertions. It think that it is very critical that the author makes very good and persuasive reasonings to support his/her own interpretations and opinions, especially when they contradict and deviate from the conventional ones but in this book, however, the author often fails to do so. It seemed to me when I first read it that she tries to show the readers that she is trying to base her own historical analyses solely based on reliable historical sources such as archaeological finds but it also seemed to me that she also does so to support her own biased opinions about Chinese history.

The only reason I give this book a rating of two instead of
one is that it is clearly written. If you really want to
learn about Chinese history, I suggest to use other books
because this book just gives its readers a distorted view of
Chinese history based on what the author thinks is right.

This book is wonderful to have for people who don't have knowledge in Chinese History. The author categorized the subjects neatly. However, I am pretty dissapointed with this book because the author focus more on the literature and philosophy then the history itself.