This book gives a unique picture of the New York Art world from the 1940s-1970s, plus the author's experiences in Russia, Germany and France; it tells of his emigration from Russia during the Revolution and from France during World War II. Includes meetings with peoplesuch as Jackie Kennedy, Igor Stravinsky and Marc Chagall. An inside view of the Wildenstein Gallery (the family has been much in the news these days), and of the elite world of buying and selling Impressionist and other masterpieces.

I read this book when in a Russian Liturature class. At the time I had a Russian girlfriend who actually lived in the apartment complex where the story took place. This made it interesting. It is in the same class and genre as "The Inspector General" or "Oblomov".

This book looks at multi-particle interactions of small number, mainly in terms of interactions of with small nuclei. The approach is mathematical, and a great deal of space is provided for examination of approximation methods.

The fourth chapter, however, gives examples for magnons and sum rules, which are more to my liking, as well as the very important case of varible numbers of particles.

This is a very informational book about Lenin. It is told in the third person form and describes Lenin's aspect of life. It shows him as a Russian hero and an American fear. I suggest this book to anyone that is doing a report on him. It gives more information than neccasery. The only drawback is on some topics it won't give many details.

This book is a good help to work with modems, the configuration and optimization is more simple using the instructions step by step. When I begun to read, understand more about how linux and the serial ports are working in the environment. I'll recommend this product if some person need to know more about this kind of devices.

When the book first arrived on the shelves of the library that employs me, most of my coworkers agreed they would never read the book to children. In fact, there were bets being placed as to how long it would last before some parent complained about the content. But, I'm here to say that Manneken Pis: A Simple Story of a Boy Who Peed on a War does more than just rely on the laughs the images of a peeing boy conjures. While I cannot vouch for the validity of the history lesson the book provides (not my best subject), I can vouch that the story engrossed the fourth grade classes I read it to. The story starts off as any other folk tale might, with a beautiful family in a beautiful town where everyone is happy. Soon the war strikes, and the book focuses most on the viciousness of war, showing the soldiers as pseudo-human gremlin types, and the ill effects it has on the town. The child, torn from his parents wanders the streets and in a moment of dire emergency, relieves himself from the top of the town wall causing the soldiers to break into a laughter so fierce that they fall asleep from exhaustion. When they wake up, no one can remember why the war started, and the little boy who peed on a war becomes a town hero, complete with a bronze statue named after him. The book's illustrations are simple and colorful and work great in this situation. Anything too realistic could have caused far more controversy than the book needs. Highly recommended to show children that war is bad, laughing and pausing to think is good, and sometimes, if a person REALLY has to go, they REALLY have to go.

For anyone, like me, more familiar with Nabokov's more famous English work (in my case Bend Sinister, Lolita, Pale Fire), the first Russian stories in this collection might come as something of a shock. Inevitably, being translated, they lose what was presumably their magic in Russian; and as the joy of Nabokov is language (what he does with it; how he expresses meaning through his manipulation of it, rather than ideas or narrative; how he is its most beautiful exponent of the century), one is left with a feeling of frustration adn dissatisfaction. There is little of the callous burlesque which invade his most delicate artifacts. 'The Aurelian' could almost have been written by Simenon. Others have the nostalgic melancholy of Turgenev. This is all very nice, but it's not Nabokov.

And yet, it is. 'Cloud, Castle, Lake', for example, combines the familiar Nabokovian disjunction between elegance of style and content of the most horrific viciousness. There is a definite increase in pleasure when one gets to the English stories - the tone, created through language, in unmistakably Nab - narrators, resembling Nabokov in suavity, taste and intelligence, are actually feckless idiots, with their creator smiling behind them.

