Though Robert Greiss (of the Monster group fame) has assured me that the proofs and theory in the book are all sound, a beginner would have a difficult time believing it. The proofs generally leave a great deal to be proved, and worse to not point out these short comings so that a reader could at least work them out on the side. I am sure that if one understands representation theory then this is a marvelous reference, but for beginners I prefer Curtis & Reiner's Methods of Representation Theory Volume 1, or even the last section of Dummit and Foote's Abstract Algebra which is the best explained intro to representation and character theory that I have found.

This is a fascinating book, as much for how it's written as for what it says. Balbus interweaves his own experiences of being a Father with his analysis of Feminist Psychoanalytic Theory (a la Chodorow) and political Feminism. However, his analysis is not stirringly original. It very effectively analyzes the object-relations theories involved, gives an interesting analysis of narcicism theory, and then weaves in his daily experiences with his child. In the end, it is all a bit too psychologically convoluted (note the author is a political scientist?) for my tastes, though Freudian fans might like it. One is left to wonder, too, if Balbus had spent more time focusing on Parenting (and good parenting) rather than capital-F Fatherhood, whether he might have been more successful in his book and his childrearing.

While some English renderings of Kabbalah are controversial for wavering from the original intent of the Kabbalistic masters, this book paradoxically suffers from being too faithful and literal. As in word-to-word Hebrew-to-English literal as could be generated by software. By using such exact translations, Berg has created a new English jargon in which standard Kabbalistic terms are replaced by neologisms. Thus Berg's terminology is unrecognizable to secular and religious scholars alike.Students of this book may even get the bad rap of being "cultish" for speaking in such idiosyncrasies. Berg is innoculated from any taint of heterodoxy or innovation; his loyalty to his teacher Rav Ashlag is to be commended. But the unintended consequence of his approach is to create a private code for a few initiates.

The book is indeed unusual for its quadrilingual (English, German, French and Russian) presentation with keywords all defined in the context of a continuous, thematically organized text in all 4 languages, and as such is certainly useful in the field of physical geography. However, it strangely fails to make any mention of the fact that it is a completely unchanged reprint of a 1972 publication prepared in connection with the 1972 Stockholm Conference on the Human Environment, the precursor to the Rio Earth Summit twenty years later. The result of this is that the entire field of industrial waste management, for instance, is shrugged off with the statement that this is irrelevant, agriculture accounting for the greater part of wastes! This amply highlights the unfortunate fact that this book completely fails to reflect environmental concerns as they have come to be understood in the quarter century since its original publication. The outcome: useful enough for physical geography, but a misnomer as "Environment in Key Words", and outright misleading as a 1990 publication.

From the title page: "Four Years in the Rockies: or, The Adventures of Isaac P. Rose, of Sheangno Township, Lawrence County, Pennslvania; Giving his experience as a hunter and trapper in that remote region, and containing numerous interesting and thrilling incidents connected with his calling. Also including his skirmishes and battles with the Indians--his capture, adoption and escape--being one of the most thrilling narratives ever published." By James B. Marsh, original publication, 1884.

Isaac Rose, born 1815, spent from 1834-1837, in the company of Kit Carson, Jim Bridger and others trapping beaver in the northern rockies. Includes the usual incredible (and mostly true) adventures with grizzly bears, horse stealing, and Indians. Contains a narrative of an unusual journey down the Humbolt river and a touching story about Chilsipee, a young Blackfoot girl found wounded after a battle who became a pet of the trappers.

After the rendevous of 1837, Isaac returned home to Pennsylvania and became a school teacher and lived quietly.

In some way, adoption has most likely touched your life. This book offers tremendous insight into the angst of all parties concerned. It is sensitive to the adoption triangle and allows the reader a view from all perspectives. It will definitely inspire the reader to ponder how each person involved is affected by the life-changing event known as adoption. You will want to buy this book and pass it along after you've read it.

So, it may not be the best story ever written, but it does carry on the Asimov Robots storyline. If you can quote the three laws of robotics, you gotta read this whole series. It will not knock your socks off or anything, but you will enjoy it.

When Isaac Bashevis Singer first arrived in New York to take up the writing assignments arranged for him at the Yiddish paper the "Forverts" by his more successful brother Israel Joshua, he wrote to a friend in the Warsaw ghetto where all his own baby steps toward an individual literary identity had been taken and was not hopeful: "In spite of everything, it's sad, and it's sad because here in New York I see even more clearly than in Poland that there is no Yiddish literature, that there is no one to work for. There is a crazy Jewish people here which keeps slightly kosher and peddles...and awaits Marxism for the people of the world. But it doesn't need Yiddish literature. We built on a paper bridge."

