Bonansinga's plots are culled from old movies, pulp thrillers and comic book style adventures then given a 90s spin. This wild action-filled story is a vast improvement over The Killer's Game and far more deserving of being turned into a film than his previous book. I found myself gasping at points and trying to outguess the characters as they attempt to piece together the true identity of John McNally. Once again, he leads the reader through a rapid, breathlessly paced story ending with an outrageous, nerve-shattering and preposterous climax. This pulp thriller has it all: amnesia, serial killers, train chases, car chases, and a very modern twist on the mad scientist and his creepy lab experiments.

The Kirkus reviewer must have lost a high-school love to Bonansinga -- there's no other explanation for such an off-the-wall review. Bonansinga's premise is a different twist, it engages straight into high-gear, and his dexterity with the word and the mind are like a master jazz musician's fingers working two lines, in counterpoint, into one perfect climax. Get this book. Get every one of them, in fact.

Head Case is a well written roller coaster of a page turner. Sort of like the Dean Koontz genre with its well liked characters and plot but definitely the author's own. The characters are well fleshed out, the amnesiac with an uncertain past and the strong female character who helps him make you care what happens to them. The plot kept me guessing and was rewarding and made complete sense with all its twists and turns and plot developments. I was never bored with it and the short sharp chapters worked with the fast-paced feel of the book. I highly recommend it! I would like to read the authors other books if they are as good as this one.

As the child of parents who came from the strictly Orthodox Jewish community of Hungary, and as one raised within that Orthodoxy, albeit transplanted to America, this book exposed me to a portion of Hungarian Jewish history I never really knew. This book speaks of the tragedy of so many Hungarian Jews. Jews who were totally estranged from their ancestral faith, who had no attachment to their heritage. For those people, Judaism was an undesirabe yoke to be cast aside or at best ignored. This book tells the reader however that one cannot truly escape his true identity. The true hero of the book, the author's father, discovers this in the hell of Bergen-Belsen. His uncle, the priest, spends the war in relative safety, but always in fear that he would be denounced. That uncle also has to contend with the very real possiblity that his Hungarian coreligionists "allowed" him to escape to Italy into the warm embrace of Padre Pio and the Capuchin monks not out of dedication to him in the spirit of Christian fellowship, but rather out of a desire to be rid of another Jew.
The emotions that pervade this book are powerful. The characters are real. The dialogue, while made up, displays the pathos of the characters and speaks to the reader's soul.
This book is about many things: religion, families and their dysfunctions, theodicy, Catholic-Jewish relations, and overding all of those, this book is about the complexity of life. Like all great works, the message of this book will be shaped by the reader and his/her weltanschaung.

I hate to disagree with 3 5-star evaluations, but I thought the story was insightful and interesting but I did not find the reading process as easy as another critique stated. If the book was decrased by about 50 pages, I believe it would be even more compelling than it is.

I have read a number of holocaust books and this family did not have it as bad as others, but I assure you all of them were near death except the Catholic Father.

I particularly liked the beginning and end when the author was talking in the first person. A fine read.

A very thoughtful and sensitive family story. Very insightful. It helped me to understand my own parents better. It is very well written, easy to read and I couldn't put it down.

Young has done an admirable job at presenting some really beautiful and useful aspects of Hilbert spaces in a manner comprehendable for advanced undergraduates. After reading the book and reflecting on the experience, I'm somewhat amazed at the amount of nice ideas that were presented in such a compact text. The book cannot be compared with more rigorous and comprehensive texts such as Rudin, but you still get all the fundamentals of Hilbert space plus some wonderful applications.

I must strongly disagree with the reader from Sao Paolo who says that chapters 12 and 13 are poorly motivated. These chapters are crucial for the final theorem of the book in chapter 16. Parrott's Theorem in chapter 12 is the key to the foundational Nehari's theorem of chapter 15. Chapter 13 explores Hardy spaces which are the setting place for the major theorem of Adamyan, Arov, and Krein in chapter 16. In fact, I found the movement of ideas from chapter 12 to chapter 16 to be marvelously compelling. These chapters have extreme importance for theoretically oriented control engineers.

Only a modicum of real and complex analysis is necessary to understand the book. Knowledge of measure theory is not required.

This book is good to any control engineer who wants to know the background theory of optimization and robust control, but read read an analysis book first.

