This is an excellent, highly readable book for anyone interested in the nuts and bolts of British politics. Each constituency is profiled in-depth, and I reach for this book every time a by-election is caused. This new edition is highly welcome, as the old edition was made hopelessly out of date by the 1997 Labour landslide. Buy this book, and you'll know which seats Peter Snow means the next time he says "Now let's have a look at our Swingometer!"

Excellent resource for British Politics. Glad to see it has been updated to reflect the sweeping 1997 Labour Victory and Boundary Commission changes. A must for anyone interested in British Politics.

Excellent review of british politics. Gets even better with time. If you are interested in what is going on in a major player in europe this is the book to get. Provides excellent portraits of all the major players in this parliament and of Tony Blairs government.

I was SO glad when this came back in print. This is a cumulative tale a la "House that Jack Built". You can get the children chanting "Jump Frog Jump!" in a few pages. Barton's bright folk-like illustrations fit right in.

As a teacher and an aunt I highly recommend this book which is a favorite with the kids! It's easy for them to memorize the lines and follow the words (a great skill to develop while learning how to read). A fantastic addition to any child's library of books!

I first dismissed Robert Byron's book ''First Russia, then Tibet" because it came across as an anti-Soviet diatribe. I picked it up again because a good friend, whose opinion I respect, said that it was good. On a second reading Byron was less prejudiced than I had at first thought, and I realized that what I had thought was right-wing blinkers was in fact a fine aesthetic sensitivity. He also understands that one of the most important things for a travel writer is to observe people and not just places. He describes Russia shortly after Lenin's death.

I thought at first that he was there as a political observer but I was a lot more sympathetic when it became clear that he was really interested in the art and architecture. You end up with an interesting picture of Russia just after Lenin's death, and just before Stalin's crackdown.

The second two thirds of the book are more interesting, though. He recounts the first commercial flight from Britain to India, which takes all of a week. He then retells a short journey into Tibet, something as forbidden then as it is now.

What really stands out is how he describes how everyone looks and lives, be they a Maharajah or Tibetan peasant. You can literally feel and smell the rigors of travel in a place that has not progressed much beyond medieval technology. He does not judge anyone although he is ultimately very sympathetic to the Tibetans' rejection of the modern world. You get the sense that he could have been very scathing about the attitude of the British colonials to the locals, but instead chooses to say nice things about those colonizers who did make the effort to meet the natives on their own terms.

One note: the description of a dinner at the governor's house in Darjeeling is one of the funniest passages that I have ever read. Byron's deadpan style is perfect to describe a minor incident in a place where nothing ever happens. It reminds me of the game of cricket in "England, their England". His descriptions of his travel companions, and the fact that they are often more reluctant than he, are gently witty, and turned back on himself.

I would recommend this to people who liked "A short walk in the Hindu Kush", or who read Peter Hopkirk's books on exploration and espionage in Central Asia in the last century.

This book will open your eyes to problems that the world is dealing with in the mental health field. Issues such as depression, schizophrenia, sexual abuse, and substance abuse are seen differently when Western nations read about third world countries. While Americans are concerned about which medicine or therapy to take for their mental health, the third world countries are trying to get any help they can. A recommended book for any library.

The Byron & Fuller provides a serious introduction in mathematics of classical and quantum physics. This book is designed to complement graduate-level physics texts and one of its goal is to introduce the physicist to the language and style of mathematics. Consequently, this book may be really useful to people with strong skills in physics and maths. No doubt that they will have fun reading the theory of vector spaces.
For the others, just like me, not really specialized in physics and maths, but maybe just curious, this book can bring you a lot of fun too. It reminds you of what you may have studied a few years ago... And more than that, you cover with this book other fields of mathematics that are not taught to non specialized students like Hilbert space, quantum physics, theory of analytic functions, Green's functions and integral equations.

To conclude, if you're curious about mathematics and physics, you should buy this book. If you're good at maths and physics, you should already own this book.
And now, with this special price, do the maths!

This book is not, and I repeat, IS NOT for the inexperienced. This book is a GRADUATE LEVEL TEXT on mathematical physics. If you are an undergraduate student taking a physics class, this book will be of no use to you. I recommend that anyone interested in purchasing this book have a somewhat decent amount of mathematical background. I personally recommend Calculus I-IV, Advanced Calculus and Linear Algebra.
If, though, you have this background, then this book is may just be for you. It is concise, to the point and presents a clear and well written discussion of mathematical physics.
I just felt that before you dive, head first, into the world of mathematical physics, somebody needed to warn you about what you were getting yourself into.

This book introduces the reader to the basic mathematical structures of theoretical physics: mainly Quantum Mechanics, Electromagnetic Theory, And Classical Mechanics. I used this at UC San Diego for a year long graduate course on Mathematical methods in physics and engineering. If one has the time, there is really a lot to be gained by carefully studying this book. A big part of the book is geared toward developing in detail the mathematics of the Quantum Theory. This is a good thing because in my experience most QM books are too eager to "get to the physics". It is true that you can get by with a superficial understanding of functional analysis and still do QM, but this book will give you an immensely deeper understanding of the underlying structure of the theory. In particular, the treatment of Green's functions and integral equations is good. There is chapter on Group Theory and it's uses in QM. Also is a chapter on Complex analysis, although it is a wise idea to read a book entirely devoted to this subject. Overall, I like this book very much.

