I Wanted to have a Schumann symphony score. I love the theme of the first movement of the 3rd symphony. I like to hear it on a piano my be someday i will make a transcription for the piano.

This 18-chapter book shows us the latest development in computer games. I found lots of useful information in the 640-page book, and its CD also gave me wonderful experience in several new games. The book is real good for persons who need basic & detailed directions on various present-day games. For each major game-category, the author supplies one or two examples with simple directions on the playing strategy, along with playing requirements for platforms, modes and systems. You can also find many directions for home-gaming hardware choice and installation. Among the book's three parts (Part I Hardware Basics, Part II Other Game Worlds, Part III Advanced Gaming Topics), the third one is most useful for me---a game-lover who do not have enough time to go through various game stuffs but really want to know something about at least most of them. By the way, this is a bible for game players, not for game programmers.

This book is the second in a trilogy of books on the issue of poverty and human development undertaken by the World Bank. It is estimated that there are 2.8 billion poor people around the world and this book will tell you stories about 20,000 of them from 23 countries in Africa and the Middle East (like Egypt and Zambia), Eastern Europe and Central Asia (like Bosnia and Uzbekistan), Latin America (like Argentina and Jamaica) and South and East Asia (like Bangladesh and Vietnam).
The idea began in 1998, planning during 1998 and field studies in 1999 with final reports targeted for the 2000 World Development Report. A very impressive and quick research study that in this book focus on well-being and ill-being, problems and priorities, role of institutions and the role of gender relations. For each of the 23 countries a national research team selected 8-15 communities to be representative of the target population of poor people with field interviews and studies performed in a short time span, sometimes under very stressful and sometimes dangerous situations.
The authors of this book then had to go through about 10,000 pages of field notes and national reports from 23 countries and make a useful and readable book out of it. They have really done a good and impressive job out of it. The pages are the stories of many experts on poverty, not from academics or universities, but from the mouth of the poor person him-or herself and there is a lot to learn. Seven themes for change emerge:
·From material poverty to adequate assets and livelihoods
·From isolation and poor infrastructure to access and services
·From illness and incapability to health, information and education
·From unequal and troubled gender relations to equity and harmony
·From fear and lack of protection to peace and security
·From exclusion and impotence to inclusion, organization and empowerment
·From corruption and abuse to honesty and fair treatment
A powerful statement for change that we hope the World Bank will be instrumental in fullfilling, so that the dream of a world free of poverty can someday soon come true.

Professor Joav Merrick, MD
Medical director, Division for Mental Retardation, Box 1260, IL-91012 Jerusalem, Israel. E-mail: jmerrick@aquanet.co.il

Geula Merrick, CDA, BA(Psych)
Child development specialist

Cline's Dark Chamber is a tale of a man, half Gothic hero, half Byronic villain, who has opted to defy Nature herself, as well as the natural order of things, by artificially coaxing his memories to the fore in an attempt to avoid facing the reality of his current, shattered reality. In an ill-fated quest to recapture the glories of his youth, he not only revisits his personal memories but accidentally unlocks those primordial memories of man's collective subconscious from a time when the division between man and beast was even more tenuous than exists today.

The Dark Chamber is a sinister, malevolent journey back to our dubious hereditary history and a warning that the past and the present are often poor bedfellows.

Das Lied von der Erde typifies Mahler's genius; a genius for transposing the Wagnerian/Jungian preoccupation with mankind's myths from the Operatic stage to Symphony hall. Taken from a series of Chinese poetic meditations on man's relationship to the earth, Das Lied von der Erde is a deeply contemplative work for a large orchestra and three singers: a Soprano, a Tenor, and a Baritone. Like most Dover scores, Das Lied von der Erde is a treasure. Reprinted from an original edition, it includes a translation of all frontismatter from that edition, as well as a small glossary of German musical terms used in the score. The paper is acid free, and the binding is high quality, so this thing is going to last for a while. Also, the book itself and the printing are large enough that, contrary to complaints I've heard regarding other Dover Mahler scores, you could conduct from it. Finally, all Dover scores are so moderately priced that any devoted Mahler fan simply will not be able to resist this Das Lied von der Erde.

It's difficult to pin down what brings forth the magic of this magnificent book - the poetry in the simple, unpretentious prose, or in the sympathetic, perfectly accomodating illustrations. This is the first book I've read by Ms. Chambers, and I will scour the shelves for her other works. My kids loved this book, and I fell in love with it as well.

The story is about Palo and Mala, a pair of twin elephants who couldn't be more different. Palo is gentle, almost timid, and loving. Mala is wild, carefree, and energetic. The twins' mother is concerned that she won't be able to find a life suitable for the two of them. By book's end, we find that it is acceptable to embrace our differences, rather than attempt to stifle them. The elephant twins are to be given their own, very different settings for their very different lives, and the reader soon learns that all elephants will be the recipients of their good fortune.

This book touches the children on so many levels. Not only are kids taught that we can be different and still be loved, but we can also be important for our differences. The kids may wind up learning a bit about how to tell the difference between Indian and African elephants, too, if they're not careful!

An exceptional book for every child's shelf.

