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ivan is a performer and each story lends itself to being read aloud . try reading one aloud to yourself and be something new - or remember something lost - in your own imagination.
i recommend this volume to educators looking for appropriate stories for grade and high-school exploration of gender, sexism and homophobia. there is wry gentleness here - an open style that lets the reader choose to do as much work as each is ready to. start with "no bikini."
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19th-century Russian literature is sufficiently striking to make him a national archetype. He is
usually an aristocrat, intelligent, well-educated, and informed by idealism and goodwill but
incapable, for reasons as complex as Hamlet's, of engaging in effective action.
-Encyclopaedia Britannica
In his great autobiography, Memoirs of a Superfluous Man, Albert Jay Nock meant that he was
superfluous because his ideas, particularly his belief in freedom, had become so outmoded at the time
he was writing--the 1940s. But the original superfluous men were Russian nobles, who led utterly
meaningless lives of leisure, while peasants worked their land, servants took care of them, and
autocratic government mostly ignored them. They were felt to be superfluous because they had so
little to do and made so little contribution to Russian culture. For the most part though, they were
treated, in literature anyway, as kind of tragic heroes, as Russian Hamlets.
Thus, in Ivan Turgenev's novella, The Diary of a Superfluous Man, the young protagonist,
Tchulkaturin, humiliates himself in a romantic entanglement and a resulting duel, all the while
conveying the sense that there's nothing else really left for him to do with himself. Turgenev's
portrayal of this hopeless character combines tragicomedy with social criticism, but it is certainly more
sympathetic than not.
As always, Turgenev is the most accessible of Russian authors; the Constance Garnett translation is
very readable; and it is blessedly short. Even if you're, understandably, intimidated by Russian
novelists, you'll enjoy it.
GRADE : B+
The Diary is not just a negative romp of a self-pitying aesthete. True, there's much complaints, hysteria, and sentimentality, but it's relieved by Tchulkaturin's amusing self-awareness. Likening himself to a useless fifth horse on a carriage, dragged along by life, he says, "But, thank goodness, the station is not far off." It was said that his birth was the "forfeit" his mother paid in the card game of life. Turgenev's ironic humor and relentless yet light-hearted social criticism add sharp levity.
Tchulkaturin supports his self-assessment as superfluous with the "folly" of his life, a failed three week love affair which he claims was his only happiness. Through this vehicle Turgenev explores the themes of love, passion, illusion and will versus weakness, which is also the focus of the companion story, First Love.
Tchulkaturin remembers bliss and humiliation, but he did take action. We see that no one wants to be rescued from passion, not even Tchulkaturin. Does it matter whether he reached his goal? The townspeople eventually esteemed him--perhaps he did make a social contribution and wasn't, afterall, a superfluous man. Irony upon irony and no answers.
In his small room, confronting death, Tchulkaturin realizes that none of the pathetic facts of his life matter. Yet he laments he has "gained sense" too late. He sees what things have had meaning for him. No matter how small, he wants to hold onto them--he wants to live. The tragedy is that Tchulkaturin is universal, not superfluous. He, like most of us, come to realize that it is part of the human condition to feel that happiness and life seem to have hardly begun when nearly over.
At the end of the diary, after Tchulkaturin has died, Turgenev adds another ironic touch that doubles as a social comment and as a device to force the infinitely unvarnished and necessary view that life goes on however it will, regardless of how we may think we have lived.
First Love is the story of an adolescent who falls in love with the same woman as his father. It sensitively portrays the transformation of a child to a young man, precipated by his first passion. The unusual triangle intensifies the suspence as we wonder how the son will find out who his rival is--he knows there is one. His inevitable realization deepens his emotional life and his understanding of the complexities of human life.
The story has an episodic structure from which the poetry and drama effortessly unfold, showing the son's growing love and helpless flip-flopping from child to man.The parlor games portentuously hint at the untold subplot. No character is wasted. Each has a distinct purpose for plot development and highlighting the boy's predicament.
Turgenev's incomparable nature depictions have such a clarity of vision that vivid and penetrating images automatically arise in the mind's eye whether he uses them to symbolically presage events or to reflect a character's emotional state. Or, Turgenev can use his visions of the expansive beauty of nature in opposition to the character's emotional condition to distance us from it to show human insignifcance in the face of the vastness of existence.
