Ed Burke does an excellent job of choosing experts to write about the different subjects, and using timely research to back up the information. The sheer volume of information is amazing. It is a hard read at times, but it helps if you have an elementary understanding of physics, and biology/physiology. This is a great book for all of us science geeks!

This book covers the major areas of interest to cyclists and coaches. The ordering of the chapters is a little haphazard , but it covers nutrition , biomechanics , energy dissipation , position and suspension. If you want to know the whys of cycling , this is the book to read .So many cycling books seem to rely on subjective comment , this uses objective measurement and presents the data in such a way that the reader can easily extend the text and apply it to their needs. Each chapter is written by different writers and the stylistic differences can be a bit offputting on times , but the shear amount of objective information is astounding . You can use the data to quantify the effect of a few ounces of your bike weight , how much difference the latest whizzo wheels will make etc etc . Cycling in general suffers from fasion , this works in favour of the manufacturers , this book will enable you to cut through the rhetoric and give predictions of the effect for you. It is by far the best book on cycling I have ever read . No other book I have seen comes close to being a useful for the serious cyclist . There are a few weaknesses , the major one being no description of typical training regimes for various ability cyclists , and no work correlating training intensity and duration with improvements in performance . But for describing the physics and biology of cycling , it is excellent , I look forward to future publications that cover some of the missing sections. No serious coach should be without this book , no cyclist can afford not to have it .

First I quite agree with the reviewer jnhrtmn... , so I won't repeat what he said. Physics in universities seems to be taught with little real reference to the history-- as if quantum mechanics and relativity sprung brilliantly out of someone's mind fresh out of the twentieth century. This book shows the importance of history in the development of physics-- and anyone seriously studying physics should read this book, to see how much the ideas of physics have evolved and been influenced by the past. Much of it requires a good math background--a knowledge of calculus is needed for much of it. It is sad that it is out of print--a publisher needs to make this available.

I am an amateur physicist that thinks modern physics is more of a belief system than a science. This book is the most objective account of why science is where it is today. It is raw and readable. It leads you through the evidence as it happened. Hundreds of references. Meaty stuff, not just fluff for a book. You want insight into science you never had before, this book is a very good step.

A writer of outstanding repute in all his endeavors (translator, novelist, critic), Keeley has temporarily left aside all that academic stuff to write one of the five most beautiful books I have read in the past twenty years. Greek and Anglo literati like Seferis, Durrell and Miller come alive for us in these pages and special features of their work are examined with new depth. There are also some minor writers who serve as attractive backround to, and greatly enrich, the larger story. In his final paragraphs, Keeley hints that he might have a first person narrative in store for us covering a subsequent generation of philhellene writers. Let's hope he makes good on this almost-promise.

An interesting book about Henry Miller/Lawrence Durrill and the "Generation of the Thirties"-Greek poets that include Seferis, and painters such as Ghikas.

The book is exactly what the NY Times calls it--a combination of literary history/critique, and cultural history. It tries to provide a deep understanding of the poetry from the decade before World War 2. It dispells the notion that Greece only has offered the world Homer & Pericles. Seferis, for example, won the Nobel Prize in Literature.

I, too, have only ever seen this produced, and never found it in print... but it's just brilliant. And FUNNY. How do you build a farce around the idea that "bad faith makes the world go 'round?" Well, Sartre manages it... I'll stop before this turns into an essay, and just recommend that anyone who has a chance to see this performed by a cast of any distinction at all should jump at it.

My first trip to England in the early 70's was the highpoint of my theater-going experiences. I was lucky enough to see Alec Guiness in "Voyage Round My Father," the Peter Brook production of "A Midsummer Night's Dream," and a young Ian McClellan playing the lead in "Kean." All were unforgettable, but this play still sticks in my mind as being among the negelected masterpieces of 20th century playwrighting. Sartre understood theater history and he understood role-playing, appearance vs. reality and all the other critical saws that are discussed in high-school English classes. Yet in this play these tired themes are perfectly expressed and therefor renewed and made infinitely interesting by the manner in which the playwright unfolds them. There is a gradual peeling away of pretense and bravado on the part of the protagonist (the play might as well be a monologue), and the audience comes to understand that behind all the masks, what Sartre finally wants to show us is humanity stripped of its skin. He exposes the viscera, the protruding bones, the raw psychic flesh that we are all heir to. Kean, by play's conclusion, has degenerated into a knd of erstwhile Truman Capote, having sacrificed his soul in the process of gaining notoriety. He also shares Capote's substance abuse weaknesses, though his alcoholism is merely a symptom of his inner malaise. Sartre is saying a great deal about art, about the effect of fame and about the human condition in this work. It is a play that should be revived every fifth year either on the West End or on Broadway, in my opinion. It is apparently hard to come by. I can't even swear that it reads as well as it plays (I've seen two productions, but haven't been able to find it in print myself). If you ever have the opportunity to see the play, by all means avail yourself of a rare theatrical treat.

