An excellent book for the Student as well as the professional. This book presents statistical concepts in a clear and simple fashion, using graphs. This makes it a pretty handy guide for people who use regressions and other stat techniques.. The reader is expected to be a bit comfortable with some greek symbols though

An exploration of the various syntheses of Hamilton's political thought, and its meaning for our institutions. Complex, as was Hamilton's mind, it is a necessary work for understanding the contributions of Hamiltonian principles beyond the manufactured absurdity of the Jefferson-Hamilton pseudo-morality play.

Hugo Hamilton writes with an excellent style. There's plenty of characters in this book, all of them fairly interesting and well-explained. The book reads well, and the overall arc of the plot is like several episodes of a soap-opera. My only complaint is that speech from characters wasn't quoted in quotation marks, it was hyphenated like this:

-Well, that's a nice necklace you're wearing.

But it was fairly funny in places. There's so much going on and it's all so original and well-detailed.

Well done, Hugo.

I not much for gothics, but I admit that this one caught me up with its intrigue and coastal fog among the redwoods. Pre-Civil War San Francisco was extremely fascinating as well. Anyway, Felicity is besieged by "accidents" and doesn't know where to turn for help. She finally finds it...within herself. Great stuff. Two thumbs up!

Sharon Hamilton evidently knows her way around the works of William Shakespeare and, as she demonstrates in this analysis of Shakespearean depictions of father/daughter relations, around human nature in the raw. Any reading or re-reading of the plays will be immeasurably enhanced by the insights she winkles out. This is a book that thespians especially will benefit by.
Happily Ms. Hamilton's attempt to equate the English language's greatest wordsmith with a certain Will Shakspere of Stratford - a dreary and litigious businessman and one-time actor scarcely able to write his own name and sire incidentally of two apparently illiterate daughters - detracts but little from this invigorating volume.

Anyone who has traveled through the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia knows that it is a naturally beautiful place, unfortunately pocked, like most of the United States, with garish fast-food "restaurants." But there is more to the place than the mountains and corn fields, as Scott Suter's deeply informative book reveals. There are people, their customs, their culture: music, religion, food, basket-weaving, amateur sport.... The book proves that, in spite of those ubiquitous burger joints, there is still a "there" in America. So, I highly recommend a deeper trip through "the Valley." The book, by the way, is well researched, vaguely academic in tone, as it uncovers the antecedents to the Valley's current folkways; but that doesn't mean it's hard to read. It's also got some amazing photos. And I'm really grateful to at last have a recipe for "ham-pot pie"!

Sir Ian Hamilton is destined to be remembered for one thing - the disaster at Gallipoli. In reality, however, he was a veritable rennaisance man with a varied and largely successful career that came crashing down around his ears over the period of a few weeks in 1915. John Lee is the first person, to the best of my knowledge, to take a close look at Hamilton's life outside the box of his performance at Gallipoli.

Lee deals with Hamilton's early career, his friendship with Lord Kitchener, his regimental career during the Boer War and his extensive service as an attached officer with the Japanese Army. The Gallipoli fiasco is also covered and Hamilton is given a sympathetic, though by no means hagiographical or apologistic, hearing.

Of particular interest are Hamilton's personal and political views. His early distaste for the Japanese Army (and broadly pro-Chinese sympathies) and his predictions that a) the Japanese Army was an effective fighting force that should not be taken lightly and b) that it was only a matter of time before Britain and China came to blows make informative reading. His reformist, radical even, left-wing political views and overt Liberal connections made him slightly out of place in the army (which had it's share of liberals, though of a less radical bent than Hamilton). Yet they led him, like a number of other left wing radicals with big ideas in the inter-war years, eventually to become somewhat attached to political ideas and causes which, while not exactly fascistic (and he was certainly no pro-Nazi) were fairly borderline.

Lee documents these issues in a readable fashion which adds flesh to the bones of the often rather superficial popular perception of Hamilton both as a person and as an army officer. The book should obviously be of interest to readers with an interest in the Gallipoli campaign (the recent history of the campaign by L. A. Carlyon is also excellent) but there is a lot more to it than that and anybody with an interest in the Great War in general or the history of the British Army would do well to take a look.

All in all, a good book. Having read it, one emerges with the feeling that Hamilton deserved a fair hearing and I believe John Lee has given him just that.

