We used this text for our Beginning Russian class in college and let me say that it's the worst text to use. The WHOLE CONVERSATIONS ARE IN RUSSIAN and EVEN THE WRITTEN TEXT IS IN RUSSIAN!!!.....There are no English translations and since Russian is a difficult language to learn you need the translations side by side with the Russian. By using this book it really discouraged me from continuing Russian! Quite a few students felt the same as I did about this text. This text states it's for beginners, but no way, it's far for the intermediate-advanced student or a student who has background in the language. If you are looking to learn Russian on your own try Pimsleur's Russian Quick & Easy or Pimsleur Russian: Basic. for audio only. Then once you've mastered that, then try Living Language Ultimate: Russian in order to learn the reading and writing. They provide translations for you (text only, not on tapes)

When I first time found this book in the university library,I was attracted by this book so much,and again and again I reborrowed this book from the liberary.And when I travelled in Russia last year I bought the travel guide of lonely planet series,it also recommends this book as good russian textbook.Finally I decided to have one my own copy ,and I searched it at Amazon.com.

But when I saw the general review of this book I was surprised that this book has "only" three stars!And I can't help but write a review to counterbalance it.This is really a rather good one on the market with its relatively low price.The downstairs said that this book doesn't have English translation to accompany the Russian text.I don't see it as a drawback.If there's English translation beside the Russian text,you would probably rely on the English translation and would not spend time to read the Russian one, which I think will hinder the learning of a new language.

The content of this book is well organized and the materials are very authentic whihout losing fun.I really think it's one of the best text book for the beginners of this difficult language, and I truly recommend this to everyone who would puck up Russian language efficiently and happily!

This Russian Language book is by far the best beginner Russian book I have ever seen. I studied with this book in College and by the end of two semesters I had a wonderful base of Russian grammar and vocabulary. This book gave me such a great foundation I was sucessful with my studies and today I am in a PhD Russian program.

This book is so confusing, everyone in class think it's stupid. Bottom line: He attemps to classify tales when it is an impossible task to do, and criticizes others for trying to do what he can't even do himself.

This is the first work to systematically characterize and describe a corpus of folktales. It includes a list of possible plot twists, in their correct chronological order for any story, and numerous examples from actual Russian fairy tales. This translation in particular reads well and makes a point of not departing from the text's literal meaning in any significant way. I would highly recommend this work for anyone interested in folktales or oral literature in general.

This seminal work is essential for an understanding of structuralist theory and the theory of folklore. It differs from the psychological view of the folktale in its descriptive ability. This theory is based on objective description and sytagmatic conjunction and complementation. Because of that, it is more applicable and flexible than any psychological dissection. Also, two people will reach roughly the same conclusions with this method- something impossible with a psychological approach. This is excellent for anyone interested in attacking the down and dirty working parts of a narrative.

This book is absolutely horrible. The photos are mislabeled (Olga and Maria as Alexandra?!) and there's nothing new and interesting. I don't think it deserves even one star.

This book is a good example of why the average American knows nothing or next to nothing about the forty to fifty million people who were murdered by the Soviet regime. A book about the last tsar and his family should be the perfect opportunity to familiarize the general reader with the basic facts about the Soviet terror. After all, the murder of Nicholas II, his wife, five children, their family doctor and three servants, was but an opening salvo in the mass terror perpetrated against the general population by the Communist regime under both Lenin and Stalin. But you would never guess that, reading this book. While the author Mark Steinberg dwells with excrutiating detail on the personal and political failings of Nicholas and Alexandra, which contributed to the downfall of their dynasty, he neglects to put their murders into any larger historical context. Everything ends in 1918. In fact, in 1918 the terror was just beginning, and it would make the murders in Ekaterinburg look like a mere dress rehearsal (which, in a sense, they were).

