Not a lot of explanations but lots and lots of exercises I am a violin teacher and I sugest the book to all my students... but most things in the book still need explanations, Very good exercise book if nothing else. Fingering has changed from the time the book was originaly written, but still a very usefull book if you would like to use the fingering and style that players in Beethoven's time used. I sugest the book to all beginners and advanced players.

As an adult beginner, "The Art" gives me everything I need to complement my lessons - answers to basic questions of theory and technique, progressive exercises, technical principles illustrated by hundreds of phrases from the masters. And scales, scales, scales. Especially nice are the complete two-part scales of Cherubini.

This is one of the great string-playing books. Please buy it and read it---you will not be disappointed.

I loved the movie Dangerous Liasons with Glenn Close and John Malkovich and decided to try this audio version of the book. I can't say it was better than the movie, but the audio is superb. It is on 3 CDs and so is longer than the movie and supplies more detail. Since it is in letter form, its style more closely follows the book. The readers show incredible and intense emotion in their voices - you can almost see them in your mind. It made my commuting a joy for several days - I was almost sorry when I got to the office or arrived back home and had to quit listening. Such devious-ness! Who is the most wicked? Enjoy.

I must admit that I have not listened to the tapes. However, the new movie "Crule Intentions" is based on this book. I have seen the movie and if the two are anything alike, I would highly recommend ordering them.

Just when I though that there was no more room for improvement in my aggressive driving, after a championship title in karting in my youth and 20 years driving an assorted lot of racing and so called super cars, here cames Prost with this little jewel filled with practical hints and advise. Folks I guarantee that you will not waste your money with this one. After all no one is proficient in every discipline ( want did I really know about rallye driving ?)

Along with L'Assommoir by Zola and Journey to the End of the Night by Celine, Choderlos de Laclos's masterpiece ranks as one of my favorite books of all time. To fully appreciate the genius of the letter writing form,one must understand that the libertine novels of the 18th century all utilized this format. Laclos admittedly set out to write a book that would depart from other works of the century to leave a dramatic imprint on the world, and he succeeded. While written in the same lingusitic and seductive style of a libertine novel, Laclos transforms the limited and mundane scope of the libertine world into a riveting classic. Each character reflects a different conception of "love" and how the libertine world can go awry when true sentiment is confused with lust. La Marquise de Merteuil reflects the purest degree of libertinage. In perhaps the most spellbinding of all the letters, she explains to Valmont her duplictious conduct after her husband's death to obtain her reputation among men and place herself at the forefront of society's attention. In contrast, Mlle. de Tourvel is the epitome of sentimental love, to the point that she can become physically ill if it is not reciprocated. Clearly what separates this work from other romance novels of the 18th century, elevating it to the level of other world masterpieces, is the character of Valmont. He is the heart and soul of this novel in every way possible. One one hand, Valmont is extremely self-assured in his ways, when describing his calculating, rational strategy in courting naive young ladies. On the other hand, he refuses to accept the reality evidenced by his relationship with Mme. de Tourvel that he is not the manipulative libertine that he, and society, consider him to be. The deep struggle within Valmont between his true feelings and his vanity in preserving his reputation of libertinage is perhaps the most compelling storyline in the novel- because it is physcological and under the surface. At this level, Les Liaisons Dangereuses is often compared to "Crime and Punishment". les Liaisons is more subtle in its physcological dimension in that the reader must form her own conclusions about Valmont's physchosis whereas Raskelnikov's mental state is at the heart of the prose. If I have not convinved everyone yet to go ahead and experience the magic of Laclos (who fortuneatley survived the Terror), then I have failed in my task...

Many people have seen one of several movie productions of this book and assumed that it is a modern story that has taken the 18th century as its setting. In fact, the book was written at that time, and it provides a shocking, thrilling, sexy window into the lives of the french aristocracy. It is a thing of beauty. The exploits of the central characters make your average daytime soap opera look tame, and it is all done with a cunning and an evil grace that went out of style with the french revolution. Language is used as an aphrodesiac, a lever, and occasionally a cudgel, and since the book takes the form of the published letters of the main characters we hear it straight from the pens of those involved. "Les Liasons Dangereuses" will make you mourn the invention of the telephone. Such skill with the written word! The double meaning was king, with muddied intentions as its queen. Read this book: you really must. If you love language it will become a favorite of yours, just as it did for me.

