...and maybe not them, either. The book has many words and phrases, but there are no indications as to which are obsolete and which are actually useful for a traveler or a student of modern Russian. There are no transliterations, no guide to the Cyrillic alphabet, no English translations of the woodcut illustrations, and no indication as to which words are scandalous and which are merely naughty.

On top of this, Drummond gives only idiomatic translations, not literal ones. Most obscenity dictionaries do this to some extent, but many of Drummond's translations are simply wrong. (I'd cite examples, but they'd keep this review from being published.) Literal translations are funnier, and give a much better sense of what exactly a culture finds obscene.

If you're reading pre-20th century Russian literature in Russian, buy this book. Otherwise, buy Christina Kunitskaya-Peterson's "International Dictionary of Obscenities." It is much more user-friendly and has four other languages to boot.

who wood have thunk it that aaaaaa equals oooooffff in rusian? i am a rusian that loves to party with his badself. i memmorized this entre bookk. weinerschnitzel is my favorite word

This miniature booklet, small enough to carry in pocket or handbag, presents definitions of Russian obscenities in straightforward manner. The book contains the very crudest sexual and scatological lingo. It is handy for deciphering street-slang and grafitti whose translation one might hesitate to inquire of one's proper Russian friends. Unlike "Dermo!", Drummond's dictionary does not include phonetic English pronunciations nor provide examples of the vocabulary in witty little phrases -- which is preferable, since it could be disasterous for foreign visitors in Russia to attempt to spice their speech with these taboo words. Moreover, some of the entries are antiquated terms now obsolete in "everyday" vulgarity. These are most useful for students of nineteenth-century Russian literature, bawdy tales, and lewd verse. Equivalent russkie slovari of English-language obscenities are nearly nonexistant; I gave my first copy of Drummond's little dictionary to my podruga in Krasnoe. She finds it useful for translating the "unspeakable" speech in American videos!

When I started training in Family practice I searched for a large reference book to study from. I choose this text because it was written so well. The Language is direct, the explanations are clear and the advice is well founded. Now that I am in training the book is not as helpful as I hoped. Most of the time I find the treatment on any given topic too shallow for what I have to learn. I belive this is the result of a compromise between size and completness. I now wish I had saved my money and bought three textbooks - Harrison, Williams and Nelson as opposed to trying to find one book to cover all of internal medicine, obstetrics, and pediatrics.

This book is designed in a practical and understandable approach to family practice. It is an excellent text and a comprehensive reference especially useful for a nurse practitioner/graduate student in family practice. Not only does it provide treatment and management of common medical conditions but also includes psychosocial aspects of caring for clients and their families.

There's plenty of good information and some nice anecdotes in this history, but it's presented non-chronologically as a loose string of biographies grouped under almost arbitrary chapter headings. The biographies leap into each other abruptly, and after a while it becomes impossible to distinguish individuals among the parade of similar faces. There are some nice analyses of some major albums, though, and it seems like a good starting point for someone trying to determine which recordings might paint the best picture of the hard bop era. Still...there's no long line to follow, and the last quarter feels like a grind.

"Hard Bop" is bop with an edge, bop with an aggressive, blues-based attack. Its archetype practitioner was trumpeter Lee Morgan, killed outside a nightclub in January 1972 by his lover. Influenced by boppers such as Fats Navarro and Dizzy Gillespie, Morgan and other hard boppers developed a style emphasizing minor keys, a "dark" mood, slurs, and half-valve effects. Morgan's most popular number in the idiom was the huge 1964 hard bebop/R&B hit "The Sidewinder."

Hard bop is introduced here through the prism of Lee Morgan: Morgan helped develop the style as an alternative to bop's successor, cool jazz, as developed, in part, by Gerry Mulligan and Miles Davis, and hard bop began to fade with his murder. But the book tackles more than Morgan, and, in fact, more than hard bop: It's a fascinating account of the various musical streams colliding--sometimes melding-- in the 10 years between 1955 and 1965.

