What happens to a Sovietologist once there's no Soviet Union? If the Sovietologist in question is Dmitri K. Simes, he lands a cushy job at the right-wing Nixon Center and pops out the odd book, in which he pursues the avocation of all former Sovietologists: making incompetent predictions about what Russia is going to do.

The Sovietologists had an uncanny track record: in the seventy years that their object of study existed, they never once guessed right about its future course. Every single step the USSR took was news to them. And yet they managed to keep the money coming in by the same means that other soothsayers use: persuading everyone to ignore their past failures by making ever-more-lurid new predictions. Like astrologers, they made a living by persuading frightened, dim clients that there was a supernatural shortcut to understanding complex phenomena.

Their profession has shrunk recently, because no one in the US fears Russia as they did the USSR. But there is always a place for a man like Simes, who possesses a trait even more valuable than predicting the future: the ability to flatter powerful people shamelessly and at length in print. Simes is a born toady. He just goes all gooey when he describes the big players, above all his hero Nixon, who apparently adopted Simes as his lapdog in the latter years of his exile. Simes' unctuous, deferential bearded face is shown on the back cover of this book leaning deferentially toward Nixon, brushing Mister President's jacket for lint like the good little lackey he is.

There are those who claim that Mr Simes supplements his income from the Nixon Center with a regular stipend from another would-be scary employer: the CIA. This view was advanced by Limonov himself in a recent eXile column, which described Limonov's dinner with a drunken Simes and wife, in which Simes broadly hinted that he worked for the CIA and considered himself far superior to the yokels in the FBI. Ah for the old days, when GRU and KGB spent most of the working week slagging each other! No wonder Simes made such a wonderful adjustment to his new home on the Potomac. One of the features of this book is the easy way that Simes equates his former life inside the Soviet bureaucracy with his present job at the Nixon Center. He repeatedly refers to "the Moscow Beltway" when describing the HQ of the Old Regime. Clearly, he sees DC and Moscow as twin towers; he's just stepped across the elevated walkway for a while.

This book is written in the language of those gray journals for which Simes writes: Foreign Policy. U. S. News & World Report. He mentions former Secretaries of Defense as if their names would be remembered, and invokes the living dead (like Kissinger and Nixon) with outright reverence. Much of this book consists of Simes' reconstruction of his trips to Russia with Nixon, in which Nixon appears as a noble figure, compassionate and profound. It's an odd story, most of all because Simes, for all his claim to Americanism, still thinks and writes in a very Soviet way. He longs to find some Great Helmsman who can tell him what to think about everything, and in whom he can invest his talent for sycophancy, and it's no accident that he found it in Nixon--because Nixon, for good or ill, was a very Soviet figure.

But Simes doesn't keep Nixon around just for sentimental reasons. Simes is involved in palace intrigue: a Byzantine secret war within the Sovietology world. Nixon is the banner identifying his faction. Against Simes and Nixon are other presidents and their own little viziers, Simes' rivals: Brzezinski the hated Pole and his Methodist owner, Jimmy the Carter; Bush and his Master of Assassins, James Baker; the evil Strobe Talbott, Russian viceroy of that overage Student-Body president, Clinton. Simes writes about the tyrants and their little grey eminences with the deep hatred of a courtier out of power who has the chance to smear the character of more successful rivals. His topic, of course, is the inevitable one: Who Lost Russia? His conclusion: everybody but me and Nixon.

Half of the story seems absolutely true: the bad half. The whole "How We Messed Up Our Dealings with Russia throughout the Nineties" part. Talbott's an arrogant fool...sounds right to me. Clinton knows nothing about Russia and cares less...yup, wouldn't doubt it. It's the good half that's so doubtful, above all the idea that a man like Simes, a born toady, would have done any better.

Generally a good book. Describes the details, internal workings, personalities and political maneuverings in Russia since the collapse of the Soviet empire. Enlightening about the intellectual capability of the late president Nixon in foreign affairs. Confirms what we would expect from the Clinton administration. Written with a heavy hand. You'll have to wade through the verbiage. Good cure for insomnia. Keep a dictionary handy. Author rather overconfident he has all the solutions to Russia's problems and our relationship with Russia. Overall, worth reading.

