Nick Evans has a great sense of the mobile marketplace. This book is a solid balance of the high level trends in the mobile industry and practical examples of businesses deploying these technologies.

Nick has done a nice job of summarizing the current new, new technologies and matching them to business issues. Solid read for managers and technologists alike.

I live in russia, there is no such book in our libraries, but I need to read it!

I am not sure what initially prompted the editors to ask members of the Royal Society for _recipes_, of all things, but the responses range from directions for making applejack to a recipe for camembert scones. Many of the recipes include the science of how they work (yeast, salmonella, etc.), and some are even worth trying. I highly recommend it for all scientists, whether cooks or not, and for all cooks, whether scientists or not.

I just received a wonderful book on the Roman military. It is called "CAESAR'S LEGIONS: the Roman Soldier from 753 BC to 117 AD". There are loads of photographs and over a dozen color plates! This is written by Nicholas Sekunda, Simon Northwood, and Michael Simkins. There are 143 pages, 110 B&W photos, 37 line drawings, 4 maps and 24 color plates. The book is published by Osprey Books. Michael Simkins is a craftsman and historian who has many of his recreations of Roman armor on display in European museums and re-enactment groups. The book will be a great addition to the historian, reenactor and wargamer's library.

This is the best book I've read for beginning Linux users. I've read Sams Teach Yourself Linux in 24 Hours, Special Edition Using Caldera 2nd edition, and Linux for Dummies 2nd edition among others. Although this book is written for the Caldera OpenLinux 2.3 distribution, it's helpful for any Windows user migrating to any distribution of Linux. Chapter 3, Discovering What's in Your System, is particularly helpful in getting ready for installing any Linux distribution. It tells you what you need to know about your system and where to find it in any flavor of Windows. Caldera OpenLinux is directed towards those migrating from the Windows environment. Because OpenLinux boots directly into the KDE Desktop that's the first subject covered after installing the program. Many of the other books don't do this. Next, the authors tell you about the command line and how to reach it. They tell you how to reach the command line! (I'm repeating this point on purpose.) This is the key to Linux. If you can't get to the command line, you can't take advantage of all the power of Linux. This is the only book I've read that tells you explicitly and in the right place how to reach the command line. This is very important for beginners who don't have anyone to help them. The book provides everything you need to start using Linux, including a CD with the free version of OpenLinux 2.3. (OpenLinux 2.4 has been released but it comes in different distributions.) Major sections include Introducing OpenLinux, Installing OpenLinux, Using OpenLinux, Maintaining Your System, Going Online and the Part of Tens. Like all Dummies books, this is an introduction not an all-inclusive reference. This book is worth owning, not just borrowing. Please remember that this is a book for Linux beginners. If you have lots of experience with other Linux distributions, this isn't the book for you. I recommend Special Edition Using Caldera 2nd edition for intermediate and expert users.

This is the sequel to Calling All Saints. I also wrote this book for all those who think organized religion is an absolute crock, but just might be willing to read funny stories that sneak in a moral about following Christ. May these 32 biographies give you the hope, the courage, and the inspiration to try and become the hero or heroine that God knows you can be.

This book is comprised of 12 brief, well-written essays by distinguished researchers, put together by the SUNY Stony Brook professor Nicolas Rzhevsky. The volume is divided into two parts: Cultural Identity and Literature and the Arts. If the first part of the book deals with Russian roots, the second is devoted to the flowers of this civilization.

On the crossroads of these narratives we see a vast land, stretching from East to West emerging from the union of Slavs and Vikings somewhere around the middle of the eighth century as a number of relatively small cities and tribes. Locked in the never-ending war with nomads prince Vladimir tries to unite them around Kiev. In his first attempt he tried to use paganism. He builds up a gallery of local pagan gods, trying to achieve some kind of union and establish certain hierarchy on the symbolic level. Seeing the futility of these attempts, however, he drops pagan faith altogether and adopts Byzantine ('Orthodox') Christianity, which is not dependent on local gods.

