"Yes" is the story of a man who lives in rural Austria, a scientist with an overactive imagination, and a psychologically oversensitive nature. His friend, a real-estate agent, sells a highly undesirable plot of land to a Swiss couple, a man retiring from a successful career as a power-station architect, and his female companion, a middle-aged Persian woman. The narrator strikes a friendship with the woman, and finds her his intellectual equal, or at least his emotional one. He wonders why this couple has chosen that horrible plot of land (which his friend had never previously been able to sell), and why they are building an ugly home on it.

He begins to suspect the retiring architect does not treat his female companion with as much respect as she deserves. He retreats into his home for a time, trying to get away from the world, in a fit of general agitation and anxiety, but eventually returns to his friends' company, and deepens his friendship with the Persian woman, who seems to be growing apart from her companion. The novel ends with an emotional shock, summarizing the story's happenings, and explaining it in highly dramatic terms.

This novel is unequivocally brilliant. Thomas Bernhard (1931-1989) does not employ a style easy to understand at first, but it is worth every ounce of energy invested. For example, he has written this short novel with no paragraph breaks whatsoever. (The book is 135 pages long, but the type is larger than usual and the pages shorter than usual.)

Bernhard writes in an overflowing, fulsome style, not unlike Samuel Beckett, full of language, full of description, incessant, and captivating. This is exactly his strategy: he is trying to capture the reader by forcing them to expend so much energy following his text, his narrative, his story, and his unusual style, that the final words of the story will hit the reader like a ton of bricks. This is Bernhard's signature, and this novel is a fantastic example.

Any reader should try this novel who is interested in an inventive, experimental novel, but one which does not veer too far from normal story-telling. Berhard's novels, for all their roller-coaster style, are actually quite conventional, and "Yes" is a great introduction to his literary work. His vocabulary is sharp, his characters are well spun, his occasional insights are spectacular, and his stories are intruiguing. This novel is highly recommended for anyone wishing to sharpen their mind, find a new adventure after having enjoyed Beckett's works, or introduce themself to one of the finest writers of the 20th century.

This novel was my first exposure to Thomas Bernhard and I have to admit I was initially put off by its style. Some of the sentences went on for a page and half, using only commas as punctuation. After the first page or two I began to enjoy it. The plot is very simple. The narrator is a scientist who has retired to the Austrian countryside to conduct his research on antibodies. At first he believes that the isolation will benefit his studies but gradually, he works less and less, due to the great depression that comes over him. He begins to cut off all relations with the outside world, keeping only a token connection with his friend, Moritz. When he comes to recognize that his mind can only be stimulated by socializing with other people it is too late. He cannot free himself of his terrible loneliness. It's been so long since he has communicated with a human being he doesn't know where to start. All this changes when a Swiss engineer and a Persian woman show up at Moritz's house to buy a plot of land to build a home on. Talking with the woman, the narrator finds new life, but tragically, it will be shortlived.

This is a great novel. I have never seen the mindset of isolation and the depression that follows better portrayed. The style of the piece lends itself to a breathless reading. You don't notice that periods are scarce after a while. It has an exquisite flow to it. All the characters are nicely done. The translation is excellent. I really have nothing negative to say about it.

I have long been a fan of Bernhard, and this is one of my favorites. It appears to be less ambitious than his "masterpieces," but this untrue. I find it to be one of his most intimate, intelligent, comical and most brutal pieces of work. It is incredibly concise and as readable as "Wittgenstein's Nephew." It contains everything one desires of Bernhard, due in part to the fine translation, stripped down to the to the bone. Something is always lost in translation, but an excellent ear and eye has been at work here. It is a poetic masterpiece with blinding light, brialliant language, and a twisted satori. Aside from the politcal, moral, social and philosophical criticism that is Bernhard's trademark, there is a unbelievable consecration between the author and reader that takes place and demands that "you must change your life." If you allow it to happen you will be left with nothing but an eyelash and a sock, but you will find that the author with all his vitriol,sarcasm,and "so black it's blue" humor, has still preserved what is best in the human heart, and damn, he tells a good story.

This book is really good for art students and medical students if you want the deteils. I highly recommand it!

Albinus on Anatomy is a great book. I am a printmaking student;My teacher introduced this book to me when I asked her about detailed etchings of the human figure. I love how intricate and delicate the lines are to create figure. They remind me of the prints of Rembrandt. For anyone interested in art, I really suggest this book. It's great for those studying to be medical illustrators, print students, the everyday sketchers.......ANYONE! It's also great for those who just love to learn about the anatomy of the body.

