Rajan Srinivasan Mahadevan held the previous Guinness World Record for reciting the first 31,811 digits of pi. "That record stood until March 9, 1987 when another memorist (Hideaki Tomoyori) recited 40, 000 digits of pi". This book in most part is the clinical account of Rajan's memory ability and processes. Also included in this book are other control subjects GN, DA, DW, MD, TH. In about a 3-yr. period of time Charles P. Thompson, Thaddeus M. Cowan, Jerome Frieman conducted a battery of tests and worked closely with Rajan. Rajan has proven himself worthy to be in the line with other great memorists.
Contents:
Preface
1 Rajan The Person
2 Memory Span and Memory Load Tasks
3 Non-Numeric Performance
4 Number Matrices
5 Memory Search
6 Priming Digit Strings
8 Comparison With Other Memorists
9 Overview And Interpretation Of Rajan's Performance
References
Author Index
Subject Index
This is a list of Chapters, there is much more information in the sub-chapters. Furthermore, check ... Memory Search by a Memorist- for complete chapter-sub chapter listing.
This book has a tremendous amount of information. Numerous memory tests ranging from memory span, mean memory Span, mean Recall, mean organization measures, mean study time and recall, mean time per matrix, median search times, theoretical median encoding/production time, and more. There are numerous charts and graphs comparing Rajan with the test subjects, also contained are tests on Rajan himself. As you can tell, there is a lot one can learn from this book.

The beginning of this book is an introduction to Rajan. Rajan himself writes the autobiography in the beginning of the book. Also learned from the autobiography is Rajan's middle name "Srinivasan". "He is named after a distant cousin who perhaps was India's most famous mathematician, Srivinvasa Ramanujan". Following the autobiography are only brief accounts of interviews NBC, radio, 60 minuites, etc. Also most memorable is the sub-chapter entitled "The "Larry King Show", a very amusing story. Then some information about Rajan the person and his schooling. The meat of the book is the memory experiments.

Also contained in chapter 8 of this book is a brief comparison of Rajan to other well-known memoirists, Inaudi, Diamandi, Arnould, Ruckle, Bergh, Finkelstein, Isihara, professor Aitken, Shereshevskii, VP, SF and DD, TE, and last Bubbles P.
There is information regarding Ericsson's Theory of Skilled Memory and how it pertains to Rajan. The reference section also gives valuable information. I found some valuable books and papers catalogued here.

I did not want to involve myself in the work of detailing information that is contained in this book because of its length and scope. Because of the previous reviews, and I wanted other memory enthusiasts to have a handle on what to expect from this book. This book is more of a clinical account of Rajan's ability and not the most pleasant of reading material. However, there is a terrific amount of experiments and information in this book. I learned how to conduct different memory experiments, understand memory function, also learned about the uses of "rote" memory. I urge anyone interested in memory read this book.

the book is a story of espionage, and you can feel yourself moving with the characters. a great way to tell a story about love. and a nice twist of faith for the two lover.

If anyone knows what has happened to this author, please post a notice. I read all three of her books years ago and they are definite keepers, they are fabulous, kept me on the edge of my seat and I've always hoped for more.

I took this book to Mexico with me recently and was amazed by how well researched and authoritative it still was despite having been written a decade ago. The sisters have a great insight into the country and a sense of humor to go with it. I highly recommend this book to anyone with an interest in Mexico and its culture.

