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I particularly like how it is practical yet philosophical and can even cause deep reflective thinking. It is also a great resource for quotations and presentations.
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I found it to be a light-weight overview of the major periods of JFK's life, along with some information on RFK and Jackie. While it revealed a few new things I hadn't heard before, this book is really of interest primarily as a coffee table book for ocassional perusal, and not for study. It's a great combination of stories you will have heard and pictures you have already seen.
The accompanying CD, however, is particularly interesting in what it reveals about JFK the man and his way of being. Overall, I enjoyed it.
there is a cd also.
we can hear a few dialogues,. there is one with rfk and on the 14 tracks we can hear young caroline.
there is part to rfk and jbk too.
so I enjoyed it.
To Enhance The Experience of reliving the Kennedy years, a riveting 60 - minute audio CD of JFK'S phone conversations and personal dictations is packaged with the book. The following is a list of the recordings.
- An undated memoir entry concerning JFK'S entrance into politics.
- A dicated letter (circa 1959) to Joseph P. Kennedy on election and poll results.
- A dictated letter (circa 1959) to Jacqueline Kennedy on weekend in Rhode Island.
- Phone Conversation with Sargent Shriver recorded on April 2, 1963 regarding keeping CIA out of the Peace Corps.
- Three phone conversations with Ross Barnett recorded on September 30, 1962, regarding the University of Mississippi crisis.
- Phone conversation with Richard J. Daley recorded on October 28, 1963 regarding the civil rights bill.
- Phone conversation with Charles Halleck recorded on October 29, 1963 regarding the civil rights bill.
- An undated phone conversation between JFK and RFK concerning articles in Newsweek and Time magazines.
-Phone conversation with Dwight D. Eisenhower on October 22, 1962 regarding Cuban missile crisis.
- Phone conversation with Dwight D. Eisenhower on October 28,1962 regarding Cuban missile crisis.
-Phone conversation with Lincoln White on October 26,1962 regarding comments to the press concerning Cuban missile crisis.
- A dictated memoir entry dated November 1963.
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This novel in particular I was pleased with because of its historical accuracy to the Renaissance period while being unafraid to drop in a bit of alien involvement here and there. The main character, John Dee, is also particularly endearing. While he's easily recognizable as the protagonist and the one who is supposed to "save the world" (such as it is) he's still a bit of a scoundrel and a villain. I would, without a doubt, recommend this novel.
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As most of those who follow cosmology probably already know, Stephen Hawking is afflicted with a serious neuromuscular disease. Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, ALS or Lou Gehrig's disease (after the baseball player who died of the disorder) had confined Hawking to a wheelchair by the writing of the book and has since put him on a portable ventilator. Having worked with people suffering with this disorder earlier in my career, I can attest both to the seriousness of the malady and to my surprise that the gentleman has survived as long as he has. Both facts make his intellectual achievements, the dedication of his caretakers, and his own personal tenacity for life very real to me and very impressive.
John Boslough, the author, is a scientific journalist. He appears to understand physics at least well enough to describe it for the layperson, and does so in a readable style. He also creates a biography that is flattering to the subject without diminishing the contributions of others to the field. The book is, however, extremely simple, more of a history of the development of the theory of the big bang and black holes than a thorough explanation of them, and the interested reader would do well to look at Hawking's own popular writings on the subject for a more thorough and professional point of view. My only complaint about the book would be that it does not contain any form of bibliography, a resource I always consider one of a book's most valuable assets. It helps the reader to find material for further study, and it also provides a measure of the preparedness of the author on his topic!
I'd recommend the book to any beginner who is curious about the Big Bang Theory, about black holes, the Theory of Relativity, the Theory of Quantum Mechanics, or about Stephen Hawking. I would also say that any person from junior high level or above would be able to understand the material.
Firstly, on a personal level, Hawking admitted already at that time that "As far as theoretical physics are concerned, I'm already ... quite far over the hill'.
Secondly, it gives an excellent explanation of Hawking's contribution to theoretical physics (black holes and their similarities to the beginning of time).
Thirdly, Hawking has outspoken opinions about the anthropic principle (against), the universe of Eastern mysticism (an illusion), the many universes theory (not meaningful) or determinism ('Even if we do achieve a complete unified theory, we shall not be able to make detailed predictions in any but the simplest situations').
This booklet offers also excellent examples for the theories of relativity and quantum mechanics and contains Hawking's Inaugural Lecture 'Is the End in Sight for Theoretical Physics?'
Although this book is, from a theoretical point of view, out of date (no superstrings), it should not be missed.
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At 1040 large (8.5 x 11) pages it is the ultimate guide to unicode. With information on scripts and glyphs I had no idea even existed.
