Franny and Zooey is a wonderful novel that gives concise insight into minds of the Glass family. Salanger is brillant as he uses intellect and whit while creating the characters. It gave me a whole new outlook on the world. I recomend it to all.

My name is Will Feaver and I go to Colonel Gray High in Charlottetown PEI Canada and I would like to to talk to the athor of "Catcher In the Rye" J.D. Salinger for a school project and some serious bonus marks.

This is indeed an interesting book about the life and career of the late Joan Crawford. The text about her 80 movies is interesting, but even more fascinating is the author's collection of pictures. The pictures chosen show the transformation of one of silver screen's most underrated actresses. Her face undergoes such interesting changes as the years went by in her career. Truly this coffee- table sized book is one of my most cherished books I have on the late actress. Surely everyone who has been interested in Joan Crawford and her career would find the book very interesting.

I was delighted to find this book several years ago. It is indeed a treat to read the information Alexander Walker gives about my favorite actress. The factual information he gives is well-written. Even more important to me than the accuracy of his words, however, is the myriad photographs he has included in this marvelous book. For those who have not followed the late actress' career, the book will be a treat to see the many ways Joan Crawford changed her "face" to meet the needs of her audience. The book is a lovely tribute to a very fine actress. I believe she would have been pleased herself to see such a lovely book. It is a pity it is now out-of-print.

My problem with this book is that it contains so much. Joseph Campbell would occasionally begin a talk with"The greatest truths cannot be spoken, the lesser are always misunderstood." Before you read on, listen to the Casals recordings of Bach Suites, and if possible place yourself in the hands of a teacher of Alexander's work. In her quest for the art of "Playing Naturally" Vivien was guided by one remarkable teacher and the spirit of another. Alexander had died by the time her three years with Casals were over. Casals metaphors were drawn from Nature, Alexander found the natural "use of the self" in his search for the skill to give expression to the genius of Shakespeare.
Vivien's lesson by lesson account of her relationship with Casals is unique in biographical writings on Casals. Accounts of lessons with Alexander are available from a variety of distinguished sources. This is the first time two such important influences have been united in the sympathetic environment of a conversation between friends. It is a valuable contribution to available writing on the Alexander Work and Music.

For most of us, Pablo Casals exists only through recordings. It's wonderful to encounter him alive through the living voice of Vivien Mackie--to imagine her in a high window-ledge in Prades as he made his magnificent recording of the Schumann Cello Concerto, to hear him regretfully but kindly telling this brilliant new student, "You do not know what you are doing," to learn how she learns his great lesson: "Do only what is necessary." Often, she found, "doing what was necessary meant doing a great deal more than I had ever done before," but sometimes it meant doing a great deal less. Her conversations with Joe Armstrong show us that "doing more" must include a patient but insistently revealing discipline that can allow the musician to "see all the colours and shades" of the music, "and all the texture, where it tightens, where it loosens and where the turning moments are,...to take time to examine it and bring it all into being." "Doing less" means "getting rid of clutter"--not just "questionable intonation,...and inadequate articulation, and any sort of doubt" in the playing, but also, and chiefly, any habitual clutter of mind and body that might prevent a release of "life and energy." The lesson applies beyond music.

It is a summary of what a laser crystal or better a rare heart doping material could do. Special solution on particular wavelength could be found on this book.

The book "Laser Crystals" is dealing with the basic properties of doped single crystals. Stark level splittings, some (low resolution) spectras, any demonstrated laser transition (with temperatures) gives a survey of this topic, some new materials and dopands are not included (published 89), over 900 references! Unfortunately out of stock.END

Compiled out of quotations, newspaper articles, different folk songs and own experiences with Austria-Hungary and Germany through World War One Karl Kraus wrote this book to show the people of the time after the War their own absurd behavement. The book is written as a Drama, but without a continuous story it shows the war with examples of Journalists, Politics, Aristocrats, Workers, Soldiers. It is an important forefather of Brecht's epic drama. To understand the different quotations you should know a bit about the Austrian and German history and the Emperors of the time.

Karl Kraus is still well known in Germany, and deserves to be better known here. THE LAST DAYS OF MANKIND, 'a play to be performed on Mars' is one of the most trenchant satires written this century. Kraus compiled the play from newspaper articles, official bulletins, and overheard conversations during World War One in Vienna. He actually performed excerpts from this damning indictment of the human race during the war. I wish that someone would translate all of this book from the German; one flaw of this edition is the note early on which states that 'since modern Americans are not familiar with minutiae of the life of the Emperor Franz Joseph, these chapters have been cut.' With all due respect, if we did not know something about the later Habsburgs we would not be reading THE LAST DAYS OF MANKIND in the first place. The lowest pit in Kraus' hell is reserved for those vultures who treated wartime reporting as popular entertainment--which makes him an uncomfortably modern writer. Please, please beg borrow or steal a copy of this book and try to get it reprinted in a full translation!

This is no "traditional" childrens book, but a very funny and interesting story, told to children as a bedtime story in installments, written down as a book. The real cool thing is the story has some subtle humor in there, which grown ups can understand best. I read this book when I was 8 y. o. I still enjoy reading it now :-)

The last man alive is a great book.