In the crepuscular post-September 11 world I find myself in, I thought I would go and read some of the classics of travel in the Middle East back when the going was good. Byron's OXIANA looked promising, so I curled up with it for a few enchanting days.

Byron was no lover of pre-packaged tourist sights. He begins by slurring Venice, where he begins his journey. Later, he slams the Taj Mahal and the Alhambra as examples of what he did NOT want to see in the Middle East. At first, I was not sure where the book was going: Byron comes across at first as one of those hypereducated upper class twits who pop in and out of Evelyn Waugh's novels. Fortunately, it turns out to be just one of the author's favorite personas he assumes from time to time.

Over half a century ago, he saw clearly what would happen to Palestine when the British pulled out, namely, that the Jews and Arabs would be at each other's throats. As he reaches Iran we finally begin to see what Byron is really after: He travels from one old mosque or ruin to another. Although none of places he describes in such loving detail are known to me, it was easy to see that here was a man who wanted to be one of the first to see some marvel of architecture and capture it in photographs and in prose before the forces of time would destroy it utterly.

In the process of going from place to place, he describes the Europeans and locals he meets with humor and shrewdness. The Middle East was not the easiest place to travel in the 1930s, and Byron ran into some almost insurmountable obstacles which he typically surmounts. One such is his arrival in Aghanistan's high country too late in the season. He backtracks to Persia and waits six months until he could return in the spring.

I highly recommend ROAD TO OXIANA to all who wish the world was safe and innocent enough for us to pursue our own Oxianas, wherever they may be.

The Road to Oxiana was popular when it was first issued, but gradually dropped out of sight, only to be revived when Bruce Chatwin and others rediscovered it. Chatwin in particular was heavily influenced by this book. It is the story of Robert Byron's efforts to see large brick burial towers located in Persia. Or at least that it was what Byron said he was looking for. The book is more a depiction of his misadventures -- he was suspected of being a spy by most who met him, although there was no truth to this. The style of this book is highly innovative; rather than presenting a straight narrative, it is (or appears to be) a collection of diary entries, newspaper stories, anecdotes, and cultural analysis. This makes the book sound themeless, but Byron's personality holds it together. This book should be on a short list of the best travel books in the English language.

I first read Byron's best travel book in 1982 whilst in the midst of an epic year long trip myself. I now have about 4 copies of the book and an original signed copy with Byron's pictures in it(which are equally brilliant as his prose).His book kindled in me a desire to see all that he had seen and to further explore Islamic architecture and archaeology. After numerous forays into the Near East and a Masters in Near Eastern and Middle Eastern cultures--I am still searching. One can't really appreciate Byron's description of the Sheikh Lutfallah Mosque in Isfahan unless you actually have been there--standing under the immense dome in subdued yellow light. I had that priviledge last year and Byron's description does justice to the magnificent structure. Byron's eye for detail is unmatched in most other travel books and his humour is endless. I had the luck to find "Four Loyalties" by his travelling companion--Christopher Sykes in a book sale in Dubai, UAE. Sykes paints a wonderful portrait of Byron. It's a pity that Byron died so young as I think he is one of the better travel writers--definitely my favourite. Unfortunately, as Bruce Chatwin pointed out in one introduction to "The Road to Oxiana" that you won't be able to drink green tea and eat mulberries under the shade of a plane tree in Istalif, Afghanistan. Those halcyon days that Byron and Sykes experienced and later by Levi and Chatwin are the stuff of legends. "The Road to Oxiana" is a good starting point. Go there now. Good reading.

There are some gems here, notably "Fondly Farenheit" and the previously unpublished "The Devil Without Glasses", but most of the short stories are decidedly second-rate. "Galatea Galante" is a clumsy Heinlein pastiche. "They Don't Make Life Like They Used To" is the sort of leaden "whimsy" which has plagued Fantasy & Science Fiction for the last half century. And several of the stories from the early 50's are thinly veiled diatribes against the paucity of original thought in "classic" science fiction. (Bester makes the wholly convincing argument that most of genre is little more than adolescent power fantasies, but fails to provide stories that provide a meaningful counterpoint.)

Stick to the novels - THE STARS MY DESTINATION and THE DEMOLISHED MAN, Bester's best work.

Alfred Bester's science fiction spans 40 years, and is always a treat. In this collection, we are treated to some of his early work "Adam and No Eve" (1941), to some of his last "Galatea Galante" (1979), as well as a previously unpublished complete story and an incomplete fragment (with the note :Its much easier to begin a thing than to finish it) found in his papers after his death.

