Mosely writes in the end of Impossible Object, "But you always read books more for form than for content," giving away, I believe, an epiphany that mostly comes to those who have read many, many books. Mosely's form in Impossible Object is extremely interesting because of how intertwined the stories are--characters reappear, images recur, and narrators are constantly positing on what exactly constitutes love. When you're finished reading the book you could very well wonder if it is really a short story collection or a loosely-stitched novel. You can decide. Whatever it is, I really enjoyed the book and think that Mosley is a fine writer who deserves a larger audience. Sometimes the characters are a bit on the undercharacterized side--making them a little vague and mildly uninteresting--but Mosley's prose makes up for that easily. The first line of his short story, "Life After Death" is a good example of the unique vision Mosley captures in his text, "Walking through streets late at night I saw a crack in the sky and a red arm coming through with the fist clenched like a foetus." It's pretty hard to walk away from a line like that--not exactly your usual sunrise. Very refreshing.

I was left with a sense of confusion after reading this book. There is so much interpretation that needs to be done after reading this, that a reader needs to back and re-read many times. A handful of stories were very interesting, and the rest, well, I can't comment on them because I didn't fully understand the book. Anyone who is up for a challenge,and good at interpretation of books on many levels, would enjoy this, and those who undersand it..e-mail me and tell me what you thought it was about.

A large formated book with some sketch plates of shellfish, vegetables etc. Instead of a cookbook I would term the work a walk through the food classes. A noble attempt at conitinuing to educate the reader on the different ways to look at food. However, for a chef of Robuchon's quality and popularity, the reader is left with a feeling of being jipped. Not really getting any more personal cooking tips, or recipes that made him famous. This might have been a better third effort, not second. Your money is better spent elsewhere.

While I agree with the other reviewer that this is not your conventional cook book- I think it's a wonderful resource for every cook. Great for "I just saw this wonderful asparagus on the market- what's the best way to cook it?." A rare opportunity to learn from the great master book is based on an weekly column written for a French magazine over a year. Each article includes a discussion about a single ingredient- from asparagus to wild hare. Robuchon writes about history, shopping tips, proper treatment and provides a few receipes that celebrate that ingredient.

Sarantakes covers the battle that began Easter Sunday in 1945, candidly dissecting the actions of the American commander in the battle and his resourceful Japanese counterparts. The book then proceeds to cover the political and strategic reasoning for keeping Okinawa under American control. The main reason, Sarantakes notes, is that America did not trust a militaristic Japan to maintain its promises in the surrender agreements, and wanted to be sure they didn't have to fight the battle of Okinawa all over again. Okinawa's strategic central location in Asia also made it very convenient as a forward deployment area should the need arise.

Keystone reads like a doctoral dissertation on the American administration of Okinawa. Historians and political science aficionados will find it interesting, but aside from the first chapter, there is little action. And there is little to no examination of 29 years of post-reversion history, even though Okinawa is still host to several American military bases and personnel.

I served on Okinwawa with the Army for three years, and while this book filled in a lot of the history from the Battle to Reversion, I was disappointed to find no mention of what has happened in the 29 years since.

In this thorough and well-written work, Professor Nicholas Sarantakes relates the story of how the United States occupied and controlled the strategically vital region of Okinawa after World War II, and held it until the early 1970s. No issue is ignored: Sarantakes combines politics, diplomacy, strategy, and even culture in this detailed look at a controversial American policy.

A number of general things make this book especially valuable. Sarantakes writes well, especially in his vivid description of the 1945 battle for Okinawa itself. His research is impressive, as he makes use of material from presidential archives, government repositories, and a good collection of oral histories. His argument that Okinawa was essentially an American colony is clear and convincing, even if policymakers would not have used the term. And, he does a nice job showing why American policymakers began to rethink this approach in the 1970s; not because of any ideals or principles, but because of Japanese resistance to the heavy-handed American presence.