Steinberg has much to say about the public's tendency to "romanticize" the Romanovs, but he doesn't offer any new insights into the underlying reasons for our continuing fascination with the family. Nevertheless, by publishing this book he himself profited from that fascination. Books about the Romanovs were extremely popular when this particular one came out. Perhaps the rush to publish and cash in on popular demand explains the overall poor quality of the translation of key documents (which unfortunately do not retain the flavor of the original Russian), as well as the many factual errors in this book. In the photograph section alone, there are three glaring mistakes: two of Nicholas' daughters, Olga and Marie, are misidentified as Alexandra in two separate photographs (is it really that hard to distinguish between teenaged girls and their middle-aged mother?); in yet another photograph, all of the imperial children are misidentified with the sole exception of the only boy, Alexey. Furthermore, it is simply not true that most of the documents in this book had not been published previously in the West. Most of them had already appeared in other books, and in better translations, too.

Steinberg's so-called "objectivity" really amounts to no more than moral relativism and superficial historical analysis. People who want to read an in-depth, objective, and thoughtful account of the Russian Revolution should read Orlando Figes' excellent history, A People's Tragedy; people who want an in-depth account of the murders and the events leading up to them should read Robert K. Massie's The Romanovs: The Final Chapter or Edward Radzinsky's admittedly very subjective biography of Nicholas II (where, in fact, most of the documents pertaining to the murders were originally published). Personal accounts of the family are available in dozens of contemporary memoirs. Sergei Mironenko's Nicholas and Alexandra: A Lifelong Passion, is a far more inclusive collection of excerpts from the family's personal letters and diaries (including the children's); the translations are very well done and the book as a whole is quite simply excellent.

Unfortunately, a large amount of historical material from Russian archives still awaits translation into English. For example, there are several accounts of the murders by perpetrators and other firsthand witnesses which have been published in Russia but which, for whatever reason, Steinberg chose not to include here.

Finally, I would suggest that one of the reasons some of us "romanticize" (remember?) the last Romanovs is that they have come to symbolize the millions of (mainly anonymous) victims of the Soviet regime. Of the eleven people murdered in the Ipatiev House by the Bolsheviks on the night of July 16-17, 1918, only two, Nicholas and Alexandra, had ever held any political power. The remaining nine people were all, by any definition, complete innocents: four girls (Olga, 22 years old; Tatiana, 21; Marie, 19; Anastasia, 17); their brother, Alexey, not yet 14 years old; the family physician, Eugene Botkin; the cook Kharitonov, the valet Trupp, and the maid Anna Demidova. There is a symbolic power in remembering these victims, for persons of both sexes and of every age, class, and profession would be murdered by the Soviet state in the next forty years. Interestingly, Steinberg doesn't provide us with any photographs of the murdered servants. Apparently, he's as much of a romantic snob as the rest of us.

The book, The Fall of the Romanovs, is a great narrative filled with primary documents of the family's path from the most powerful position in Russia into imprisonment and eventually death. Basically, the author explains the attitudes of Nicholas and Alexandra as lovers and rulers. He puts them in the light of leaders as well as family men and women. There are four basic stages explained which give a very nice organized fashion that presents the life in power and downfall of the family. First the tsar and tsarina are discussed in detail from a personal viewpoint. Next, the author moves on to describe the revolution that forced the abdication of the tsar. Then, the reader is taken through daily life and happenings while the family is under arrest at the Selo. Finally, the author narrates the family's captivity in Siberia and their inevitable death at the hands of revolutionaries in Yekaterinburg.

The book is introduced as an unbiased analysis of the downfall of the tsar and his family. However, it is easy to tell that in many aspects the author discusses the family as the good guys and throws a dark shadow over the people who held them captive and later killed them. In many aspects the author analyzes situations and the outcome turns into the portrayal of the family as harmless victims to uncontrollable change in society. The author supported his analysis with a huge number of primary sources, which made it very hard to look upon the royal family as bloody rulers. Nevertheless, it was interesting how very little wrong doings of the family were thrown into the primary documents. The author does a very good job portraying his points through his analysis and backing it all up with sufficient documents and evidence.