The first eleven chapters are an excellent introduction to functional analysis . Both Hilbert and Banach spaces are introduced carefully. Then there are two short chapters on orthogonal expansions and classical fourier series and then linear operators are studied. From the point of view of a person who is interested in applications to physics and engineering one can say that the book is well motivated mainly because is so compact and because of the many notes on applications. Chapters nine , ten and eleven on Green's functions and eigenfunctions expansions are extremely good. Chapters twelve and thirteen are poorly motivated from the point of view of applications.Finally chapters fourteen to sixteen try to exhibit the applications to complex analysis of operator theory and be helpfull to eletrical engineers.I think the book fails in this. So the ten first chapters of the book are excellent . The remaining less so

Pete Shotton was John Lennon's best friend throughout his life, and this book gives a positive upbeat and revealing look at that friendship.

Starting from their rebellious childhood antics in Woolton and Quarrybank we are taken on a "Magical Mystery Tour" through the Quarrymen formation and onto Beatles superfame. Throughout it all Pete was the sane down-to-Earth component of John's life. Here's a glimpse of the Real John Lennon from getting every bird around (and the rest) to going off the deep end with Acid. It's sure to entertain you and keep you laughing with uncanny Lennon humor. The book is no whitewash, but neither is it the blackwash of Goldman's book. It's basically as close to the truth as a good friend can get. I also recommend The Man who Gave the Beatles Away and the new book, Lennon in America. I await the release of John's Diaries.

I very highly recommend this book to any Lennon/Beatles fan with a good sense of humour and an open mind. I Loved Every Page Of It. You wont be able to keep a straight face while you read it. What A Clown!

There are only three decent books on John Lennon: Albert Goldman's, Ray Connelly's and Pete Shotton's "In My LIfe". This book is almost completely free of the schmalz that ruins other biographies. It's truthful and frank and is quite fascinating. A good thing about the book, is that it focuses on the man rather than the music. From reading it, you do get an idea of what he was really like. Regrettably, I lent my copy to a friend who promptly left it on a table in a cafe or hostel in Paris (early '96). So if you found it - I want it back!

With the insight of a seasoned educator, Mr. Remy offers a strategy for both inside and outside the classroom. The beginning educator fresh with credential in hand, as well as those seeking to improve their teaching ability, will appreciate his well organized approach to classroom management. - Matt Shirley, Teaching Assistant Scripps Ranch High School, Scripps Ranch CA and currently working on Teaching Credential

Mark Remy's teacher's guide provides a "cookbook" approach to establishing and/or modifying effective classroom management procedures. It frees the teacher's focus for curriculum development and instruction. I recommend it for all new teachers. - Patricia Parks, Principal, John Paul Jones Elementary, San Diego, CA

"A New Teacher's Survival Guide" is well-worth reading for all teachers that are interested in good, practical ideas for smoothly and effectively managing a classroom. This book is an inspirational beginning guide for new teachers, as well as, an excellent refresher for veteran teachers. - Jodie Roberts, 2nd grade teacher, Social Circle Elementary, Social Circle, GA 1995-96 Social Circle City Schools Teacher of the Year

In my opinion this book isn't as good as A Gentle Madness. Both are long and indeed "roving," but I would have rather that this book had been marketed as two or even three separate books of which I would have possibly bought one and perhaps read two. There are indeed many nice stories, but i found that I enjoyed some of them markedly less than others which I guess one must expect with this much material. I would think that this book would be a must have for librarians, especially of special collections. I must admit that I'll still be curious to read Basbanes next book when it arrives.

If you are passionate about books, I mean really passionate, then Basbanes may have written this tome for you. He provides a 600-page history of bibliomania, the obsession with books through the centuries. But for the general reader, the non-scholar, this book is probably twice as thick as it needs to be.

The chapter, "Madness Redux," features Jay Fliegelman, a Stanford University English professor and book collector who seriously (and physically) assesses the relationships between the books he owns. "I wake up sometimes and I will go to my library and move a book from one shelf to another, because in the middle of the night I thought about certain connections between the two. I am wondering, does this author belong with this author?" The perfect image for those who live, and literally, dream books.

