Its not the book, and its not the film. So what is it? Its the screenplay of course! Chances are, if you are reading this, its either because you saw the film and liked it; a fan of Stanley Kubrick: director of the film; or you read the book Lolita and the Annotated Lolita and figured "I might as well read the script;" or just a big fan of Nabokov and its the one book you dont have in your collection. Whatever the reason may be, it falls between the book and the film. This is Nabokov's version of the script that was cut, recut and then edited by Kubrick (incidentally, Nabokov still recieved on-screen credit for the screenplay). It may hold water on its own, but in comparison to either the book or film it cannot stay afloat.

By his own account, only about 20% of Nabokov's 213 page screenplay ended up in Kubrick's film. Even so, the author's opinion of Kubrick's end product was high, and the screenplay itself is a fine cinematic representation of the novel.

Lolita: a Screenplay is recommended reading for anyone who loved the novel and appreciates Nabokov's wonderful sense of humor. The story goes that Nabokov presented his screenplay to Kubrick, who told him, "Look, regardless of how brilliant it may or may not be, it would take eight hours to film." So it's unfilmable; if Borges can write literary criticism about books which don't exist, surely it's not so radical to devise screenplays which are never meant to be filmed. Nabokov adds much to his existing work, including a psychiatrist who speaks directly to the camera and a cameo for himself. One wishes that Adrian Lyne had added a few of the humorous elements of the screenplay to his film, which is fine but perhaps a bit too reverent which it should be audaciously funny. All in all, I highly recommend picking up what amounts to one of the 20th century's great geniuses playing hooky.

This book is a necessary addition to the library of anyone who already knows a fair amount about the Russian Revolution and Russian Civil War. It provides for the first time in one volume the advances in understanding that result from availability of Soviet archives and close cooperation between Western and Russian scholars. It also points out numerous topics on which further research would be useful.

However, it has its flaws. Some topics are covered redundantly in various essays, and not always the ones one would expect; other topics get inadequate attention. Makhno's anarchist army in Ukraine, for example, is barely mentioned in Mark von Hagen's essay on Ukraine, given an unsympathetic paragraph in Vladimir Chernaiv's essay on anarchists, and a longer and somewhat more useful paragraph in Orlando Figes' essay on peasant armies. Given that at times Makhno's army was the most effective military force in Eastern Ukraine, and that all other combatants in Ukraine had to worry about what Makhno was going to do next, this is fragmented and incomplete treatment of an important topic. As another example, the description of what happened in Latvia between 1917 and 1920 is seriously incomplete; the bitter division between pro-Bolshevik and Latvian nationalist elements is not brought out clearly, nor is the intensity of the war that took place in Latvia, with many Latvians, German troops (the von der Goltz Iron Division) and some Russians (the Bermondt-Avalov force) on one side, and the Latvian Bolsheviks and the Red Army on the other. One would not guess from this book how disastrous this was for Latvia; by the end of the fighting, about half the population of Latvia had fled the country or died.

Rather than cite other such topics, I'll turn to the observation that most of the bibliographies of these essays consist mainly of secondary rather than primary sources. This is a drawback in a book which implicitly assumes that the reader already has a general familiarity with the subject matter. To be sure, not all primary sources that presumably exist are accessible even now; in particular, one suspects that somewhere in British government archives are documents that would clear up various puzzling issues. But there is a conspicuous lack of references to the extensive German political and military archives related to the Russian Revolution and Civil War. Indeed, the German role is so incompletely treated that one suspects some of the authors are, quite understanably, not familiar with this material. But from 1917 through mid-1919 the Germans deliberately shifted their weight to keep any of the forces contesting for power in Russia from winning a clear victory; the Germans occupied here, distributed weapons there, stirred up trouble over yonder, and generally tried to make sure that revolution and civil war in Russia would not spread to Germany. A careful discussion of German policy and its effects on the course of events in the first half of the Russian Civil War would be extremely helpful; lacking that, a good bibliography of the primary sources in German would be most useful.