The Fall of the Romanovs was published in 1995. It is a very recent book, which means that the author had access to never before seen archives made available to all only in the early 80s. I don't believe the book has a specific intended audience, however, I think anyone who finds the Russian revolution intriguing will find this book very interesting and informative. The book, with many new resources behind it, is able to address many aspects of the treatment of the Romanovs during their imprisonment and issues concerning their imprisonment and execution. In my opinion, the appeal to the reader and the analysis of issues brought up in the book are superbly accomplished throughout the text. With the incessant evidence and extremely organized structure, the book is a great read.

The overall purpose of the text is the layout of analysis and evidence in such a way as to allow the reader to see the story exactly as it is and be able to make their own conclusions. The author does a good job of laying out very accurate analysis backed up with great primary documents. Very organized, is the main style of the book. Every situation is correlated with a primary document towards the end of the chapter that gives the reader great insight. Photos and personal letters involving the Romanovs do a tremendous job portraying the royal family as not only rulers but also as a real family with real values. Everything is extremely relevant and makes the text very easy to read and understand.

This book definitely helped me understand one of the many aspects of the Russian Revolution a lot better. I know feel that I have a great deal more insight into the family that was probably most affected during this whole ordeal. The author does a great job explaining the importance of the personal characteristics of the tsar and his family as to why they were pushed out of power and came to such a tragic end. I would definitely recommend this book to anyone who is studying the Russian revolution. Also, this book is just a great read for those who enjoy informative texts with a plot. The authors writing techniques, the historical importance of the events, as well as the numerous pieces of first hand evidence, make this a great informative read.

This book is about a giant carrot growing outside. Almost everybody in the town tried to pull the giant carrot out. It was interesting who tried to pull the carrot out. I recommend this book to people who like beautiful illastrations and carrots.

My 3yr. old niece and my friends 4yr.old son can't get enough of this book ! We borrowed it from the library, and both kids wanted their own copy. The colorful illustrations and humerous text really capture their attention. We read it over and over again, and they beg for more. Great kids book !

The idea of this book is a superb one: to teach probability from a "gambling" point of view, recovering in this way the origins and development of this area. But the authors have decided to go over a complete account on the historical evolution of the subjacent concepts. It turns out that it is neither a book on the history of probability, nor a clear and well written textbook.

Glenn Shafer wrote a very thought provoking book on the mathematical theory of evidence many years ago. Vladimir Vovk was a student of Kolmogorov. At first I thought this would be a book that tries to replace the measure theoretic approach to probability with a game theory (gambling) approach and I was skeptical about it being successful. But these authors are serious and first rate probabilists who understand the theory, foundations and history of probability from all the angles.

The authors sell the book as two books. The first half presents probability theory and the classic probability results in the framework of a game between two opponents that they call Skeptic and the World. If we replaced Skeptic by Investor and World by Market we see it naturally as an investment problem in finance. They see their methodology as natural for a course in the probabilist approach to financial problems. The special topics in finance and important models such as Black-Scholes is then the subject of the second part of the book.

On the other hand if you replace Skeptic with Gambler and World with the House we see this as the natural gambling problem that really goes back to the origin of probability and the days of Fermat and Pascal. It is this third aspect of the book that I enjoy the most. In this first part, their approach is mixed in with the history of probability. The famous probabilists and their theories come to life in photographs and sketches. We get the introduction of Martingales as developed by Jean Ville in his 1939 book. The subjective approach of de Finetti, von Mises approach through collectives, Kolmogorov's establishment of mathematical rigor through the measure theoretic approach, Kolmogorov's later development of complexity theory and the various debates on probability by the great 20th century probabilists including J. L. Doob. We are even introduced to lesser knowns such as the UCLA mathematician Tony Martin (picture in the appendix with his theorem)who in 1990 provided an important advanced mathematical result in game theory that is important in these authors' approach. Curiously, we also see a picture of D. R. Cox a famous statistician (but not known for fundamental contributions to probability).

