Aragones, Francescato and Garling have organized an excellent volume with the main rotes investigated by modern research in the environmental psychology of residential settings. Since the classical oeuvre "The Handbook of Environmental Psychology" (1987) edited by Stokols and Altman (and the excellent work inside made by Tognoly about that huge topic) there were few other literary accomplishments like that one. As an architect I am specially interested in those researches linking "without fear of the inherent complexity" the physical and functional and psychological variables in residential environment planning - and some of the chapters (like the chapter 9, "Spatial-Physical Neighborhoods Affecting Social Interactions among Neighbors") are well written and founded, helpful, and "within call" to a major transcultural and trans-professional discussion. I personally recommend that book to my dearest colleagues, the ones wrestling in that difficult area of social work service in which the architect is so needed.

"It is interesting to speculate on what southern history would have been if the Negro had not been a singing race," reflected Guy B. Johnson in 1934. He did not develop the speculation in his essay "Negro Folk Songs" in the 1934 collection Culture in the South. But he noted how a black composer "borrowed from the storehouse of folk blues, shaped up his 'blues hits' and turned them back to the folk with interest. It is all a bit confusing to the folk-song collector who tries to keep origins and paths of diffusion straight, but to the folk it makes no difference. The phonograph and radio blues are rapidly becoming at home in the folk tradition."

In the "veritable flood of literature on Negro songs" which was published after World War I, there were several works that noted blues, though generally the emphasis was on ballads and spirituals. Conventional folk-song scholarship, combined with uncertainty as to the authenticity of blues which had "become the basis for commercial exploitation," resulted in a growing disregard of the idiom at the very time when it was exceptionally revealing of black attitudes and experience.

Opportunities for research on popular African-American values were present even in the depths of the depression era. Narratives from black interviewees were gathered in seventeen states, mainly in the South, for the Writers' Unit of the Library of Congress; from these, two thousand "slave narratives" were selected and published. Important as they were, sixty years later one can only regret that complementary narratives of life in the segregated South were not gathered at the same time. Yet some studies of rural black culture based on field research were written by, for example, Carter Woodson, Arthur Raper and Charles S. Johnson. The latter, in particular, cited extracts from the personal narratives of those from whom he gathered data.

Quite the most extensive study of blacks between the world wars was undertaken by a thirty-person team led by the Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal. Substantially funded by the Carnegie Foundation, it provided a solid socioeconomic base for black studies and assessed white and black "beliefs," "valuations" and expressed "opinions." Although an unrivaled work, An American Dilemma spared a mere eight of its more than fourteen hundred pages for "Negro achievements" in business, literature, sports, dance, theater, popular entertainment and the visual arts. In this disregard for African-American culture it reflected the work of black sociologists E. Franklin Frazier, J. G. St. Clair Drake, Horace Cayton and others who were members of the team. Yet blues was mentioned, even if "Negroes have contributed such popular music forms as ragtime, jazz, the blues, swing and boogie-woogie" was all they had to say on the subject.

Song collecting was the province of the Archive of Folk Song of the Library of Congress, and the invaluable location recordings of John A. Lomax, Alan Lomax and other field workers such as Zora Neale Hurston and John W. Work give us insights into the work song, ballad and folk song traditions that survived in the South. A decade later John A. Lomax described the circumstances of his field recordings, in which, however, the blues played little part. A dozen blues were included in the Lomaxes' 1936 collection, Negro Folk Songs as Sung by Leadbelly, which related to the singer's past life.

In spite of the fact that many thousands of blues records representing hundreds of individual titles were on general sale in the 1930s, whether in country stores and chain stores, from tailgates or by mail order, they were rarely accorded more than a passing word in the social literature of the period. There was no recognition that they could be significant indicators of the spirit and suffering of the African-American poor, or that blues singers expressed the feelings and attitudes of those who shared their color, class and culture.

In order to ascertain the impact on the black community of the depression, the implementation of the New Deal and the involvement of the United States in World War II, Guido van Rijn's book, Roosevelt's Blues analyzes, in depth for the first time, the content of the blues of that period. Some may argue that the blues is not reliable as an indicator, but as noted above, there are few, if any, others. As the author shows, some singers were particularly concerned with social issues, but a significant proportion of all blues and gospel titles were sociopolitical in content or implication. That many of these referred directly to President Roosevelt may seem surprising, but the nature of the presidency in American politics is such as to personify government.