This oversized book contains over 200 illustrations of the human body, posed so as to be of use to the artist studying the human form. Beautiful and highly accurate, the book can be a valuable tool for the artist wishing to improve his skill through a better knowledge of human anatomy. Albinus himself is not solely responsible for the engravings. He collaborated with an artist who did the drawings and finally the copper plate engravings of the figure. In the meantime, Albinus arranged the poses and oversaw the process from rough sketches to the manipulations of the printing press, ensuring that the accuracy and quality of the images were preserved. The figures are represented with various layers of tissue exposed, first the nude model, then the outer layer of muscle, the next layer of muscle, the organs, down to the bare skeletons. Each layer has an anterior and a posterior view. The potential for the engravings to become a grim lesson on internal anatomy is offset by the engraving artist¹s whimsy. He was allowed artistic freedom with the background on each plate, and the settings range from a Greek temple to a verdant forest. In one plate a rhinoceros grazes directly behind the model. For the student of anatomy, each bone is taken individually, and the proportions, muscle attachments, and major connective tissue are shown for each in turn. A passionate introduction to drawing the human body starts the book off, and a complete index ties it together. The playful, detailed drawings make this book attractive to the artist and the art admirer alike. For its size and complexity, this book is a great buy.

Thomas Bernhard must have been the bane of the Austrian cultural world during his lifetime. His favorite style is an endless, run-on paragraph, seething with rage and pain at every turn. If you don't catch that these crabby narrators are constantly undermining their own credibility, you might not see how funny these books are. Old Masters involves an old musicologist, who spends every other day in front of the same painting in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. This 150-page assault on Western art and music (few are spared: Mahler, Beethoven, Mozart, Bach, and especially Bruckner are given real tongue-lashings, and at one point he implies the painting he always looks at is a forgery) might annoy you, until you realize that, as flawed as these great works might be, they're all we have to keep us going day to day. Life without these Old Masters would be unbearable. The narrator is slow to admit this, but when the admission comes, it's heart-breaking. For someone to complain this vigorously about the limits of Austrian art and culture, he must have loved his homeland very dearly indeed. You won't be disappointed in this one.

This a book about two grumpy old men. " ..he does not like solar radiation. He avoids the sun, there is nothing he shuns more than the sun. 'I hate the sun, you know that I hate the sun more than anything in the world,' he says. What he likes best are foggy days, on foggy days he leaves the house very early in the morning, actually takes a walk, which he does not normally do, for basically he hates walking. I hate walking, he says,it seems so pointless to me. I walk, and while I am walking I keep thinking how I hate walking, I have no other thoughts at the time, I cannot understand that there are people who are able to think of something other than that walking is pointless and useless, he says." If you cannot find this very funny then this book is not for you. In 156 pages there are no paragraphs, or chapters. But there is excellent prose and conversations on philosophy of life, art, suicide, class, Catholicism, nationalism, culture......life. Very funny and perhaps sad too, but in the end strangely exhilarating. A wonderful read.

Yes,it is enjoyable and considering the dark and disturbing contexts of his other novels it is indeed a comedy.Yet it is seriously constructed and top quality novella.

I can't wait to share this book with my student and his mother from Eritrea. Most of the time I have to find books on Ethiopia which doesn't sit well with mom even though she understands the difficulty. I also recently purchased a mancala board so we can play that game after we read the book. Mancala has been promoted to teach math and cooperative learning social skills.

Jane Kurtz has once again taken the raw material of the oral tradition and translated it to print, without losing the "feel" of a story told face to face. Tekleh, armed with a plaything that was designed to keep him out of trouble, finds himself trading it and each new item he receives, to stay out of trouble. As is traditional in such a circular tale, he ends where he began.

For those who wish to venture into the world of telling a story without the book, this is one story that will help you avoid "trouble" as you retell the tale. For those who appreciate the appeal of an illustrated tale, the pictures are just enough to delight, but will allow the reader/listener their imagination at the same time.

TROUBLE is a circular story in the best tradition of folkloric literature. Young Tekleh is always in the company of trouble as he tends his goats in the Eritrean countryside. He loses the gebata board, which his father has made for him to keep him away from trouble, to a group of traders. Yet another board is cleverly regained, in a circular fashion, by the end of the book. Kurtz's rich imagery enlivens the story as do Bernhard's sprightly folk art illustrations. With an ever changing palette, she tells her own small jokes in the pictures. A wonderful, child-centered story kids will ask for again and again

The Best Of Baby Boomer Trivia is a wonderfully entertaining compendium of trivia questions focusing on the "baby boom" generation and range from the exceedingly easy to the exceptionally tough. Hundreds of trivia questions cover every aspect of the boomer years, personalities, events, and activities that will test the memory. Great for parties or for simple self-entertainment for a rainy day, Best Of Baby Boomer Trivia is very highly recommended.

This book lets the BABY BOOMER test their knowledge on Baby Boomer trivia without having to log onto baby boomer sites. The book is small enough to take to the beach, long trips etc. It can easily fit in any tote bage. Every phase of the baby boomer era is covered. The People, the Advent of Television, Everyday life, the Famous People of that era. Entertainment and a final chapter of Potpourri that has a little be of everything. It is the ultimate book on Baby Boomer Era

The best book on the market of Chemotaxis and Migration. As I started reading this book I recognized that I was reading over hours. This is a very interesting book covering a total interesting subject. The first time an author defined and clearyfied the terms. Moreover in total a very helpful book and it should be a duty for all clinicians/scientists are interested in that field.