Rosenthal traces the evolution of hard bebop as bop declined ("bebop . . . had turned into something of a straitjacket . . . Many of its best practitioners were dead, and others . . . were in decline"). Musicians looked to R & B to revive bop, and a new "more emotionally expressive and more formally flexible style began to emerge." Rosenthal looks at the expressions of hard bop in such diverse artists as Sonny Rollins, the soulful Horace Silver ("The Preacher"), Cannonball Adderley, organist Jimmy Smith ("Midnight Special"), Jackie MacClean, and, to a lesser degree, Art Farmer, Andrew Hill, Mingus, and some of the pre-1965 John Coltrane (e.g., with Miles on "Cookin'"). Rosenthal perceptively notes that hard bebop was a "complicated set . . . of interlocking tendencies," rather than a static, easily defined style.

I enjoy this book because it explores a somewhat brief phenomenon, and shows how it developed, flourished, and then gave way to new elements. The writing is crisp, intelligent, energetic, and full of illustrative anecdotes that illuminate and entertain (not the dry pedantic treatise one might expect on this rather narrow topic). Rosenthal shows the connections between various elements of jazz, and presents it as a living, evolving, powerful force. Eleven chapters following the introduction, no pictures. Very highly recommended to jazz fans of any stripe.

This book has provided a very practical TQM framework, both for the concepts and the implementation. The book very well describes how to adopt and practise the Customer Focus concept, a component of TQM, by using well explained standard steps and real world examples. The best thing about this book, however, is that it has been written with the very common English so that it is not too difficult to understand by those using English as their second language.

Nice review of the very best practices of total quality management. Grat number of dramatic samples of quality tools use. Recomanded to professional of quality business.

This is a must have for anyone who enjoys those oldie but goodie tv comedies. My one disappointment was that it did not contain an episode guide for one of my favorite TV sitcoms, "I Married Joan". It's almost impossible to find out anything about that show and it would have been great if it had been included in this somewhat exhaustive work. My request to the writers is to include this info in the next edition (if there is one and I hope there is). There were others I would have like to have seen included too, but Joan was the really missed one.

As a TV Sitcom writer/producer I was particularly enthralled by this labor-intensive work. It has excellent "TV-Guide-style" synopses of the most popular syndicated shows, and even some cult favorites we may never see again. Not only is it an excellent record, often reflecting "the signs of the times", and superior single-volume reference work, going through the various story lines is a great springboard for ideas for new sitcom stories. My only wish is if they were a) more thorough with the credits for writers of episodes in particular, and b)they churned out a new edition. It's been over 10 years, boys

If you're interested in the future uses and directions of digitized images, Alan Rath's joining of digitized images with kinetic sculptures is worth considering. Rath doesn't see kinetic art as alienating, so he's a bit baffled by commentaries on kinetic art such as those in his interview with Meredith Tromble ("There are undoubtedly more electronic circuits in my home than there are bits of painted canvas, yet when I imagine art about daily life I still think of a still life or a family portrait."). Rather he sees our relationship to technology as being just as intimate as our relationship to more culturally established forms of art. His digital video sculptures--built from circuit boards, memory chips, frame buffers and wires--are meant to be playful investigations of people's relationship to machinery and technology. For example, though Rath uses digitized videotaped images of the human eye to lend a psychological presence to his kinetic sculptures, he resists tendencies to anthropomorphize his sculptures in order to discover and create new modes of exchange and social relationships. In Rath's "Watcher," a wall-mounted monitor showing a shifting pair of eyes-neither quite inanimate nor animate-the effect of the image isn't to create a kind of portrait, or suggest any real perceptual ability, but simply to draw attention to our emotional responses as our traditional modes of relating are questioned and thwarted.

A 2-D book format is obviously not the optimal format for experiencing Rath's kinetic sculptures. Nevertheless, if you don't have the opportunity to go to one of his exhibits, the photographs of Rath's exhibited works at SITE Santa Fe is the next best thing.

This book really helped me prepare for Algebra II. With the help of this book, I had a 97% in the first semester and a 94% in the second. Then at the end of the year, this was a great tool in reviewing for the final.

Everything in this book used to be classified as artificial intelligence, but the authors have chosen to call it computational intelligence, arguing that it is the computational aspects of the subject that they want to emphasize. The book is very well written, and students and those interested in A.I. research and development will find it a helpful step to more involved studies.

The emphasis in the book is on intelligent agents, which the authors characterize in chapter one. Agents are viewed as black boxes that take in knowledge, past experiences, goals/values, and observations and output actions. They define what they call a representation and reasoning system consisting of a language to communicate to a computer, a methodology for giving meaning to this language, and a collection of procedures for computation. They also outline the three applications domains they will be developing in the book: an autonomous delivery robot, a diagnostic assistant, and an infobot.