It is interesting to read of thirteenth century librarians chaining books to wooden cabinets in an attempt to deter thieves and vandals. Chains apparently became a basic component in the layout of medieval libraries (as replicated, too, in the recent Harry Potter movie). The Cathedral Library at Hereford, England, is currently home to the largest collection of chained books anywhere in the world.

There are also pages on some famous bookstores such as the cavernous Serendipity Books, Inc, in Berkeley, California (owner Peter B. Howard's only business goal is to "continue with dignity"), and both the Argosy and Strand Book Stores in New York City. The Strand also sells and rents books by the linear foot, and proprietor Nancy Bass once filled an order for customers in Miami Beach who wanted only books in the colors hot pink, yellow, and magenta.

Basbanes also tracks the antiquarian bookselling trade in Europe. German bookseller Heribert Tenschert, based in Ramsen, Switzerland, produces beautiful book catalogs which are marvels of scholarship, often more than 500 pages long. Tenschert insists that selling a book is only a small part of what he does. "What I shamelessly believe is that you have to fall in love with a book first. It is physical as well as emotional."

Patience and Fortitude in the title, if you didn't know, are taken from the unofficial names of the two lions carved from Tennessee pink marble outside the New York Public Library on Fifth Avenue. That library is also featured in this big book about book people.

As he did with the first volume, "A Gentle Madness", Nicholas Basbanes has written a book for a very wide audience. "Patience And Fortitude", goes well beyond any confines that would limit the work to readers interested only in the smallest of details that would be of importance to only the most addicted of bibliophiles. This is a history book, a political science book, a work that discusses education, and a book that addresses the importance of libraries, whether it is the matter in which they are constructed or how political groups attempt to influence History. It is also about the future of books and in some cases the wholesale destruction of publicly owned library inventory and their contents.

There is also good news, for the moment The United States still has more libraries than we do McDonalds. Such may not always be the case if some of those responsible for the care of our written history are not carefully watched. The most notorious example of destruction came about in San Francisco during the transition from the old library to the new. There is no question that a library may choose to have a limited number of copies of a given book, but having the department of sanitation collect and then dump tens of thousands of volumes in to the city landfill should be criminal. There is never a shortage of interest in books. When the disposal of books became known, books that had been marked for destruction were offered to the public gratis. One woman came home with over 1200 books.

The construction of The National Libraries of England, France, and an attempt to create a new Alexandria library are also covered in great detail. England's new facility may not be a visual treat but as a repository for books, there care and distribution it works. The National Library of France would be funny were it not also ridiculous. Vertical libraries don't work very well and the new French facility has not one but four towers. Dozens of steps must be climbed to reach a common area for the towers, but if you wish to enter you must travel back down another set of stairs to gain access. The towers are made of glass. If there is anything that will guaranty the destruction of books it is sunlight. The French facility was a political project that just happened to involve books. Built as yet another architectural monument to a former president it fails from the selection of the location right through to its layout and high tech book management system that has even locked employees out of the building. A recent novel by W. G. Sebald, "Austerlitz", took the time to harpoon this facility in great detail.

The story of a new library in Alexandria, which is scheduled to open soon, is quite sad. Once the site of one of if not the greatest library in history, the new facility is wonderful but it lacks a key ingredient, books. This may sound like sarcasm but the massive core catalogue that any good library needs much less a great library can no longer be assembled. There are very finite numbers of classical rare books, and other facilities are not about to give them up.

Libraries are also critical to the success of any college or university. The author spends a good deal of time discussing the top collegiate libraries in the nation, the difficulties they face with their expanding stock, and how they deal with it. Mr. Basbanes also highlights an insidious political practice as well. UCLA was offered a 1 million dollar grant from the Turkish Government to establish a chair in Ottoman Studies, but it came with the following prohibition, no scholars would be given access to any material, "that might document the Armenian Massacres of 1915". After having taken a quarter of a million dollars from the Turkish Government UCLA was bombarded with protests and the money was returned. In Turkey education and History may be artificially and selectively constructed and taught, but in this instance at least a library in The United States took the correct path. That it had to be pushed by protests is unfortunate but not as unfortunate as the US Congress that dropped a resolution in the fall of 2000 at the request of a lame-duck president not to pass a resolution condemning Turkey for Genocide in 1915. This is not the only example of gifts with strings attached, but when compared to a string that requests a library be named after the donor of funds, it certainly is the most repugnant.