However if you are just getting started with Unicode I would recomend you get Unicode a Primer written by Tony Graham from M&T books. If you understand or feel you are starting to understand Unicode then The Unicode Standard Version 3.0 is the best comprehensive reference on the subject out today.
This book is essential for software engineers, at least for the next ten years or so. All programmers should understand characters, and UNICODE is the best we have for now. Even if you don't need it in your personal library, you need it in your company or school library.
The standard is flawed, as all real standards are, but it is a functioning standard, and it should be sufficient for many purposes for the near future.
The book itself is fairly well laid out, contains an introduction to character handling problems and methods for most of the major languages in use in our present world as well as tables of basic images for all code points. Be aware that these are _only_ basic images. For most internationalization purposes, be prepared for more research. (And please share your results.)
**** Finally, UNICODE is _not_ a 16 bit code. ****
(This is well explained in the book.) It just turned out that there really are over 50,000 Han characters. (Mojikyo records more than 90,000.) UNICODE can be encoded in an eight-bit or 16-bit expanding method or a 32-bit non-expanding method. The expanding methods can be _cleanly_ parsed, frontwards, backwards, and from the middle, which is a significant improvement over previous methods.
Some of the material in the book is available at the UNICODE consortium's site, but the book is easier to read anyway. One complaint I have about the included CD is that the music track gets in the way of reading the transform files on my iBook.
Central to the book, taking up the larger part of it, are the tables of the characters themselves, printed large with annotations and cross-references. If you enjoy the lure of strange symbols and curious writing systems then browsing these will occupy delightful hours.
For the Latin alphabet alone there are pages of accented letters and extended Latin alphabet characters used in particular languages or places or traditions: Pan-Turkic "oi", African clicks and other African sounds, obsolete letters from Old English and Old Norse, an "ou" digraph used only in Huron/Algonquin languages in Quebec, and many others, particularly those used for phonetic/phonemic transcriptions.
The Greek character set includes archaic letters and additional letters used in Coptic.
Character sets carried over from previous editions with additions and corrections are Cyrillic (with many national characters), Armenian, Georgian, Hebrew, Arabic (again many national and dialect characters), the most common Hindu scripts (Devanagari, Bengali, Gurmukhi, Gujarati, Oriya, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada and Malayalam), Tibetan, Thai, Lao, Hangul, Bopomofo, Japanese Katakana and Hiragana, capped by the enormous Han character set containing over 27,000 of the most commonly used ideographs in Chinese/Japanese/Korean writing. Then there are the symbols: mathematical/logical (including lots of arrows), technical, geometrical, and pictographic. You'll find astrological/zodiacal signs, chess pieces, I-Ching trigrams, Roman numerals not commonly known, and much more.
Scripts appearing for the first time this release are Syriac, Ethiopic, Unified Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics, Cherookee, Runes, Ogham, Yi, Mongolian, Sinhala, Thaana, Khmer, Myanmar, complete Braille patterns, and keyboard character sets. And yes, there are public domain/shareware fonts available on the web that support these with their new Unicode values.
There are very good (and not always brief) descriptions of the various scripts and of the special symbol sets. Rounding out the book are some involved, turgid (necessarily so) technical articles on composition, character properties, implementation guidelines, and combining characters, providing rules to use the character properties tables on the CD that accompanies the book. After all, this is the complete official, definitive Unicode standard.
Of course this version, 3.0, is already out-of-date. But updates and corrections are easily available from the official Unicode website where data for 3.1 Beta appears as I write this. My book bulges with interleaved additions and changes. And that's very good. Many standards have died or been superceded because the organizations behind them did not keep up with users' needs or the information was not easily accessible.
Caveats?
The notes on actual uses of the characters could be more extensive, particularly on Latin extended characters. More variants of some glyphs should be shown, as in previous editions, if only in the notations.
Some character names are clumsy or inaccurate (occasionly noted in the book), because of necessity to be compatible with ISO/IEC 10646 and with earlier versions of the Unicode standard. For example, many character names begin with "LEFT" rather than "OPENING" or "RIGHT" rather than "CLOSING" though the same character code is to be used for a mirrored version of the character in right-to-left scripts where "LEFT" and "RIGHT" then become incorrect. And sample this humorous quotation from page 298: "Despite its name, U+0043 SCRIPT CAPITAL LETTER P is neither script nor capital--it is uniquely the Weierstrass elliptic function derived from a calligraphic lowercase p."
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His knowledge on Church History is incredible, especially his understanding of the Reformation, the Puritans, and the Particular Baptist movements. But he cannot be limited there even. I could literally listen to him speak for hours.
I strongly recommend anything by Dr. Haykin as you will become well informed on the topic that he writes about, whether it's Cromwell, Bunyon, Edwards or anyone else.
God bless and enjoy.