When I read Choderlos de Laclos' 1782 novel, "Les Liaisons Dangereuses" (which retains its French title in the 1961 English translation by P W K Stone), I found myself amazed and thrilled by its absolute excellence of execution. Its energy and spirit, and the seductive and machiavellian - perhaps even diabolical - undertones which whisper throughout the work, urge the reader ever onwards in the best page-turning tradition. It is possibly not for nothing that the book itself was eventually decreed 'dangerous' by French officials a full 42 years after it first appeared, long after it might have been expected to have lost its ability to shock. Even if you have seen the films "Dangerous Liaisons" (dir. Steven Frears) or "Valmont" (dir. Milos Forman) based on the book - and whether or not you liked them - this is an outstandingly good novel which is beautifully served by the precise and graceful prose of its translator, whose subtle range of diction manages to convey the tones and tempers of the characters most convincingly. The story's chief virtues - a compelling narrative drive, and a skill in characterisation which permit some superbly-observed insights - easily withstand comparison with the screen versions; even today, when we are so fully exposed to the diverse secrets of the psychiatrist's confessional and the details of the all world's vicissitudes and miseries, it would be hard to improve on their portrayal here in print.

The book succeeds so well for many reasons. Some of its appeal to a sophisticated (or at least blasé) modern audience is, I believe, the multi-layered cynicism of its vainglorious but not unattractive main characters and rivals, the Marquise de Merteuil and the Vicomte (viscount) de Valmont, a reminder that profound deceit is not the sole prerogative of the post-industrial era. Part of the reader's amusement is to observe how their egotism - by far the most easily-wounded of their sensibilities - is also an exercise in the deception of themselves as well as of all those with whom they have dealings. Equally, their wily scheming and duplicity simultaneously appal the reader while also appealing to any secret desire he might himself harbour to exercise his own will with equal freedom and with equal heedlessness of conscience or consequences, thus planting a distinct ambivalence in his or her breast. This effect is augmented by the shifting first-person narrative, a device which gives the voices of its protagonists an intimate (and often touching) immediacy and multiplies the scope for irony by giving the reader a consistently better view than the characters, to which the skilful interweaving of the sub-plots also contributes. I should mention that the novel is written entirely as a sequence of letters. This format was common in the 18th century when the book was written, but its relative rarity in modern fiction makes its appearance today refreshing. That it is overtly concerned with the sexual seduction of the weak by the strong partially disguises the fact that it is also a philosophical novel whose themes would easily form the subject of more general discussion. As a depiction of the relations between individual human beings, it is, to be sure, a study of calculating spiritual emptiness, but one which does not shy from laying bare the catastrophic consequences of the conspirators on their victims, just as the report of a war correspondent might describe in detail the horror of a bomb explosion in a hospital. "Les Liaisons Dangereuses" not only contains plenty of anguish on the part of its characters and an affecting deathbed scene, but the reader's own emotions are made to oscillate intensely throughout from amusement to arousal, from curiosity to incredulity, from admiration to dismay... all thanks to the superb manipulation of Laclos, whose mastery of both narrative and reader is absolute and, perhaps, somewhat unsettling. (But how I wish he had written more!)

What do the United States, Myanmar, and Liberia have in common, as opposed to every other nation in the world? The answer is that they are the only nations not to have embraced the metric system. Inevitably, they will; their scientists all use it, and cars are made by it, and trading with other nations requires it. The inevitability of victory of the metric system is something Napoleon himself recognized: "Conquests will come and go," he declared, "but this work will endure." The work he spoke of was the defining of the meter, and it was a task begun in the final days of the French monarchy. In 1792, two French astronomers set out separately on the quest to make an accurate measurement of the globe, a measurement that would enable people to use the constant of the size of the globe as the foundation for rational weights and measures. Their plan was to measure enough of the distance of a north-south meridian through Paris that they would then be able to calculate the distance from the equator to the north pole, and one ten-millionth of that natural distance would be the meter. They aimed for unprecedented precision, and they got it, but they didn't get it exactly, for fascinating reasons all wonderfully told in _The Measure of All Things: The Seven-Year Odyssey and Hidden Error That Transformed the World_ (The Free Press) by Ken Alder.