The authors expand upon the representation and reasoning system in chapter 2 in terms that are familiar from mathematical logic and computer science. A formal language, a semantics, and a proof procedure are the three essentials of an RRS. All of these elements are discussed in great detail, and concrete examples are given for all the main concepts. Readers without any background in logic may find the reading difficult, but with some effort it could be read profitably. The authors do a good job of presenting material that is usually delegated to texts on formal computer science.

In chapter three, the authors show how representational knowledge can be used for domain representation, querying, and problem solving. This is done via an example of electrical house wiring and the PROLOG-astute reader will find the presentation very straightforward. But LISP programmers will also see its influence and the discussion on lists. An application is given in computational linguistics, namely that of definite clauses for context-free grammars.

A discussion of searching is given in chapter 4, in the context of potential partial solutions to a problem, with the hope that these will truly be real solutions for the problem at hand. Graph searching, blind search strategies, heuristic searching, and refinements of these are all discussed with great clarity. And, because of their importance in applications, dynamic programming and constraint classification problems are overviewed, albeit very briefly.

Chapter 5 turns to the topic of how to choose a representation langauge for knowledge. The authors detail the criteria for comparing different languages or logics in terms of expressiveness, worse-case complexity, and naturalness. Most important in this chapter is the discussion on qualitative versus quantitative representations.

This is followed in chapter 6 by a discussion of the user interactions to a knowledge-based system in terms of a meta-interpreter that produces knowledge acquistion, debugging, etc.

The next chapter shows how definite clause representation and reasoning systems can be extended to include the relation of equality and negation, and quantification of variables. This sets up naturally a discussion of first-order predicate calculus, but only a brief overview is given. A very short treatment of modal logic is given.

Chapter 8 considers agents that act and reason in time, with three representations given for reasoning about time. These are the STRIPS representation (developed at Stanford University), the situation calculus, and the event calculus. It is then shown how these can be used to reason and produce plans to achieve goals. Although brief, the discussion is very interesting, and the authors give good references for further reading.

The authors generalize their discussions to assumption-based reasoning in chapter 9, which up until this chapter has been restricted to reasoning from knowledge bases. Nonmonotonic reasoning is defined, along with abduction, which is a form of reasoning different from both deduction and induction, and which emphasizes hypothesis formation.

Chapter 10 considers the more realistic situation whre the agents have incomplete or uncertain knowledge. This naturally brings up a discussion of probability, which the authors define as the study of how knowledge affects belief. They distinguish between evidence and background knowledge, the latter which is stated in terms of conditional probabilities, the former characterized by what is true in the situation being studied. Belief networks are introduced as a graphical representation of conditional independence, these graphs being directed and also acyclic (the latter for reasons of causality). An algorithm for determining the posterior distribution of belief networks is given, and is based on the idea that a belief network specifies a factorization of the joint probability distribution. A brief overview of decision networks is also given.

The important topic of learning theory is overviewed in chapter 11. And, naturally, neural networks make their appearance here, although the discussion is very brief. PAC learning is also treated, as well as Bayesian learning. Unfortunately, the important field of inductive logic programming is not discussed, but some references are given.

The last chapter covers artificial purposive agents, otherwise known as robots. This is a vast subject, and only a general overview is given here, but the authors do a good job of showing how robots can be characterized within the concepts outlined in the book. Dynamical systems are used to represent the agent function for a robot. Readers familiar with the theory of dynamical systems will see the state transition function appear here in a more general context. The states of an agent at time t encode all of the information about its history. The state transition functions acts on the states and percepts, with the percepts playing the role of time in the usual dynamical system.

The appendices include a terminology list and a short introduction to PROLOG, along with a few examples of PROLOG code applied to some of the concepts in the book. Although very general, the inclusion of these examples are of further help in understanding the material in the book.

This book brings back the many forgotten works of William Wurster. It balances the architect's story and illustrations well. I recommend this book to architecture enthusiasts who want to reach beyond mainstream architecture.

This book covers bone biology, bone structure and function (particularly useful are the drawings of muscle attachments), and the interpretation of bones (age, sex, race, stature, trauma, disease, etc.). A very good book to gain understanding of why bones have the morphology they do.