Analysts will continue to assess the depth of the crisis, the efficacy of the administration, and the measure of recovery. But postmortem analyses, though revealing and necessary, seldom reflect the perceptions of the times. Echoing Guy B. Johnson, we may find it interesting to speculate on what we would know of black southern feelings and opinions in the interwar years if African-Americans "had not been a [blues] singing race," and had not been recorded for the phonograph, or if Guido van Rijn had not undertaken so rigorously and sympathetically the formidable task of transcribing and analyzing the content of large numbers of those records and placing them so precisely in their historical, social and political contexts.

Sometimes with impassiveness and resignation, frequently in anger or frustration, often with irony or scepticism, and always with simplicity and economy of expression, the blues transcribed and explained in this important book open windows on the inner lives and emotions of African-Americans in the depression, giving human dimensions to the raw statistical data of 1930s sociological surveys.

Paul Oliver, Oxford Brookes University

Even though he never made it to Lhasa, which was off-limits to outsiders when this book was written, Secret Tibet is the most informative & insightful book on Tibet's history, culture & religions I have ever read, a rich & rewarding experience, the best of all books I've read on Tibet (& I believe I've read them all). Fosco Maraini was an exceptional human being, compassionate, highly intelligent, & he wrote with poetic elegance. He was a top ethnologist, a skilled photographer, an expert mountain climber and above all, an extraordinary human being with an amazing understanding of human behavior at all levels. All of his books should be in print & read. He wrote extraordinary books on Mountain Climbing, Pearl Divers in Japan, & above all, on Japan: Meeting With Japan, one of the most amazing books I have ever read. I recommend him to anyone & everyone. You'll never regret reading him.

Unfamiliar with Ceronetti's work, I discovered this text through a reference to it in E.M. Cioran's ANATHEMAS AND ADMIRATIONS. It seemed worth checking out, since a.) he was keeping company with profiles of Borges and Beckett, always a good indicator, and, b.) the slip of information that Cioran wrote seemed to suggest that the author was perhaps more pessimistic than Cioran, which I had to see to believe. Anyway, this is something like a gloss of medical history for the past few thousand years, viewed with a very grim and gimlet eye and with a focus on the less pleasant aspects of the bodily experience. The selections are generally as pithy as Cioran and sometimes as vicious, but all in all Ceronetti seems a bit more even-tempered. Nonetheless, for fans of the Rochefoucauld/Nietzsche/Cioran school of merciless epigrams, this is strongly recommended.

This book is BRILLIANT! A familiar good vs evil plot, beautiful illustrations, and chock full of bizarre situations. Reading this book to a child, and pointing out all the hysterical things in the illustrations, is a complete joy. Definitely worth locating and purchasing used.

I read this book shortly before meeting Joan Andrews at a pro-life event in Houston. Words cannot express the feeling one gets upon being introduced to this very courageous yet extraordinarily humble person. Joan has spent her entire adult life fighting the evil which is abortion. She has always done so in the most passive, peaceful, Christlike manner. This book is essentially a diary of the two and a half years she spent, mostly in solitary confinement, in a Florida prison on a five-year sentence for dismantling a suction machine in an abortion "clinic". During this time, she was denied everything which most of us hold near and dear, including that which mattered most to her as a devout Roman Catholic, the Eucharist. The indignities to which she was exposed and the humiliation she was forced to suffer in an attempt by her captors to coerce her into recanting her beliefs make this a painful story to read at times. However, Joan's triumph over all this adversity, her indomitable spirit, and the way in which she has always loved & prayed for even her worst enemies make this a rewarding book to finish reading!

This book is an excellent book if you already know the language and have some good Python books that explains the various language features (from Beginner to Intermediate Levels). I would recommend it if you need to quickly look up some language feature/syntax that you may have forgotten or can't quite remember. But it is not a good book for even an experienced programmer to learn Python from. The book is very terse wrt to the language features, with minimal information for somebody trying to learn about the language. The last 2/3's of the book is information on the Python libraries that come with a standard distribution. The Library section contains no more than what you will find in the documentation directory of the standard Python distribution. Considering approximately 1/3 of the book (99 pages) deals with the language and the rest deals with material that you can access and print (if required) from the current distribution that you have downloaded, it is not a particularly good book to purchase. It is a good reference book but to learn the language properly you will need to purchase other books on the subject - in which case you won't need this one! :-)

This book is probably the most useful book you will find about Python.