Despite these criticisms, the book is a big step forward in understanding what really happened and who did what to whom in the Russian Revolution and Russian Civil War. I hope that a decade or two from now there will be a second edition clarifying some of the topics not easily understood from this first edition.

This is a solid, definitive, wide-ranging and in-depth look at the Revolutions told from a variety of viewpoints, ideologies and mindsets. Modeled after the Foucoult/Ozuf Critical Dictionary of the French Revolution, this is an excellently assembled book, with very current material, well worth having by any scholar of this period.

Vladamir Mayakovsky was the greatest of the early 20th-centuary Russian "Futurist" poets. For The Voice was a compilation of his most-quoted poetry, made in collaberation with bookmaker El Lissitzky. The book itself can be considered an art-object. The use of a thumb index so that poems could be found quickly is an ingenious touch. Mayakovsky was a great poet, but the poems included here do not in my opinion fully exhibit his talent. This is because most of them were written as pro-Bolshevik revolutionary propaganda, and meant primarily for agitation of the proletariat, rather then casual reading enjoyment. As a result some of the statements ie. "..We'll break history's horse./By the Left!/Left!/Left!.." seem a little less inspired, and more outdated then Mayakovsky's other work. He was still a genious, though, and this book is well worth the money. This edition consists of three volumes - the facsimilie, the translation, and a collection of very interesting essays and facts about Mayakovsky and Lissitzky (one section of which is a great help in understanding the poems at a deeper level).. I would recommend this book to anyone interested in Mayakovsky, Russia, or avante-garde bookmaking/artwork. For anyone else - FIRST look at some of Mayakovsky's other poetry..a lot can be found online...and maybe his other books, then come back to this one. His long poem, "A Cloud in Trousers" is highly recommended. Sad note : Mayakovsky felt so oppressed by the soviet society he wrote propaganda for, so tired of his poetic voice being stifled, and so dissapointed in romance, that he shot himself dead in 1930, aged 36.

Back in 1992, I was in New York to attend the exhibition "The Great Utopia" which was held in Guggenheim. The show was a dreamland for the soviet art of the twenties still not known as it should be. Moved by the great amaze the exhibition made over me, I looked for the editor Jaap Rietmann who had made an almost out-of-print fac-similar version of the historical book Dlia Golossa by Maiakovsky with El Lissitsky's graphic design. I was not successful. Mr Rietmann said me that this was a very expensive book and he discontinued. Years later, I made a contact with the excellent work of Mrs. Patricia Railing, one of the most gifted analysers of the period, in my opinion. She has not only a great inside information about the subject but held the courage to accept the challenge and publish this and others precious titles of the russian avant-garde. Books such as History of 2 squares (also listed here in Amazon), 32 Drawings by Kasimir Malevitch and others, as well as essays in various publications (Leonardo and others). Patricia Railing is one of these people who is so much dedicated to a subject to the point it makes the researcher go beyond any obstacle. The book is simply great, very well edited and - I must warn - hold it! because maybe another chance will not arise.

I do not agree with the reader above completely. The book is definately hot stuff and you won't find this kind of opinion readily available ... but the foreign policy of the US could have been more structured.

5 star just for being really out there! You will not find this type of writing in English anywhere! A month ago books on Iraq were old. Now there are some 20 titles written in the last 3 weeks. This is not the case with this book (russian copyright 2002).
"A humanitarian .... hero of his people ... loved by the masses .." yep, this is writen about Saddam in this book and darn well backed up with some uneasy facts and startling analysis. This book is for everyone who has been outraged by the blatant, vile right wing media propaganda following Gulf War 2. And what is most interesting that the author deals with post Saddam scenarios and is accurate to the millimeter ...and this was written last year!

