This book is a MUST for Frankie Laine fans.

It's full of information on the life and times of one of our all time greatest song stylists.

Although this isn't directly addressed in the book, Frankie Laine's career (72 years and counting) is itself an overview of 20th century American music. From his childhood inspiration by Al Jolson (music's first superstar), through his introduction to the Jazz world of the 1930s & 40s, his own years of superstardom in the late 40s/early 50s, to his forthcoming album OLD MAN JAZZ (appropriately title, as he's now 89 years old), Frankie Laine has been an integral part of it all.

As the first "Blue-eyed Soul singer," he played a seminal role in the switch-over from Big Band to the Golden Age of vocalists, and ultimately (if inadvertently) helped paved the way for the Rock era. Always experimenting, his records range from jazz, blues, folk, pop, cowboy songs, country and even some rock and roll.

(That and the fact that he's the best damn singer that ever was.)

Laine's book is written in an easygoing, entertaining style, and if it has one fault, it's that at 228 pages it only whets one's appetite for more.

Theodore Roosevelt not only wrote to his kids, but also drew great pictures. One of his best in here is a drawing of TR playing tennis. Before widespread telphones, and certainly prior to cell phones, people seemed to dash off notes to each other more frequently. One school of TR thought says Teddy simply loved writing to his kids in profusion. The revisionist school says, of course he did, since he was so frequently away.

TR's letters to his son Quentin are especially touching, since later on Quentin took a German gunner's bullet through the head over France, driving TR into inconsolate murmerings lamenting the loss of his "Quentee-Quee." The development of these nicknames is chronicled in these letters.

For whatever reason TR wrote them, they read very movingly. TR's own namesake, Ted Jr., tried to pull off the same thing with his kids, documented in another out-of-print book written by Ted Jr (before his early heart attack during WWII) called "All in the Family." Wherein little Ted's mistake is to too slavishly imitate big TR's way of organizing walks, going camping, and dashing off notes. So there is something inimitable here, which should also caution the modern reader from hankering too quickly to start writing letters-a-plenty. But the picture drawing might be OK. What kid wouldn't like a few more scribbled pictures from their dad?

So at least look at the pictures here. Unlike Ronald Reagan's, these were done to and for TR's own kids. Not to dump on Ron, but to perhaps establish a reference point among competing versions of family dysfunction.

This is an excellent collection of papers. It is a good starting point for people looking for recent work on the computational approach to understanding transport at interfaces. I suspect most readers will come to the book from the citation of one of the included papers. I think they will find several other papers that will be useful.

In today's society, many factors exist that tend to influence children in a negative way. Instead of focusing on the negative, one author has chosen to highlight a positive quality to help teach children - tolerance.

In the book, "There's a Skunk in My Bunk: Helping Children Learn Tolerance," by Joseph T. McCann, Psy.D., a boy meets a skunk in his bedroom. The boy, who has heard all sorts of bad things about skunks, is not too pleased to have this visitor in his home. The skunk defends himself and introduces him to some of his friends whom the boy also has a negative opinion of. In the end, the boy learns not to judge a book by it's cover.

MyParenTime recommends this book -- the lesson that is taught is a very important part of a child's life.<

This book is pretty new in thin-client field. I got the general(not too technical) concept and information from this book. If you are a freshman in thin client field, this book is a good start. After this book, you may try the "Windows NT Thin Client Solutions" from Todd W. Mathers & Shawn P. Genoway or "Windows NT Terminal Server and Citrix MetaFrame" from Ted Harwood. From the two books, you can get more detials about thin client computing.

Fans of Old Time Radio will find radio actor Joseph Julian's autiobiography to be a pleasant and informative little book. Julian entered radio in the early 1930s and spent three decades in the business. While not a star of the absolute first rank, he had top roles in scores of radio shows and, along the way, also served as a sound-effects man, announcer, newscaster, disk jockey, writer, and foreign correspondent. His descriptions and anecdotes about all of the positions are educational and entertaining, even hilarious. Julian's book is also significant for its chapters on his experiences in Hiroshima shortly after the atomic bomb was dropped there, as well as on the grossly unfair blacklisting he suffered for three years as a result of McCarthyism. As a younger fan of Old Time Radio, my hat goes off to you, Mr. Julian, for your artistry and courage, and for your determination to tell us something important about the golden age of radio and a formative era in American society.

