Out of print? Out of print??? I assume that Vintage are waiting for the movie tie-in edition, or something. It's in print in my country, anyway, under its proper title "The Luzhin Defence".

This is, as Brian Boyd says in his excellent Nabokov biography, its author's first masterpiece. I am an execrable chess player, but I know just about enough about the game (and am obsessive enough about various other things) to find its shambling, mumbling hero one of my favourite characters in the Nabokov oeuvre. I've always liked Nabokov's less clubbable heroes - although I recognise that "The Gift" is a greater novel, I can get a bit tired of Fyodor's limitless resourcefulness and poise. (I got impatient with "Ada" for much the same reason.) The unsocial and inarticulate Luzhin is more my kind of character. Surely John Turturro was born to play this character, even if the movie isn't that great.

John Updike, in his afterword, gets a bit sniffy about the meticulous patterning of the book, but I think he fails to appreciate the scope and grip of Luzhin's insanity. This is one of the saddest books Nabokov ever wrote, but also one of the most openly compassionate. Later on, there were more intricate and more skilful games being played with our need to (dodgy word coming) "empathise" with a central character, but "The Luzhin Defence" is still the first book Nabokov wrote that has the mark of the master.

This is Nabakov's third novel, a moving and bleak picture of a self-obsessed man who decides to obsess on anything but himself. It is wonderfully written, beautiful, an obvious indication of just how marvelous a prose stylist Vladimir was, but I sometimes found myself wondering if I really cared. Of course, I find chess to be terribly dull (perhaps my own lack of ability at the game having something to do with this), but that didn't stop me from admiring the compelling structure of the narrative--the world reduced to a chess board and the people taking on the individual characteristics (including the methods of movement) of the various pieces.

I'm sticking with Nabakov, continuing on, hoping that he was more than just a nifty stylist and eventually blossomed into that rarist treat: A stylish author who understands how to tell an engaging story.

This is an inspirational and often moving biography of one of the great mathematicians of our century. Hadamard was not only a brilliant mathematician, but a stimulating mentor, a man of wide-ranging knowledge, insatiable curiosity, humility, and most of all, great humanity. When Japan invaded Manchuria, he proposed that the League of Nations send peace-keeping forces there, only to face ridicule from the French press. Hadamard, more than most of us, deeply felt the tragic wastefulness of war. He lost two beloved sons in World War I. Of his son, Etienne, he once said: "what I did in mathematics is nothing compared to what he could do if he were alive today." (Half of the brilliant graduates of the Ecole Normale were killed in that war). I finished this book with feelings of gratitude and regret--gratitude to Hadamard for sharing his remarkable gifts with such generosity, and deep regret that "fate" was so grievously unfair to him.

This is an inspirational and often moving biography of one of the great mathematicians of our century. Hadamard was not only a brilliant mathematician, but a stimulating mentor, a man of wide-ranging knowledge, insatiable curiosity, humility, and most of all, great humanity. When Japan invaded Manchuria, he proposed that the League of Nations send peacekeeping forces there, only to face ridicule from the French press. Hadamard, more than most of us, deeply felt the tragic wastefulness of war. He lost two beloved sons in World War I. Of his son Etienne, he once said: "what I did in mathematics is nothing compared with what he could do if he were alive today."(As the book points out, half the brilliant graduates of the Ecole Normale were killed in that war). I finished this book with feelings of gratitude and regret--gratitude to Hadamard for sharing his remarkable gifts with such generosity, and deep regret that "fate" was so grievously unfair to him.

Vladimir Zhirinovsky tells a chilling tale of life in Russia. The book begins with his painful and anti-social childhood. Vladimir overcame his past and began his carreer in politics. The book discusses this three-time presidential candidate's plans for the Post-Soviet nation of Russia. There is only one drawback to this book: it seems as though something was lost in translation. Th sentences are somewhat choppy and the vocabulary is poorly chosen.

I find this book to be the most enlightening books of the twentieth century. I give it the ravest reviews. Long live Slavic people!!!

"OKB SUKHOI" is the first comprehensive volume on one of the most famous soviet design bureau. A large part of what was known was based on intelligence database released during the cold war; this work is the first definitive insight of this team: many details are revealed by gathering informations and photographs published in original russian papers; some snapshots are from personal collections of engineers actually involved in bureau development and testing work. In fact many of them are rare examples and they include prototypes and research vehicles, previously unpublished in the west.

The text is accurate and a detailed description of design features, structures and systems is covered by having access to soviet engineering data. In this regard is important to remark that the metric system is a standard russian practice; if the reader is looking for a precise figure in tabular data, she/he must take into account the significant digits while computing own conversions to british system.

Even if its style is different from the western standard in aviation pubblication, this is a much needed book, really helpful to get a clear picture of the hystory of this famous bureau; above all it is a fine tribute of its leader, one of the most gifted genius in soviet aviation industry.

Interesting book but not as throrough as Gordon & Gunston one on MiGs aircraft, especialy when it comes to detailling TOW, fuel load, Sfc and evolution history on the recent types (i.e. MiG-29 versus Su-27 family). Nevetheless a reference book that should be on everyone interested in aviation bookshelf. But who will come up with an update on the Su-24/32/35/37 family ?

