This is a well-written and hard to put down history of the Bayreuth Festival. Thanks are due to Mr. Spotts for sifting through many works in German that are hard to find. However, there are a couple of curious statements that make me wonder about the veracity of the book as a whole. In his discussion of the 1951 reopening, he refers to Karajan as an up and coming young conductor from Aachen. Well, in 1942 Karajan left Aachen to assume directorship of the Berlin State Opera, and by 1951 his associations with the Vienna Philharmonic and the Philharmonia Orchestra had made him an internationally known recording artist. Hardly a young upstart from the sticks!

In the same chapter, he refers to a society that was organized around Hans Pfitzner to protest the radicalism of Wieland Wagner's productions. However, Pfitzner died in 1949, presumably without seeing the first of Wieland's stagings in 1951. No explanation is given for this statement.

In general, this is a book written by a well-informed and insightful fan, but perhaps one without a strong musical background.

I consider this book to be very informative, on a topic that may not interest everyone, but anyone who is interested in Wagner and his music should read this book. The links the author makes between the Bayreuth festival and Hitler help explain why Wagner's music was considered central to the National Socialist ideology. Another book which I have read and which I highly recommend for people who do not know much on Wagner but would like to know more is "Wagner without Fear" by William Berger. It mentions the Bayreuth festival, but also summarizes all of Wagner's operas (except "Rienzi"), something which is not found in "Bayreuth: A History of the Wagner Festival."

I will never forget the excitement of seeing this book on the shelf. Admittedly, the heavy emphasis on outstanding photography made me hesitant. But, having been to the Festival a couple of times (and having cut through many a book related to Wagner), I had to go with it. I was not disappointed. Indeed, I would be hard pressed to suggest a better written book on the festival, its relationship to Nazi Germany, the conflict of schools of interpretation, Wagnerism, or ... Wagner! This book sails and you are sorry when the trip is over. It also provides a serious, well-organized discussion of the development of Wagner's music and the characters who desired the association of the Wagner household. The musician, performer, historian, critic, biographer, and disciple will all be entertained.

Legates and Stout do an excellent job of compiling and briefly explaining many seminal writings on cities. There is a lot to read here and I'm not yet finished. But this heavy book is full of informative, interesting and fun writings and provides an excellent introduction to the study of cities. This is essential reading for students of Urban Form, Architecture, and the Social Sciences. Includes Le Corbusier, Patrick Geddes, Jane Jacobs, Lewis Mumford, J.B. Jackson, Witold Rybczynski and many others.

As a first year Urban Planner, this book was on the required readings list for our course. This book gave me the edge to all my fellow students because it provided a detailed sample through a historical and progressive manner. It provides the fundamentals of the great thinkers in Urban Planning. It also covered and introduced me to further research on areas such as design and sociology, promoting further personal research.

As a second year student, this book can always be seen in my bibliography, and is always the first thing I head towards for a brief history on any concepts that are raised in my lecturers.

This book can be seen as THE general summary of Urban Planning.

For years I've been looking for the perfect diet--a diet that would allow me to lose weight and be healthy. I tried a number of diets only to find myself falling off the wagon here and there and then finally giving up. After reading this book (and I've read it at least twice by now) I am convinced that this is the perfect way of life for me. The Hellers and Mr. Vagnini have done their homework and provided us with a foolproof means of getting the weight off and preventing heart disease. I recommend it for everyone but especially for women who like me (in their early 50s) are entering those years when we are most prone to heart disease and diabetes. IT'S A MUST READ!!

This book is definitely not just a re-hash of their earlier books. Although it follows most of what they previously wrote, it contains MAJOR improvements and refinements over their old program. Some that I found particularly intereststing are as follows:

1) Artificial sweeteners are now identified as being culprits in raising blood insulin levels, which relate directly to weight gain and heart risk factors.

2) Sulfates contained in foods are similarly identified for the first time by the authors.

3) Many supplements are identified and assessed with extensive bibliographies as they relate to weight control and heart disease.

4) This book is co-authored by a Cardiologist for the first time, and he incorporates many heart health-related issues and suggestions to form a major difference in the Heller's original book.

This newest book by the Hellers takes the ball and runs way beyond their earlier publications. There have been many developments since 1993 when they published their original book, and they identify and extensively discuss these updates. I really did not find this to be a rehash at all, but an update.