The pairing of The Diary with First Love is good. Each is a meditation on life, love and death. The juxtaposition of the two love stories, the neurotic dying man, the intelligent, passionate young son, and the powerful, archetypal father stimulate profound thought: How should life be lived--passionately or safely? Why to we cling to life so, no matter how we perceive it? Who decides whose life is superfluous and whose is meaningful? What are the criteria? Is any life meaningful? Does it matter how we have lived if we can discard our regrets and wonder at the paradoxical smallness and greatness of life? Is any significance we attach to life a mere crutch to face life or a crutch to face death? Each rereading of the stories reveals more perspectives and more layers of meaning.
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Writer acknowledges that Malaysia's seasons (Hot/Wet and Hot/Very Wet) are not necessarily the same as, say, Indonesia's or Hawaii's. Therefore, the section on cacti and succulents is a bit scant. And I wished for a little more variety in palms. What nearly makes up for this is the completeness of all the other categories... shrubs, flowering plants, foliage plants, water plants, so on. Amazing detail is given for each plant and, often, its variations. Holtum can always be relied upon to comment on, say, a plant's success at high altitude or near the sea.
Lots of suggestions for how a plant should be used in relation to other species or what size garden it requires. But no landscaping sketches... this is all imparted through the text and sometimes photos. With each listing, the reader will be able to learn rates of growth, most appropriate methods of propagation, etc. Photos excellent but not always inserted RIGHT next to the appropriate text, and sometimes a plant is listed/written about in more than one place (without any good note to this fact). All in all, though, it's a useful reference book without extraneous chit chat.
Bonus for Indonesia and Malaysia: along with plants' common English name and Latin name, we get the Malay name (usually same as Indonesian). Extremely useful for dealing with local suppliers.
I have been very happy with this huge and generally well organized book. None of the gorgeous looking Periplus or smaller tropical plant books come close to the usefulness of this book.
However, it is a valuable resource for those growing tropical plants outside of these climates as well due to the number of photos and descriptive information on each plant. The book covers such topics as tropical climates, garden planning, pests, disesases and weeds in addition to information on topics such as bonsai.
I found some of the reading to be a bit in-depth for the typical indoor grower and was hoping to find plant by plant propagation information instead of a chapter of general information on the subject but as a plant reference book, you cannot go wrong with this one.
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The chapter on the Atlantic Cedar forest stems from information my wife JoAnn and I brought to him. His interpretation far exceeded what I saw, yet I cannot honestly say it was in any way false or manipulated. I enjoyed the book almost as much as I enjoyed the man. Gerard Bentryn
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The various graphics are seen applied to print (magazine/book/poster), signage, film and sculptural media.
The examples span several decades, from the early 40s to the mid-90s. The great thing about seeing superb design in the years before the 1980s is that design during that period was accomplished without the use of computers; as a result, greater emphasis was placed on composition, shape, typography, color and imagination. The result was design that was simple, bold and highly communicative. It's a far cry from the over-stimulated design that almost everyone with a computer is capable of producing -- and has.
The back of the book contains an index to the graphics with a descriptive label and the year in which each was produced. Each designer's section starts off with a few paragraphs of introductory text, and ends with a brief bio.
The graphics are displayed one per page, and speak for themselves. Designers should pay attention to the message in this body of work.
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At its heart, As I Crossed a Bridge of Dreams is a song sung in retrospect by Lady Sarashina. This is a song of denied dreams that always just barely seem to fail.
The one constant of the narrative is sadness. Whether Sarashina's life was really so melancholy or whether she wrote this looking back through the lens of bitterness is speculation. Yet the sadness is palpable. Sadness hovers over each scene. When happiness breaks in, it is an unexpected and short-lived guest.
The narrative covers most of Sarashina's life. It starts in her childhood and leads up to her later years. She lives a very sheltered life in her father's house. So much so that it, in some ways, could be described in non-religious terms as a cloister. All the young Sarashina has to occupy her time is her love of tales and the hope of a more fulfilling future.
The genesis of Sarashina's great unhappiness is the glimpse she gets of the greater life around her--a life that she is never capable of partaking in. In all her travels she is never able to break free from her own internal solitude. She will not allow herself to live in anything more than a "dream."
For me, the extremely episodic nature of the book made it hard to get deeply involved as a reader. There were long spaces in this book where the author dwelt on seemingly unimportant matters. There are also quite a few brief sections where the author skips ahead a number of years. This made things difficult for me to follow on a number of occasions.
The one part of the book that I enjoyed was the poetry. I greatly enjoyed the poem that the author's father had his daughter compose to send to his ex-wife. The moment was both touching and insightful into their relationship.
