If you like things analyzed in exhaustive detail - to death, actually - Edward Snow's "A Study of Vermeer" is the book for you. If half of what Snow thinks is going on in these paintings is really there, then the mystery of Vermeer's low 30 plus lifetime production of paintings is answered. He was busy spending years planning each canvas to amaze and confound future art historians, critics, and english professors who take a fancy to his work, before ever picking up a brush. Who was Vermeer the man? You won't find it here. What historical, sociological or personal influences shaped his work? Except for brief passing mention of the "vanitas" not a clue can be found in this book. I award him 3 stars because he did motivate me to really, really look at these marvelous paintings to see what he (Snow) was talking about. Oh, and he credited a few of his students for their readings of the paintings during his course on Vermeer at Rice University, which he used in rewriting this expanded volume. Guess he couldn't figure out when the youngsters were serious or just pulling the old professor's leg.

This revised and enlarged edition is an unusually thoughtful, intelligent and eloquent offering from a scholar of remarkable insight and rare passion. Until I read the book (in one night as I couldn't put it down), I didn't know why I had always liked Vermeer. Dr. Snow's book is a journey of pleasure and discovery. Light, space, colour, desire and luminous revelation fairly crackle with intensity. An historic contribution to the art world, or as Dore Ashton observed, "an authentic contribution to the literature (yes, literature!) of the visual arts".

I read this book in 10 minutes and passed it along to a friend. It's completely accurate and highly readable, but WOW, is it simple. You feel like coloring in it. It's one tip per page - literally.

First off, this is a physicist's book. It is worth bearing in mind that this book is a PhD thesis, and has that format: there are lots of equations, with a few charts on almost every page. That will probably put a lot of people off. Still, if you really want to understand, in a quantitative way, the acoustics of woodwinds, I haven't found another book that approaches it as directly as this one (Fletcher and Rossing's book is encyclopedic in its coverage of instruments, and therefore necessarily thin on specifics of particular instruments). You probably don't need a PhD to read it, but certainly a master's degree to get much out of it.

First, the bad news: I think the layout could be improved: the sections are numbered in order from the start of the book right through to the end, rather than in a chapter-by-chapter way. This makes it difficult to find section 27 (for example), because there's no way to narrow down where it might be. The notes added for this edition could have been integrated into the main text, rather than being appended. Still, I suppose the readership may not be large enough to warrant such a thorough overhauling.

The good news: This book lays it all out for you, if in a rather terse way. It's broken down into four chapters, roughly corresponding to introduction, bore, toneholes, applications. The math is heavy at times, and is not helped by the choice to print in two columns on each page, thereby causing a lot of equations to be broken over two lines. Also the choice of variable names is not particularly mnemonic, so I found myself constantly referring back a few pages, to remind myself of their meaning. Still, it starts off generically, develops general models, then applies them to each of the classical instruments: flute, sax, clarinet, oboe, bassoon.

My greatest wish for future editions of the book would be to augment how much is left unsaid. Each chapter concludes with a half-page summary. More than once, I found myself reading something in the summary that I couldn't recall from the text. But by studying the charts and equations closely, and doing a few back-of-the-envelope calculations, I found that it really was there. (An example would be at the end of Ch.2, where there's a mention of how conical-bore instruments can be overblown in the octave until the truncation ratio reaches about 0.2. It's not explicitly stated in the main text, but you can see it, with a little thought, from the charts on the facing page.) So I feel that the book could really be enhanced with some more textual analysis.

I hope the author has a chance to re-work this book - there's clearly so much between the lines.

MacDonald's biography of Brahms is insightful and informative benefiting from findings in recent Brahms scholarship as well as from the authors command of language and knowledge of the art of music. Its only fault, albeit a rather prominent one, is the author's need to comment at least a few words on every work of Brahms's. This becomes tedious and the reader is left with a feeling of unsatisfied curiosity as if he or she is reading program notes to a concert he will not hear. MacDonald, however, reserves his more detailed accounts for Brahms's more important and popular major works (his all too brief analysis of the Fourth Symphony leaves one wishing he would write a book entirely devoted to that masterpiece) a trait which reveals the author's keen analytical mind. The book would have benefited greatly if the author had devoted space given to smaller or less significant pieces to a more extensive discussion of the composers major works

Walter Frisch explores the concepts of developing variation, a term 'created' by Arnold Schoenberg, in the works of Brahms. Frisch examines the essential principles behind Brahms concepts of subtle variation. Through developing variation, Frisch introduces ideas of how Brahms would dervie all of the material for a single work from the initail idea. This formal study is a great read for any musician who wishes to further their understanding of Brahms' music. This study is also very essntial to those who set out to study any music that has been influenced by Brahms, especially that of Schoenberg.