In a career spanning some sixty further years he did not significantly disprove his initial estimate and his troubled, complex relationship with his Jewish past both theological and familial, his aspiration and despair for the Yiddish language, his desire and contempt for the English audience through translation which was finally to be his only avenue to worldly success, all make his career an oddly emblematic one for the Jew in the twentieth century, seeking to retain an identity but selling it out at the same time. Janet Hadda's "Isaac Bashevis Singer, A Life" gives the outlines and some colour of his travails.

It was only when Israel Joshua died that Isaac Bashevis really came into his own, completing his first - wild, delirious, frenzied, sexual - novel about, significantly, the time of the social order shattering messiah Sabbatai Zevi, "Satan in Goray". Isaac, Hadda tells us, was a strange mixture of his weakly emotional father and coldly tough, rational mother - the grandson and son of rabbis whose father was far less suited to the role of judge and advisor than his mother. His sister, Hinde Esther, also a writer, was a turbulent, passionate, too close and perhaps sexual involvement in the home which Isaac never escaped - though he was cold and callous to her in person in later life, witholding particularly financial help in her difficult post war existance, he surrounded himself with emotional substitutes for her - mad, turbulent women - and what he did for himself he did for his fictional counterparts.

Again and again, in life and in fiction (the same triangle was in his modern set novels "Shadows on the Hudson" and "Enemies: A Love Story", as well as historical ones), Singer finds creative tension, the material for his output and his day to day entertainment, in a triangular state of play, the mistresses alternating, sometimes helping with translations among other duties. One of Hadda's most engaging finds, a Singer story in outline, has Singer's long suffering wife Alma coming to Israel to confront him with his mistress in a hotel. This could not go on, she said. He told her it had been going on five years. She was dumbfounded. Sensing an opening Isaac leapt in, asked her if it had really bothered her at all all of this time, and the three wound up going together to visit retirement homes that might suit the mistress's mother.

There is not enough of this sort of thing. Deep details of the texture and taste of this most sensual writer's life are missing, not just in the sections about the Warsaw writer's world, which justifiably will have evaded the biographer's reconstructing steps by disappearing, but also in New York, a city whose buildings are there, more often than not, and whose neighbourhoods survive, if occupied by new ethnicities, a different time. I know New York and would have welcomed a charting of this late century's Jewish odyssey up the rungs of the city's economic life and out via the career of this writer. But you cannot tell where Singer lived when he wrote which book, in Hadda's account, you can't tell where he walked. Writers, as much as bankers and bricklayers, are creatures of money and time, and what street a book was written on matters as much as its historical wellsprings. A friend of mine, living in New York in the eighties, said he'd see Singer walking some blocks regularly - he walked fast, focused, and unstoppable to where he was going. You were not going to impede this old man from going anywhere.

Hadda's short-comings are most evident where she quotes the interview of Richard Elman, who through a few touches picked up during interview, prises open all the tensions of Singer's relationship with non-Jewish literature and life: he translated Dostoevsky's "The Devils" into Yiddish while in Warsaw and snipes at Alma to keep quiet about it, belittling her favourite German Jewish authors Wassermann and Sholem Ash and her, then smiles at Elman as if it was a game. Hadda the Yiddishist and fellow woman is unable to pick up anything like this juicy from her interviews with Alma or the remaining friends, lovers, haters. She gets from Alma that the Singer marriage was glued together by good sex and that perhaps this was the same for Singer's own mis-matched parents, but this does not compensate for a lack of sensitivity to nuance, an inability to touch the world she is painting. If Singer is as important as she believes, and he did win the Nobel Prize, sniping at his first notable translator Bellow for beating him to it, he deserves a fuller book.

...why buy this when you can get it in other Asimov books, along with many of his other excellent stories? This short story, which can be equally enjoyed by adults and children alike (and is a good way to introduce members of the latter category into the genre), while certainly a classic of the science fiction field, is widely available in several different anthologies. For example, you can read it in Asimov's monumental collection, The Complete Stories, Volume 1. I do highly recommend you read this story; but, if you're going to, you might as well purchase it in an omnibus, where you can read other stories of his as well. That said, if you want to own this particular story by itself - which is a good idea, actually, if you're planning on handing it to children, as it is small and lavishly illustrated - or if you are an Asimov completist (God rest your tortured soul) - then you will want to pick this nifty and hard-to-find item.

OK to read if you need a couple of hours of escape. Written in the same first person singular style we're all used to. Rehashes several old plot lines. Are robots human? Are the three laws mutable? How about robot sex? Please don't forget the super aliens. Maybe it's me, but did I spend too much time exposed to hyperspace for this to stick in my mind as memorable