Guido Knopp's "Hitler's Henchmen" is really a multiple biography of the six men the author identifies as the German dictator's most important disciples: Herman Goering, Heinrich Himmler, Joseph Goebbles, Albert Speer, Rudolf Hess and Admiral Karl Doenitz. In Knopp's chosen lineup lies the first problem. Most students of The Third Reich would certainly place Hitler's Chief of Staff Martin Boorman and SS Security Chief Reinhard Heydrich well above the ineffectual Hess or the plodding Doenitz in terms of their importance to the Nazi regime. Ignoring those two vital figures is a serious flaw in the book.

The second problem is the book's configuartion. Not witstanding the fact that a few chapters is not nearly enough space to adequately explain the lives and roles of any of these individuals, Knopp provides pages of direct quotes from and about each one, interspersed at random throughout the narrative. He also makes the fatal mistake in such an introductory work of assuming the reader is already intimately familiar with the overall history of Nazi German, referring to larger events with attributing dates or in what sequence they occurred. All of this left me wondering exactly who was the intended audience for this work? Nazi scholars won't learn anything they didn't already know, while casual readers are likely to find themselves hopelessly confuced.

Overall, "Hitler's Henchmen" is not a well written work of history, even allowing for the fact that it was translated into English.

Guido Knopp has given us six psychologial pen portraits (not biographies) of leaders of the Third Reich - Goebbels, Goring, Himmler, Hess, Speer and Donitz. He will have no truck with the argument that Hitler was a weak, lazy or disinterested dictator. Rather, the henchmen portrayed in this book took their orders directly from the fuhrer. Knopp writes, "The Reich's murderous existence depended solely on him. Without him, it became a ship of the dead." Although the author has included some new material from British and Russian archives, the analysis of the characters does not break a lot of new ground (how could it?) although this reviewer was interested in Knopp's account that Speer may have returned to the Berlin bunker in late April 1945 to dissuade Hitler from appointing him as successor. The author's strength lies in putting these nazi leaders properly in context. He shows up very well the inconsistencies in Himmler's character which made him both a yes man and, ultimately, a traitor. Donitz by contrast was made of sterner stuff - he went on fighting for supplies and raw materials long after there was anything to distribute. If you want a summary of what made these men tick, interspersed with wry contemporary comments from their colleagues, Knopp's book is well worth studying. When Goring told Hitler in 1939, "We've got to stop going for broke," Hitler replied, "All my life I've gone for broke." Those few words aptly sum up the leadership problem of the Third Reich.

I'm only on the 3rd chapter, but from what I've read so far this book is well written. I'm only 17 and I don't know much about that era besides the war. because my history books never said anything thing about these men. It gave me an insight on what went on nazi Germany. When I started reading this book I thought that Hitler was the behind everything. I didn't even know these people existed. This book is giving me a psychology and history lesson.

Keep up the good work. Guido Knopp

I bought this book purely based on the fact that it is deemed "classic literature" as well as "scandalous".

I read through the first couple of chapters then threw it down with disgust..even for a translation it seemed poorly written and the content was DEFINITELY unnerving. (I was looking for a STORY behind the porn..and there was nothing but sex at first..).. Anyway, later that evening I picked it up and started to browse through it again..THIS TIME I saw the "story"! There is much more here than a woman debasing herself for a lover..there is much more here than the graphic depictions of sexual encounters...this is a story about the complex ities of love vs sex et al...about a very complex woman whom (it could be argued) was not "enslaved" at all. If there's anyone out there who,like me, want to read this as a literary experience..I would recommend it! BUT!..You must be willing (and able) to see the story through the sex..andI almost missed it because of a kind of knee-jerk, conservative reaction. I'm glad I overcame that, and allowed myself to finish the book.

As SM books go, The Story of O is rather tame. But this book is so much more than just erotica. It's a story of complete submission, mental, physical, emotional. Is it a slam on women? I suppose. Could the protagonist have been male? Sure. But it wouldn't have been as effective. Face it, feminists denounce the book because a women becomes a slave to a man. What would the fems say if it had been the reverse? Probably nothing, because it would have been just another piece of porn (to them). That someone would give themselves so completely to another triggers something dark within us all. As fantasies go, it's a powerful one. As a lifestyle, it's an amazing study of the psyche.

I read some of the customer reviews and I would like to clarify a couple of things. It seems that some of the readers did not pay much attention to the fact that Pauline Reage did not write this book. This book was written 40 years ago by an anonymous person. The reviews were negative toward the author and the writing style of the book which, I felt, was inncorrect on the part of the readers. Secondly, I feel that some of the readers did not understand that this was not, in my opinion, a romantic "love story." This book was about what O would do for her lover out of love. Yes, I believe that the characters ideals of love were extreme and very perverse, but that is not how I interpreted the book. To me, the book showed the enjoyment O received out of being submissive not only to Rene and Sir Stephen but to all men and women that wanted her to belong to them in everyway that was possible. This book took me by surprise but I would definitly recommend this book to anyone that has ever been curious about S/M. The Story of O will either push you into the exotic world of sado-masachisticism or it will completely horrify you. I would love to know who originally wrote the book but it will probably remain a mystery.

