This is without question one of the best cookbooks ever. I can't get my mind around how it is absolutely "just right". The food is lavish and beautifully presented, yet, it has this simplicity about it that brings it back from pomposity. There is a touch, a feel, that is as good as I've ever witnessed. A certain maturity that exudes extreme confidence.

Stylistically, the closest thing to this in my collection is the new edition of Larousse Gastronomique. Yet that book is full of recipes that are sloppily either over-the-top or ho-hum. Imagine that kind of cuisine taken to its absolute apex.

The descriptions are utterly clear, and detailed, and in a very helpful format of preperation, finishing touches, and presentation. This takes you through the mise en place carefully and then shows you what you need to do when ready to fire the plate and put it together. A quantum leap, IMO, in recipe presentation.

The photos are breathtaking. If you are intimidated by the recipes, you can always make yourself happy just viewing this as a picture book. But if you force yourself through these recipes a few times, you will lose the intimidation and wonder why you weren't cooking this way all along? Go ahead dive in the deep end...even a sloppy, crude rendition of these recipes will be worth every ounce of unnecessary stress.

I think Girardet has created a new watermark in cookbooks and look forward to seeing attempts to top this.

PS Serious sleuthing has revealed what "Nion" is (for the Nion Tart). Nion is the compressed nutmeat left over from creating nut oil. Girardet calls for grating walnut or hazelnut nion for his tart. It will take significantly more sleuthing to get one's hands on some nion, however!!!

Of course, no gourmet cookbook would be complete without calling for a tablespoon or two of pure unobtainium.

I use this book for instructing my third year marketing students who find the case study section particularly helpful. The glossy pages of international statistics make for easy reading. A very good value for money book.

I have an extensive collection of eclipse books, and this one really stands out in the crowd. For one thing, it's easily the largest-format eclipse book I've seen; I'd call it a coffee-table book. But what is really striking are the beautiful photographs. The reproduction is outstanding, and the large size makes the photos particularly vivid.

I haven't read the text yet, and so I can't comment on it, but the overall impression is that this book is a must-have for anybody interested in the beauty of total solar eclipses.

I have read this book in French and even in one of the most annoying languages around, it is beautiful. Mr.Dubois has a beautifull way of writing things in a reasonable and humorous way that could charm a free-minded crittic. The book is enjoyable as both a guide to Europian folklore and as a book full of fairy-tales. The illustrations are beautifully magical and mysterious and a joy to the eye. A tip for those who can read French or Dutch, Mr. Dubois has written another book of this sort, an encyclopedia of the Little People which is just as great.

Worldweary eco-activist, renegade psychiatrist, authentic poet-socialist, Felix Guattari is a first-rate contemporary thinker whose writings have long pined away in the shadow of his loving cohort, Gilles Deleuze. But unlike the latter, Guattari abandoned Academe as soon as possible, becoming an agent for the interiorized police-state of the modern psychiatric hospital. No academic canon could have prepared him for the horror of the wards, for the sequence of oedipal territories which derange and invalidate psychiatric praxis. Like the prison in Foucault's writings, the mental hospital became for Guattari only a more intense restatement and synecdoche for the wider regime of cultural repression. What could an intellectual offer these morbid precincts of madness incarnate, without bitterness and cynicism, without a Ballardian post-despair fetishization of the Postmodern?

The opening sequence of essays illustrate Dr. Guattari's travails as one of the spearheads behind France's notorious "anti-psychiatry" movement. His profound and unsettling career in the clinical matrices of institutions more deranged than their denizens provides a much-needed analogical narrative for those uncomfortable with D & G's scorching brand of C-Theory. The dangers and vicissitudes of the French psycho-pharmaceutical complex are engaged by Guattari's unrepentant desire to make the mental hospital a true community-culture, where "the real relations of force between the personnel and the patients"(42) are restored to the schizo-subject.

Parts II and III escape momentarily from the psychiatric compound to schizo-analyze the mechanosphere of our transglobal Technocracy, disseminating the "postmodern impasse" of ethical abdication, sounding the alarm for new and more complex forms of political resistance. "It is necessary to reinvent the body, to reinvent the mind and to reinvent language. Perhaps the new telematic, informational, and audio-visual technologies can help us to progress in this direction"(115). Rejecting the paranoid neo-Luddism of the Heideggerians, Guattari sees infinite possibilities for forming alliances with the engineering sciences, coeval with perpetual danger, caution, a selectively informed resistance.