This book is long on historical perspective, philosophy and clear writing. But don't think that it is a probability for dummies book. The probability theory is deep and the mathematics is not necessarily simple. I think the authors find their approach more appealing than the usual measure theoretic approach that requires the formality of the holy triple (sample space, sigma algebra and probability measure).

This book is good for learning the history of probability from the Bernoulli's and DeMoivre and Laplace through to the 21st century. It is also good for learning the fundamentals of stochastic finance. A great book for probablists and statisticians to have.

Bayes is the only historical character missing from the book and it is a mystery to me that they would leave him out especially since they do spend time covering deFinetti and subjective probability and they also say that their approach borrows from both the subjective and the frequentist schools. Bayesian methods are mentioned only briefly on page 59 where the "neosubjectivist" movement is discussed and we see a picture of Bruno de Finetti (the first one that I have seen).

If you want to see a different approach to finance that relies heavily on the Ito Calculus, Mike Steele's book published by Princeton University Press offers it to you. That book is one of the few references on the subject that is not in the authors' bibliography. The bibliography is nice and fairly extensive.

This book could be used for a graduate level course in probability from a non-traditional framework. It is good also for business school students with a serious interest in probability and the second half of the book could be used for a course in stochastic finance.

The doctor's plot would make an interesting 30 page chapter in a larger book on Stalin's life, but there's just not enough material of interest for it to sustain a 300+ page book. There is quite a bit of repetition and tedious exploration of obscure documents and characters. The author demonstrates that the book is well researched, but in this case that does not translate into a well crafted story.

This book will change the way that anyone thinks about the doctors plot. It has new evidence to the poisoning of Stalin (probably by Beria) and also opens up documents lost in KGB archives since the death of Stalin. It is very well written and is worth the making of a movie for because of all the newly unveiled plot sequences. For example- General Vlasik was questioned by KGB because they thought all the people with lines next to their names in his address book were spies. It turns out that he changed all of his many lovers names to their masculine form (which is very easy in Russian) so that his wife wouldn't know and he put lines next to their names so that he'd know which ones they were. Come on people that's great! But that's far from the best here. This has all of the correspondense between Timashuk and KGB higher-upers, all the interrogation files of the Jewish doctors, everything you could possibly want to know about the Doctor's Plot and don't get any of the other books on it. Trust me, they're all lies. This is the real deal.

This book introduced main works by V. Surikov but reproduction on paper hardly reflect the main features of the painter's art. Surikov's paintings featured with large size, rough canvas, brave brush and strange and strong color, all of these are not reproduced in this book. But this book discussed his life in detail which will help those who needed the basic understanding of his life.

For those who love works by the Peredvizhniki, or the "Itinerants", or the "Wanderers", or whatever they might have been called, THIS IS THE BOOK YOU HAVE BEEN WAITING FOR!

Vasily Surikov has been an inspiration and the icon of Russian Realism, and through this wonderful publication one may understand how his works and his life intertwined with each other, through detailed studies of his masterworks like "Morning of the Execution of the Streltsys" and even "Yermak's conquest of Siberia". In fact, if i hadn't read this book i wouldn't have realised Surikov is a descendant of the Cossacks!

If your thirst for Russian art doesn't stop here, check out Parkstone Press Great Painter's series for other Russian Masters, like Repin, Shishkin, Larionov and even the seascape master himself, Aivazovsky.

Let me first say a couple things about myself so you can better know how to interpret my review. First of all I am a physician who was previously a biochemist, and I have been an assistant professor of medicine at a major university; and secondly (actually primarily as a person) I am a devout Catholic Christian. Now for my review.