While scholarly and of interest, the text, sadly is not well organized so that one might apply and interpret the parts. The most striking problem with the text is the clinical manner in which the author describes the "wanton" nature of a girl, 20 years of age, who gave him her birth data for a chart but was raped and murdered before he gave the interpretations to her. He (Zoller) says she "managed to get to a friends house after being beaten and raped but died on the way to the hospital". He then goes on to "illustrate" how this was all due to her low character as he "deomnstrates" from her chart. This is an unspeakably lowly abuse of his poor client and the art of astrology and as such, I did not appreciate his approach one bit.

This is an important reference book, for all astrologers interested in the history and roots of the Art. A masterpiece.

My interest in NN/GA started 3 years ago and I found this book. It covers some advanced methods for trading. But I am not sure whether they are really better than the traditional technical analysis. The results in this book could not prove it. And some authors didn't disclose their methods clearly. It seems to be very common among people who are using NN/GA/fuzzy logic in trading. So it is hard to know the reliability and accuracy of their results. And we cannot repeat their experiments. Personally, I won't use them in trading. I also gradually lose the interest in this area. I would like to know anyone really made profit by using them.

Discusses financial applications of neural networks, genetic algorithms and fuzzy logic. Is aimed at the beginner to intermediate level. Focuses more on data processing and application than on the actual building of neural nets. Several useful examples are given. Sections are written by experts in that particular field. This is usually advantageous except ocassionally where terminology may not always be consistent between sections. Overall a good book if you know how to write your own NN/GA/FUZZY program or have access to one.

As an avid fan of the Marquis de Sade's infectious intriguing writing and a fan of all thing artistic I was thrilled to add this to my collection. Yet it was a bit of a disappointment.

In de Sade's words Justine was portrayed as much more of an innocent looking girl, young, childlike and hopeful, yet Crepax's illustrations portray her as a wanton, gaunt looking woman. Much of the elegance and richness of de Sade's original writing is lost in Crepax quick pen and ink drawings.

I could be disappointed merely because my favorite character of the Justine tale, a blood thirsty count, was not included in the Crepax version, though he lends an air of sensuality and intellect (deranged though it may be) to the tale.

This is however a lot of fun to have around. I don't mind flipping through every now and then. Be warned though many people will find it offensive, and if you have any sort of moral fiber it may disturb you (even though you won't be able to look away).

This library reference is very extended, up-to-date and cover every aspects of Python's modules ( string, regular expressions, ...). The division in themes ( Maths, Internet, ...) and in order of usefulness makes it easy to learn and get important information. The index and the table of contents make it very easy to find the appropriate method to perform a particular task. In addition, the style is concise and the presentation clear.

Nevertheless, this is only a reference : The examples are rare and insufficient to learn efficiently the language, unless you need'nt examples to learn all about a new language.

Therefore, this book should be used as a reminder or a quick finder, i.e. a reference book.

If you are interested in communication research, this is a good resource. It covers social science, theory, statistical methods and data analysis. However, if you're just interested in mass communication--especially as a writer--you might find this book a littel dry.

I love the concept of this book - the worlds leading astronomers discuss what we can't explain about the universe! Dialogues are entertaining, but you'd most likely have to have some education in astronomy/cosmology to be able to understand the theoretical parts, which make most of the book. (The book is meant for graduate students and researchers.)

Two books I liked about the subject are Stephen Hawking's "A Brief History of Time" and Alan Guth's "The Inflationary Universe".

Venus in Furs details the author's semi-autobiographical attempt to memorialize his fetishism as literature. His mania for being the object of anothers punishing behavior, while sounding interesting, doesn't have enough impetus to make a truly intersting read. The book's value lies primarily in showing the reader where the M in S&M comes from.

SOM are a kind of neural networks that are totally different from the feedforward multi-layered networks that everybody has heard about. The ideas behind SOM are remarkable intellectual stuff, first intellectual class stuff, and would certainly deserve to be more widely known. I found myself wondering how comes I rarely heard of Prof. Kohonen, and when is he going to win the Nobel prize... Prof. Kohonen and the development of SOM would make a good subject for the James Gleicks out there.

This book is in fact a collection of short articles about how SOM can be applied to financial visualisation and classification problems. Compilations of articles are a awkward genre, ranging from either the totally unitelligible or the totally trivial, and if you have graduate education in finance, you will find that most of the articles are pretty lame, if not downright amateurish, compared to standard academic finance literature; if you don't have grad education, I'm not sure whether you would want to buy this book in the first place, but there's nothing particularly hard about it. Art buffs may be attracted by the richly colored SOM maps (Vasarely-like) that come inside the book, and I could imagine somebody exposing these in an art gallery...

Anyway, after going through this book, one gets a decent idea of what can be done with SOM, so I would definitely say IT IS worth reading. I have to say I found it utterly fascinating, although I was disappointed with most of the articles.

Another thing I don't like about the book is the price (I mean, OUCH!)... The other thing is the fact that even after reading the theory article by Professor Kohonen in this book, I still couldn't understand intuitively how the basic SOM convergence algorithm worked. It is only after reading the first few pages of his masterpiece "Self-Organizing Maps", published at Springer in 1992 that I had the "haha!" experience and that I decided to put Professor Kohonen on the pedestal of my personal heroes of science...