Part IV, "Polysemiosis," showcases Guattari's stunning agon with Hjelmslev and Peirce, a crucial body of text for anyone who needs the anti-Saussurean translinguistics of D & G further enlarged upon and clarified. Here, the order of elements is secondary in relation to the axiomatic of flows and figures (i.e. creativity in languages may be eternally binded to dominant syntactic and grammatical machines, yet there's always an engine of creation pushing these laws beyond their prescribed ends). Twenty pages later, Guattari steers this apparatus onto the political stage with a pair of essays raging through the microphysics of Foucaultian power.

Part V traverses the uncompromising byways of Red and Green eco-revolutionary constructs, queer politics, a delightful and surprising exegesis of Jean Genet's classic autopoetic *Prisoner of Love*, along with more powerful satellite-imagery and theoretical fine-tunings of Guattari's always-developing theories of machinic subjectivity.

Part VI proves once and for all that the pomo abdication of life-critical issues is anathema to our world community and its institutions. Intellectualism which forsakes political aptitude and activism can only put us further in the hole. "Our problem is to reconquer the communitarian spaces of liberty, dialogue, and desire"(255). The meaning of social life, for Guattari, is to engineer institutions and practices that provide open channels for the exploration of our own subjectivity, supplemented by clinical pathways ready to disinfect those persons who've been wounded by this unrepentant promethean drive.

All in all, a required body of texts for those in need of paradigmata to orienteer D & G's more byzantine theoretical forays, without having to reread (yet again) your spine-rolled volumes of M. Foucault.

Conguratulations for the excellent work Mr. Mathieu did for this second edition of the catalogue. A lot of color reproductions made us much easier to feel and enjoy the spirit of the works.

This book is the first comprehensive source for comparative immunology in such a wide range of species. As such it will be an invaluable addition to the library of any researchers working outside of the usual primate-mouse paradigm. It will also prove useful to veterinary scientists working in vaccinology or other immunology related fields and as a graduate level reference text. Each chapter provides information on a given animal or group of animals and is edited by at least one expert on that particular animal or group of animals. The chapter sections, covering specific immunological areas, are likewise edited by at least one expert in the field. Chapter sections are kept essentially the same in all chapters to make for easier comparisons between species. Easy comparisons are also facilitated by the great amounts of information presented in tabular form. Extensive references direct the reader to important papers and authors in the various fields thereby allowing the reader to pursue more specific, in depth knowledge. One weakness to be perceived in this excellent book may be the need for more diagrammatic representations of the genes encoding antibodies, TCR and MHC thus making for quick, at-a-glance, genetic comparisons. Readers will hopefully suggest other improvements and expansions so that future editions will contain still more information, and perhaps more species, as knowledge increases. Due to the vast array of international expertise brought to bear in the preparation of this book it is a top quality production, able to cover even such a broad range of vertebrate species very well. All in all the importance and utility of this book can hardly be overstated. As its use and familiarity grows, the editors may expect many thanks from colleagues around the world for this timely work.

...and evolutionary philosopher. Worth having, if only for more of the author's wonderfully intuitive insights and a rough chronology of the development of his thought. A man of spirit as well as the earth, I think he would have liked Marie-Louise von Franz's description of alchemy, a discipline akin to the Father's own pursuits: "divine power in matter."

when Jean Claude Mezieres' and Pierre Christin's comic "Valerian"
was published in France for the first time it was different fromn other comics in the same genre. It featured a strong, female character, Laureline and some great designed aliens, to me "Valerian" is the best sci fi comic and if you have good taste you'll think that too.

Another object book with content that matches the originality of the design. Herzog & De Meuron, the Basel-based architects, are best known for their art museums, but also for creating buildings that are works of art--even when the program is as mundane as a railroad signal box. This companion to the recent CCA exhibition is an anthology of interviews, stimulating essays by artists and clients, and pictures of objects that have inspired them, in addition to an illustrated catalogue of their 200 buildings and projects. (Michael Webb is the book reviewer for LA Architect magazine.)