It seems a simple task; a line of longitude from Dunkirk south to Barcelona would be mapped and calculated by triangulating high points, like mountains and steeples, along the line. In practice, it was devilishly, maddeningly, and lethally difficult. Weather, disease, the ravages of time, superstition, politics, and war all conspired to make the work of a few months stretch into years. The astronomer Delambre, heading north, was mistaken for an aristocrat, detained, and suspected of using a church tower as a royalist beacon. His partner Méchain, who took the southern route, had similar problems, and worse ones, as war with Spain erupted while he was in Spain. He had a fiendish obsession with exactitude, and made measurements of Barcelona's latitude by reckoning from the stars. Unfortunately, they were wrong due to refraction from the atmosphere, and Méchain knew they were wrong, but couldn't get them right. The knowledge of the error tortured him for the rest of his life. Méchain's error is not the error referred to in the book's subtitle. All the triangulation work had shown that the critics had been right from before the beginning, for the work could not produce a perfectly precise meter; the world was too irregular for that. The astronomers' work had produced, however, documentation of the more interesting fact of Earthly irregularity.

This story could not have been presented in a more dramatic and entertaining manner. An epic about the foundation of the metric system might seem to be impossible, but Alder has made the personalities interesting. He has also made clear the process of triangulation, the equipment required, and the scientific philosophy of what an error actually is. He has well described the history of the period, and the failures of the French Revolution, such as the calendar containing twelve months of three ten-day weeks each, or the clock with ten one-hundred minute hours in a day. Beside the origin of the admirable metric system of weights and measures, Alder has also given a brief history of how the world has adopted the system, which Americans ought to know about, since, with reluctance, we are having to use it more and more

The Measure of all Things - Ken Alder

This is a fascinating book! The subject (A French expedition to determine the length of the meter) sounds deadly dull, but the author weaves a thoroughly engrossing tangled web of science, personalities and French history around the time of the revolution. Do not be put off getting the book if science scares you: There is little science in it. If you are a scientist and lover of France, as I am, you will find yourself in heaven as the many of the places mentioned are places you may have visited. For example, the Pantheon in Paris, now a final resting place for many famous French, was one of the sites used for triangulation. But I learned more about its history in this book than in any other! In short, buy this book!

THE MEASURE OF ALL THINGS is a delightfully written account of the quest by Delambre and Mechain, two astronomers who, in the midst of the French Revolution, attempt to use the latest technology (at that time) to triangulate various points along a meridian to find the perfect measurement, the meter. (One ten millionth the distance between the North Pole and the Equator) Along the way, they combat rapidly changing governments, ignorance and fear of the unknown, and most importantly (in Mechain's case), a crippling fear of error. The twists and turns of this enterprise are amazingly well-researched by Adler, and they are written in a style that is both informative and entertaining. Adler suggests that this quest led to nothing less than the transformation of how science was perceived by its practitioners; the change from the idea of savants (who believed in certain absolutes in science) to scientists (who were "engaged in a struggle to quantify their [scientists] uncertainty. ") The metric systems importance to France and the world at large is explained in political and economic terms that are easily digested by the reader, but at the heart of this book is the basic concept that how man deals with error; it can be his salvation or in the case of Mechain, his downfall. This is a wonderful examination of this momentous undertaking and well worth the time of anyone interested in man's constant efforts to utilize science for the improvement of the human condition.