This book covers school law in a clear and concise manner. The language is easily understood and should be on the desk of every teacher who is concerned about the welfare of children.

I like this book very much because as the book says, it summarizes school law in a nutshell. I have found it very helpful to refer to while taking a school law class. It is any easy read compared to my school law text, and hits the main points of court decisions.

This is a very good book on the basics of chess. I would recommend it for anyone who wants to learn to play chess, or who already knows but would like to improve.

This book was originally published in 2 volumes. Now they have been combined into one. Volume explains the rules, and the most basic info about the opening, ending, and how one wins a chess game.

Volume 2 covers the most useful ways to win material (pins, skewers, forks). There follows a chapter on mating attacks. Then there is more info about openings and endings. The last couple of chapters give some general advice and points the reader to other sources of chess information.

Each chapter has exercises. Some of them are simple, others challenging. Don't be discouraged if you can't work them all. My advice is to do every exercise. Write down your answers before looking at the solution. If possible, work the exercises without using a set and board in order to develop the ability to look ahead. I enjoyed working the exercises. They illustrate the lessons, and some of them challenge you to think a little deeper.

The Alburt and Pelts books are also very good. Learn Chess could be used before, after, or along with the A&P books to get a couple of views of the same information.

Es un grandioso libro que explica muy bien, y de forma muy sencilla, los principales topicos del juego de ajedrez. Es un libro excelente para principiantes.

The authors are young researchers who did their Ph.D. research in this rapidly developing branch of pattern recognition. Because they are young and are at the state of the art in the filed the book has sevral advantages and disadvantages and what I see as a disadvantage someone else might view as an advantage. Anyway here is my view.
Advantage 1: Pattern recognition is a field of many disciplines. It has been studied by statisticians, mathematician, probabilists and engineering and people that call themselves computer scientists specializing in artificial intelligence. The field is old and has a long history but each discipline has developed their own jargon and many times the wheel has been reinvented. The advantage of this book is that these young scientists don't see that awful history. They have learned and mastered their subject in a basically engineering jargon but they include many concepts from statistics and statistical learning theory that are not common to engineering texts. This includes such topics as robust regression, ridge regression and spline estimation. Much of the classical statistical literature is cited. The book contains over 600 references including much of the authors own work.

Disadvantage 1: Because they are young they miss some of the important historical literature and key texts. I found it a little disappointing that the bootstrap which is a statistical tool that has played a major role in discriminant analysis (particularly in the estimation of classification error rates) was completely overlooked. Also although many important texts on pattern recognition, machine learning and discriminant analysis are cited the fine text by McLachlan is overlooked as is the recent relevant text by Hastie, Tibshirani and Friedman.

Advantage 2: This book highlights the work of Vapnik and Chervonenkis and provides nice concise descriptions that one can easily refer to when needed. The mathematics is deep and includes reproducing kernel Hilbert space and many important properties from functional analysis and statistical theory.

Disadvantage 2: The authors are more experienced at writing professional papers than at writing text books. Consequently the book does not flow well and the authors freely admit in their preface that it is best not to read the book in sequential order but rather to take the suggestions in the preface that differ based on the readers background and interest.

Having said all this, for someone like me, who is very knowledgeable about statistical pattern recognition this is a great text for getting me up to speed on an exciting new area that I know very little about. I became curious about it when I started reading Vapnik recently.

I am hoping that a careful reading of this book will give me an intuition about why this approach that incorporates kernel methods can be a powerful tool in pattern recognition and classification.

This book should be a useful reference for anyone interested in this research area. It could be used in an engineering or statistics course in pattern recognition at either the undergraduate or graduate levels depending on what material is covered.

In a recent communication with Bernhard Scholkopf I learned that his book was sent for publication before the Hastie et al. book went to press. So that is the only reason it wasn't referenced. I think that point is worth my mentioning in an editing of this review. Also on reflection I do not think the disadvantages are so great as to remove a star. So it is 5 stars for them.

I can only hope that they will reference the work of McLachlan and Hastie et al. in their future books and research on this subject.

This book should be on the bookshell of anyone interested in kernel methods. The authors managed to make a clear and comprehensive enough textbook such that it is well suited for graduate students. But it also contains all the state of the art results of the domain, and its scope is wider than other similar books. For this reason, this book should be very useful to any researcher in the machine learning field.

This book is a handy guide particularly for final year medical students and those doing a surgical term. It has superb concise descriptions as well as simple hand drawings to accompany the text. It is pocket sized, so that you can carry it to the hospital and read up about procedures and even read up about the procedures before theatre. It is a fantastic book and it a great reviewing tool. I would strongly recommend that it be the surgical anatomy textbook for all medical students.

This is the best surgical anatomy book that I have read. It has very good text that outlines surgical antomy in simple wording. It has good simple hand drawn diagrams that are easy to follow and emphasise parts of the text. The best part of the book is that it is practical, and being a small size you can carry it on ward rounds and use it to study from before theatre lists. I would reccomend it for people in their second to last and last years in their medical degree and for first year doctors doing their surgical training terms.