The primary appeal in this book is the photo collection. While the accompanying text throughout is quite interesting, I think most people will buy it for the pictures. And excellent pictures they are.

For buildings that still exist, the authors/editors took brand new photographs specifically for this book. You would be hard pressed to find similar quality photographs anywhere else.

However, if you are interested in an introductory reading on Wright's work, you won't be disappointed. The reading level seems to be geared towards someone who already knows who Wright is, but is not familiar with his lesser known works, or with the details of his life and of architecture. The authors did a splendid job of placing Wright's work in the context of the time and place, and highlighting that which is fundamentally American about both. From the insight on Wrights life and works, you will learn not only about some of the foremost icons of American architecture, but also about American culture itself. The passion the authors have for Wrights work really shows through in every page, both through photographs and text.

I read every single word and closely examined every single photo. I can promise that if you're honestly interested in learning about Wright's work, as well as his place in history and culture, you will not be sorry you bought this book.

I have been a fan of Frank Lloyd Wright's architecture for over 30 years, and have seen many of his finest buildings. No book that I have seen in those years is as good as this one for explaining his life, the development of his architectural style, providing the details of his best work, and showing stunning photographs of exteriors, interiors, and views. If you only buy one book about Mr. Wright, I suggest this one. I have it with me tonight as I begin a one week pilgrimage to his finest work in the midwest. Each night, I will reread the sections about the works that I will be seeing the next day.

The book would be worth buying, just for the photography alone. For those buildings that still exist, brand new color images were made. These are so magnificently reproduced that they actually exceed the appearances of the originals! I don't know of another book of architectural photography where I could make the same statement. It is as though you are seeing the scenes in Wright's eye, as the pure forms that he was seeking to reproduce. Also, you get lots of images. For example, the home and studio in Oak Park, Illinois section displays 10 large color photographs. Naturally, for the buildings that do not still exist, you have only historical photographs, some in black and white. But these are very fine, as well.

Most books with wonderful photographs usually have limited essays. Masterworks is the happy exception. The essays are clear, thoughtful, and extensive. Yet they tie together to tell the story of Mr. Wright's development. So, they are more like chapters in a book rather than stand-alone essays that such books usually inspire. I was particularly pleased with the information about the materials and building methods that Mr. Wright experimented with and used at various stages of his career.

As wonderful as the photographs and essays are, what made the book special for me were the many draft sketches and conceptual diagrams in Mr. Wright's own hand. To see the transition from first sketch to final details was wonderful.

If you know Mr. Wright's work, you will be aware that he often designed his own furniture and sculptures for the buildings, and had craftsmen execute them. You will see many fine examples in the book of these details presented in their most dramatic ways.

The book also has good balance. Many books about Mr. Wright favor his homes, or his famous works, or his public buildings. This one creates a balance over his entire career of all his work. So you get a decent amount about his Usonia period as well as his Prairie years.

Here are the works that are covered in the book: Home and studio in Oak Park, Illinois; William H. Winslow House, River Forest, Illinois; Susan Lawrence Dana House, Springfield, Illinois; Arthur Heurtley House, Oak Park, Illinois; Ward W. Willits House, Highland Park, Illinois; Larkin Company Administrative Buidling, Buffalo, New York; Unity Temple, Oak Park, Illinois; E.E. Boynton House, Rochester, New York; Avery Coonley House, Riverside, Illinois; Meyer May House, Grand Rapids, Michigan; Frederick C. Robie House, Chicago, Illinois; Midway Gardens, Chicago, Illinois; Imperial Hotel, Tokyo, Japan; F.C. Bogk House, Milwaukee, Wisconsin; Aline Barnsdall House, Los Angeles, California; John Storer House, Hollywood, California; Paul R. and Jean S. Hanna House, Stanford, California; Fallingwater, Mill Run, Pennsylvania; Herbert Jacobs House, Madison, Wisconsin; S.C. Johnson & Son Administrative Building, Racine, Wisconsin; Herbert F. Johnson House, Wind Point, Wisconsin; C. Leigh Stevens House, Yemassee, South Carolina; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York City; Arnold Friedman House, Pecos, New Mexico; Herman T. Mossberg House, South Bend, Indiana; Kenneth Laurent House, Rockford, Illinois; Unitarian Church, Shorewood Hills, Wisconsin; David Wright House, Phoenix, Arizona; William Palmer House, Ann Arbor, Michigan; Isadore J. Zimmerman House, Manchester, New Hampshire; H.C. Price Company Tower, Bartlesville, Oklahoma; Harold Price, Sr. House, Paradise Valley, Arizona; Gerald B. Tonkens House, Amberley Village, Ohio; Beth Sholom Synagogue, Elkins Park, Pennsylvania; Don M. Stromquist House, Bountiful, Utah; Marin County Civic Center, San Rafael, California; Taliesin III, Spring Green, Wisconsin; and Taliesin West, Scottsdale, Arizona.