The native Japanese worldview was wholly foreign to me. All the pilgrimages, priests, nuns, and what I would term "superstitions" struck me as convoluted and semi-capricious. The mother's taking of vows while still living within the house, yet being separated from the household, was a truly odd moment.
Though sometimes hopeful, Sarashina has no true hope. In its place Sarashina resigns herself to the idea that all the bad things happening to her are the result of Karma.
I have a hard time swallowing this much hopelessness. There is an endless sense of wallowing about As I Crossed a Bridge of Dreams. I wanted to talk to Sarashina--to tell her that no matter how deep the darkness, it only takes one point of light to dispel it.
While this book may have value in being representative of the Japanese Literature of its day, it is not something I would choose to read again. The problem with As I Crossed a Bridge of Dreams is that no one ever crosses the stinking bridge.
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Simply a great primer for a new Design Engineer. Explains clearly the basic prinicipals and equations used in Radar technology. If you get to know the stuff explained in this book, you will not have any difficulty about the terms used by the Radar gurus, such as Radar Cross-Section, Radar equations, radar signal returns, received power, fluctuations in Radar Cross-section, S/N ratio of the received signals etc. Virtually everyone that works in a Radar industry would have read at least some sections in this book.
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(1)divisibility
(2)congruences
(3)quadratic reciprocity and quadratic forms
(4)some funtions of number theory
(5)some diophantine equations
(6)farey fractions and irrational numbers
(7)simple continued fractions
(8)prime estimates and multiplicative number theory
(9)algebraic numbers
(10)partition funtion
(11)density of sequences of integers.
It also contains basic cryptography, basic group theory and basic elliptical curves in some of the chapters. The authors give notes on the end of each chapter about some research results, which I enjoy reading.
However, the author give too much hints spoling the fun of solving the problems. Eg 32-36, 40-3, 59-53, 108-36, 136-17, 312-8, and most of the problems in chapter 8. The author should put these hints at the back of the book. I suggest you look up IMO (imo.math.ca) for problems suitable for chapter 1-7 because IMO is well-knowned for its excellent number theory problems (especially 1990-3).
Overall this is an excellent book. I give it a rating of 4.5/5, I don't give it 5 because of the author give too much hints to problems instead of putting hints at back of the book.
Alas, it is pre-FLT. So you'll have to look elsewhere for that.
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Dr. Victoroff appears to have followed the same strategy that many school and college students follow when writing a paper for which they lack material: state obvious facts, repeat information, present information that is only vaguely relevant, all to ensure that the required "length" requirements are met. This book is far too long. There is too much of information on the physiology of the brain. Many of Dr Victoroff's recommendations appear to be self obvious (eat right, exercise, avoid stress).
Had the book been about a third of its size, it might have been interesting. As it is, it is extremely dry.
In the end, I ended up skimming thru the book to get to the "juicy" part that could actually help me: unfortunately, I found nothing.
Surprisingly, it is also clearly written and fun to read!
A must for anybody with a brain.
Dr. Victoroff gives you current information on a vital subject. This book was published in July of 2002 and it draws upon over 14,000 studies in the last five years - some from early 2002. He even refers to the impact of the September 11, 2001 tragedy.
I especially liked his technique of presenting both point and counterpoint studies for the impact of most of the herbs, hormones, diseases, exercises and general lifestyle factors he describes. He makes it clear when a statement is based on solid facts, when it seems likely based on some but not all studies, and when he is speculating - giving his personal opinion. This type of honesty is sometimes lacking from the medical profession. One of my favorite sections contains a quote from the head of a medical school who tells the incoming students that half of what they are about to learn is false; but that unfortunately, we don't know which half.
I came away from this book with a much clearer understanding of how my brain works, what can happen to keep it from working optimally, and what I can do to help protect it.
Since the research on herbs and drugs is changing so rapidly, much of this book will be out-of-date within a couple of years. It's my hope that Dr. Victoroff will write frequent revisions to keep us informed about these changes.
In 2002, this book is a must-read for anybody with a brain, who wishes to keep it functioning.
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The story itself is in the framework of a diary of a dying man. More than an actual diary, it is actually an account of a desperate man, hopelessly in love with a young girl. It is the story of his unhappiness and jealousy, which make him a superfluous man without use and objective.
The only downside to this volume is its length: "Superfluous Man" is more of a long story or novella than a book in and of itself. Look instead for a collection.