There is, though, very little to smile about in these stories. Spanning (in composition)the period of Stalinism, Nazism, World War II and McCarthy era USA, they detail the complete derailment of the Enlightenment project in our century. Each time rationality, the power of the intellect or the artist is asserted, it is always denied by exile, totalitarianism, madness, deformity, conformity, self-destructive urges, unknowable terrors, but most importantly, by knowledge of the deception inherent in writing. Each story begins with an assertion, and the confident possibility of giving expression to the world, and ends with these values rigorously distorted, fragmented, smashed and broken by that world.

And yet it is only through the mind that we can escape this evil, through nostalgia, recreation, possibility, artistry, transcendence. 'Lance' is an extraordinary, baffling, ambivalent parable highlighting this. Is its vision of the sublime delusive? Does this matter if we can fumble towards imagining it?

Almost every character in these stories languishes in some kind of prison, trying to escape, seek epiphany in some way connected with the mind, whether it's a simple, sensual appreciation of beauty (a fluttering butterfly; a reflection of a cloud on a lake), or a quiet kindness to someone else, helping us escape our crushing solipsism. 'Signs and Symbols' is the key story, its deceptive simplicity masking untold anguish.

I would be lying if I said I didn't miss the astonishment of watching Nabokov in full flight, but there is so much wealth in these stories, which require untold rereading - not just to extract meaning, but to savour again, and again, their remarkable beauty, their deadpan comedy, their impotent apprehension of terror and brutality (although there is a persistant failure in the portrayal of women) - to remind us why Nabokov is the century's greateat.

Vladimir Lossky was a reputed Orthodox theologian. Most of his books were published postumously and they reveal the depth and extent of his knowledge of Christian thought. And this book is no exception. The present volume was originally written in French and then translated to English. Almost all the fundmental principles of Christian doctrine are dealt with in this book. The book contains a Prologue, a Postscript and four chapters dealing with different dogmas of the Church. His theological arguments are solidly based on Scriptures and the Fathers of the Church. Since the emphasis is on correctness, the language has become cumbersome and understanding sometimes difficult. He has some familiarity with the Indian understanding of God which he occasionally brings in.

This will remain a valuable book of all time. For a student of Eastern Orthodox Theology this is a must read.

In 1954 the Australian Labour Party seemed poised for electoral victory. Just before the election the senior KGB officer in the Soviet Embassy defected to Australian authorities. A short time after his defection armed Soviet Body Guards tried to take his wife back to Russia but were stopped from doing so at the Darwin airport. Photos of a distressed Mrs Petrov being dragged across the airport tarmac by two Soviet Goons hit the front pages of all major newspapers.

Petrov?s defection was one of the more significant defections of Soviet Agents in the post war period. Amongst the documents he brought with him two caused fireworks. One was a briefing that had been prepared for the Soviets by an employee of the Labour Opposition. Another was a document prepared by a leading journalist.

The conservative Prime Minister Menzies who had seemed poised for certain defeat immediately established a Royal Commission into Communism in Australia. The existence of documents prepared in the office of the leader of the opposition was a tremendous embarrassment. In the following election Menzies was able to win.

These events became known as the Petrov affair. The loss of the 1954 election led to the Labour leader Evatt having what was probably some form of mental collapse. He from this point made a series of errors of judgement that led to the party splitting and it was out of office for another 18 years.

The fortuitous juxtaposition of the events have led writers on the left to believe that the whole affair was orchestrated by the Liberals for their short term political advantage. Manne has gone through all the sources, some of which at the time of writing had just come into the public domain.

His book is a convincing argument for the fact that no conspiracy existed. Rather Menzies simply capitalised on chance events that occurred in a miraculous way to get him out of a deep political hole.

Manne?s argument is convincing. The book itself is reasonably amusing. Petrov himself was a chronic alcoholic and it seems clear that he was one of the more incompetent KGB operatives to be let loose on the Western World. Despite his incompetence he was able to provide the Australian secret service with an account of what had happened in the past when KGB operatives womanised and drank less, and as a result could do some work. The political events around the affair have meant that most Australians have never released that the defection was in fact of some importance apart from what it did to destroy the electoral fortunes of the Australian Labour Party.