This is one of the most coherent, relatively short books available anywhere on what has happened in Russia since the collapse of the old regime. Simes writes in a very clear manner and avoids the long, complex explanations of events common to many who write on this topic. One of the reasons why this book is so readable is that it is more of a journalistic, personal impression which incorporates his discussions with senior Russian leaders as well as former President Nixon. His explanation of Gorbachev's fall, for example, is placed against the background of Nixon's views on the subject as well as his own conversations. I wish I had seen this book earlier. I would have used it in a class I teach on Russian politics.

Dale Herspring Kansas State University

Most of this book is about bygone days of imperial Russia. However, instead of being a typical "Nicholas and Alexandra" book or "How the Royal Family Lived", the passages here are first person accounts, recorded as memories, or as the actual journal entries.

Through this, the reader gets a picture of what it was like living in the upper echelon of society in the latter half of the 19th century, and the early 20th. It is striking and gorgeous.

This is the land and the society that these people later had to flee, and the author, Obolensky, grew up in the Russian emigre community in France.

There was a couple problems that found with this book. While the descriptions of these people's lives were fascinating, it wasn't a page turner, and for that reason, it took me a long time to actually sit down and FINISH this book.

A major problem with it, too, was it's heavy reliance on French. I know that some things are not translateable, and I know the author knows French very well (besides English), and I know that French was the language of many courts and of international diplomacy in that day, but it seemed like there were so many times when the author's point would be punctuated by a phrase in French, which did absolutely no good for me, since I don't speak or read this language.

The third thing that kind of irked me was that Obolensky spends probably 4/5 of the book in aristocratic Russia from 1875-1920, having many perspectives represented, but when it actually comes to the "exile" part, the only representation is his own experiences, and they seem, somehow, not to be nearly as in-depth. (Then again, he was jumping over HUGE periods of time.)

Despite its flaws, this book does serve to recall a time which is fast fading in memory. Most of the "authors" of this book died more than 40 years ago, and this perspective is unique to try to comprehend.

Well, I liked it. It is seemingly undescribale, although it is mildly hard to follow of you haven't read Cardbaord Castles, which is still one of the best books I've read ever. I would highly reccomend this book, if nothing else than some good bible humor.

This book tells about the concepts about ESS as well as the practical application. From this book, you can find the tools you can use in your ESS data analysis and profile design.

This book is great for a student or a practicing engineer. It starts with the fundamentals of polymer science and ends with more specific processing problems. There are design problems at the end of each chapter for which solutions are not provided. This is great for a college textbook, but is not very useful for the practicing engineer. Overall, this book is well worth it.

I study Medicine at Bologna (Italy) and I have a passion for Ophthalmology. I think that Albert & Jakobiec's Principles and Practice of Ophthalmology is a very fine work. This textbook has the correct range of structure and topics, although some of them are in need of integration, i.e. Surgery, Ophthalmic Pathology, Optics (involved exposition), Lens and Strabismus.
Every chapter is similar to a Scientific American article, but just not easy to read and sufficiently comprehensible. Therefore, the book is not appropriate for use by medical students and residents; yet the six volumes cooperate to make clear the physiopathology of many ocular diseases, chiefly because the Authors are very authoritative and experienced. There are few pictures, so I think it is necessary to buy a valid atlas (Spalton) to compensate for such lack. The strengths of the current edition are: Retina, Uvea, Eyelids, The Glaucomas, Conjunctiva and Cornea.
In my opinion "Principles and Practice of Ophthalmology" is a great work for Ophthalmologists who want to widen their knowledge.

Subsampling is a form of data reuse similar to the bootstrap. However the idea of subsampling preceded the bootstrap. The original work is due to Hartigan in the 1970s and was motivation for some of Efron's ideas on bootstrap. The authors begin with a treatment of bootstrap theory. They then introduce subsampling under the assumption that the data are independent and identically distributed (i.i.d). They then provide the theoretical development of subsampling for i.i.d. data, stationary time series, non-stationary time series, random fields and marked point processes. The material is thorough and includes some of the authors' own original research. It is a highly advanced text that presupposes a first year graduate course in theoretical statistics.

firs of all i would pay to thank to the author of the book and then i would say that i am really impressed by the mind of the author any person can get knowldege from the endeavor of the author