The subject of this classic of musical analysis is the complicated phenomenon of Mahler's music and our response to it. The treatment is philosophical/psychological/analytic and the abstractness and complexity of the prose is typical of what one would find in a doctoral thesis, except that it is beautifully written (and Jephcott's translation is itself a work of art).

To introduce the subject let me start with an experience of my own, which is no doubt typical. My introduction to Mahler's music was through the Ninth and Tenth symphonies, which is like starting a mountain climb already at the top of the mountain. I was 22 and naturally quite bowled over. Imagine my chagrin then at hearing the Fourth for the first time -- what is this Haydnesque genre piece that ends with a naive song? How could it have been written by the same composer? As always, though, Mahler's music works on one's subconscious and a few days later I felt compelled to listen again, and what a revelation this was! The first movement, in particular, is absolutely extraordinary. It starts with a curious repeated figure, four flutes in unison playing fifths plus a grace note, accompanied by bells; this leads directly into the deceptively classical-sounding main theme and reappears throughout the first movement (and also in the last) as a kind of magic talisman with multiple meanings. The main theme is followed by a striking sunny interlude in A, with bases rocking pizzicato in fifths, a scurrying violin figure, and violas trilling like insects singing in a meadow. I had the impression of an adult and child walking through a field on a summer day. There's a brief change to the minor, then some high sustained notes in the flutes. These are repeated more emphatically by high clarinets, heralding an ominous change, as if the bucolic scene were being overrun by scudding clouds. Things are not what they seemed, and we don't know where we are! Somehow, we've gotten lost in a forest inhabited by goblins, spooky though not actually menacing. There's a swirling sensation accompanied by dark intimations in the bass, chromatic muted trumpets, and repeated sustained high chords in the flutes; the effect is weirdly haunting. After a while a commotion in C develops, drums crescendo, and then suddenly pure terror -- a high trumpet playing fortissimo. By some process of pure magic, the music suddenly recovers its former equanimity and adult and child (who turn out to be one and the same) find themselves back in the sunny meadow. What sublime irony, and how true to human nature -- when we see something uncanny that disturbs us, we try to put it behind us, forget it. Mahler alone is capable of evoking such feelings. Only a magician could have written the Fourth, and Mahler's achievement here is just as great as in the very different late works, not to mention the middle symphonies.

I could cite other personal examples, as could any Mahlerian. We might disagree about particulars, but each of us carries away something essential from Mahler's music and is enriched by it. And we are quite confident that the experience is qualitatively the same from listener to listener.

Adorno approaches the subject of our response to Mahler's music and what it means through his own experiences of it. But what a listener! It's as if a very learned friend with a doctorate in Mahler stopped by to discuss the subject over tea and ended up staying all week. A gifted writer and philosopher, as well as a professionally trained composer who studied with Berg, Adorno discusses all the symphonies except the Tenth and is always interesting even when you disagree with him. Musicological jargon is mostly avoided, although philosophical-rhetorical terms abound (he loves the word "aporia").

Two caveats. First, the treatment is vulnerable to the charge of "over-intellectualization". One recalls Mahler's reply to William Ritter, an early admirer:"... I find myself much less complicated than your image of me, which could almost throw me into a state of panic." It seems that we, and particularly Adorno, are the complicated ones. We project our feelings onto the music, which seems to invite them to an extent that would surprise even the composer. The mystery of why this is so, and the multifariousness of Mahler, the capacity of his music to be offensive, highly questionable, fascinating, and sublime all at the same time, form the subject of the book.

Second, and more seriously, he disparages Mahler's "ominous positivity" and thereby underestimates the Eighth Symphony at least (readers may agree that the finale of the Seventh is problematic; he does not discuss the extraordinary Tenth, which achieves a wholly serene, positive conclusion). But the positive in Mahler is an essential part of his dynamic disequilibrium; without it, there would be no aporia and the music would degenerate into mere cynicism. Most of the symphonies follow a pattern -- conflict, followed by attempted reconciliation and reconstruction. This process is entirely sincere, and if it fails even in Mahler's hands, it's because he's attempting to do the impossible. Even in the Sixth, the most "tragic" and "despairing" of the symphonies, a good performance will reveal powerful updrafts. To deny the positive in Mahler is to chop him in two. That Adorno's book is nonetheless required reading is testimony to the value of his other observations.