There is nothing worse than being a fat, out-of-condition cardiologist! You know your patients are wondering how you can be giving advice when you look like you're going to have a heart attack yourself any minute.Until I found this book I had all but given up.My father and his two brothers suffered heart attacks by age 55. My mother's family had diabetes. I felt as if I was headed straight for a heart attack.My blood fat levels, blood pressure, blood sugar levels and weight were getting worse no matter I tried. I had seen this time and time again in my patients but, to tell the truth, low-fat diets just didn't work for me. I couldn't stay on them and they seemed to make my blood fat levels worse.In the two weeks after finding this book my life has turned around. My cravings are gone - gone - gone. My blood pressure, triglycerides, and blood sugar levels are normal! I'm losing weight even though I have a Reward Meal of my dreams every night.I knew this program made sense when I read it. It was built on good science and it was the first program I felt I could believe in. But living it is even better than I could have hoped for.I started giving copies of this book to my patients. The immediate results appear to be just a great for them. I just want everyone to know that this program not only makes good sense and is easy to follow but that it works, too!

Wheelock's Latin is THE latin textbook used in most courses. The book is good, but one thing about it is that it presupposes a good knowledge of english grammar. If you don't know a participle from a preposition, you will be confused. Why? The chapters are very brief and to the point. No fluff or narrative to explain grammar, just a straightforward explanation for the grammar-literate about the rules of how latin works. The best way to use this book in my opinion is to find the Wheelock Latin notes written by Dale Grote (they are posted on the internet), and use those. If you read his notes for each chapter first, then you'll be able to understand the Wheelock book easily. In fact, if you read Grote's notes first, then the Wheelock chapter second, then do the exercises in the back of the book (and possibly also the workbook if your class uses it) third, you'll do fine.

I've tried picking up Latin on my own but it never worked and when I finally was able to take Latin in college the textbook the professor used was Wheelock and I was amazed. For the first time all those endings made sense and why the endings changed made sense also. Learning grammar may be old fashioned but I prefer to know it. For me, it makes things easier. Instead of looking at a Latin sentence and being completely lost, I could easily look up the gender of a noun (if I didn't remember it) and figure out what function it served based on its ending, what adjective went with what noun because of agreement, what tense the sentence was in because of the verb and anything else I needed to know about the sentence so I could translate it. Wheelock takes quite a bit of studying and I have had to buy several extra books because my command of English grammar is laughable but Wheelock is the only Latin book that I've ever been able to understand.
And Wheelock doesn't really bombard you with too much information at once either. At least not for our class since we do a chapter a week. Each chapter has the new information first, a list of vocabulary next, and sentences to translate along with a paragraph at the end. That's pretty much all I pay attention to and while Wheelock doesn't provide answers for the chapter exercises, they can be found on the internet (most of them), and the exercises in the back of the book have answers to them.
Labor me vocat!
Labor- 3rd declension masculine noun and because of the form it is in, it is either the nomitive (subject of the sentence) or the vocative (direct address). Labor means work, toil, etc. Me- pronoun meaning me. Vocat- the t tells you it is third person singular (he/she/it) and since this is a first conjugation verb (vocare- to call), it is in the present indicative active (basically he/she/it calls, is calling, does call). And the it refers to labor since labor's form indicates that it can be a subject. Work calls me. Work is calling me. Work does call me.
I just gave you a long tedious explanation but I can assure you, I feel much better translating a sentence and being able to tell exactly why it is translated that way instead of being lost. I quit taking Spanish, and still loathe the subject, because I was lost. I made good grades, could write it, read it, but I had no clue what I was doing. Just stuck stuff together because I had memorized what sorts of things went with what sorts of things. Being able to pick apart a Latin sentence and be able to tell what the subject is, direct object is, indirect object is, the tense the sentence is in, and everything else is a wonderful feeling. If you want to skip the grammar, go ahead, but I prefer to be able to understand what I'm doing and Wheelock is the only book that seems to understand that.

It would be hard for me not to give five stars to the single series of books (all the wheelock collection) which enabled me to attain fluency in this extremely difficult and complex language. I consider myself very qualified to write a review on the book in that I have very slowly and arduously digested all 40 chapters of the book over a period of five years and the concepts I learned from this grammar have been reenforced repeatedly through readings of original authors. While the grammar may not be as completely comprehendsive as other more advanced grammar books it is extremely practical, essential, and straight forward. The books main strengths are

1) Its very informal, non technical language and lucid explination. Some reviewers have expresed a feeling that the book pre-assumes knowlege of english grammar in order to explain latin grammar. This is to be expected and is perfectly rightly so. As a matter of fact, if you havent learned the grammar of the language you speak, how can you ever hope to understand an explination of the grammar to a language you dont speak? We would have to call nouns "those things that are names for things" and past participles "those words you use to refer to a verb that has been done already" You see many of the detracted stars this book has recieved are not due to faults in the book but in its readers. This book does a very good job of making the explination understandable without overloading you with technical grammatical terminology. I own 8 grammar books some of which date back to the early 1900s and by far this one is the most expressive.