A few things in particular deserve mention. Sarantakes does an excellent job explaining how American policy toward Okinawa evolved, showing that policymakers first wanted control of the area because of fears of a rearmed and aggressive Japan. Then, when it became clear that Japan was not moving toward militarism, American officials still refused to abandon Okinawa, afraid that doing so might encourage Japan to move toward a more neutral position in the Cold War. His account of the political infighting between State Department officials who saw withdrawal as a means to build up goodwill in Japan and elsewhere, and military leaders who clung to the base for its potential strategic value, is particularly insightful. He also does a nice job looking at the way that, especially in the early years, military officials were able to rule Okinawa with an almost iron fist. Finally, Dr. Sarantakes does a nice job putting the occupation in the context of the Cold War; its strategic location, for example, which allowed American planes to threaten targets in Asia and parts of Europe, made Okinawa especially valuable as American fears of Chinese and Soviet expansion grew.

Overall, this is convincing, thorough, and interesting book. I recommend it highly.

the illustrator of the maps is Brian Mckean, not Dave Mckean. i haven't read the book but if you arelike me and buy basically anything woth dave mckeans name on it, pass this one by.

I didn't realise this book was out of print. It seemed to be everywhere at one point! I can only say it deserves to be reprinted as soon as possible. Moorcock's introduction is a wonderful introduction to Sinclair full of a kind of amiable contempt for most of Sinclair's less talented but generally more famous contemporaries. McKean has done a good job, but one of the main points of interest in this book is that it's what Peter Ackroyd acknowledges as his main influence on Hawksmoor. Profound, witty, idiosyncratic, it's a wonderful start to Sinclair!

This book is quite practical. I have been looking through different books on negotiation and this one seems very complete and not focus one specific tactic to negotiate.
It makes you aware of the different tactics used in negotiation and how to counter-attack them. Some books only focus on attack. The examples are quite easy to understand and are based on daily life negotiation (car, house and so on...). To that you have some useful exercices that you can practice by yourself or with a partner. Recommended!

This is a fantasitic book on negotiating. I have read over a dozen and this is the best, along with Guerilla negotiating. This book details many strategies and "tricks" and gives counter-strategies as well. This book is a must for new and experienced negotiators.

A good book, yes, even if doesn't tell anything I wanted to know. I would say it is a good introduction book. What I was hoping was to find accurate and comprehensive descriptions of Nelson's battles... They are well described, it is a fact, and there are beautiful reproductions of contemporary pictures, but good maps are cruelly lacking. For the least important battles there are a few modern maps, but for the three most important battles (Nile, Copenhague and Trafalgar) there are only reproductions of contemporary maps. Not that they are not good maps but they are too small and it is difficult to read the legends and they are only "static" maps. I would have hoped several maps showing several crucial steps of each battle.

For a better understanding of naval warfare in the sailing ship time, you should better read Keegan's book "The price of admiralty". The first chapter is devoted to Trafalgar but tells a lot more about this epoch.

"Nelson's Battles" is not a biography. The subtitle really says it all; "The Art of Victory in the Age of Sail". About half the book is devoted to discussing the navies of the Napoleonic Era and the technical aspects of combat and communications. The rest of the book examines Nelson's fleet battles: Cape St Vincent (where he was not in command, but was principally responsible for the British victory), the NIle, Copenhage, and of course Trafalgar. The writing is clear and interesting and the contemporary illustrations are excellent.