Who then is this book for? It is best for Mahlerians of long standing, those who are well past the first flush of discovery and have regained their musical equilibrium so to speak, and who want to put Mahler in perspective, or even just "share" opinions with an uncommonly intelligent and sensitive critic.

If you know anything about Theodor Adorno, you might well be familiar with the entire edifice of western cultural and philosophic thought; Kant,Hegel,Kierkegaard,and Marx,the history of art,literature,painting and music. Less film,a realm Adorno never got to know. Here in Mahler,we have a concise profile of this one time neglected composer, long misunderstood,even today. I recall a rehearsal with Bernstein and the Vienna Philharmonic who couldn't quite understand Bernstein's raving from the heart,for clarity yet passion. Adorno knew Mahler's art much better than Mahler ever did for we learn this from Adorno, that Mahler simply abandoned himself to his own intuition to resolve his creative problems. Each chapter in this masterwork in miniature is self-sustaining. In the chapter "Tone" Adorno reveals the basic music materials of Mahler his orchestral pallete. The high positioned violins,in uncomfortable registers where they loose their souls to a menanced, shrill, thin timbre. The string section for Mahler is creatively undisciplined to begin with, each playing differing roles, each contributing its own independence, as in the opening of Mahler's "Ninth" Symphony, the melody tossed between the violins, tremoli in the violas, and the contrbass above or equal in register to all with harmonics. Mahler's progressiveness was in pure content,he was not one to pursue "tangible innovations" but secured his tenuous position with the diatonic mode,familiar scales and harmonic surfaces. A chiaroscuro of means (schatten) the shadows he creates with reliefs of foreground and background. Tonality is not so much renewed as an unheard voice enters the stage, Mahler's voice cracks,is overstrethched, the various woodwind passages like in the "Scherzo" of his "Seventh" Symphony. The forced tone is itself an expressive innovation of his own making a premonition of the darker legubrious brooding up the road in the orchestral works of Arnold Schoenberg. In fact we find ev! ery bit of these darker pages in Mahler before the horrors which await the citizens of Eastern Europe,even up to Bosnia. Adorno's focus is always how Mahler creates meaning within familiar confines,the roads that lead to simple harmonies. He disrupts the stability of rhythm,of gesture that once was, the familiar in Mahler's orchestral context becomes something quite different, no longer can the romantic symphony depend on redemption. Bruckner could depend on this, for he already found his spirituality, whereas Mahler spent his life in pursuit of it . Adorno in the chapter "Novel" reveals the non-progressive side of Mahler.He needed to depend on some stability so his musical characters come and go untarnished at times, the lowlife natural trombone,to the intimate/elegant solo violin, and the cracking horn moments in Mahler. This is where we find "Stufenreichtum" the richness of texture,the musical thread running from the full orchestral (tutti) everyone's voice heard, to the single voice the solos. This is Mahler's context from the distance "in sehr weiter entfernung" to the immediate. It is this expressive immediacy, he learned from Beethoven that gives way to developed chaos as his life wears away. The overblown vacuous "Eighth Symphony" resolved nothing for his real creativity, and the "Ninth" the ideas begin toward the irrational,Mahler is serious even in the "Rondo-Burleske" from the "Ninth",the almost improvised gesture reminded me of Charles Ives,who was writing just about the same time. Adorno's chapter "Variant-Form" we learn Mahler's technique progressed away from what an academic would consider "good" Mahler needn't be as glib as Richard Strauss,nor as consummate as Wagner. He learned music in another way and pointed toward a profound goal. A goal in which his music simply breaks its own voice "Durchbruch" as Adorno mentions where there was no comfort in traditional moments. Adorno opens thi! s expressive vault of Mahler and we can see Mahler again. As recently as Pierre Boulez in his ongoing recordings with The Chicago Symphony we find a Mahler quite as a turning point to the 20th century. Well Boulez brings Mahler into our century whether we want him there or not. Boulez brings a sublime ugliness at times to Mahler's simplicity, the functional predictable movements of harmony creates a kind of timbral dirt. Mahler wanted this. No we are not done with his marvelous "Symphonies" we can contemplate them for some time.

My favorite book beside The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Orchids by Alec Pridgeon, I recommend it highly for anyone who loves orchid species.

As complete a reference as you can own in one cover, this book has it all. Cultural medium requirements, temperature, light - everything you need to know for the most species coverage. Most of the color plates are high quality, some not so good.

an excellent way to get straight to the heart of the matter by delving into the actual content of his words, both spoken and written.

Much wisdom here.