After you finish enjoying this book the first time, ask yourself what has been Mr. Wright's lasting impact on America. How has his work affected your life? How will it affect your grandchildren's lives?

Turn an optimistic view of people living in natural harmony into reality!

A great reference and must have for anyone interested in Wright. Detailed pictures and text.

I have owned this CD for several months now and have completely enjoyed it. I find this CD to be a useful tool - not only in answering questions I might have but in helping my children do assignments in school. It is very easy to navigate and the pictures are top quality. A very smart addition to any library.

Outstanding! At first I thought a CDRom would lack the warmth of a book. This CDRom is on fire. What an achievement and what a treasure.

Whether for the newcomer, enthusiast or student, David Brooks's CD-ROM cannot be bettered as an accessible and stimulating resource. Many images - such as the Van Gogh Museum's version of 'Vincent's Bedroom in Arles' - are supported by informative commentary. Where possible, Brooks adds full details of ownership, display and the specific letters in which Van Gogh mentions the painting, drawing or sketch. It is a delight to witness rarely-seen works from private collections and others that previously one had only read about. Added bonuses are the very clear chronology and biography that David Brooks provides. This CD-ROM both broadens and deepens one's knowledge of The Master and is excellent value for money.

A few of my favorite painters are contemporaries of Still, so I saw it as my duty to see the Hirschhorn exhibition. Well, I picked a dead day and had the show to myself and simply put I am now a fan. The book is great and David Anfam's addition to the book is especially enlightening about the work of Still.

I am a painter who has largely avoided Clifford Still but this book has turned me into a great admirer. Particulary influential was the contribution by David Anfam, the art historian who was responsible for the magnificent, award-winning Mark Rothko catalogue raisonne. Anfam's essay is insightful, far-reaching, beautifully written with poetic underpinnings, a pleasure to read. All you'll ever need to know about Clifford Still, his work, and his place in art history is covered in this essay. The color plates are also wonderful and, even as reproductions, offer a great chance to appreciate the paintings.

Clyfford Still is one of the giant figures of the art world and this book puts his paintings in a proper perspective. The book contains many color reproductions of his large non-objective canvases. Still himself wrote the book and gives us a very good insight into his life and thinking process. He discusses what went into his paintings and how his unique canvas numbering system worked absent dates and titles to identify his work. It is also a journey through his body of work. His paintings were skillfully balanced with positive and negative spaces and his unparalleled use of color is well documented. This book is a must for any art lover in general and for students of American art in particular. I liked this book not only for the well reproduced paintings in color but also because it let's us into the painter's mind to get a glimps of his true genius.

The theory of schemes is usually thought to be highly abstract and esoteric, and one that makes the study of algebraic geometry even more difficult. The authors definitely dispel this notion in this book, which could have been called "A Concrete Introduction to Schemes", because of the clarity with which the concepts are introduced and explained. After studying this book, one will understand and appreciate the power of schemes in algebraic geometry. The authors do an even better job than they did in their earlier and short work "Schemes: The Language of Modern Algebraic Geometry", which is now out of print.

In chapter 1, the main definitions are given and the basic concepts behind schemes outlined. That schemes are more complicated than varieties is readily apparent even in this beginning chapter, where they are thought of as corresponding to the spectrum of a commutative ring with identity. Very elementary exercises are given to help the reader gain confidence in the constructions involved. They authors do have to discuss some sheaf theory, but they show its relevance nicely in this chapter. They also discuss the notion of a fibered product as a generalization of the idea of a preimage of a set under the application of a function and relate it to the construction of the functor of points. The role of the functor of points as reducing schemes to a kind of set theory is brought out beautifully here.

The next chapter gives many examples of schemes, with the first examples being reduced schemes over algebraically closed fields, these being essentially the ordinary varieties of classical algebraic geometry. The authors then give examples of schemes, the local schemes, which are more general than varieties. When departing from the assumption of a field that is not finitely generated, extra points will have to be added to classical varieties. The fact that only one closed point appears is compared to the case of complex manifolds, via the concept of a germ. This is a very helpful comparison, and one that further solidifies the understanding of a scheme in the mind of the reader. The authors give the reader a short peek at the etale topology in one of the examples. Examples are then given where the field is not algebraically closed, generalizing classical number theory, and non-reduced schemes, where nilpotents are present. The chapter ends with examples of arithmetic schemes where the spectra of rings are finitely generated over the integers.