This work investigates the British post-war myths that have grown unchallenged. The Spanish-speaking author was an intelligence officer in 3 Commando Brigade (Royal Marines) and heard 3 Commando Brigade's commander and the 3 Para battalion commander conferring by radio on the night of June 11/12 1982. THERE WAS A TREMENDOUS TEMPTATION TO WITHDRAW 3 PARA FROM MONTE LONGDON; most of the opposition coming from the 7th Infantry Regiment platoon of First Lieutenant Raul Castaneda. The Argentine platoon is recorded by the author of having 'gained a reputation for reckless courage', and forcing a temporary British withdrawal. Two platoons from 3 Para had to withdraw and leave casualties behind when it came under accurate fire from the 7th Infantry Platoon.
Van der Bijl was fortunate in being able to interview most of the Argentine regimental commanders involved in the battles of the land war. Lieutenant-Colonel Omar Gimenez said his 7th Infantry Regiment on Wireless Ridge had been overwhelmed by superior firepower. Van der Bijl also met the Commanding Officer of the 4th Infantry Regiment whose name is Diego Soria. The Argentine colonel said he and his B Company commander discussed the possibility of breaking out from Monte Harriet after the counterattack by his regiment had failed. Van der Bijl was also fortunate in being given the war diaries of the Argentine Special Forces - on one occasion the 3 Para Patrols Platoon ambushed several Army Commandos from Compania de Comandos 601 but they had not counted on the courage of the Argentine Commandos at close quarter. The Argentines charged headlong into the ambush and were able to route the Paras on this occasion! The most controversial clash occured in the early morning of Malvinas Day (June 10). During a fierce action two Argentine Commandos were killed. Major Aldo Rico from Compania de Comandos 602 was reported as having said that the battle was fought on the centre of Murrell River, and he claimed at least four Royal Marines were killed.
The author tells for the first time the true story of the Malvinas Land War, as seen through the eyes of both the British professional soldiers and the Argentine conscripts and regulars. According to Nick van der Bijl the Argentines fought well. During the attack on Cerro Dos Hermanas (Two Sisters) the 4th Regiment platoon of Second Lieutenant Marcelo Llambias-Pravaz with limited night visibility devices (2 night vision goggles) blocked 45 Commando's X-Ray Company for three hours before caving in! On the eastern end of Two Sisters the 6th Regiment platoon of Second Lieutenant Aldo Franco engaged in holding 45 Commando's Yankee Company off along the eastern ridge. The Argentine platoon conducted a spectacularly successful delaying action employing the standard leap frog tactics; one section on the ground holding the Royal Marines off, one section setting up the next fall back position and one section in movement and caused the proposed attack on Mount Tumbledown by the 45 Commando battalion commander to be aborted! And the author found that it took 42 Commando's L Company (on Monte Harriet) nearly SIX HOURS TO ADVANCE 600 METRES. The Argentine platoon which had held them up was commanded by Second Lieutenant Eugenio Bruny who was wounded and was later decorated.
It was reported in the United States that the British Artillery gave the British infantry their advantage over the Argentines. In the final count the British relied on anti-tank rocket launchers in close quarter combat.
But then the whole thing would have been different if the 2nd, 14th and 17th Airborne Infantry Regiments (from the Argentine Army 4th Airborne Brigade) had been parachuted across Wickham Heights, the Venezuelan government reportedly offering a brigade of their own parachute troops to help in Malvinas!!!

I found this book, although expensive, a good general review of the war. Having read approx 20 books on the subject, there were still some unknown points. However, there were a few faults! One of the main ones is that Argentine relatives were never refused permission to visit the graves of their relatives. By stating this, it made the Islanders look inhuman and uncaring, which they were not!

The book "Object-Oriented Ray Tracing in C++" is a practically oriented introduction to Ray Tracing. It describes how to build a ray tracing application based on a graphical class library which is introduced throughout the book and is provided on disk.

This text gives a decent introduction to the basic ray tracing algorithm and some of the main acceleration techniques. The choice of the covered acceleration algorithms is very good. The book is clearly written and does guide the ready to a successful implementation of an image synthesis application.

But I do have some problems with this book. First of all, I believe that some of the mathematical concepts need to be explained in more detail for a reader unfamiliar with the material. Some of the implementation details remain a mystery and have to be accepted as they are and this makes the library quite hard to reuse in other contexts.