The material contained in the textbook presents and discusses recent developments, but also important statistical (learning theory) concepts such as model selection, regularisation etc, in a unifying manner.
Although the authors are somewhat biased towards kernel methods, support vector machines in particular, they discuss the applicability and performance of other methods (neural networks, fuzzy systems, etc.). This is to be commended, as there are not many books that discuss all such methods in a common framework.
This book is highly recommended to readers wishing to gain a good understanding of the most significant statistical and other methods being applied in industry, and continuously experiencing significant academic research. A set of very good references (some mandatory and well known in the research community) presented at the end of each chapter directs the reader to some very useful material and scientific publications. This is a book that will particularly appeal to the research/academic community.

This book is excellent and easy to study. Graduate students will find the book statistical learning theory and support vector machines(SVMs),especially learning system based on recent advances in machine learning and multiobjective optimization. This book describes the Vapnik and Chervonenkis(VC) theory's generalization abilities. For statisticians, Applied mathematician, mechanical engineers and most graduate student are interested in reading this book. This is a very good excellent reference!!

This book by Kayta Arnold is a book which lends itself to discussions on animals relationships to other animals. Will the puppy discover which animal says meow? Children will enjoy the animal sounds and the bright illustrations.

I first read this book to my two and a half year old son in the library. We both laughed so hard I was looking for the "shushing" librarian. I had fun because my son had fun. We both had SOOO much fun I had to go out and buy it so we can do it again whenever we want. I say do it again, because it is like a game you want to play over and over.

Reading through this book gives excellent insight into one of the greatest thinkers of the 20th Century. The letters are arranged in chronological order, so reading through them gives a perspective on Lewis' life that I found to be better than any biography. This is a very enjoyable collection, and if you are a fan of C.S. Lewis: Read these letters and get inside this great philosopher's mind!

This is fine reading for the tired hours of the day. The little biography by his brother Warren is first rate, and the letters themselves are windows looking into the garden of C.S. Lewis' life and thought. They are varied, usually insightful or edifying, sometimes splendid. This edition, edited and enlarged by Walter Hooper, includes a few marvelous additions but also what appear to be some errors in the text, especially in the (fortunately rare) bits of Greek. Let's hope that the Collected Letters (published by Fount in the UK and apparently available through UK) will become available in the USA.

While standard biographies are the medium people often turn to to find out more about someone, the letters an author pens often more revealing. I thoroughly enjoyed this (much needed) updated version of the letters of C.S. Lewis from 1916 - 1963 to his various correspondents. They are at various times funny, full of good advice, intentional nonsense, great learning, wit, homely (talking about the every day events that go on in life), and all in all intensely interesting. In addition to this fine volume, you might want to try his volume of Letters to Arthur Greeves (originally published as They Stand Together), C.S. Lewis Letters to Children, or The Latin Letters of C.S. Lewis. They are all quite good.

A good, albeit highly idiosyncratic, guide to Statistical Learning. The highly personal account of the theory is both the strong point and the drawback of the treatise. On one side, Vapnick never loses sight of the big picture, and gives illuminating insights and formulations of the "basic problems" (as he calls them), that are not found in any other book. The lack of proofs and the slightly erratic organization of the topic make for a brisk, enjoyable reading. On the minus side, the choice of the topics is very biased. In this respect, the book is a self-congratulatory tribute by the author to himself: it appears that the foundations of statistical learning were single-handedly laid by him and his collaborators. This is not really the case. Consistency of the Empircal Risk Measure is rather trivial from the viewpoint of a personal trained in asymptotic statistics, and interval estimators for finite data sets are the subject of much advanced statistical literature. Finally, SVMs and neural nets are just a part of the story, and probably not the most interesting.
In a nutshell, what Vapnick shows, he shows very well, and is able to provide the "why" of things as no one else. What he doesn't show... you'll have to find somewhere else (the recent Book of Friedman Hastie & Tibs is an excellent starting point).
A last remark. The book is rich in grammatical errors and typos. They could have been corrected in the second edition, but do not detract from the book's readability.