This book is actually three essays. Each essay is split into several subject matters and thus becomes a neat secondary source for any student of the subject at hand.
The first, by Jean Bottero, is superbly crafted for the general reader who wishes to learn more about, as he says: "History begins at Sumer". The language does not, unlike Clarisse Herrenschmidt's second essay, presuppose a detailed knowledge of the subject at hand. Bottero outlines his premise that Mesopotamian culture is a direct descendant of Semite (Akkadian mainly) acculturation of Sumerian culture. He argues that writing evolved as a mnemotechnical device beginning with ideograms and pictograms. He gives a pellucid explanation of the definition of religion, stating it presupposes a belief in the 'sacred' or 'supernatural'. I.e. a higher order that manifests itself in two ways: Either through religiosity - a reverence or love for the order, or centrifrugally - a fear of the order. What is particularly good about Bottero's writing is he makes statements and then spends some time explaining clearly what the terms of his statement mean. For example, many scholars would state the Mesopotamian religion was not historical and leave it at that. Bottero gives a concise and very understandable definition of the term.
The second, by Clarisse Herrenschmidt, far more than Bottero, presupposes knowledge of the subject at hand. Therefore, it is slightly less accessible to the general reader. Given her essay is the longest of the three this is a shame. Nevertheless, Herrenschmidt opens, spending considerable time explaining why proto-Elamic is untranslatable and then tends to run away like any excellent scholar into the intricacies of language and its development from the consonant alphabet to the Greek vowel-using alphabet of eighth century Athens, to the detriment of the general reader who will invariably get lost along the way in the tricky twists and turns of intellectual theorizing. Aside from that, the essay has a long discussion the development of consonants and states that an alphabet is ruled by the rule - one sign = one sound. Not entirely sure I agree with that, as the english alphabet has many variances of sound on its letters. Anyhow, there is an excellent brief history of the technical evolution of writing and its links to social recognition. Herrenschmidt basically states that, in a barbaric society, (which she never really defines) speech = power. From here Herrenschmidt goes on to major discussion on the Mazdean Avesta and from there to Greek. She ends by saying Greek was the language of culture, Aramaic the vernacular, and Hebrew that of the sacred corpus. The concluding section places far too much emphasis on the Greek dropping of the aspirated 'h' in eta c.403 B.C; for example, in the statement: "They thus prohibited the privatization of breath through writing, because speech was for everyone and that included the gods." What exactly does that mean? So, Herrenschmidt's essay is for the advanced student of ancient writing, not the general reader, particularly given its immense 'mathematical' and 'analytical' approach to the subject.
The third, by Jean Pierre Vermont, is much akin to Bottero's in style and, therefore, far more accessible than Herrenschmidt. The main thrust is to discover the origins of the Greek world given the 4 centuries of literary darkness after the collapse of Mycenae around the 12th century B.C to the appearance of the Greek hegemony in the 9th century B.C. He indicates that Greece moved from a society of the oral to the written and that its religion was governed by two facts: a polis with its own tutelary god and the general pantheon 'managed' from centers such as Delphi. Vermont places (rightly so) much emphasis on the introduction of prose in the 6th century B.C. and its subsequent consequences in that it meant philosophical discourses moved from the realm of the intellectual - much in the same way Herrenschmidt states that Persian cuniform was retained because its complexity gave individuals power over the whole with sacred texts - to the common people. Hesiod's Theogony is heavily drawn on by Vermont to demonstrate his thesis that the evolution in Greek writing was tied to a shift in social power. What becomes more interesting is the realization that the form of writing was influenced by a maturing need for catography. Vermont moves on to a discussion on the polis and the invention of the political and democracy. There is a good two page opener on the definition of the very word 'democracy' and the section ends up being somewhat semantical as it proceeds from there. Inevitably, as any serious scholar must do, Vermont dives briefly in to the Laws of Solon and thence into Homer.
To conclude, any student of ancient writing, reasoning and religion must read these essays. They are precise, clear and extremely good at their given niches. The general reader will find it very informative and Bottero and Vermont can be read by anyone with a rudimentary grasp of the ancient history. Herrenschmidt might become too involved with detailed knowledge of her subject matter.

This book consists of three long essays by different authors, one of whom is Bottero. The book is more technical than Bottero's Everyday Life in Ancient Mesopotamia, and if you're thinking of reading this book, I would recommend you probably read the latter work first before tackling this volume. It might also be a good idea to read a brief history of the ancient Sumerians and Akkadians to get at least a basic grounding in the history and something of a historical context, since, as I said, this book is significantly more technical, and perhaps, a little dry as a result, but it's still an impressive piece of scholarship and well worth reading.