This book was the text for the first part of a sequence on statistical signal processing which I took. We covered chapters 1-7, chapters 4-7 in great detail.
This book almost never explains things well. It has a lot of detail and a lot of repetition, but the essence is usually poorly explained. For every important concept, like the Levinson-Durban algorithm or Yule-Walker equations, I had to read other books to figure them out. Stoica has more insight in 2 pages on the Y-W equations then Manolakis has in a dozen. Also the structure and flow of the detailed developments is astonishingly bad. For example, there are algorithms with steps out of order.
Another problem is the huge number of mistakes. It will take you about an hour per chapter to fix each chapter using the publishers errata sheet. But there are errors not included on the errata list, so watch out.
The few good things about this book include a very detailed table of contents, and useful introductory discussions for each chapter and chapter 1.
This book is a disaster and reads like a so-so first draft. Shame on the publisher for not enforcing more quality. Instead of this loser, I recommend Adaptive Filters by Haykin, Spectral Analysis by Stoica, and Mathematical Methods for Signal Processing by Moon and Stirling among others.

I am trying to study from this book and, because there are some mistakes, I am interested where I could find the errata. I tried at McGraw-Hill without success. Any idea?

Thank you.

This book gives a brief overview of fundamentals of Digital Signal Processing and Stochastic methods, before graduating to the core topics, namely Signal Modeling and Parameter EstimationNon-parametric estimation, Optimal filter design and structurs, RLS, LMS and Adaptive Filters.

Though high on content, the topical organization of the book leaves a lot of room for improvement. A logical sequence of topics to be studied by an advanced level DSP student is recommended as follows - 5. Linear Signal Models, 9. Signal Modeling and Parametric Spectral Estimation, 6. Optimum Linear Filters, 7. Algorithms and Structures for Optimum Linear Filters, 10. Adaptive Filters, 8. Least Squares Filtering and Prediction, 11. Array Processing. You may have to keep skipping advanced topics towards the end of a chapter, only to come back later after having gone through related background material in other chapters. In this respect, this volume is indeed inconvenient.

However, the authors have more than made up for all its faults with the depth of content, and also the breadth. Assuming that this book is meant for an advanced reader, it is very much self contained, from the ground up, barring a few minor low-level details, which the authors have assumed prior knowledge of.

Chapters 11 and 12 essentially deal with very specialized applications for Radar Engineers and people dealing with esoteric math involving Signal Processing techniques - the case in point are the topics on Blind Deconvolution and Unsupervised Adaptive Filtering.

The authors have also provided some rudimentary background information on Holor algebra (matrix and vector algebra esp.)

I would recommend the reader to keep a more basic text on Mathematical methods for Signal Processing as a cross reference while using this book. A case in point is Mathematical Methods and Algorithms for Signal Processing, by Todd K. Moon and Wynn C. Sterling.

If you have any interest in learning pathology this is NOT the book to choose. As a medical student who is forced to use it I can speak from experience and say that it is possibly the worst text I have ever encountered. We are forced to use it since the editors are at my school. However, virtually every lecturer we have had points out all the errors and contradictions in the book and then refers us to other texts for better information. The writing is also extrememly uneven and there is virtually no integration of information between chapters. Every chapter seems to be like an entirely different book. Also of note is the distinct lack of gross images. For example, the skin chapter has many histologic images but only TWO gross images. Contrast this with the Robbins Pathology text whch has a histologic image AND the corresponding gross image next to it. So, if you have any interest in learning pathology I would STRONGLY advise staying away from this book and selecting Robbin's Pathologic Basis of Disease. That is the book recommended my most of our professors and with good reason. There is a reason over 80% of all medical schools use Robbins and only about a dozen use Rubin and Farber.

How come all one-star-rating reviews seem written by one same guy? You hate your professor, but please do it in other ways. Don't confuse readers online.

I thought that this book was pretty good, although it may not be written for a medical student as much as a path resident. Excellent pictures, and good descriptions. I felt that the skin, kidney, and bone section were weak and wordy, but the blood, GI, cardiac, and neuro sections were well put together. I have not read robbins, although I think the general consensus is that is the book to use. The bottom line is I liked this book, and felt that I got a good pathology education from it.