This is a very readable book by an authority on this subject. The book starts with the statistical learning theory, pioneered by the author and co-worker's work, and gradually leads to the path of discovery of support vector machines. An excellent and distinctive property of support vector machines is that they are robust to small data perturbation and have good generalization ability with function complexity being controlled by VC dimension. The treatment of nonlinear kernel classification and regression is given for the first time in the first edition. The 2nd edition includes significant updates including a separate chapter on support vector regression as well as a section on logistic regression using the support vector approach. Most computations involved in this book can be implemented using a quadratic programming package. The connections of support vector machines to traditional statistical modeling such as kernel density and regression and model selection are also discussed. Thus, this book will be an excellent starting point for learning support vector machines.

Vapnik and collaborators have developed the field of statistical learning theory underlying recent advances in machine learning and artificial intelligence (e.g. support vector machines). This book almost accomplishes the formidable task of comprehensibly describing the essential ideas of learning theory to non-statisticians. It contains ample theorems but almost no proofs.

This is a pretty good collection of Interviews with Nabokov and Nabokov's letters to editors and stuff like that. For people who want to find out more there's the comprehensive two volume biography of Nabokov by Brian Boyd.

Nabokov's opinions in a nutshell?

Thought everything written by James Joyce was completely mediocre except for "Ulysses," which towered above the rest of his ouvre as one of the supreme literary masterpieces of the 20th century. Loved Flaubert and Proust and Chateaubriand, did not like Stendhal (simple and full of cliches) or Balzac (full of absurdities). Loved Tolstoy's "Anna Karenina" (considered it the greatest novel of the 19th century) and "Death of Ivan Illych," hated "Resurrection" and "Kreutzer sonata." Liked Gogol, despised Dostoevsky as a melodramatic mystic (he even once gave a student an F in his course for disagreeing with him). Loathed Conrad and Hemingway, but liked the description of the fish in "Old Man and the Sea" and the short story "Killers." Hated Andre Gide, T.S.Eliot, Faulkner, Thomas Mann and D.H.Lawrence and considered them all frauds. Thought Kafka was great, Orwell mediocre. Despised Camus and Sartre, considered Celine a second rater, but liked H.G.Wells. Loved Kubrick's film of Lolita (thought it was absolutely first-rate in every way) but later in the '70s regretted that Sue Lyon (though instantly picked by Nabokov himself along with Kubrick out of a list of thousands) had been too old for the part & suggested that Catherine Demongeot, the boyish looking 11 year old who appeared in Louis Malle's 1960 film "Zazie dans le Metro" would've been just about perfect to induce the right amount of moral repulsion in the audience towards Humbert (and prevent them from enjoying the work on any superficial level other than the purely artistic). Liked avant-garde writers like Borges and Robbe-Grillet and even went out of his way to see Alain Resnais' film with Robbe-Grillet: "Last Year at Marienband." Didn't care for the films of von Sternberg or Fritz Lang, loved Laurel and Hardy. Made a point of saying how much he hated Lenin when it was fashionable to blame the disasters of the Soviet Union on Stalin. Supported the War in Vietnam and sent President Johnson a note saying he appreciated the good job he was doing bombing Vietnam. Never drove an automobile in his life & his wife was the one who drove him through the United States on scientific butterfly-hunting expeditions, all through the many locales & motels & lodges that later appeared in "Lolita."

Seem interesting? You're bound to be offended even if Nabokov is one of your favorite writers. Genius or madman? I would say both, the 'divine madness' of the greatest of artists. Highly recommended for a peek inside the artistically fertile mind, and the tensions that need to be maintained to produce it.

An entertaining read for fans of the man, but probably not for others. Learn what it was about VN that to this day causes well-meaning fans to rave in such affected (and misspelled) tones. See below and you'll know what I mean.

Probably, or better yet most definitely, Nabokov was and is the greatest thing with flesh huddling by its bones and peeping with two ice-cube eyes this miserable little golf-ball of a planet will ever see. This is that man sounding off and checking the dunderheads and charletons who plague or lives with false sympathy and athletic stupidity