Projective schemes are the subject of Chapter 3, and are defined in terms of graded algebras and invariants of projective schemes embedded in projective space are discussed. The Grasmannian scheme is discussed in detail as an example of a projective scheme. Interestingly, Bezout's theorem, very familiar from elementary algebraic geometry, is generalized here to projective schemes.

Constructions from classical algebraic geometry are generalized to schemes in Chapter 4. The first one discussed is the notion of a flex, which deals (classically) with the locus of tangent lines to a variety. The flexes are defined in terms of the Hessian of the variety, the latter being generalized by the authors to define a scheme of flexes. The notion of blowing up is also generalized to the scheme setting, with the authors motivating the discussion by blowing up the plane. The discussion of blow-ups along non-reduced subschemes of a scheme and blow-ups of arithmetic schemes is fascinating and the presentation is crystal clear. Fano varieties are also generalized to Fano schemes in the chapter. Most of the information about these schemes are contained in the exercises, and some of these need to be worked out for a thorough understanding.

The next chapter is more categorical in nature, and deals with generalizations of the classical Sylvester construction of resultants and discriminants to the scheme setting.

In the last chapter the authors return to the functor of points, and motivate the discussion by asking for a parametrization of families of schemes. The authors show, interestingly, that using the functor of points one can more easily compute geometric information about a scheme than using its equations. They illustrate this for the Zariski tangent space. Then after an overview of Hilbert schemes they close the book by introducing the reader to moduli spaces and a hint of algebraic stacks. No end in sight for this beautiful subject..........

This book is clear, well written, and has a nice balance of generalities and examples. If you know the basics of rings and modules, this book will show you what schemes are and why they are useful for several different problems: for example, number theory, or studying singularities. I find it a helpful companion to Hartshorne's ALGEBRAIC GEOMETRY. But this book does not get to cohomology, and so cannot actually get to the working methods in the subject. For that, you need Hartshorne.

Very good book for scheme theoritical approach to Algebraic Geometry

Brimner's Raindrops is a gentle, poetic tie-in to primary science units about the water cycle. Big and bold illustrations by David Brooks in soft, pastel colors are dreamy--as if seen through a soft rain. Brimner, who is one of the best loved writers for kindergarten and first grade, has a winner here. Like this one and you'll enjoy some of his other emergent readers--Cowboy Up!, Nana's Hog, Firehouse Sal, How Many Ants?, and the hysterical duo Max and Felix. Kids love them (and so do their teachers).

A first-grade team teacher, I find Brimner's emergent reader to be a useful tie-in to our science unit on the water cycle. Although he doesn't clobber readers over the head with scientific facts--it is, after all, fiction--the cycle is there for young readers to discover and enjoy. An excellent choice for anyone wishing to tie scientific fact to the realm of young fiction.

This book contains some outstanding essays and pieces by P.J. O'Rourke, Danielle Crittenden, Rush Limbaugh and many others who are on the cutting edge of conservative policy.Although it contains nothing on the Monica Lewinsky scandal it is still a pleasure to read. I was extremely impressed by William Kristol's essay "A Conservative Looks at Liberalism" and both (short) pieces by P.J. O'Rourke. Enjoy.

Most C-programming books are very thick and the authors spend a lot of pages in explaining historical and detailed aspects of the C-language. As a chemist I often get frustrated when reading these type of books since it takes about 250 pages before they e.g. explain how to read or write to a file. When you finish the books you are not at a level of solving real problems in C. C programming: The Essentials for Engineers and Scientists by David R. Brooks goes, as the title says, directly to the essentials for a scientist. The book is based on a five-step problem solving procedure throughout the book. This way of structural-thinking, which is often neglected in other books, helps the reader to get a good programming habit in any programming language. Since the book is very problem oriented, the author is able to cover more advanced programming topics than other C-books. The book is designed for undergraduate studies without any knowledge in programming, but may be used by anyone interested in learning C. Many programming examples and exercises are taken from the field of chemistry and physics and thus, the book is perfect as a introduction course in C for chemists and physicists.