And I am quite unhappy with some of the C++ code. While most of it is written quite well, there are some classes that are just not implemented in an object oriented way, e.g. the class RGBColor is derived from the Vector3D class. While this is technically possible, it doesn't make any sense and it certainly is misusing the possibilities of object oriented programming.

Overall, the book provides a good high level introduction to building a ray tracing application, but the text could go more into details and the provided C++ library should be improved and follow the oo paradigm.

I'm a beginner programmer in C++ and I think this book was great to start me off in Ray tracing, since I didn't have to learn a whole new language. One of it's great advantages is it's reuseability of OORT(The programming library used in this book), since it's object oriented and so is C++ this book makes ray tracing and C++ go hand in hand. Although a little old, this book is great for anyone who's intrusted in ray tracing.

This is a very good book. I give it 4 stars because it is not told in such an engaging manner (so it gets 5-stars for content and 3-stars for style). But it does give you a complete version of the early Socrates, and it shows how Plato's attitudes influenced the presentation of Socrates in various dialogues.

The book covers several areas of Socrates' approach, breaking it into six chapters. Each chapter covers a separate aspect of Socrates' thought: his method, his epistemology, his psychology, his ethics, his politics and his religion. The argument is directed to showing that much of Socrates' approach is based on his religious views, so that one can't separate the Socratic argument and method from Socrates' conception of piety and god. The two make the argument that Socrates is essentially a religious thinker, that his religious attitude was central to Socrates' method.

This interpretation is reasonable as far as it goes. My interest, however, is epistemology. Here I find the approach conventional, lacking in some important points. I can't really fault the authors because all Platonists I have read so far remain silent on this subject. Brickhouse and Smith have a section discussing "The Procedural Priority of the Definition," and it is a good in so far as it points out the importance to Socrates of defining terms. However, the discussion never gets to the "meta-theory" of the notion of definition; it never discusses what Socrates' actual notion of definition entails or whether it is or ever was suitable to describe real activities.

I find Socrates' apparent notion of definition, one that tries to define terms using models of geometric or arithmetic measures or of physical attributes of things, to be a deficient formula of definition. Wittgenstein showed that some definitions simply don't work that way. This formal notion of definition doesn't apply well to words like "garden" (are there absolute physical properties all gardens reduce to), "weed" (are there general properties of weed other than as a plant not wanted by the gardener in his garden), or "piety," "goodness," or "virtue."

It should be remembered that Socrates never arrived at satisfactory definitions for these or many other value concepts that interested him. And the modern heirs of Socratic formalism, the positivists, have thrown out the notion of value as it relates to philosophical description. This indicates one of two possibilities: either Socrates' notions about values were inconsequential because the very idea of value lacks a basis in real (formal) description, or his notion of formal description was deficient because it could not satisfactorily encompass the real values that he wanted to discuss.

Brickhouse and Smith go directly to the relevant issues in today's Socratic studies. Following the arguments of Vlastos, Kraut and others, this collection of six essays is both well-thought and insightful. Their documentation or counter arguments and commentaries is very thorough, and lends itself well to deeper investigation. A great book for scholors as well as for those reading Plato for the first time.

The mystery of the Dauphin has been explored by many authors, but I have never read a more convincing telling of it.

Segalla is a fascinating person and I like seeing the troubled times through his eyes. Most of the characters are two-dimensional, but this is not entirely fiction so its ok.

I love all the twists and turns the story takes and the way the people leading or who lead France are described.

A mildly entertaining book, but by no means great.

What happened to the Dauphin? Historians have long debated as to whether he died soon after his parents or escaped and lived under an alias.

In this book time-travelling sleuth Nicholas Segalla offers his version of the tale. In fact Segalla himself is often more interesting than the stories he tells - an immortal detective who claims to have been present at the Battle of Hastings and also knew Lenin!

Bring on the book that reveals his past!