As a college student, who had not previously read Walden, Cliffs Notes where very helpful and often touched on topics which my professor thought were very important within the novel.

This story of three friends gone their seperate ways after an accident made me relate to my own experiences as a youth out of college. Each of the main characters (all named David) begin to lead different lives and lose touch with one another (as well as their original ideals) as they adapt to their new surroundings. Each David experiences new encounters with interesting and somewhat ironic characters that help shape their personalities and attitudes. One of the most intriguing things about this book is the style in which the author tells the story through the Davids. Not your typical coming of age fiction, a suggested reading by this reviewer.

Novelist James Gould Cozzens has left a rich record of official documents and memoirs in this work, which originated in his three years of WWII military service as a USAAF officer. He was "there at the making" of several important decisions and policies, including the disposal of unwanted P-39 and P-63 aircraft to the USSR, (and other matters involving that ally, including his tongue in cheek comment in a secret document that the provision of B-29s to the USSR might be inimical to future US national interest...) race relations, problems facing woman service members, discipline, service racketeering, the true story of what went on in Colin Kelly's B-17, and many other bits of then-classified information, provided in the rich and humorous context of a skilled observer's diary. Cozzen's broad knowledge of many professional fields and deep understanding of the motivations and behavior of men and women and the organizations they comprise really fleshes out the record. This is social history examined by one in a macro position; he traveled so broadly to so many troublespots and was so curious as to have compiled a record from the "bottom up" and the "top down" simultaneously. This is a fine book of great use to historians interested in the social and institutional history of the USA at global war, with its all too human everyday problems. Also rich in documentary material (nmostly classified 'secret') about various aircraft and opeerational problems. The B-29, B-32 and early jet programs (P-80) are discussed. The work could benefit from a subject and/or name index.

This book, originally published in 1983, was reissued in 1999, no doubt because of the importance of genetic sequencing in recent years. What is neat about the book is it shows how algorithms from one field can be applied to solve problems in another, possibly totally disparate field, one example being computational linguistics and sequence algorithms in computational biology.

A general overview of sequence comparison is given in chapter 1 with applications to molecular biology, human speech, computer science, coding theory, gas chromotography, and bird songs discussed. The author discusses how deletion-insertion, compression-expansion, and substitution are employed in sequence comparison. Different metrics are introduced, such as the Levenshtein distance. Dynamic programming, which pretty much dominates the book, is introduced here also.

Part 1 of the book discusses sequence comparison in molecular biology. The use of dynamic programming is emphasized and its importance continues to this day. The advantages of using the dynamic programming method are outlined, and it is shown how to find the substring in a longer sequence with most optimum agreement to a shorter sequence. In addition, given an RNA molecule with a known nucleotide sequence, methods are discussed for predicting the way different parts of the molecule will bond to each other. These methods are based on dynamic programming. Mathematicians considering doing research on or about entering the field will profit from the section on the biological background. The treatment of RNA secondary structures is excellent.

In part 2, the emphasis is on speech processing and what is called "time-warping", which is a technique for comparing functions by altering the time axis. An interesting application is given to the comparison of bird songs. An algorithm is given for adjusting the time scales for two songs to arrange them in the most optimal alignment. In addition, the differences between compression and expansion and deletion and insertion are discussed in this part.

In part 3, a modified Smith-Waterman algorithm is employed to find similar portions in two sequences. Called local alignment in computational biology, it is shown in detail how to define the recurrences for the alignment and how to keep track of the pointers for backtracking. This part also generalizes the operations of substitution and Levenshtein distance. In addition, the strategy of doing sequence comparison by allowing transpositions is discussed. Such a strategy entails a generalized concept of trace, wherein trace lines can intersect each other, leading to entangling of the traces into knots or plaids. The usual dynamic programming techniques must then be extended to deal with these complications. One particular algorithm for this is discussed, called CELLAR, which involves the construction of a directed graph whose paths correspond to admissible sequences of generalizations of traces, called cuts. The computational complexity of this algorithm is discussed. In addition, an O(n^2/logn) algorithm is given for computing string-edit distances.

The last part of the book deals with studying comparisons between random sequences. Combinatorial arguments are used to derive upper bounds on the expected length of the longest common subsequences of two random sequences. Other miscellaneous results dealing with comparing common subsequences of two random sequences are given.