This volume contains the best of Tovey's once-famous analytical essays, the chapters on Bach, particularly the Goldberg variations. Tovey is completely at home with the meticulous and ultra-methodical craftsmanship that was Bach's special way of expressing himself, and his enthusiasm as well as his exactness and lucidity should be enormously helpful to any listener wishing to deepen his or her understanding and enjoyment of Bach's sublime polyphony. His digressions are often illuminating too, but even here (and far more when he gets to Mozart and the 19th century) his admiration for certain composers in particular seems to me to skew his judgment. If I were to say that the setting of the text 'He trusted in God that He would deliver Him' in the St Matthew Passion is not a patch on Handel's treatment of the same text in the Messiah I would be guilty of utter superficiality in comparing such unlike cases, but no sillier than the great Tovey himself is in the gratuitous swipes he takes at Handel. Handel seems to like fugue for a special kind of vigorous expression not as a musical universe in its own right, but when he decides to use it for 'He trusted in God' he produces something that Bach, transcendent genius though he is in other ways, could never have written in a million years.

Still, Tovey's remarks on various composers' part-writing are true and insightful. What was Mendelssohn's game in his keyboard fugues -- was he just trying for an 'impression' or did he see no point in rigour? Would we know that Franck's quartet was a quartet at all if we had not been told, with its unremitting double-stopping? With the essay on Mozart's piano/wind quintet we are into the usual Tovey style, but we have to swallow the placid assertion that a perceived greater variety of style 'makes Beethoven a vastly greater composer'. Not for me it doesn't, but that is just my sense. Tovey's fixation on Beethoven above all was something he shared with his revered teacher Parry, but frankly it gets on my nerves. These essays are useful up to a point, but I'm not sure how much real enlightenment is conveyed by commentary of the 'this modulates through the minor submediant to the unexpected entry of a new theme in A flat' variety, accompanied by a slightly hectoring way of telling us what to admire. Tovey is also prone to rather solemn vapourings on the nature of Art, Life and The World prompted by this or that contrast, modulation or type of expression that fills him with a sense of inevitability or ultimate artistic truth when it is written by the right person, usually Bach, Brahms or (of course) Beethoven. He had little talent for this kind of criticism, and particularly when it comes to Brahms, who more than any composer since Bach expressed himself through intellectual devices, I wish he had applied himself to the kind of analysis he gives Bach, although the job is admittedly more complex and difficult. However on Schumann he is particularly good.

A bit dated maybe, but a great educator for all that.

This book is definitely a heart warmer. The main characters are passionately real and they touch your soul. The secondary characters are so friendly you wish there were more people like them. Only four stars because some of the writing was confusing. Also the author could have weaved more of the two main children into the storyline. This is a calm cozy by the fire story that you should read if you are in need of compassion!!!

I used this plant guide in Killarney Provincial Park (Ontario) and found it useful for identifying major plant species of the area. This guide is interesting because it includes both a photograph and a line drawing of each plant featured in the guide. Plants are divided into lifeforms (e.g., shrub) and descriptions of each plant within a lifeform are contained in a separate section of the guide. The keys for plant identification are not detailed, but the objective of this book is to provide a simple, non-technical guide for plant identification. The authors meet this objective. For more detailed plant identification, a technical botanical guide (Michigan Flora by Ed Voss) probably should be used instead of Forest Plants of Central Ontario. I recommend Forest Plants of Central Ontario as an interesting, non-technical guide for identifying major plant species of the region. It is appropriate for more advanced botanists as a handy field guide and is also appropriate for investigators who have no formal botanical training but who want to quickly learn to identify plants.

Most people know Whittaker Chambers as the former Communist spy who gave testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee. In the process, he blew the cover of fellow agent, Alger Hiss, a high-ranking official in FDR's State Department.

That was in 1948. Even in recent times, with evidence by now thoroughly convincing, liberal Democrats have refused to believe that Hiss, a left-wing icon, was a traitor. In the introduction to this book, Milton Hindus writes that their lack of contrition makes relevant Chambers's work, some of which is collected for the first time in this anthology of journalism. For a wider view of Chambers, outside the famous case depicted in Witness, one can turn to these articles, reviews, and stories written between 1931 and 1959.

The chronological arrangement of the pieces allows the reader to see the progress Chambers made from his revolutionary fiction for The New Masses, through his authoritative anti-Communism as an editor at Time, to the mature conservatism he composed for National Review from his farm in Maryland late in life. In all there is a steady introspection and honesty. He was that rare thing, Hindus reminds us - his own man.

There is also a good bit of variety: reviews of Ayn Rand, James Joyce, Franz Kafka, and George Santayana; a prophetic short story about the rise of Russian imperialism; a history of western culture; and a moving piece about the resistance of Maryland farmers to the intrusion of bureaucrats from the Department of Agriculture.

The review of Rand's novel, Atlas Shrugged, is particularly devastating. Chambers found this popular book to be less a novel than a political tract in which Rand presented a melodrama meant to depict the world's problems, then, in the sort of authoritarianism she denounced, set herself up as that world's savior. Chambers criticized Rand's inability to see shades of grey. In effect, the review drew a line between conservatism and libertarianism, with Chambers and Rand at opposite poles, a line just as sharp as the one Chambers often drew between Christianity and Communism.

In leaving the Communist Party, Chambers was convinced that he was joining history's losing side. It should not surprise us that the word "witness" in Greek also means "martyr," for in Chambers work there is more than a hint of martyrdom. At times his gloomy pessimism about the fate of the West trips his logic, causing not so much a leap of faith but a jump to a conclusion.

Yet I believe that Ghosts On The Roof still has something to offer: for the craftsmanship of its fine prose; for the challenging breadth of its world view; and for a perspective on the central political and moral events of the twentieth century, a perspective based not on theory but on experience, on having felt these conflicts in his bones.