I was surprised there was a SparkNotes volume for Edith Hamilton's "Mythology," because as this little blue book itself notes at one point, her book is like "one large SparkNote in itself." However, since Hamilton's classic look at the "Timeless Tales of Gods and Heroes" is a staple of my Classical Greek and Roman Mythology course I picked this up to make sure I know what my students may pick up from this study guide.

After an overview there is a Character List that covers the gods, heroes and monsters, broken down in over a half-dozen categories. This would certainly help students learn who is who, but they still need to remember that the point of reading this book is to learn about the stories and not just who was the god of war, etc. The Analysis of Major Characters only looks at Zeus, Odysseus, Oedipus and Medea, and only provides two paragraphs on each. For me, the strongest section of this book is the one establishing Themes, Motifs & Symbols, which looks at: The Dominance of Fate, Bloodshed Begets Bloodshed, The Danger of Arrogance and Hubris, Reward for Goodness and Retribution for Evil, The Hero's Quest, Beauty, Love, Cannibalism, and Art. Again, these are brief sections (two paragraphs each except for Fate, which gets three), which means that they give students an idea of each of these ideas without providing anything substantial that might, by accident no doubt, make its way into a student's paper. Actually, this is an important consideration. As long as the writing assignments for your class are relatively substantial, the study guides are going to provide help but your students are still going to have to make the case.

The biggest section of this volume provides a Summary and Analysis of "Mythology" broken down by chapters and parts. The summaries, as a general rule, do for Hamilton what she has done for Homer, Hesiod, Euripides, and the rest of the Greek writers. The analyses are of more value, but I would contend that unless you have read Hamilton (or the original works) then it is difficult to really appreciate the analyses off of having read just the summaries. Again, the analyses point students in the right direction, but do not do the work for them. The Important Quotations Explained section, apparently standard in SparkNotes, is unusual since it looks at a couple of lines from Greek tragedies, the riddle of the Sphinx, and Hamilton's comments on Roman mythology.

So far I have been reasonably impressed with the SparkNotes volumes I have seen. Clearly these study guides, put together by Harvard students, have been created to do something different from CliffNotes. The biggest difference to me is that the analysis is more streamlined, which may simply result from the fact that the little blue books are written by students and the little yellow books are written by professors.

Ok, so I'm not 9-12 years old (the book's target audience), I'm almost 30 and I still enjoyed this book tremendously. It has awesome illustrations to show the techniques used in various effects like robotics, miniature models, etc. The explainations are easy to understand too. This book took the mystery out of the state-of-art special fx with recent blockbuster movies as examples. For an introduction to special effects, it's excellent.

This book covers general stochastic control more thoroughly than any other book I could find.

This is *not* a book on numerical methods. It is also not on the cases which yield closed-form solutions: there is a chapter on LQG problems, but for the most part, this book focuses on the general theory of stochastic controls -- which are not the easiest things to solve in general, as you may know. The book handles only diffusion processes with perfect knowledge of the past and present (natural filtration). If these sound like what you want, I doubt there's a more thorough treatment.

It starts with a chapter on preliminaries of prob. spaces and stoch. processes and the Ito integral. After that, the book briefly addresses deterministic problems in order to compare solution methods to the stoch. approaches. It approaches the problems using a stochastic maximum principle and a stochastic Hamiltonian system, and also from a dynamic programming point of view using HJB equations. The authors attempt to show the relationship between the two approaches.

This book is technically rigorous. Though it claims to be self-contained, the reader should certainly be familiar with functional analysis and stochastic processes.

The authors try to keep the solutions as general as possible, handling non-smooth cases as well as smooth ones. This is fine, except that they don't emphasize well enough (I thought), for instance, that the solutions are much simpler when functions are well behaved on convex bodies (it's mentioned as a note on p. 120), or when diffusions are not dependent on controls, and such.

Because of this tendency to present one solution which will handle any case, it could sometimes be difficult to figure out what all the terms are. In the end, it all works out. Each chapter ends with a few pages of "historical background": who did what piece of the theory when, with an excellent list of references. (I found the originals useful to help explain things, on occasion, especially to see simpler ways to do simpler cases)

Altogether, a very thorough piece on general solutions to stochastic control! I was quite impressed.