Mr. Hoare starts his book out with a solid review of the scientific research done upon the Shroud. This does help for those who want to review what has been studied. And to his credit Mr. Hoare does this rather even-handedly. Where the author really fails is what he does after reviewing the data. And what contributes to his failure is his very poor understanding of Christianity, despite the fact the book describes him as a "protestant". This quote from the book should help explain what I mean:

"Experience and studies have shown that on this earth there are certain laws that operate. Is the only answer really that God stepped right outside those laws in the case of Jesus?" (p. 130)

This short quote fairly clearly shows how the author either doesn't realize that Jesus Christ is Himself God (in the second person of the Holy Trinity) and therefore not subject to the laws of nature since He is the creator of all that is, or it shows that Mr. Hoare does not believe in Christ's divinity. Either way it leads him to draw seriously flawed conclusions about Jesus. He basically suggests that Jesus was in a coma in the tomb and removed by followers who nursed Him back to health!

This brings us back to the basic truth that how we see and interpret everything depends on our belief (or disbelief) in God. A poor analogy might be that if someone saw a jacket hanging on a door and had no knowledge of "hooks on doors" then their entire interpretation of gravity would be incorrect since they would postulate reasons why the jacket did not fall to the ground. This of course would not be reality - infact it is the layman's definition of insanity (failure to recognize and live in reality).

So in essence his book reviews the evidence fairly soundly but draws conclusions from that evidence that simply are far beyond what the evidence is able to say. Mr. Hoare arrives at the correct conclusion about the shroud being that of Christ but simply takes too much liberty beyond that.

If other researchers along with forensic scientists say that the body on the shroud is in rigor mortis state, how can the man on the Shroud be "Comatose"? Although this book tries to give proof of the Shroud's authenticity, it turns into a "sour" experience once you find yourself with such a contradiction (not only for researchers and readers in general, but for Christians that believe in the death and resurrection of Christ).

A book worth reading! But, as another reviewer mentioned, an ending not consistent with the main part of the book. That reviewer speaks of "ascention" and there just is no such thing. Ascending to where? The clouds? The heavens? The Kingdom of God is within, not 'out there'! Everyone knows that, on a cellular level, the physical body dies and re-creates itself daily and death is when that event no longer takes place.

The author of this book may well be right, when he states that Jesus possibly lived on. What most Christians, and others, are uncomfortable with is the question: What did Jesus do after such an event, and why hasn't anyone heard about that part of his life? We'll never know for sure. That corrupted "apostle" Paul saw to that!

What might help the curious reader is to form a larger backdrop to this sort of information. Here, a few other authors provide an interesting tapestry: "Evolution's End" by Joseph Chilton Pearce (odd title, but one of the best books I've read), "Jesus, A Revolutionary Biography" by John Dominic Crossan, "The Gospel According to Jesus" by Stephen Mitchell and perhaps "The Five Gospels" by Funk(?)

The answer to "Who is MY Jesus" comes to each of us differently, just like every fingerprint and every snowflake is different, but this book will make up one of the mileposts we all need to become the being we want to be.

Having bought this book about a year or so ago, I just picked it up from the bookshelf and had a look at the current URLs of the examples provided. Given the rate of change of the web you would expect many of these example sites to be different - I found that many were no longer there - and those that were have changed their style radically. Hmmm. Not a good advert for the book!

I used this book largely as a reference and for the samples on the CD-ROM. The book emphasizes the importance of incorporating feedback from web surfers and using this feedback to customize the site as well as other applications.

The book is lengthy and does not offer many pictures; however, the advice is very sound and definitely comes from one who has been there. It is a good reference and worth the purchase for the CD-ROM.

100

No where in the title does this book spell out that it is for " Pool Checkers". a much different game than the version that most americans play, Luckly i found a copy at the library, so all that was wasted was time. I dont know anayone who's played this and regular checkers is contrary to popular belief a life study in itself.

An excellent book by an unsurpassed master of the subject--but the subject is Pool Checkers, which has different rules from "Straight" or "English" Checkers. Pool Checkers, in which single men can jump backwards and kings move like Bishops in chess, is played in the U.S. mostly by Black Americans and Russian immigrants. The book is written in awkward English, translated from Russian, and is in the algebraic, chess-style notation rather than the usual numeric checkers notation.

After reading this book,I realiged that I had always understimated the potential of sacrifice in checker.Thank to writer Vladimir Kaplan my checker knowledge has been widened tremendously.