In making this review, I'm amazed on the date I'm writing it to be the first one, this book has been in print for over half a century and I can't believe I'm the only one who ever found it useful. The author Allyn Thompson, was a postmaster by profession, who led a group of a group of amateur telescope makers at the old Hayden planetarium in the 1940's to the time of his death in the mid 1950's. The book itself is an outgrowth of a series of articles he wrote immediately after the second world war which appeared in Sky and Telescope magazine. Though the size and focal length of the telescope he describes building (a 6-inch f8 reflector) is small by the amateur standards of the last 20 years, it is still probably the best size for a novice wishing to grind and polish the primary mirror themselves to start with. And it is in his step by step discriptions for making the primary mirror of a Newtonian reflector that this book excels. He tells you in a simple straight forward way the theory and history of the telescope, materials needed to grind and polish your own primary mirror, how to do it, how to test it (his discription of the Focault tester and using masks with it are in my opinion the still the clearest written for the beginner). He does not attempt to scare you away with horror stories of all the terrible things that can happen to you, turned down edge, dog biscuit ect, a flaw you find in the old "ATM" books I and II edited by Albert Ingalls. Thompson identifies possible problems, but then guides you through them with straight forward techniques. His "button laps" were a wonderful inovation for small mirror making and molds were widely available when this writer polished his first mirrors 30 years ago. Unfortunately nobody I know of today sells the molds commercially, but Thompson shows you how to make them yourself if you want to try it. As far as the mechanical construction of the telescope, the book is dated. Not many people today would use babbitt filled pipe fittings to make a mount, not since the easily built and more stable Dobson mount became the standard about 20 years ago for home builts (for a good book on that see Richard Berry's "Build Your Own Telescope"). But John Dobson was just starting to build scopes about the time Thompson died so he can't be blamed for never having seen one, he was on the other side of the country. All in all this book has held up well for something written 50 years ago. I wish I'd had a copy of it when I built my first scope. I didn't discover it till after I'd made my second mirror and I believe things would have gone a lot smoother had I read this first instead of using the old ATM books. It's too bad Allen Thompson isn't with us today to have updated the mechanical stuff, but as a mentor for your first mirror, you can't beat this book!

Vicky Lewis Thompson keeps you glued to the pages. Unable to put the book down. The scenes awaken a passion in the reader that is scandalously hot. I felt I was right there with the characters all of the time, rooting for them to come together(permanently). Tortureously sizzling hot read. Excellent.

Very cool graphics and video clips, this really makes you feel like you're getting somewhere. The stories in the movie theatre really hit home. The curriculum is good, really makes you think. It's cool that it comes with a little journal.

Throughout the last 100 or so years, artists, collectors and curators have debated what a museum should be. Unfortunately, most museums are buildings that immediately focus on art as icon. Many contemporary artists want just the opposite. MASS MoCA represents a breakthrough in establishing a new sort of museum. Its purpose is to "mount in-depth quality work that would otherwise remain unseen for lack of properly scaled, appropriately tools facilities." That purpose has also been expanded to include being a location for the performing arts, both outdoors and in a theater.

Located 5 miles from the Williams College museum of art and 35 miles from Tanglewood in North Adams, Massachusetts, MASS MoCA adds an important new element to a major cultural center (especially in the summers).

The story of the museum is also very interesting, having been based in a rundown series of converted mill buildings that had housed manufacturing since 1768. Most recently abandoned by the Sprague Electric Company (who originally took it over from the Arnold Print Works -- makers of printed fabric), the facility covers 13 acres and over 780,000 square feet of building space. Originally, Massachusetts had planned to provide most of the funding. A recession and change in political leadership greatly slowed the progress, and much of the funding eventually came form private donors.

The book has many wonderful elements. The director, Joseph Thompson, has a fine essay explaining the museum's roots and concept. The architect, Simeon Bruner, also weighs in with his thoughts about the design along with drawings of his plans. The pieces de resistance, however, are the wonderful photographs of the site (both before and after) in black and white and color that capture the transformation. These were done by Nicholas Whitman, and started before the museum was planned. He and his father had both worked in the Sprague plant, and he wanted to preserve the memory of the space before it was torn down. There are some stunning side-by-side photographs of before in black and white, with after in color with beautiful art on the walls.

Most of the current photographs were taken during the 1999 grand opening of the museum, which I had the pleasure to attend. The classic piece that defines MASS MoCA during that opening was the display of Robert Rauschenberg's "The 1/4 Mile or 2 Furlong Piece" from 1981, which can only easily be displayed in full in MASS MoCA. There are also nice photographs of Natalie Jeremjenko's "Tree Logic" and James Rosenquist's "The Summer in the Econo-Mist." There are some fine John Chamberlain sculptures as well.

This book is a great resource to have for any contemporary art lover, or someone who is interested in new museum forms. I also recommend it as a working document for a museum still in progress, for most of the development of the MASS MoCA site is still ahead. If you are a museum trustee or are planning a new museum, you should read this book, as well.

I should admit that I collect contemporary art, and love to visit collections of contemporary art. If you share that love, you'll adore MASS MoCA!

Abolish your stalled thinking about what a museum is and should be! Also, be sure to give yourself a treat, and visit MASS MoCA soon. It's well worth a special trip from Boston, New York, or Philadelphia.

Donald Mitchell

Coauthor of The Irresistible Growth Enterprise (available in August 2000) and The 2,000 Percent Solution

(donmitch@fastforward400.com)

Valerie Thompson has done an outstanding job of tackling this portion of the global bond market. The book is thorough enough to provide a refresher to a market pro yet accesible to moderately skilled retail investors. Mastering the Euromarkets is particularly recommended for the legions of retirement plan equity investors who will eventually need to worry about generating income from their portfolios.