I am always amazed how books that actually tell you something somehow go out of print. There has not been a single decent analytic study of the complete Brahms Symphonies since Julius Harrison's Survey in 1939. That work is written in a period style that tells the student of these symphonies very little. This is symptomatic of a problem with English music literature in general. There are not enough general purpose guides to single pieces of music.

The density of Brahms's symphonies is such that many details can be easily overlooked without guidance. Walter Frisch is one of the foremost English-speaking experts on Brahms's music. One can try to work out all the thematic ideas of the symphonies without a guide. I have conducted three of these works myself, and before reading this work, I had missed several details that now redefine how I interpret them (for example, I was never able to articulate reason for the magical of the second movement of the Third Symphony, until I read Frisch's comments on how the tonic chord can be the dominant of the subdominant.)

This last comment is music-speak. Regrettably, it is only comprehensible by a small percentage of the concert/recording audience. For those fortunate enough to know German, there are several good guides on individual pieces of music in that language. Otherwise, the closest thing one has in English is the Cambridge Music Handbook series. The problem with that series is that many of the entries are not analytic enough (ie. they fail to provide a measure by measure breakdown of the piece) and the books are overpriced for what they provide ...

Luckily, Rheinhold Brinkmann's Late Idyll is still available for the reader. He restricts his discussion to the Brahms 2cd symphony, but it is a wonderful work indeed. Frisch attempts a similar approach with all the symphonies. It could use more detail, but I'm sure he was limited to a certain length by his editors.

This simple story of the life of St John Vianney, written by Milton Lomasek and illustrated by Johannes Troyer has the young Christian adults as its target. The simplicity of its form and the clarity of its contents would make it an excellent experience for the young people. The life of the cure of Ars is so often told that some of the details are almost lost in legend. In this book he emerges as a most personable and real person, like most of us. The simple language, the narrative style and the fast movement of events make it easily readble.

The clumsy looking farm boy, Jean, born during the French revolution in Dardilly, France opts to be a priest against all odds. But his struggle with the study of the Latin language raises further hurdles on his way. This lovable young man's journey of life to become the most lovable parish priest of France, 'cure of Ars' is an inspiring one. The style of the book makes it also interesting.

Jansen, a professor at Leiden University in Holland, is one of the most astute and daring writers on fundamentalist Islam. His title points to the rather pedestrian fact that fundamentalist Islam 'is both fully politics and fully religion,' but the book offers the author's deep understanding of this phenomenon, which he characterizes as an 'unusual combination of logic, religion, politics and violence.'

Jansen shows how fundamentalist Islam is 'religion narrowed down to an ideology' but is still a religion, albeit one concerned with earthly power. He establishes that it is not a protest against being poor but an invariably successful form of propaganda 'because the public to whom it is addressed love to hear it.' The two chapters on fundamentalist attitudes toward Jews and women are among the most incisive anywhere. But the most interesting chapter may be 'the failure of the liberal alternative,' in which Jansen establishes that the anti-fundamentalists have 'no weapons other than words' and so are steadily losing to the fundamentalists, who have large masses of followers.

Jansen's book is not so much a systematic study as a series of musings by a original and daring mind, primarily concentrating on Egypt. He reads the writers others only cite, such as Faraj Fuda and Shukri Mustafa. He chides not just fundamentalists, but also the ulema and fellow orientalists for absurdities and errors in logic. Islam, he says, obviously must be tolerated in an open society, 'but does this tolerance extend to Islamic fundamentalism too?' Yes, he replies, if it is a legitimate form of Islam; but not if it is a political ideology.

Middle East Quarterly, December 1997

This is a republication of an old translation.

If you haven't read Kepler's own words, then this book will be both more and less than you expected. It is both a mathematical and phylsophically speculative text, which in some sections can get quite technical.(Warning: the title is a bit deceiving. Only part of the Epitome is included.)

I would only give 3 stars to this book, except that english translations of Kepler's works are very few, and this book is the most financially accessible of those currently on the market. I therefore recommend it as a good first exposure.

There's no substitute to reading the original words of great thinkers, especially in gaining insight into their way of approaching the world.

This book is not an easy read, but it does provide wonderful insights into how Vermeer achieved the effects he did. It certainly heightened my appreciation of his work, both in technical and in artistic terms.