This book will take you around the world to libraries that have functioned for hundreds of years. You will visit monasteries whose collections are one of a kind and are literally irreplaceable. Mr. Basbanes also continues to introduce collectors of books as well as the creators of books from small presses staffed by true artisans. One of the book's highlights is the section dealing with the Pennyroyal Caxton Bible recently produced by the gifted Barry Moser. This work is the first completely illustrated Bible that has been produced for hundreds of years, and the story of its creation is remarkable.

Two volumes complete and one more yet to come. Mr. Basbanes has and continues to create a body of work that will become a standard not only for those who love books, but those who enjoy the history they represent and record.

Even though I have not finished the book as of yet, I thought I'd still comment. Obviously with Russian you are forced to learn almost twice the amount as compared to an alternative European language due to the fact that you have to grasp the intracies of the Cyrillic alphabet. Once you've translated a word from Russian to English, the meaning could still be unknown. Anyway, the author realises this and has spent a fair deal of time on making the alphabet clear, and the first few chapters are dedicated to giving you a thorough understanding of it, including some basic rules, and of course letter pronunciations. The imitated pronunciation, which is present in all of Hugo's language books, is once more very helpful. Once you start repeating certain words with the pronunciation guidelines, you realise that what you're saying does sound like authentic Russian, or at least if you have heard Russian before anyway. Personally I may find it easier because I possess books by the same publisher in Swedish and Spanish, but even so, the explanations are clear and comprehensive. It's the little additions, like idiosyncracies and other tidbits which supplement your understanding. For example at the back of the book the author has included a section on how Russian handwriting is done, showing you how some of the alphabet changes when written rather than printed. Unfortunately the version I bought was without the cassettes which come with the book, and I feel that these would greatly assist me in learning the language. The cassettes do a lot for giving the student a real 'feel' for the sound of the language. If you are prepared to do a little bit of work and revision, you can easily master the basics of the language. I do and will continue to use Hugo's language courses exclusively. (And not just because they are nicely colour-coded...)

This course is an excellent value. It has four cassettes with very good audio quality. The book in combination with the cassettes helps you see how the words are written as well as how they are pronounced. It would be nice if there were more repetition with the tapes -- but considering the price you are getting a lot for your money. I have also purchased Pimsleur tapes which are excellent but which are very expensive. This course also provides grammar and pronunciation rules that are very helpful and which make this course better in some ways than Pimsleur because many of the sounds in Russian are very subtle and are difficult to pick up when only listening to audio tapes. I highly recommend this Hugo course. I would also supplement it with other materials like Pimsleur.

Three months after starting this course I went to live in Moscow. I bought food, travelled on public transport, had simple conversations with strangers, read newspaper headlines, spoke to my neighbours and went out to nightclubs.

I've read a lot of Russian language course books and this is easily, easily the best value.

To improve your Russian after this book - there's one 'Verbs of Motion for Intermediate Students of Russian', which is also fantastic. Also buy Offord's guide to Russian grammar if you're going to Russia. There are also a couple of great books published by Strathclyde University's Professor of Russian, do check these out. Don't buy any textbooks written by a Russian (unless it's from MGU), they're all terrible!

This book is better than Erickson's in many ways. I did wish
King could have told us more about Alix's childhood and family.
Read Mager's bio of Grand Duchess Elizabeth for a better narrative on this point. Some of King's phrasing is awkward (he
repeats the word "pair" too often when referring to 2 people.
Overall, this is a pretty good book, as long as you consult
other books to flesh it out.

This book is a good retelling of the facts, with some new theories added (King's ideas about the influence of the Empress's childhood, for one) and some academic theses give the popular treatment for the first time. On the latter score, this biography, for example, is the first Romanov book which does not repeat the old stereotype that Rasputin was exploiting the trust of the Imperial family for political ends, but rather adopts the more credible line that he simply agreed with their own views. The political context is presented a little superficially, with no attention being given to the Empress's real reasons for selecting particular ministers, and the assumption made (all too easy with hindsight) that she was pursuing an illogical and doomed course. Dominic Lieven's "Nicholas II" is a good alternative picture, locating her strategies firmly in the populist tradition of the later nineteenth century. In some ways the book does not fulfill the promise of its introduction, which hints at a totally new picture. However, it is a good read and a good introduction for newcomers, and the character it presents, if less attractive, is a more lively and interesting one than that in the celebrated 'Nicholas and Alexandra'. It redresses the balance of the latter by actually discussing the Empress's work beyond the political sphere, in particular her interest in girls' education. For a fuller picture of her political role, see Joseph Fuhrmann's footnotes to her edited correspondence with her husband.