The author of "The Queue" has become recently one of the most popular writers in Russia. "The Queue" is an instance of Sorokin's early writings and is free of his later excessive exploitation of sex/drug/alcohol abuse scenes. This as well might be due to the difficulty of including one when the action in the book is constantly taking place in or around a crowded public area.

The text is better described not as a novel but as a prose poem of the size which is exaggerated far beyond the bounds of decency. The first few pages might be of certain interest to a professional in Slavic languages. The translator certainly deserves a high praise at least for his patience in reading all of the two hundred pages of dialogs between tens of unnamed heroes of the book. In my opinion, Venedikt Erofeev's "Moscow-Petushki" is a more curious, humorous and literary valuable item of this genre and time.

If you're wondering how people lived and survived in the Soviet Union, or if you just want to read a book full of innovations (in terms of style) and bitter humor, this book is for you. I read it in both in Russian and in English and either way, it's great! The whole book is in form of dialogue, which makes it easy to read and to follow (sometimes).

It includes a sex scene... only dialog, no descriptions, one of the most powerful scenes i've read. Your mind has to produce images while your eyes see phrases, of cource, it's the same with the rest of the book.

Sorokin's style in The Queue is much milder than what he has now, less postmodernism, more realism, but the format is simply outstanding.

I recommend this book to all beginning writers and people who enjoy a nice well-written book once in a while.

...

Excellent descriptions and partition. Good idea are the individual lists of instruments showing the main artists of these instruments and the style of music they play.

An improvement would be to show all artists which appear on each CD.

I am eagerly waiting for the third edition.

The publication of the Tex formatted version of Almgren's famous big regularity paper makes the original three-volume, 1700 page paper much easier to read. Especially, since Almgren developed the whole new machinery, it takes time for the beginning readers to become familiar with the terminology and to consult essential materials in the Appendix. Readers who have suffered reading the original three hand typed ``telephone books'' will appreciate this all-in-one book.

As in the title of the book, the paper provides a method to deal with the regularity problem of mass minimizing surfaces in higher codimension. This paper not only gives the optimal upper bound of the Hausdorff dimension of the singular sets, but also provides a possible approach to understand the structure of the singular sets of mass minimizing surfaces. This deep but famous paper contains several ingredients to be understood and explored. It is worthwhile for people who are interested in geometric measure theory to spend some time on reading it.

I recommend that anyone looking to have some mischievous fun at chess should take up the the Budapest as an occasional surprise weapon. I found this book at a used book store for $5 a few years back and my investment has been paid back a 100-fold. The Budapest is great for quick kills versus weaker or similar strength players. A gross example: White N.N. (1600) - Me (2000), 1998; 1. d4 Nf6 2. c4 e5 3. d5 Bc5 4. Bg5?? Ne4! and white resigned after a few more moves and I was soon relaxing at Hardees while my competition was grinding out four-hour games. Of course 5. Bxd8 loses instantly to ...Bxf2#. Boryk's book is much more easily absorbed than Tseitlin & Glaskov's, Budapest for the Tournament Player, with its head-spinning variations and transpositions. Instead, Boryk offers numerous games with ideas and strategies for Black. Nevermind that this opening is not popular with the GM set where they have everything memorized out to 20-25 moves. This is a great opening for chess improvisors and tacticians out here in sub-master land that like to mix it up. If you can get this book at a bargain price -- pick it up!

I think it's a shame the 'Collected Stories', with its dull chronological order and unimaginative completeness, has come to supersede the four volumes specially prepared by Nabokov in the 1970s, which were, as his son and co-translator Dmitri says, 'painstakingly assorted and orchestrated by Nabokov using various criteria - theme, period, atmosphere, uniformity and variety'. the stories were translated with these volumes in mind, and to break up their order is to risk destroying Nabokov's carefully calculated voice.

The stories in 'Details of a Sunset', written between 1924 and 1935, mostly centre on the Russian emigre experience in Berlin Nabokov himself was living, as he struggled to write his first novels. It is a world of pale, starving writers, small, shabby rooms, dark, streetlamp-lit streets, jerky trams; a world in which present love affairs are bleak and deadly, and ideal ones are ruptured by misunderstanding or death; where reunions with lost family members are painfully inopportune.

this could all sound oppressively glum; what makes these stories sparkle is Nabokov's aggressively alert consciousness, his ability to literally light up the dreary by illuminating tiny, irrelevant details that combine to create magical tableaux - a focus on the material that produces an exciting spiritual rush.

Two stories here, 'A Bad Day' and 'Orache', would be later reworked in Nabokov's miraculous memoir 'Speak, Memory', and already the Russian's charged nostalgia exerts a magnetic pull. 'A Busy Man' is a little masterpiece about a hack writer who half-recollects the recollection of a childhood dream that may or may not have foretold his death on his 33rd birthday; 'A slice of life' is a sordid fait diver shot through with sympathy (and a rare excursion by the author into female first person narrative). 'A Guide to Berlin' is possibly the best story he wrote, a cartography not of famous landmarks, but the more hauntingly insistent humdrum - pipes waiting by the road to be dug in; dancing in a cafe; a huge tear on an actress' face in the cinema.

Clearly written and covering a lot of territory -- a good read/reference for anyone interested in modeling catalytic processes.