Bottero's Everyday Life is also written by a team of authors, with Bottero writing several of the chapters. It's quite readable, as well as extremely interesting, and has chapters on Love and Sex in Ancient Mesopotamia, Religion, the Law, Food and Cuisine, Women's Rights, etc.

Overall, this work is a valuable contribution to scholarship in the area with much good information and some important theoretical discussions on the nature of thought and culture in ancient Mesopotamia.

Some years ago I read a quote by Rabelais -- something about whether a chimera bombinating in a vacuum could devour second intentions -- and I sensed that his humor might appeal to me. "Gargantua and Pantagruel," his literary landmark and the source of that quote, is a virtual encyclopedia of Renaissance satire that contrives a heroic epic as a backdrop for a comprehensive commentary of medieval and classical history and mythology.

The story, which concerns the adventures of the giant Gargantua, his son Pantagruel, and Pantagruel's friend Panurge, is completely silly; just scan the chapter titles in the table of contents for an indication. Silly, but not stupid: Rabelais is a serious scholar who has written a book that is not intended to be taken seriously. An epicure with an insatiable appetite for learning and a fascination with bodily functions, he believes that wine, scatology, and the pursuit of knowledge are inseparable. The book is all codpieces, urination, defecation, and flatulence at the service of satirizing the pedantry in the medical, legal, ecclesiastical, and academic professions as they existed in the sixteenth century. It should be noted that Rabelais's satire is generally playful and cheerful rather than bitter and mean-spirited, so the book's tone is always light even if its content is very erudite.

The plot, such as it is, is episodic rather than unified. Gargantua defends his country, Utopia, from invasion by King Picrochole of Lerne, in a war started by an argument between Utopian shepherds and Lernean cake-bakers; Pantagruel and Panurge then defend Utopia from invasion by Anarch, King of the Dipsodes; Panurge conducts inquiries among a variety of experts on whether or not he should get married, which leads to several discussions about cuckoldry, impotence, and cuckoldry as a consequence of impotence; and Pantagruel and Panurge, along with their monkish friend Friar John and several cohorts, embark on a sea voyage to consult the oracle of the Temple of the Bottle, visiting many strange islands and encountering many bizarre creatures along the way. As mentioned, it is of course all nonsense, but it is a definite precursor to the more farcical works of Jonathan Swift, Voltaire, Lewis Carroll, and James Joyce, and for that reason it has significant value as a ribald curiosity.

This book is unparalled in its accomplishment. Francois Rabelais manages to deliver a satire of incredible wit, humor, intrigue, cleverness, and subtleties, while still maintaining a literal story more captivating than any piece of contemporary literature. I give it my highest praise, and recommend it whole-heartedly for anyone interested in the Middle Ages, philosophy, religious satire, French, humor, or just a good read.

This book is Rabelais at his best. Yes, the humor is at times crude and vulgar. Yes, the more delicate reader may find it disgusting and idiotic, but if this isn't one of the most clever books ever written, I'll be a monkey's uncle! Not unlike Robertson Davies, who mentions our potty-mouthed friend many times in his book "The Rebel Angels", Rabelais takes bathroom humour to a level you probably never thought it could reach: high comedy. I highly recommend it!

In the beginning this book seems as if it will be interesting, or scandalous, or something, but it quickly proves to be an endless series of repetititive vignettes about the two title characters and their innumerable attempts to find love, or passion, or a reason to live, or something. The second half of the book is centered mainly on Jim's long affair with Kate, Jules' wife. Jules completely approves of and even facilitates their relationship, so there's really no conflict there. The conflict comes from their innumerable break ups and reconciliations. When I say innumerable, I mean it. After a point I found myself not really caring whether they stayed together or not, but just praying for the relationship to be resolved one way or another so that the descriptions of their silly, melodramatic fights would end. The book is kind of interesting in terms of its style and its commentary on social and moral values in early 20th century Europe, but overall I found it a bit of a bore.