Well-researched and impressively compiled. For those interested in World War II history, this resource is definantly something not to be overlooked!

Out Of The Inferno charts the efforts that went into the rescue of Rabbi Yosef Schneersohn, during which six months of lobbying with countless political figures led to the eventual rescue of the Rebe from World War II Europe. Here are letters, memoranda, and documents detailing the efforts to rescue a revered man - and his trial, which continued even after his journey away from Europe.

Professor Isaac has written a book for those interested in learning about probability. It is at a high school algebra level although knowledge of calculus could be helpful at times. He starts with the now famous Monte Hall problem and provides the most lucid explanation I have seen to date. This is a great way to introduce important probability notions such as sample space and probability models for the sample outcomes. Deals mainly with discrete probability which is easiest to understand and yet rich with applications in gambling and other areas.

Important theory is presented but without the detailed mathematical proofs. Covers the gambler's ruin, geometric probability, Monte Carlo methods and some statistical decision theory. He also presents both the frequentist (throughout the text)and the Bayesian paradigms (Chapter 4) for statistical inference. Examples of the application of probability to statistical inference is nicely treated in Chapter 15. The deeper material on Markov chains and Brownian motion are relegated to the last two chapters (16 and 17). The exposition is excellent throughout and many good references are provided for readers who want to learn more or delve deeper into the theory.

This introduction to probability and statistics teaches you about important concepts, theorems and applications without going into proving most of them. It's easily accessible to amateur mathematicians with a bit of persistance, and it illuminates many of its concepts using famous problems. I'm going to take a statistics course next year, and I found this to be a delightful introduction to the topic.

The book, that is. The stories and pictures are just unbelievably warm and beautiful. I often read this short book cover to cover during Chanukah--one sparkling little gem a night. Just perfect for adults and, I'm sure, children, too. In fact, I can't imagine anything nicer than to read these to a kid on Chanukah. This book is the perfect gift, to yourself or anyone else. And if you can find yourself a hardcover copy, then you're *really* in luck.

I really enjoyed this book. This book has eight stories, one for each night of Hanukkah. All the stories were interesting and had beautiful illustrations. My favorite story was The Power of Light. Isacc Bashevis Singer is a Nobel Prize Winner. This is a great book.

This is a fascinating book detailing the fall from grace of the Soviet Union's number 2 man in the revolution: Leon Trotsky. After Lenin's death, Stalin, Zinoviev, and Kamenev, the ruling triumverate, did all that they could to eliminate this popular figure from the political arena. Deutscher does a great job illuminating one of the the major ideological conflicts in the Soviet Union during the 1920's: socialism in one country advocated by Stalin and permanent revolution supported by Trotsky. Deutscher's arguments make a strong case for Trotsky's position, since without a communist revolution in a more industrially advanced country, Soviet socialism faced the danger of becoming heavily bureaucratic and deformed. The other major difference between Stalin and Totsky was about the course of inustrialization in the Soviet Union. Trotsky warned about the danger of the New Economic Policy (NEP) slowly restoring capitalism in Russia. In Stalin's battle for power with Trotsky, he originally supported the NEP and a slow course of industrialization. When he finally defeated Trotsky (which begins the final book of Deutscher's trilogy) he almost completely stole Trotsky's program of rapid industrialization for the USSR. The question that the reader is left with is: would idustrialization in the USSR have been more peaceful under Trotsky than Stalin? Would we be talking about millions of dead Soviet citizens today and would the communist movement around the world still be a factor if Trotsky, not Stalin, would have won the power struggle in the 1920's. It's obvious that Deutscher is a big supporter of Leon Trotsky. Its hard not to be: he almost single handedly organized the Red Army with no military background which repelled foreign intervention during the Russian Civil War. He was matched only by Lenin as the supreme Marxist intellectual of the time. A supreme orator, he was the consumate revolutionary and internationalist. This trilogy is by far the best Trotsky biography to date. Any one interested in the Russian revolution or the Communist movement must read these books.

