This is perhaps my favorite book on statistical mechanics. Bloch's exposition is self-contained, starting from fundamental concepts. The emphasis is on concepts. The presentation is concise and elegant, relying on mathematics rather than words to present the theory. Highly recommended to advanced undergraduates and beginning graduate students.

This text is composed of the lecture notes Felix Bloch delivered to the graduate students at Stanford. Clearly the author knew his stuff, but the writing and presentation is thoroughly accomodating to the beginner and builds from the symplectic structure of phase space all the way to full-blooded quantum statistics. The formalism is not as heady as the physical insights offered here, and the author goes to great effort to clarify the many subtle features of Statistical mechanics. Any beginning graduate student who seeks to augment their reading will be rewarded by this document. Similarly rewarded will be those who seek the insights of a unique mind who mastered a unique subject.

Without bogging the reader down with endless scientific minutae, this book treats the entire family of cowries in a manner useful to scientists and serious amatures alike. I have several books on cowries and this by far is best. The feature I especially like is the large quantity of high quality photographs of each species giving the reader not just many examples of each species but showing all the subspecies and varieties and explaining the differences. The explanations of the biology, life cycles, habitat and habits etc. is easily understood by nonscientists yet very useful to scientists. My copy came without a dust jacket so I asume that it was published that way...While this book may be purchased directly from the publisher the savings is only slight and is eaten up by the shipping costs from Germany. I recieved mine from Amazon in less than 2 weeks by UPS ground.

Expensive, but worth it. I have seen numerous other cowrie books (Burgess, Allen, Wallis, etc.) and believe nothing comes close. Lots of specimens showing lots of species variation. Highly recommended.

This is, according to publisher William S. Hein & Co., a "reprint edition" of the Handbook of Federal Indian Law, written by Felix S. Cohen while he was in the Office of the Solicitor at the Department of the Interior. As a reprint, the original title page is included and shows that this is the "Third printing 1942" version. This page also indicates that 1942 was the original date of publication. In other words, this *is* a reprint of the original work by Cohen, and it includes the Foreword by the Secretary of the Interior, Harold L. Ickes; the Introduction by Cohen's supervisor, Nathan R, Margold; and an Acknowledgements section by the author. Hein reproduced this text because the original publication, and a 1971 reprint edition produced by the American Indian Law Center and the University of New Mexico, were out of print, and this is - without doubt - a primary text in the area of federal Indian law. In 1982, an updated version of the Handbook, edited by Rennard Strickland, Charles F. Wilkinson, and others, was published under the title Felix S. Cohen's Handbook of Federal Indian Law (Michie; ISBN 0-87215-413-0). This rendition was described as "a more thorough-going revision of Cohen's work than was first anticipated" (p. x). Their introduction discussed the history, uses, and popularity of the 1942 Handbook and of the 1971 reprint. The 1982 volume, however, was presented in a different manner than Cohen's 1942 Handbook, but it did include legislative and legal materials through March 1981.

This is the bible for federal indian law. If you can afford only one book on federal indian law, this is the one. The original, written by Felix Cohen and published in 1947 is even better, but it is hard to obtain and very expensive. Rennard Strickland was editor of this updated version.

I have always wanted to visit Highgate, but economics keep me at home. There is a nice history of the cemetery and a it is wonderfully illustrated. If you are into cemeteries, Highgate is The Victorian Vallhalla and it amazes me that it is out of print. Wouldn't The Friends of Highgate make a couple bucks selling copies? There are graves I would have liked to have seen pictures of that aren't in it, Elizabeth Siddal for instance, but there are wonderful stories about the people who are there.

I was surprised, when struck with curiosity about Highgate Cemetery, that there was so little information available about this beautiful and fascinating landmark. I managed to find this photographic study of the cemetery through my library. What a shame that it's no longer in print. (I believe it WAS in print in the UK until not so long ago, but last time I checked Amazon UK it wasn't there). Beautiful, well done photos, a record of a time when death was common and loved ones were remembered with spectacular display and tender words. Many of the photos were taken prior to the vandalism that occurred there in the 60's and 70's, so this may be one of the few records of how the place appeared before then. I highly recommend anyone to seek this out through an interlibrary loan.

This is a beautifully written story about a young girl's discovery of how life and death in the natural world are always linked together. If you love the outdoors and the animals that live by the rules of nature, and if you want your children to understand the relationships of animals in the natural world, this is a must read.

Gorgeous language captures that inevitable moment in every child's life when they feel the injustice and poignancy of death. Whether it be a family member or creature of nature, we all have experienced that one moment when we realized things will never be the same; the world is forever different. Ellen Wood weaves a beautiful story of yearning and vengence, and ultimate discovery for a young girl who seeks to understand why living things must die. A beautifully written story that is a joy to read-aloud.