The activities in this book are geared to children aged 5-8 years, with a few suitable for older children. Most can be performed with common household objects in ways that are enjoyable for children. Math can be viewed as a game rather than a chore. The availability of this book in Spanish will help reach a wider audience. I hope other books of this quality will also be made available to this country's large and rapidly growing Spanish-speaking population.

The book covers a history of carriers and grounds, binding methods and vehicles, their viscosity and transparency effects, pros and cons of different binding media, glazes and varnishes. It then gives a classification of medieval pigments and details the main pigments used to produce colours on the page, wall and panel. Mixing, reaction and permanence problems with pigments, confusion of identification, and history are described. Metals are also discussed, including types of gold media and gilding methods. This is an absolutely essential book for anyone (and especially SCAdian illuminators) interested in the building blocks of medieval painting. It will give you a good grounding in the basics and help you understand the resources, techniques and mindset of medieval artists. I cannot recommend it enough. It is also an entertaining read(if occasionally unintentionally).

Richard Thompson has done a wonderful job in this book, delving into all kinds of topics, from Deterministic Chaos, Turing Machines, Relativity, Quantum Mechanics to all kinds of psychic and paranormal phenomena while maintaining the overall theme of the book - exploring the possibility that the world we live in may not be the real world. I won't be surprised if 100 years from now, Richard Thompson is hailed as a scientist at par with Einstein, though I feel his insights are better than what Einstein had - after all, even Einstein was wrong some times. But Richard Thompson seems to raise points which no sane scientist can refuse. It is a pity he is not yet recognized for his outstanding writings.

As a former student of Korzybski's 'General Semantics,' it has long seemed to me that the word 'Science,' as it is used today, is the greatest semantic catastrophe of the age; instead of 'Science' what we should be talking about is 'Science-1' or 'Science-2' or 'Science-3,' etc.

There are, in other words, many possible forms that science may take, both higher and lower, and if those of the ancient Indian Vedic culture or Heraclitus or Goethe are considered as types of Science-1, a reading of Thompson will very soon convince you that our own science, that of the modern age, barely rates a Science-3 designation.

If we consider that the author is himself a highly qualified mathematician and scientist with professional experience in fields as diverse as quantum physics, mathematical biology, and computer systems analysis, we may begin to feel that this is one of the most amazing books on science ever written.

Thompson is something of a paragon. Not only do his books carry an impressive (though lightly worn) freight of solid scholarship, but they are also extremely well-written and well-documented, and his style is both lucid and civilized: no-one could be more fair-minded when discussing the views of those with whom he disagrees.

It would take someone far more knowledgeable than me to do justice to this book, a book which takes the reader through a whole series of key concepts from quantum mechanics, physics, chemistry, biology, evolutionary theory, artificial intelligence, information theory, etc. Thompson's procedure is first to show us some of the more grandiose claims being made by various representatives from these fields. He then goes on to select specific concrete examples from each field for close scrutiny and to apply mathematics and information theory to their analysis.

What becomes apparent from these analyses is the shoddiness, the illogic, and the invalidity of so much modern scientific 'doctrine.' 'Science' emerges, not as the shining and glorious edifice of the modern scientists' imagination, but as a flimsy, tottering, ramshackle structure, much of which begins to look more like pseudo-science than science: it is a structure riddled with fallacies.

Thompson's analysis of modern science is, as I have said, eminently fair-minded. It is also thorough, though the book has been written in such a way as to make it approachable both by the mathematician and scientist and by the general reader. His proofs are detailed, rigorous, and fascinating, and I for one have not been able to find any weakness in his argument.

When Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire in the 3rd Century A.D., the West effectively severed itself, not only from its classical past, but also from the East. The sad effects of this self-mutilation are still with us, and are nowhere more apparent than in the inferior science of the modern age. If we want to find a true example of Science-1 it follows that we will have to look elsewhere. Thompson, who besides being a scientist is also a Sanskritist, proffers as an example of Science-1 the Bhakti Yoga of Vedic India. Unlike our own reductionist and mechanistic science, Bhakti Yoga, for Thompson, not only satisfies all the criteria of a genuine science, but as a nonmechanistic science it is able to provide a valid, convincing, and true explanation of the most fundamental fact of human experience - a fact which mechanistic science has nothing to say about - the fact of Consciousness. Bhakti Yoga also offers a perfectly satisfying explanation for the existence of higher forms, forms which our mechanistic science desperately pretends come about by mere chance.

Whether you are scientist or general reader, you will find it well worth your time to read Thompson's book, a book far richer and more complex and fascinating than I've been able to suggest here. It is undoubtedly one of the finest and most interesting studies of science that I have ever read, though much of what it has to say will be unwelcome to many since few care to have it pointed out to them that the Emperor has no clothes.

Science-3, as Kierkegaard saw long ago, can only end in despair. Science-1 is what, as human beings, we are both fully capable of and entitled to if we can only succeed in overcoming our cultural limitations. Thompson is to be thanked for having shown us why this is necessary and one way in which it can be done.

As an architectural student with a hobby of medieval history, this book was exactly what I was looking for. It draws not only on architectural history, but also on archaeology, anthropology, and liturature to illuminate the form and usage of the medieval hall. The book focuses mainly on England and covers the evolution of this important typology from the early Anglo-Saxon times to the beginning of the Renaissance. A great book for those interested in medieval architecture, less informative, but interesting to those more interested in history or social issues.