This is the second volume of a three-volume sympathetic biography of the great Russian revolutionary, Leon Trotsky by Isaac Deutscher. This is Deutscher's most famous work.

In this second volume the author gets about telling the story that he really wants to tell. Rather than a balanced tale of the life of Trotsky, the author really want to concentrate on the conflict between him and Joseph Stalin. This volume is where that tale begins in earnest.

Nonetheless, Deutscher's style of writing grabs the reader's interest and holds her/him to the subject. This is a worthy addition to any library of any reader interested in Soviet history.

Isaac Asimov is the superb master of explanation! He proves it when he easily explains methods for calculations from the very basic to the quite complicated.

Dr. Asimov has discussed many subjects over the past 60+ years. All have shown insight into each particular suject.

But this book shows a true Grand Master doing what he does best; explain.

He shows a mastery of math problems can be easy and fun! If you have trouble with math in any form, this is the book for you!

This book shaped my life. I still have the algrebra medal that I won in ninth grade, partly because I checked out "Quick and Easy Math" again and again from the public library. Not only will it teach you ways to calculate in your head faster than you could on paper, but some of the methods require you to look at numbers with a bit more insight than the usual school child who memorizes the "times tables." In every case, Asimov explains clearly WHY the methods work, imparting valuable ideas as well as cute calculating tricks. How many of us know how to multiply any number by 999, quickly and without pencil, paper or calculator? Easy as can be, IF you know the principle behind it. Not every reader will become a mathematician as I did, but every reader will benefit from the power this book will give you over numbers, whether you are still in school or ready to impress your grandchildren.

Asmov covers this time in history with humor, realism and wit. It's acurate enough to be a source and enjoyable enough to just sit and read. I found his writing to be inpartial and eloquent.

The great thing about this book is that it is written by an actual writer. Too many times i have picked up a history book by some famous historian and have found the sentances so convoluted that i could hardly find any meaning in them. Many historians have attempted to become authors and have failed. Asimov is a writer who has become a historian with sucess. This book offers a glimpse at the Roman Republic with the same depth as many well known historians, but is on a literary difficulty level equal to the cat in the hat. I have read many books that are slightly more indepth than this, but none that were written in a way so that the level of understanding of the roman republic even comes close to the level provided by asimov.

This is the 4th Warsaw ghetto diary I've read and the 3rd I've reviewed. If I had to do it over again, I'd pick this one first. The author was a teacher and more than just a recorder of events. He was a gifted writer and master storyteller who was never deluded for a moment about what was going to happen and who never lost sight of the universal perspective. He writes in a wry, almost sarcastic style that makes his point effectively as he blasts the Nazis, Polish and Jewish collaborators, corruption in the ghetto, etc. He had me asking myself deep questions as I was reading. He constantly refers to the Nazis he encounters as stupid people. It shows how dangerous stupid people can be when given power. At one point, he says cruelty is a sickness that can affect whole communities and even entire nations. You see from his writings how contagious a sickness it is, and the more that violent, sadistic, atrocious behavior is permitted, the more it occurs. He vividly shows what can happen when people lose their sense of outrage. He knew what was going on at Sobibor and Treblinka and that the people being "resettled" were not coming back. He never trusted the Nazis, saying only evil can come from evil people. Who can argue with that when you are talking about people who lied up to the minute they closed the door of the gas chamber behind you? The last line in the book is "If I am taken, what will become of my diary?" He was not afraid of dying, but afraid that all his effort would be wasted. Well, it wasn't wasted. If only one more person reads this book on the basis of this review, I'll feel I have done my belated bit for a man who had real guts and unfortunately didn't live to see the ultimate survival of his people.

Kaplan's comtemporaneous recording of the destruction of the Jewish community in Warsaw, starting with the Nazi invasion of Poland is most gripping and compelling. It is most interesting because it was written without the "benefit" of other purported historical accounts or the need to explain why the Nazis acted as they did. Although Kapaln has a perspective and knows he is writing for history, his maniscript is mostly reportorial. When he is providing his opinion, rather than telling what actually happened that day, Kaplan let's the reader know.