2)It contains extra practice exercises and material that many other grammar books dont such as a large selection of original latin litterature in the back and a dictionary that is both latin english and english latin. Some people have moaned about the fact that the book dosent contain much cultural/historical info on ancient roam. This is beause the book is already about 1.5 by 7 inches of pure unadulterated linguistical and lexical magnificence intended for one purpose only, teaching you the fundamentals of the latin language. While it is good to learn of the culture you can do this elsewere in other books and if your learning a language you should never use only one text anyway.

3) it gives detailed etymological info and even a humorous bit called "latina est gaudium et utilis" in which the reader understands how latin developed into the romance tongues and how it has effected english. There are many cheesy jokes in the gaudium and utilis bits but these are a noble attempt to lighten the already onerous burden of bearing the weight of complex grammatical constructions. And if the reader consideres this material to be extraneous or superfluous he can always simply skip them with no detriment, I dont understand why some reviewers have actualy taken off stars for this. where else can i learn interesting things like "malo malo malo malo" (id rather be in an apple tree than a bad man in adversite) and that sic transit gloria mundi realy translates to (gloria gets sick at the train station on monday)

All potential readers can completely disregard the comments made by those who have given the book one star for teaching grammar the "old fasioned way." It almost sounds like someone would have us beleive that we as mature adults can learn a language only by hearing it spoken thereby bypassing the effort and work requried to internalise grammar. It is known that only infants can do this and the process is very difficult to reproduce in a classroom with adults. This is like trying to learn to play a musical instrument solely by listening to mustic, its valuable for learning how it should sound and does you great benefit, but how can you ever expect to be a motzart unless you play with a piano. Similarly if you never put forth the effort to learn, how can you say somethign like this: Quisquis vult sic latialiter loqui, hunc librum legat discatqve ut volubiliter ac libenter dicat. (whosoever wants to speak thusly latinly, let him read and learn this book that he might speak it fluently and freely)

Frederic Chopin has a French name, a French father, and spent almost half his life in France, but was always considered a Polish composer because his music drew on the peasant tunes and dances of his native land. Perhaps more than any other great classical composer it was Chopin who represented the ideal "poet in music," especially the ideal poet of the Romantic age. What Lord Byron, John Keats and Percy Bysshe Shelley were to poetry, Chopin's piano works were to music. Chopin's work was sensitive, tender, amorous, lyrical and melancholy by turn. Richard Tames provides a straightforward juvenile biography of the composer's life for the Lifetime series. Frederic Francois Chopin (or Fryderyk Franciszek Szopen as he was christened) was born in Warsaw in 1810 and his first composition, a polonaise, was published in 1817. After enjoying success in both Warsaw and Vienna, the failed Polish revolt against Russia made him an exile living in Paris in 1831.

Overall, the book is much more of a biography than a lesson in music appreciation, paying much more attention to Chopin's travels and love interests before his death at the age of 39 than in specific compositions. However, I think that when young readers are introduced to the life of a great composer they should also be steered towards specific works (in fact, I think you should always listen to the music of a composer while you read about their life; certainly there are various "greatest hits" CDs that you can pick up with that will let you hear the Minute Waltz in D-Flat Major, the Nocturne in E-Flat Major, and the Military Polonaise). There are a couple of detailed sidebars on the notorious George Sand and the pianoforte as "The King of Instruments." The book is illustrated with many drawings and paintings made during Chopin's life time, including a sketch by George Sand of Chopin concentrating while composing, as well as a daguerreotype of the composer and a photography of the romantic monument to Chopin in Paris's Parc Monceau. Young readers will get a sense of Chopin's life from this slim biography, but will have to look elsewhere for an appreciation of his music.

A well-presented book; and most interesting details of the artist's life an times. Slight disappointment in the plates - not all in colour and not full-page size. It is however, an extensive look at the artist and his work, I believe worth owning if you are interested in the genre. Not so interested myself in the sculpture side of his work and the small black and white photos of same do not show from all angles, but in general a good purchase.