This is an excellent translation of some of Meister Eckhart's finest works and is highly recommended as is McGinn's in this series. Eckhart is one of the greatest apothatic Christian mystics and both Eckhart titles in 'Classics of Western Spirituality Series' are a great place to start to read His works. If you want all of His sermons then buy O'C Walshe's 'Sermons and treaties'. For a study of Eckhart's mysticism buy 'Mystical Thought' by Bernard McGinn.

Decades before the popular travel guide "Lonely Planet" arrived on TV, Eugene Snyder had taken the "Road Less Traveled" to Mexico. Wit and wisdom are only two of the findings you will enjoy in this story of old Mexico. What we know or think we know of Mexico is a mystery revealed to but a few. Author Eugene Snyder is one of them. He show us many varied looks of Mexico a half-century ago. A simpler time to be sure. We follow along and soon are part of the journey. We see how honest and sincere our neighbors south of the border are, even while living far from affluence. This book is well written and gives a colorful glimpse back in time to places off the beaten path. In today's high tech everything, a visit to a simpler place is a nice escape and worth it.

I have just twice read "Mexican Notebook." It is without exception the most delightful and charming thing I have ever read, with many wry, humerous, and charitable insights into a vanishing world.

Although renowned for his superb detective fantasies, Carr's masterpiece of history and detection (arguably the same philosophy) is his reconstruction of The Murder of Sir Edmund Godfrey. Despite an obvious anti-Whig bias and his adoration of Charles II, his historical method is excellent, drawing a most dramatically colourful picture of Restoration England and weighing up the odds impartially. The theories are brilliantly argued, and equally brilliantly demolished, and the final solution is quite convincing. Superb.

Carr is the greatest writer of classic detection fiction. He was also a hell of a history student and an unregenerate lover of derring do of the Robert Louis Stevenson/Alexander Dumas type (see some of his historical/detection/thrillers like The Bride of Newgate), and here he combines all sorts of history with the methods of classic detection in a thrilling tale. He writes this piece of history exactly as if it were a tale--which to him it of course was.

The story deals with the murder of a noted justice of the peace in the latter part of the 17th century in England, which is then used by the political enemies of Charles II as petext for a witch hunt against Catholics in general and to usurp Charles's power by forcing the nomination of Charles's illegitimate Protestant son as official heir, instead of his Catholic brother James. (Indeed, England is brought to the brink of Revolution again and only luck and Charle's saavy prevents it--Dryden, by the way, used these same events as the base of his great poem "Absalom and Architophel".)

The characters are vivid, especially Charles, Charles's enemies Buckingham and ? (been a while since I re-read it), Titus Oates, and the man who Carr believes actually committed the murder--just to mention a few. The reign of terror that the murder served as catalyst for is brought to life with frightening horror, and you'll cheer when Charles outwits and outmaneuvers his enemies in a masterpiece of political tactics.

Carr really makes you see and feel how fear makes people lose all reason and rationality, leading them to do terrible things. Very unfair things--after reading this book, you'll be more grateful than ever for the constitution. People were tortured, held incommunicado, scapegoated and sandbagged--you name it--in the most highhanded and blatant fashion.

Although Carr even incorporates extensively stuff from primary sources, especially from the transcripts of the trials of the many victims, ihis focus is always on telling a mystery/suspense story. As even Barzun and Taylor in their Catalogue of Crime had to admit (no great fans of Carr, they enthusiastically concede this book is a masterpiece), Carr can sum up evidence like no one else. He offers in conclusiton something like eight or ten likely culprits, then tells you who he thinks is the most likely villain.

From his first encounter with Joyce's writings in Paris in 1927, Campbell remained deeply involved with the works of Joyce. He gave many lectures on Joyce, frequently read from his works, and published a number of articles on Joyce's works. This book provides a survey of Campbell's Joycean studies by conflating his articles and representative lectures, from his obituary notice on the death of Joyce in 1941 to lectures delivered within a few years of Campbell's death. Also included, in the "Dialogues" section, is a selection of Campbell's responses to questions from members of the audience at some of his lectures. Questions from listeners seemed to fire Campbell, and some of these exchanges provide a deeper insight into the material presented in the formal lectures. This book contains both elementary material and advanced analysis of the work of Joyce; it is, therefore, both an introduction to Joyce's major works and a major contribution to Joyce criticism. The whole provides a representative portrait of Joseph Campbell as a critic of Joyce. 304 pp. (From the back cover).

For me this book helps parralell the inner workings of you or me, reminding me of the pathes we take, no matter the presence or withdrawl of glamour, are adventures..... IT IS A VALUABLE screenwriters source.