I read this book for the very first time and I could not put it down. I found myself interested in the mystery about cryonics and Parker's love life. It held my interest because I wanted to know if they would find out that the women was still alive when Gaberial had the doctor cut off her head to be perserved. I was kind of spooked when Parker went home after the white Dodge was following him and he went into his home and noticed somebody has been in there. I was shocked to find out it was the student from the college he taught pathology at. The ending was great and I am glad Ennis got what he deserved and Parker is seeing Leah.

The funniest book I've ever read! From quirky quarks to the belly-laugh of the 'Big Bang', Konrad Krauskopf had me rolling on the floor! I only wish I hadn't been driving my car at the time!

A Pictorial History of Diving provides a lavishly illustrated, brief, but comprehensive review of diving history, from early breath-hold diving and primitive diving bells to modern developments like ROV's and the Newtsuit. Unlike many other books on the subject, it also includes information on underwater habitats and recreational gear. An excellent photo section on early dive helmets rounds out the history and provides some fuel for the imagination. A great coffee table book and serious reader in one volume!

I weave pine needle baskets, and am doing research for a basketry class I'm teaching this month. The Pine Tree Book by Peterson is the clearest, easiest to read book on pine trees I've found so far. The material is very well organized, not too technical, and the illustrations are beyond compare! I certainly hope the publishers reprint it so I can buy a copy - I found it at my local library!

Once again Dover has managed to produce a Piano Vocal score which is a major improvement over the existing editions. While I can't speak for the Scholarly content, and while it doesn't claim to be a "critical edition", it does EXACTLY what a performer wants in a piano vocal score. It is clear and readable and has the words as well as the music. It is also clearly market with measure numbers at the start of each staff and has clear and well marked Major Measure markers throughout. In sum, if you are looking to perform the work, this is the edition to get.

(And if you need a Full Score, the Dover full score is also a very good deal).

This book gives a very complete, authoritative and up-to-date treatment of acoustic and electromagnetic fields generated by bounded sources from several intertwined viewpoints: (a) their representations by volume sources and by "Huygens sources" distributed over a surface enclosing the source region, (b) plane-wave spectra, (c) far fields, and (d) far-field radiation patterns. When field measurements are made in a plane outside the source region, the plane-wave spectral representation lends itself naturally to correcting for the characteristics of the probe performing the measurements to compute the true fields beyond the scan plane. This explains the subtitle "Near-field Scanning Applications." Throughout the book, the scalar (acoustic) and vector (electromagnetic) cases are treated in tandem, with the acoustic case usually preceding the algebraically more complicated electromagnetic case.

Whereas the above topics have been the subject of a number of previous studies, the novelty of the present approach is in examining them thoroughly in the time domain as well as the frequency domain. The time-domain formulations are derived in two ways: by Fourier transforming the corresponding frequency-domain expressions, and then directly in the time domain from the properties of Green functions. The identity of the results, sometimes after long and difficult mathematical manipulations, helps the reader gain confidence in the final product even if she or he was unable to follow all the details of the derivation. As a mathematician, I was especially impressed by the consistently rigorous level of the treatments. Although mathematical rigor is sometimes dismissed by engineers as largely academic, the authors give ample demonstrations of its practical necessity. For example, the proof in Sections 6.1.1 (or 7.1.3) that the probe output solves the homogeneous Helmholtz equation (or wave equation) outside the region occupied by the sources and the probe is a case study of the need to justify bringing partial differential operators under an integral sign, as a sloppy treatment simply leads to the wrong conclusion that the homogeneous equation is satisfied in all of space!

The book ends with some practical considerations on sampling and numerical applications of the foregoing results.

Cooler than a Jedi knight, harder than Bruce Lee. If you love action or Star Wars you will love this. The culmination of the series is one of the best!

This book is one of the best books i have read on non conventional architecture. It includes a comprehensive discussion of material use, spatial ideas and logistics management. the depth of research is notable due to the fact that the authour has dedicated his own life's work to the field, producing many exceptional pieces himself and unlike many of the other books i have read on similar topics, his commentary is shows an empathy for the human aspects of plastics architecture - ie. comfort, placement and cultural contexts. This is an excellent book that experts can learn from, wriiten in a way that a beginner can understand. It is concise and comrehensive.