The common thread in these stories is Bester's flabbergasting imagination. His stories are often ironic, taking a wry observation about current society, and projecting it to its logical conclusion into an absurd future, from the quest for poets in an efficient future of "Disappearing act", to the drop of acid that makes a test tube woman intriguing in "Galatea Galante".

As one of the inventors of science fiction, Bester not only lays the ground work for the popular themes of science fiction such as the last couple on earth, time travel, androids and their programming, but adds his own twists: a man needing an agent to sell his soul to the Devil (of the company Beelzebub, Belial, Devil, and Orgy), collectors in the future recreating a 1950's style room, and a chaos compensator.

This is a collection of some of the most unorthodox short stories even by the standards of science fiction. One can never tell where these will take us, and even then we are surprised at the results. Reading this will change everything, because afterwards very few things will seem weird. Many of these are tour de force of writting to show of the fact that the author could get away with something, that would be considered bad in writting of lesser carliber, but Bester's power-writting simply cuts through the rules, and gives us some truly out-of-this-world stories, which overpower the reader. In some it is the idea that is the main thing, and elsewhere it is the presentation, which is allpowerful, but each and every time we are left surprised, amazed by the end result. Some of these could be called parodies of classical sciece fiction cliches. (Besides Bester invented some things, that has become cliches since, and yet in his prose they are still powerful, and not cliched at all.) Some are funny, and some are sad, and most are weird, but they are all memorable.

As a resident, I frequently prepared journal clubs, where we have to carefully discuss and scrutinize studies. I gained some introduction from "Appleton and Lange's Review of Epidemiology and Biostatistics for the USMLE". But preparing for journal clubs was quite different. There are many of statistical and epidemiological terminology in each article, some I am familiar with, but others are confusing and new. In this very helpful "dictionary" I was able to find more than 95% of the terms with brief definition and good short explanation that successfully allowed me to soundly evaluate the studies and prepare an impressive brief, neat handouts. The great thing about this dictionary was its well organization and ease to find what you are looking for. My friends frequently borrowed when they have to prepare their journal clubs, and found it really helpful.
It is a dictionary; i.e., arranged alphabetically sequencing the terms, and if a term has more than one name, they mention them all, before the explanation.
I highly recommended to every resident, as it will not only will help during residency, but also surely during real life and practice, especially a with hundreds of "trials, studies" appears in medical journal daily.
I gave it four not five stars, because few explanation were rather short, despite informative, and lack of illustration and pictures, which may require you to use a regular textbook in Epidemiology, this happened maybe almost 1 from every 10 terms.

One of the major problems with studying the field of epidemiology is the inconsistency of terminology that is used. This is because the field is relatively young, is actively evolving and has developed from multiple other disciplines including the social sciences as well as the medical sciences and statistics. As a result, it can be both confusing and frustrating for the student. This dictionary is the "bible" of terminology for the fireld, in part because there is no other. This should be an absolute requirement for the shelf of every student in the field of epidemiology. Even experienced epidemiologists are encouraged to have a copy for reference purposes. The only caution is that a new edition is due out soon. It can only be better than the first edition. Get it.

I am an ear, nose, and throat surgeon in Indonesia. May I know the first volume of Head and Neck Surgery Book by Byron J. Bailey ? I want to know about the prizes of it. How do I get the first volume ? I have just had the second volume. Thank you.

The Ultimate Dinosaur is an ambitious book, one that seeks to alternate sections on the latest theories on the origin, lives, and deaths of dinosaurs as well as pterosaurs and prehistoric marine reptiles, all written by such noted experts as George Olshevsky, Sankar Chatterjee, and others, with dinosaur-themed science fiction short stories by such authors as Charles Sheffield, Gregory Benford, and Harry Turtledove. A great concept.

Unfortunately it was rather unevenly carried out. The non-fiction sections are quite good, though a few are relatively dry to read. I did learn a few things reading these sections, and alone they just about make the book worthwhile. There were some interesting discussions over the relationship of prosauropods and sauropods for instance, and there was a great article on migrating dinosaurs.

However the short stories vary alot in style and quality, some quite good, other more moderately decent, and a few frankly terrible and hard to get through. The short stories and non-fictions are paired together, and it looks like they found it difficult to find a short story to put with some of the non-fiction sections.

Though this may only apply to the hard-cover edition which I have, I feel I must point out the book was either poorly edited, which I find suprising, or poorly published. The book was replete with words that were run together, misplaced punctuation, odd gaps in sentences, and even misspelled words. They were so common at times that it was jarring and irritating. While many books have one or two such errors, there were many of them in this work. Hopefully the paperback version cleared this up.

Having said that though this was still not a bad book and a worthwhile one to get, though frankly I would not place at the top of the list of books to fill your dinosaur needs. Still, wouldn't be bad to have either.

I have always been a big dinosaur lover, and in this book, Silverberg, Dobson, and Zimmerman really bring these creatures to life. I loved every page. This is a book for both kids and the paleontologist.

big names in science and sf coupled with top paleoartists!