Daniel Dennett has become the pivot point for all modern ideas in human cognition - philosophy's successor term. Unlike the classical philosophers, Dennett adheres to no "school" of philosophy. Indeed, one of the editors of this book attempts to coin the phrase "Dennettian" to establish a new such identity - an effort Dennett himself simply ignores. Dennett's many writings do not lend themselves to any rigid classification. Pinning him down is attempting to transfix the ultimate moving target. Dennett's tactics have led to criticism ranging from mild admonitions to scathing invective. This group of essays, resulting from a 1998 conference at Memorial University in Newfoundland, is a collection of advice, critique and demands for explanation from this innovative thinker . The book's tone is
perfectly captured in Dennett's response essay, "With A Little Help From My Friends." It is pure "Dennettian."

Don Ross' Introduction expresses the frustration many have felt about Dennett's writings: "Do Dennett's works 'come together' into a coherent view of the world?" The answer to that question must be sought in the essays as each author struggles to address it through various elements found in Dennett's writings. The first part takes up his views on evolution. This is right and proper, since his "Darwin's Dangerous Idea" [DDI] is easily the most important book published since Darwin's "Origin of Species." Timothy Crowe challenges various aspects of Dennett's view of how evolution works, falling, quite consciously, into Stephen Gould's assertions about "maladaptations." Paul Dumouchel's following essay on Dennett's use of Forced Moves and Good Tricks in DDI shows how a critic must demonstrate understanding before offering appraisal.

Following these openings, the essays move into a more "philosophical" vein. [Dennett would argue those "scare quotes" would deter some or mislead others!] Ruth Millikan, adhering to Dennett's stand that cognition is a human extension of the evolutionary processes, suggests modification to a fundamental of Dennett's thinking - the Intentional Stance. She wants better identification of "intentionality" of natural selection. Her unease is echoed in Tom Polger's essay on the use of "conceptual fictions" such as "zombies," artificial biological beings with no discernible intentionality, a concept Dennett has repeatedly rejected.

Other essays in this collection further attempt to fix Dennett's ideas within some identifiable framework. Christopher Viger, Timothy Kenyon and William Seager, particularly the latter, all seek Dennett's abandonment of a "purely naturalistic rule" for his thinking. These admonitions Dennett dismisses as a misunderstanding of how nature works. Flexibility is the key, and is Dennett's lodestone. Among the remaining essays, Andrew Brook's symbolizes the dichotomy faced by Dennett adherents: how to fix on that elusive object without eroding its valuable contents. Brook reminds us that Dennett has spent thirty years giving us an account of consciousness. In that time, Dennett has challenged long-standing concepts in philosophy. Brook implores Dennett to clarify several of his definitions, in particular the distinction between the "seeming" of an object and the actual "subject" under discussion. How do we distinguish between a thing and our idea of that thing? Brook disclaims any attempt to bring down Dennett's Multiple Drafts model of consciousness, but feels he has "domesticated it a bit." Reader unfamiliar with the Multiple Drafts model are urged to take up Dennett's "Consciousness Explained" for the most innovative idea of the mind's workings currently available.

Space limitations forbid a thorough recapitulation of all the essays. It goes without saying that Dennett directly addresses each essayist's points [where these are discernible, which isn't always the case]. He acknowledges where clarity in his work is required, but often finds the interpreter has missed his meaning. In philosophical writing, that is often a given. With most explanations of human reasoning being labelled with various "-isms," Dennett stresses his discomfort with such constraints. He's to be admired for resisting such limitations, and reading his responses, we are reminded again of why the conference was convened. Dennett is more than a square peg resisting a round hole. He's polygonal, reflecting the scope of his diversity of interests and abilities. He stands apart from "mainstream" concepts, remaining unique as the leading figure in cognitive studies.

a masterpiece. A MASTERPIECE!! mr. brooks has created a novel full of poignant conflict and brilliant imagery; age-old tradition versus the importance of living in the modern world. mr. brooks reminds us to see the beauty in what we take for granted, and urges us to try and find the beauty in the things we don't understand. his story is set against the backdrop of rural connecticut; it's the story of a young boy learning to think for himself, struggling to please his father, a tough-minded businessman; trying to understand his older brother, who is head-strong but pure-hearted. he learns to deal with loss and defeat, with personal tragedy, and ultimately, with triumph. this book is a classic, a must-read for anyone.

Just purchased the book. Great teaching tool to introduce children to different languages. Bright colorful pictures to go along with the text. They certainly hold the interest of the children. Super idea for bilingual learning. Creative words were used. Bought a few to give as baby gifts.