The three essays here, along with 29 of Mapplethorpe's photographs, provide an invaluable opportunity to address the work in a reasoned and engaged manner. In some important sense, it is no longer possible to experience the work of Robert Mapplethorpe as directly as one might have in 1988, for now "the images have become celebrities," made notorious, even, by the legal and moral controversies that have so prominently surrounded the work. (5) More importantly, however, Danto attempts to answer the question of how to look at art, particularly difficult or "awkward" art such as Mapplethorpe's, without oversimplifying what is seen. (93)

In the main body of the book, the critical essay of the same title, Danto's seriousness avoids no questions, but thankfully acknowledges the ultimate futility of asking whether such work is art or pornography. This false disjunction results from the failure to hold together both form and content when looking at art. For Danto, art is the transcendence of form and content; it is both and neither, for it moves beyond both while in some sense preserving them in the work. Although Danto needlessly complicates matters with his use of the terminology of Hegel's dialectic to articulate this transcendence, his discussion is clear enough otherwise. This is best seen in his analysis of the respective testimonies of the legislators and the experts at the Cincinnati trial in which the Contemporary Arts Center and its director, Dennis Barrie, were ultimately acquitted of pandering obscenity and child pornography. Danto shows that while the legislators saw the content and ignored the form, the art experts for the defence saw the form and ignored the content. Though this resulted in the acquittal, Danto rightly emphasizes that for Mapplethorpe, the work was all about making pornography that was art; he "literally became a pornographer with high artistic aims." (78) In Mapplethorpe's words, a work can "be pornography and still have redeeming social value. It can be both, which is my whole point in doing it-to have all the elements of pornography and yet have a structure of lighting that makes it go beyond what it is." (89-90) This attempt to "go beyond what it is" both illustrates Danto's conception of art as transcendence and defines Mapplethorpe's work in particular as a "playing with the edge." (77)

Danto identifies trust as the constant attribute of Mapplethorpe's work which allows the form and content to remain together. "The moral relationship between subject and artist was a condition for the artistic form the images took. The formalism was connected to the content through the mediation of that moral relationship." (79) This trust is attested to by the formal quality of the images, in that they are titled with the subjects' names, posed and lighted in formal abstraction, and clearly constitute something the subjects have allowed, thus presenting the subjects as themselves, but not candidly, rather as they have agreed to be presented. (39) This is why acts of sex are themselves generally not depicted, for here the formalism cannot be maintained. In Mapplethorpe's work, however, there is always the danger of losing this formal control and going "over the edge." (79) It is not just a question of sex and the vulnerability inherent therein, but of danger and violence. For Danto, "a presumption that one's partner could be trusted . . . is the basic connection between sex and love." (41) He ties this trust to "the spontaneous human appetite for feeling danger and being protected at once . . ." (42) The combination of sex, danger, and violence, when contained by formalism through trust, is evident not only in the overtly sexual or violent works. Indeed, Danto is perhaps at his literary best in his discussion of these elements in relation to Mapplethorpe's flowers, fruits, vegetables, and finally the portraits of statues.

Danto's discussion of Mapplethorpe's work is frank, clear, and engaged. In neither oversimplifying the seriousness of the issues nor avoiding the questions raised by the work, he nonetheless leaves open its moral status. This is a great benefit. When it is a matter of "playing with the edge," different people will ultimately experience such an encounter differently. Indeed, this frames what may be the most problematic aspect of looking at Mapplethorpe's work: "It is supposed to be shocking. When morality changes so that it is no longer shocking, Mapplethorpe's intentions will fall away into incomprehensibility." (112) Although his assessment of the historical importance of this work--and that of the seventies in America generally--will surely not persuade everyone, the main achievement here is that Danto gives the reader solid handles by which to grapple with a difficult body of work.

This work provides a very thorough, readable compilation of Rimbaud's best. A thoughtful introduction and timeline help place the poems in a larger context.