Professor Jeree Brissenden, UEA

This is the best aviation war fighting book this reviewer has ever read. It grabs the reader's interest from the flyleaf and doesn't let go until the last word. Authors have put together a comprehensive history of the F-86 Sabre jet and its pilots and ground crews through the words and photographs of the men who flew and maintained this great jet throughout the Korean War. This uniquely crafted history is made up of individual short stories, primarily by the pilots, which describe every aspect of fighting against the mysterious and capable MiG-15. The book essentially follows the chronology of the war, focusing on the evolution of the Sabre, the refinement of tactics against the MiG-15 and the molding of the airmen into effective teams to overcome the significant advantages of the MiG-15 in certain flight regimes. The personal, honest and exciting stories the pilots tell of combats, both successful and sometimes not, are so compelling the reader feels as if they are witnessing the event. There is humor, heroism and tragedy in these stories, many gleaned from these Sabre drivers in recent interviews, yet clear and compelling despite the passage of fifty years. These memories are related by not only the "aces," but also by many of the younger pilots who earned the everlasting affection of their Element and Flight Leads by "covering their six" and allowing them to engage the MiGs without fear of being shot down in turn. The book is rich with color photographs, many published for the first time, of Sabres, airfields, ground crews and aviators which give the book a vibrancy which perfectly compliments its text. Appendixes show the ultimate disposition of every Sabre that served in Korea; list the case of every Sabre loss during the war; list every confirmed F-86 kill; and name all of the U. S. aces during the war. These appendixes add a very nice compendium for those who wish greater detail. This is a wonderfully written, professionally composed and thoroughly enjoyable book which is a MUST READ for anyone interested in combat aviation.

This book is a great guide for how to start small and end up big. This guy is for real!

Roger Thompson examines the English genealogies, biographies and careers of a large sample of Puritan colonists. Thompson finds that most Puritans, before leaving Britain, lived, worked and socialized in the same network of communities in which their ancestors had lived for many generations. Even the merchants, the most mobile group Thompson studies, were only incrementally mobile. Over years, or over generations, merchants moved town-by-town, steadily closer to London. Most Puritan colonists, Thompson asserts, would have found the move to another continent a drastic break from both their heritage and their experience.

The examination of callings, both religious and occupational, proves extremely interesting. Thompson shows how these men and women lived in England, and why they finally felt compelled to leave. Details of their lives, both personal and professional, enrich Thompson's study.

The work is a tremendous contribution to our understanding of the Puritans, in both England and America. Thompson offers a work of outstanding skill and readability.

Other works in the same field would be the section on East Anglians relocating to New England in David Hackett Fischer's Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America, and the entirety of D. (David Grayson) Allen's In English Ways: The Movement of Societies and the Transfer of English Local Law and Custom to Massachusetts Bay, 1600-1690. Thompson's work is an invaluable contribution to the study of the transatlantic Puritan community.

When I looked at the cover of this book, I knew it was going to be contrarian. It shows volatility moving in the opposite direction to growth. Looking inside the book, I found the cover figure in Chapter 9 where it was described as volatility versus growth for 75 years of the Ibbotson Index starting in 1926. I looked at the Ibbotson table, and, indeed with the authors' eleven outlier years eliminated, the correlation is still negative (-.142). (With all 75 years included, I found the correlation to be (-.317).) At any rate, the Markowitzian notion of finding how large you can stand for volatility to be and then finding the portolio which maximizes growth is stood on its head.

The authors come up with an alternative to the Markowitz approach for portfolio selection based on something they call a simugram, which looks to be computer intensive.

Much of the book is spent on fundamental analysis, and indeed the authors do not seem favorably disposed to technical analysis. They dump on Black-Scholes and blame its use for the collapse of LTCM and Enron.

Some finance professionals will find much of this book annoying, since it attacks many standard concepts, such as the Efficient Market Hypothesis. And it seems to attack some of the basic tools in the finance tool kit, such as "risk neutral" evaluation.

One of the troubling things I found is that though the authors attack the canon of modern finance, they have only limited alternatives to recommend. They seem to recommend either doing deep fundamental analysis, using their complex simugram portfolio analysis, or putting one's money into an index fund. Most of us don't have the time to do the first or the software to do the second. To do the third really gives up on mathematical finance.

I have used this textbook in my Physical Geology classes for about ten years. It is clearly written, well-illustrated and easy to read. My students love it! Now, if someone could write one as good for Historical Geology...

I read this book over the weekend and have already sent out a mass email to parents I know telling them to read this book! This book succinctly and honestly answers questions that I'm always hearing on the "parent circuit." Not only about about teasing, but about all social skills, popularity, being ostracized, girls worrying they are fat-- you name it, it is probably addressed in this book. And the authors do a wonderful job of letting you know when you are worrying too much, or too little about an issue. A must read!