In this wonderfully nuanced book, Greg King explores one of the most complex and contraversial figures in Russian history. Alexandra Romanov was universally reviled by the Russian people and scorned by the Russian aristocracy. King does an excellent job of exposing the woman beneath the legend. One the one hand you see the exceptionally devoted wife and mother who desperately fights to preserve her family and their heritage. On the other hand, you see an unyielding and essentially stupid autocrat who is unable and unwilling to accept wise counsel or clearly see the dangers all around her. The story of Rasputin is the perfect example. She remains desperately devoted to the Russian holy man because of her belief that he can save her hemophiliac son despite the overwhelming evidence that he is a serious threat to the empire.

Alexandra is a fascinating subject, and King's balanced analysis of her character and her impact on the history of Russia is excellent. King combines excellent research with complelling story-telling. This book leaves you with a sense of sympathy for such a misunderstood woman and a simultaneous frstration that she was so stubbornly misguided in her attempts to influence political events.

This books method of categorizing logos --vertical, horizontal, combinations, type, pictorial type, etc.-- previews its major shortcoming: A lack of commercial context. Wouldn't you like to have some idea, in judging a given logo, whether it is for a clothing manufacturer, a video game, a record label, a pharmaceutical concern, a health club chain, a music group or a designer? This book doesn't help you out there. And the fact that a lot of this material is in a different language definitely doesn't clarify questions the work raises about ultimate usage. A caption line would have made the book less visually sleek and a short paragraph by each group of logos no doubt would have reduced their total number. But that wouldn't be a bad trade off. The work here cries out for some rationale.

In fact, another complaint is that some of the logos seem so bizarre, by American standards, that one suspects they are 'personal' or 'portfolio' work generated to show how zany the designers would gladly be, given a commercial setting in which to do what they have done here to entertain themselves and impress their associates.

I found Los Logos disappointing. A much better book on the market now is Logo Lounge. Logo Lounge has fewer logos, but what is there is sure to be of more use to any designer trying to make their way within an above-ground, commercial context.

This is by far the most complete and inspiring logo collection i found lately. And if you "read" this book, and not only "look" at it, you will find out all the information you might need about every logo (including client).
Definetively worth buying!

Any graphic design/ art student should buy this book. Logo design is the most commonly requested design, entailing simple but bold graphics to become universal symbols for companies and causes. This book is FULL of wonderful logos and typographical designs. Don't question it, just get it. It's the best [$$] I've spent in a while.

If you're looking for a graduate textbook, Production & Operations Analysis by Nahmias is your essential text. I'm in a PhD program now, and I found Nahmias' book most helpful. But while I was in an MBA program, I used this POM book by Chase et al. I think the fact that it's on an eigth edition hurts it a little, since the services stuff (as opposed to manufacturing) looks like it's been thrown in as an afterthought, but at least it HAS services stuff, that's a good start - research is kinda hot in the area of services (such as my own research), so you can't expect the textbook to be complete in services topics until the research field matures.

It has an excellent discussion of supply-chain management, and is pretty comprehensive in all POM areas, at least in a qualitative way. The quantitative stuff is rather sporadic, which I think is a good thing - the undergrad/MBA student can learn POM issues without getting bogged down in quantitative details. If it is missing anything, it would be in revenue management (which has lately been incorporated into the supply chain) and risk analysis. Perhaps next edition...

I am an MBA student and I used this book as the textbook for the course "Operations Management". The book is very good and helpful, very well written too. It also contains a CD-Rom with PowerPoint presentations for each chapter and some multimedia too. It covers all the basic concepts for Operations Mgt. in Manufacturing and it also tries to apply all this concepts in the service industry. Although, I would really like to see more coverage of the following subjects in the next edition:

Supply Chain Management, ERP, CRM, EBusiness, etc.....

Really well-written book with great coverage ... including SAP, service operations, strategy, etc.