The way the differents items are treated is interesting. I find them with some lack of practicity, experience and confidence transmission form the editos and authors.

Perhaps is very difficult to fullfill seniors anesthesiologists expectatives.

Thanks

This book is loaded with practical examples of what can be accomplished in the Black-and-White darkroom. It, however, lacks detailed information on some of the techniques used to achieve those results.

Most of the examples are graphical in nature giving the technical details (i.e., exposure time, paper and films used) showing before (straight print) and after manipulation. There is a short section on dodging and burning that give a very quick, not very useful, description of using these techniques.

Overall, this book is relatively lacking in instruction but is saved by the beautiful photos and examples given.

Think about the idea known to us as object-oriented programming; instead of rewriting everything from scratch over and over again, as we used to do, instead you have small blocks of code that can be used for many different procedures, thus decreasing the amount of work for the programmer and the amount of hard-drive space that the user needs. Simple and elegant. Makes sense, huh? It's actually an idea as old as language. "Object-oriented" is a good description of any language. While Oriental writing shows this most clearly, in that a relatively small number of syllabic characters are written in various ways to make larger words, it's easily understood in any language when looked at the right way.

This is the basis behind A.-J. Greimas' _Structural Semantics_. However, he extends the argument not only to language, but to thought as well, and gives the reader a new way to think about the critical analysis of what he reads.

Greimas' theory is that humans have a specific and limited number of possible ideas that can be used in various, still limited but much closer to infinite, ways to create sentences, and from there to create stories. Much of the book is spent developing and defending this theory, and only the last two chapters (devoted, respectively, to analysis of the body of Russian folktales and the body of work by French author Bernanos) show how to put the theory into practice. Given this, it should be evident to the reader that this is going to be a tough book to tackle even for experienced literary critics. It doesn't help that Greimas spends much of his time in the stratosphere, and assumes we're spending all that time with him; he drops references without backing them up constantly (the translators of the University of Nebraska Press edition identified and tracked down well over a hundred of these, and endnotes are included), and his language is so far into the abstract that if you attempt to take up this book without a pad and pen, you'll be lost early on.

This all changes, thankfully, as practical application makes itself known. Once we get down to actually applying everything from the book to the symbolism in a given author, it all starts to make sense. One wonders why the beginning part couldn't have been explained in an easier, more concise manner; perhaps Greimas, so involved in the world of literary theory, didn't know how any more.

A fascinating read, albeit a long one; while I found it tremendously enlightening, I have to penalize it heavily for being so obtuse most of the time.

It is the number of errors in this book that I find so frustrating! It seems obvious that no one took the time to proofread it. I picked up this book to do some french revision and by the time I got up to lesson 8, was ready to throw it in the trash. Accent marks are used only sporadically (sometimes ecrire, sometimes écrire...) They especially seem to have problems with "la rue Whitehall". In the french text, It appears as "la Whitehall street"!

The pluralization errors have been irritating, too. If this is intended to teach a beginning student proper French, I feel it will do nothing but confuse him/her.

I do NOT recommend this book.

There is an abundance of good material in this book, including
many French language passages. If I could be listening to an
audio tape while reading the words, it would be so much better.
There is not enough pronunciation aid in the book. There could
be twice as much.

It is extremely convenient for the beginners with a working knowledge of english. The situation taken are of the daily life with ample opportunity to grasp the words and setence structures used in day to day communication. Overall a very useful piece of work put together.

However, i wud much appreciate knowing from where i can obtain the sound recordings for this book as soon as possible.

Originally published in 1748, La Mettrie's philosophical work is noteworthy as one of the earliest affirmations of Enlightenment materialism and atheism. But please avoid this paperback reprint from Open Court - it's a facsimile of an out-of-date 1912 edition, and the English translation of the French text is much abridged.