The first 95 pages provide a very well written and well structured tutorial and overview of the Python language. Although not intended as an introduction for beginners, anybody with sound programming skills and experience in another object oriented language would find it readable. For someone with a small amount of experience in Python, this is an excellent read with great examples and clear explanations of all the Python constructs. Beazley also covers some other interesting areas like 'Performance and Memory Considerations'

The next 200 pages form a detailed reference for the Python Library. While not covering the complete Python Library (which is ever changing), the author has taken time to provide clear new examples for the most useful of these functions. Only the very obscure functions are missing and this reference should prove useful to any Python programmer.

The last 30 pages cover the topic of Extending and embedding Python. This section is for the advanced user only and will probably only prove useful if you intend to integrate C and Python applications.

The book is well written, and well presented, with excellent examples throughout.

The author did a great job of including a ton of information in a clear and succinct reference. This is not a book that will teach a newbie all about programming. However, it is perfect for those that have at least some programming experience, whether in Python or some other language, and need a reference while coding in Python.
For those new to the language who find themselves wondering "How do I do that in Python?", the first chapter includes a short (11 page) tutorial that demonstrates using:
- Variables
- Conditionals
- File I/O
- Strings
- Lists & Tuples
- Loops
- Dictionaries
- Functions
- Classes
- Exceptions
- Modules
The tutorial section is nice while getting up to speed with Python's syntax.
The rest of the book goes into a bit more detail on rest of the Python's language features with the exception of some of the more inconspicuous ones. Most of the "raw" information in the book is available on python.org or other online resources, but with the book you get that same information filtered through the author's Python experience plus a lot of concise examples. I've found that what is not covered in this book is better answered by searching the related mailing list archives.
As with the other New Riders programming books I own, this one is indexed well, making it easy to find what I am looking for. Also, the size of the book is small enough that it fits nicely in my briefcase and on my desktop.
It appears that a lot of thought went into both the content of the book as well as the overall design of the reference, that's why I've given it the highest rating.

As most other readers seemed to have done, I read this book in about one hour, and it was a pure delight. A tale well told, and the rhythm of the text is indeed like poetry. Or a piece of music with a repeated cadence like a train on rails, indicating at the same time the broad rhythm of ongoing life and the uniqueness of events. I loved the dry and sparse style, e.g. of the recurrent travel description going from France to Japan or vice-versa in one paragraph, the unexpectedly broken or repeated sentences. The story is like a watercolor with some stark ink strokes (very Japanese and Zen, of course) which makes the driving force of human love and will come out all the more powerfully. A short, romantic and elegant tale of love and commitment, light sensuality (what fabric is more sensual that silk?) and an eroticism slowly throbbing under the tale like lava. Pleasure to read, and it makes a very good gift, too.

Silk is a romantic fable of sensuality and passion blended with bittersweet irony. Herve Joncour's travels in quest of silk worms takes him around the world, but the beauty of the story has nothing to do with either silk worms or travel. The beauty comes from the intense desire and passion the author has captured in such concise form. The reader is immediately aware, not only from the slim slip of a book that it is, but from the scarcity of words that comprise each chapter, that this story will be told neatly, breathlessly, like poetry breezing off each page. One only truly understands the layers of emotion the author has created to bind the relationships of the three main characters at the end, and then at that, with only a few deft words, the poignant irony of the story stabs at the heart like the piercing sting of an arrow. That Alessandro Barrico could express such depth of feeling in prose so sparse, begs one to compare his style to that of the elegant lightness of silk itself. It is simply breathtaking, and well worth tears shed at the end.

I have read the first chapter of this book in used book stores several times, but I am stuck in Saudi Arabia and found it in a small libary here. As I read it I got very hooked.

The story is about a man traveling around the world looking for silk worm eggs. At first the fates seem to drag the man from place to place year after year. But when he finds a forbidden woman in Japan he takes charge of his fate.

There are two letters which are translated to the man which change his life. Each one changes his direction when it seems unchangable.

The use of repitition of his journey is exciting because every trip the man has changed and the same journey does not lead to the same place or time ever again.