As we learn from the essay on Religion by the leading Russian Academician Dmitry Lihachev, having a choice among Islam and other versions of Christianity Vladimir chooses Christianity for the beauty of Byzantine rites and rituals. It is by the beauty of religious acts that God was introduced to the Russian land and the remaining ancient churches testify that because of the beauty God stayed. Church became the place where artists could realize themselves as architects and painters. Christianity also brings a new alphabet. It to this epoch that the first known texts date back.

The ensuing unity enables Kiev to achieve a number of important victories in the wars with nomads. However, Kievan Russia was not strong enough to withstand the Mongol invasion from 1237 to 1240, when Kiev was burned. It became a part of the Golden Horde on a par with Greeks, Poles, Georgians, Armenians, Mordvinians and other peoples. In fact, churches were among the few institutions that withstood the invasion and secured the identity of the Russian land, because pagan Mongols respected all kinds of gods 'just in case'.

It is by the boundaries with the West and the East (which included all the Southern people, pagans and Christians alike). While West equated civilization, East was considered a territory for conquest and expansion. It is tempting to see eastward Russian expansion as a mirror of the westward colonization of the North American continent. Indeed in California and Alaska American and Russian settlers meet. It is also important to note that some of the colonizers were fuelled by religious passions over the conflict of starovery (old-believers) with the official reform of the Church by Peter the Emperor. Starovery did not accept the reform of religious rites and were prosecuted heavily by the state and church alike. They found their freedom on the frontier of Russian colonization. By the conquest of 'East' Russia eventually established itself as a Western power, and in the East it was the cultural baggage of the West. The unavoidable mix of East and West inside Russia explains well enough the repercussions of identity crisis that Russia slips into from time to time. These boundaries thus limit both the territories of the Russian state and, to a large extent mark the field of intellectual debate.

It is not these grand narratives, however, that make this book so exciting, but the amount of details and 'small stories' packed into the 372 pages of this volume. It is impossible to do them justice in the newspaper article. We still need books for that.

There is a wonderful essay on Russian popular culture by Catriona Kelly of Oxford University. In the Soviet-era textbooks, the lower classes were roughly defined by their dvoeverie ("double-faith"), the prominent retention of pagan beliefs alongside their commitment to Christian faith. Instead of dvoeverie, argues Kelly, we should use the term mnogoverie because pagan beliefs do not form a coherent system and thus, combined with Christianity, they produce plural belief systems. Going to the roots of the local obychai (customs), she uncovers an underworld of traditions, habits and superstitions that somehow influence the attitudes of Russian people up to this day. They may be charming and unique like domovoj (house spirit) or leshij (forest spirit), or frightening and commonplace like the fear of the 'Other' and criminal counter-culture. Some of the genres and themes of the oral culture prospered during the Soviet era like chastushka - a four-line ditty of humorous or scabrous nature, but its triumph was short-lived compared to anecdote that conquered the Internet. Actually anecdote is the strongest genre of the Russian oral culture that helped to communicate the most important means of resistance against the enormous power of the Soviet state: laugh. The anecdotes are not limited to political topics, though - they actually deal with every field of human existence.

The part of the book devoted to art is as thorough, interesting and profound as the part dealing with the roots of Russian cultural identity. For example, in Russian society the written word was carefully scrutinized by the church and state, Bethea asserts that the writer in general and the poet in particular became secular saints and, very often, a martyr or suffering "holy fool". Other essays of the second part of "Modern Russian Culture" deal with Russian art, music, theater, and film.

If culture and arts provide the antidote to the shallow political language, then "Modern Russian Culture" is certainly one of the best means to overcome stereotypes and misconceptions constructed by the modern political spectacle.

The thematic approach of the book deviates from the usual country-to-country approach espoused my most authors on the subject. It gives the reader a better understanding of the milestones and institutions of Souutheast Asia. It is more of a "why" and "how" approach, instead of the "who", "what", and "when" approach. In short, very scholarly!

It is interesting in today's world to see books that remond us all the present and future value of intellectual capital. It is unfortunate the book does not focus on the de-valuation of intellectual capital when downsizing occurs in an organisation. The cost of replacing the intellectual capital does never figure in anual reports, it is 'hidden' by other standard costs, such as employee related costs, equipments, etc. We need to establish a quantification method, so that intellectual capital replacement is thoroughly investigated.