After more than 20 years cell locomotion research there was no book available which address this very interesting subject. The Authors have done a great job by providing the reader with a very fine logical follow up in the book. All important points are explained so fine. After reading this book it is possible to understand chemotaxis and transmigration, even when you are a beginner in this very important field. I can only congratulate the Authors and they have filled a big gap.

The Centennial Exhibit of the Nobel Prize is brought to life in the pages of this beautifully rendered oeuvre. I bought it happily thinking that it would serve as a coffee table book and was more than pleasantly surprised to find that this book is so much more than that. Dr. Larsson has done a superb, creative job in selecting inspiring, thought-provoking essays that enhance the visual experience of the carefully chosen, high quality photographs. I keep coming back to it, and each time I do, I find something new of interest. Splendid.

A truly remarkable full color European quality paperback, divided into sections dealing with the history of the prizes, selected Nobel laureates, and various creative milieus in which they worked. Altogether fascinating. Should be in every library, both personal and public.

As a part-time resident of the Vieux Carre, and one who very reluctantly leaves to return to New York, I keep this book in my New York home to look through when I long for New Orleans. This book, with its elegant balck and white historic photos and its vivid descriptive text, captures the best of the Vieux Carre. In fact, I have had great fun trying to match the historic photos to the contemporary Vieux Carre sites on my visits to the Quarter.

I love this book, it's a wonderful gift to anyone who loves that amazing and magical place known as the Vieux Carre.

Tender in prose, painstaking in research, passionate in creation. A worthy addition to any architectural library.

The authors are young researchers who did their Ph.D. research in this rapidly developing branch of pattern recognition. Because they are young and are at the state of the art in the filed the book has sevral advantages and disadvantages and what I see as a disadvantage someone else might view as an advantage. Anyway here is my view.
Advantage 1: Pattern recognition is a field of many disciplines. It has been studied by statisticians, mathematician, probabilists and engineering and people that call themselves computer scientists specializing in artificial intelligence. The field is old and has a long history but each discipline has developed their own jargon and many times the wheel has been reinvented. The advantage of this book is that these young scientists don't see that awful history. They have learned and mastered their subject in a basically engineering jargon but they include many concepts from statistics and statistical learning theory that are not common to engineering texts. This includes such topics as robust regression, ridge regression and spline estimation. Much of the classical statistical literature is cited. The book contains over 600 references including much of the authors own work.

Disadvantage 1: Because they are young they miss some of the important historical literature and key texts. I found it a little disappointing that the bootstrap which is a statistical tool that has played a major role in discriminant analysis (particularly in the estimation of classification error rates) was completely overlooked. Also although many important texts on pattern recognition, machine learning and discriminant analysis are cited the fine text by McLachlan is overlooked as is the recent relevant text by Hastie, Tibshirani and Friedman.

Advantage 2: This book highlights the work of Vapnik and Chervonenkis and provides nice concise descriptions that one can easily refer to when needed. The mathematics is deep and includes reproducing kernel Hilbert space and many important properties from functional analysis and statistical theory.

Disadvantage 2: The authors are more experienced at writing professional papers than at writing text books. Consequently the book does not flow well and the authors freely admit in their preface that it is best not to read the book in sequential order but rather to take the suggestions in the preface that differ based on the readers background and interest.

Having said all this, for someone like me, who is very knowledgeable about statistical pattern recognition this is a great text for getting me up to speed on an exciting new area that I know very little about. I became curious about it when I started reading Vapnik recently.

I am hoping that a careful reading of this book will give me an intuition about why this approach that incorporates kernel methods can be a powerful tool in pattern recognition and classification.

This book should be a useful reference for anyone interested in this research area. It could be used in an engineering or statistics course in pattern recognition at either the undergraduate or graduate levels depending on what material is covered.

In a recent communication with Bernhard Scholkopf I learned that his book was sent for publication before the Hastie et al. book went to press. So that is the only reason it wasn't referenced. I think that point is worth my mentioning in an editing of this review. Also on reflection I do not think the disadvantages are so great as to remove a star. So it is 5 stars for them.

I can only hope that they will reference the work of McLachlan and Hastie et al. in their future books and research on this subject.

This book should be on the bookshell of anyone interested in kernel methods. The authors managed to make a clear and comprehensive enough textbook such that it is well suited for graduate students. But it also contains all the state of the art results of the domain, and its scope is wider than other similar books. For this reason, this book should be very useful to any researcher in the machine learning field.

Since there are so many versions of the Bible today I asked my Pastor to suggest a 'good study' bible. She suggested the The New Oxford Annotated Bible. I have found it easy to read with excellent explanations included. I esspecially like that it is a version of many scholars working together to interpret every word in a manner that reflects the intention of the 'original text'. I think they did an excelent job. My only regret is that I did not purchase the edition with the apocrypha.

You won't waste your money if you buy this bible. YOU MADE THE RIGHT CHOICE. This bible is an ecumenical work of different denomination scholars, well known theologians.