The best short read in years. A great one day book. The language and the story are beautiful excellent translation.

EJB

This was a thorough book on the Billy Meier case. The only gripe I have is for the money there should have been a few more pictures. The only thing that would have convinced me more is if I had had a close encounter of my own.

I read this big book twice and Im amazed at the information given on subjects, OTHER than UFO stuff. Everyone always talked about Billy and UFO's and this book has a fair share of it, but what it really does is give you an in depth look at where humans came from, how the solar system has changed over millions of years, religion and its brainwashing, spirituality as I've never heard before and many more topics... In the book he even gives future predictions of what will happen if we don't wake up as humans and talks about predictions that he predicted many years ago that already came true... This is a truly amazing piece of information..

I didn't know anything about the Billy Meier contacts until I read this book. The book covers all aspects of the case including the evidence and how life is on other planets. There is also a large color photo section with real pictures of alien spacecraft. I would recommend this book to anyone who is interested in UFOs or alien contact.

While I waited for a flight in Venice, I wandered into the bookshop in the little airport there and picked up a handful of Donna Leon's mysteries. I was DELIGHTED! Leon is a University of Maryland professor seconded to a University in the Veneto and she has developed a sweet Venetian detective protagonist, Guido Brunetti. La Fenice (The Phoenix, in Italian) is the famous Venetian opera house and serves as the crime scene for Brunetti's first case. When a famous Austrian orchestra conductor, Helmut Wellauer, is discovered in his dressing room after the second act, dead of cyanide poisoning, Guido must find not only the killer but the motive of course. His search takes him into the sexually perverse past (distant AND recent) of the conductor but also finds him confronting any number of people who are likely suspects including most of the people he worked with and a number of family members. One of the most attractive things about Leon's detective is that he is an amiable, competent family man who is dealing with the quotidian: moody teenaged son, bouncy sure-footed pre-teen daughter, a headstrong and likable wife (an English professor) in addition to an INcompetent power-insecure supervisor who does little but obstruct Brunetti's efforts. The discovery of the murderer is so complicated and the final twist in the end so neatly and tidily closes the case that I was hooked and couldn't wait to read the next one. I have always loved murder mysteries (as one reviewer calls "procedural police mysteries"), and Leon's are among the finest.

Out of the famous theater of Venice, La Fenice, sounds the music of „La Traviata". It should be an amazing premiere - the singers are wonderfull and the conductor is one of the famoust in the world, Helmut Wellauer. But after the break Wellauer's not appearing on the podium. He's death, he has been poisoned with cyanide. Guido Brunetti, a middleaged Commissaro of the police, is charged with the case. Brunetti is surching for suspects. But it is difficult to get known all the many people, which knew the famous conductour, and to figure out which of them could be the murder. Is the murder found in the theater? Maybe the famous soprano, Flavia Petrelli, whose been said to have a liason with a british woman, Brett Lynch. The director of La Fenice, Franco Santore? The bariton, the tenor? Or does Mrs Wellauer, the conductors very much younger wife, have a reason to kill him? Brunetti is surching in the present relations and the past happenings of Wellauer's life.

If I remember right, I first came across this mystery series completely by accident. With time, though, I've become an utterly devoted fan of Donna Leon. It's highly unfortunate that her books have fallen out of print in the USA. Just recently, however, they've started reappearing in these paperback editions. "La Fenice" is the first in the series. You don't have to read them in order, but it does add to your experience if you do.

Donna Leon is a GREAT writer! I guarantee that you will utterly adore the characters in these novels. All the stories take place in Venice, Italy (near where Leon lives and teaches English). Herein, we follow the life and investigations of Vice-Commisario Guido Brunetti. There's a certain brutality and social consciousness to *all* the crimes Brunetti ultimately uncovers (the brutality "off-camera" for the most part). Meanwhile, we follow (as the novels progress) Brunetti's family life, and the development of his relationship with his wife and children. Extremely good books, on all counts.

I rather suspect the reason these books have been virtually ignored in the USA is that Commisario Brunetti's wife is a professed Communist. Brunetti, on the other hand, does not share this point of view. Their diverse polical views create a necessary tension, yet it's interesting how often their practical goals regarding human relationships are really much the same. These are very European novels, obviously. And they are absolutely some of the *best* mysteries you will ever read. VERY highly recommended!