How refreshing to be able to read an historical work, without the "spin" that now accompanies most works about the Nazi occupation of conquered lands and the extermination of the Jews of Europe. This book is must reading for both serious scholars and those who are interested in the subject matter.

Thanks to my grandparents, who came to America in the first decade of the 20th century, I grew up and have had a good life. Thanks to my grandparents, I didn't become a piece of ash or a few tossed out bones in an Eastern European field at the age of 2. Wars are wars; they've occured throughout human history, but in most of them, whole civilizations didn't disappear. But the Eastern European Jewish world is gone forever. I might belong to the same gene pool, but compared to the characters in Isaac Bashevis Singer's stories, I'm as American as apple pie. Irish-Americans can discover their roots in Ireland, Chinese-Americans in China, and so on, but not me. My cultural roots are gone forever. The only way I can learn them is through reading literature written by Singer, Shalom Aleichem, Isaac Babel and others who describe that vanished world. So, obviously, my interest and pleasure in reading such wonderful tales as appear in THE SEANCE and OTHER STORIES is all the more. Never mind my personal reasons. These amazing stories, by a Nobel Prize winner, will stay with you for a long time. The strange, sad characters afflicted by poverty and by life, bring us face to face with common human personalities of all times and places, while also depicting the conditions and peculiar relationships of Jews in Poland too. Magic, religion, animals, thieves, rabbis, prostitutes, mystics, Holocaust survivors, Talmudic scholars, prisoners, books, butchers and shopkeepers crowd the pages. In each story, you find pathos and tragedy, happiness and satisfaction, tensions and transformations. Two of the stories, "The Seance" and "The Letter Writer" must rank with the best stories I have ever read; none of the others are bad. If you have never read Singer, this is an excellent book to start with. If you have, you know what I am talking about. This is the great writer at the top of his form.

Isaac Bashevis Singer was no doubt one of the greatest short story writers - ever! The various collections in the end also earned him a very well deserved Nobel Prize for literature in 1978. Several of his stories were first published in magazines like The New Yorker, Encounter and Playboy. The first collection I read was Passions and Other Stories, which immediately made me realise what a master Isaac Bashevis Singer was. Later I have read several of his novels and short stories, where especially the collections Gimpel the Fool, Short Friday and The Seance are at least as good as Passions. All a magnificent world of Isaac Bashevis Singer's saints and sinners. Sad, funny, ironic, poignant and seeming to come from Singer's pen without any efforts. This is what good short stories is all about!

I read this series when I was 10, and it has not changed a bit. It is still among the best books I have ever read -- including other genres -- and certainly the best in science fiction. It is amazing to me that it's out of print. I picked this book up at [local store] just a few years ago and there were a lot of copies. It is amazing how a publishing company could allow such classic sci-fi to go out of print (and look at the things they are printing instead nowadays...) Pick this up wherever you can. You won't regret it.

This book not only fits perfectly in the Foundation series, but also posses what has impressed me more: the capability of hide a piece of essential information until the very end of the book, which can held you thinking profoundly for some time after finishing its reading.

Es increible este libro: a mi juicio el mejor de la serie de las fundaciones. Este libro esta dividido en dos partes: la primera, corresponde a la busqueda de la secreta segunda fundacion por El Mulo, mutante con poderes para controlar las emociones de masas humanas. La segunda parte es la busqueda de la segunda fundacion por parte de la primera.
En resumen, un libro muy pero muy bueno, sobre todo el combate entre el Primer Orador de la Segunda Fundacion y el Mulo.

Podría decirse que Isaac no es muy imaginativo al retomar los elementos centrales de cualquier teoría sobre la evolución histórica de Europa. Pero sin embargo, basado en esa plataforma, construye con la creatividad que le caracteriza, toda una serie de detalles de fantasía del futuro, que yo solo había leido en Julio Verne. Es fantástico. Yo he regalado 4 veces su colección "trilogía", y hoy me he quedado sin un ejemplar en español de estos bellos tomos.