[this review shall replace the already existing one]

Indras pearls provides a very well-made introduction to the basics of the theory of discrete groups acting on the complex plane. The whole discussion on the related limit sets had been accomplished in such a hand-by-hand method.
The reader starts from complex numbers and after he is led into the deepest concepts: Möbius trasformations, limit sets of discrete groups (Schottky, Fuchsian, ...).
These limit sets are related to another interesting topic in today maths: complex dynamics on the Riemann sphere (Julia sets, ...).
As known, computer experiments had been fundamental for supporting complex dynamics and the successive success of this latter topic helped to promote and increase the interests for discrete groups too: in fact this book evinces already strong interest in the visualization and in the study of the properties of such limit sets since '80s, due to the efforts of the same authors.
One of the major points of attraction in Indra pearls is that all the theory had been helped by displaying a lot of detailed and colorful pictures which, aside the historical biography of the mathematicians that contributed to this theory, set this book as one of the masterpieces in this topic, for his lucid
and fresh approach to basic concepts.
In addition, the presence of amusing comic-strips, explaining some topological concepts on manifolds (for example), guarantees the easy-learning for the reader and also the approach, as imaginaed and completely accomplished by the authors. In this direction, it is clear how passion had been squandered by authors.
The goal has been reached: finding an easy way to introduce the harsch theory of discrete groups.
Interested readers will be rewarded and also excited.
No doubts: this book strikes and it will be a corner-stone for present and future.

Indras pearls provides a very well-made introduction to the basics of the theory of discontinuous groups acting on the complex plane. The whole discussion about limit sets had been accomplished in such a hand-by-hand method.
That is, the reader starts from complex numbers and, after, he is taken into deepest concepts as Möbius trasformations and so to discontinuous groups (Schottky, Fuchsian, ...).
Limit sets of kleinian groups are related to another interesting topic in today maths: complex dynamics on the Riemann sphere (Julia sets, ...). The success of this latter topic helped to increase the interests for discontinuous groups too. Indra pearls also witnesses and resumes the last twenty years of efforts spent for studying the properties of the limit sets.
One of the major points of attraction in Indra pearls is that all the theory had been helped by displaying a lot of detailed and colorful pictures which, aside the historical biography of the mathematicians that contributed to this theory, set this book as one of the masterpieces in this topic, for his lucid
and fresh approach to basic concepts.
In addition, the presence of amusing comic-strips, explaining some topological concepts on manifolds, guarantees the easy-learning of the approach, achieved by the authors. In this direction, it could be evinced that authors were really enjoyed while writing.
The goal has been reached: finding an easy way to introduce the harsch theory of discontinuous groups.
Interested readers will be rewarded about their choice and also excited.

According to Deleuze & Guattari, we have suffered too long amidst the retrograde critical judgements of mainstream Kafka scholarship. Ad nauseum, these pedestrian hacks have given us Kafka the alienated loner, Kafka the neurotic metaphysician, Kafka the theological invert, Kafka the gynephobic prisoner of ascesis, Kafka the self-hating Jew, Kafka the suicidal insomniac. Scholars have made their reputations by sending this great author on greased skids to Hell, earmarking him as an avatar of the Negative, a nodal point of absurdity and paradox, the pilgrim of an epic and hallucinatory Guilt Trip (partly at fault are the Muir translations, which categorically pitch the Kafkan voice as a syntax of doom and alienation). No doubt Kafka suffered immensely in his professional, family, and erotic life, in the anti-Semitic maw of Czech nationalism, in the iron-maiden of terrors both historical and metaphysical, but critics who reach their limit in expounding the pain and absurdity of the Kafka trajectory are providing us with a false and incomplete picture of this sublime literary event.

D & G decided to bring the hammer down on these reflexive doomsayers, to restore some of the joy and vibrant panache to Kafka studies. They wanted to bring him "'a little of this joy, this amorous political life that he knew how to offer, how to invent. So many dead writers must have wept over what was written about them. [We] hope that Kafka enjoyed the book that we wrote about him'"(xxv). It is useful to recall the evening Kafka read the opening chapter of *The Trial* to his circle of literary friends, assailed by roars of laughter, Kafka himself laughing so hard he had to constantly stop reading to wipe tears from his eyes. The ramifications of this episode have been repressed and overturned by the necrophilic martyrology of a reflexive Kafka scholarship. For here we have gone beyond any mere "laughter of the Abyss," the impish cackle of "black comedy," the doomed precincts of Camus's "cosmology of the Absurd." Kafka's hilarity is a laughter of resistance, of felicity, of squeezing some measure of freedom out of our peremptory and obstructionist universe. As argued in this text, the battle is within and against the political, economic, technological, bureaucratic, judiciary, and linguistic machines which held Kafka's language in thrall to its obstacles and terrors.

Here is a cento of principles developed by D & G in their dissenting text, the prolegomenon to any future in Kafka scholarship:

1. Isolation from the Law is not merely the absence of God (coinciding with the SNAFU of metaphysical realism) but rather entails the eternal suspension of judgement, ultimately an Artaudian desire "to have done with Judgement."

2. The question of ASCESIS. Deleuze has long underscored the idea that when a writer or philosopher espouses an "ascetic" lifestyle it is only as a means to achieving a more subterranean pitch of libertinism (or Life). Kafka had plenty of opportunities for conventional happiness, to live the life of a Max Brod, for example. Rather he followed the witch's wind of literary apprenticeship, a far profounder Life although, from a judgemental distance, appearing monstrous and ill-fated.

3. Kafka's oeuvre is characterized by a complete lack of *complacency*, and stands accordingly as a total rejection of every problematic of Failure. His suicidal fantasies, then, were not merely an agonizing cry of despair, but also a series of unmerciful thought-experiments designed to charge the literary machine, to clear the waters for fresh speculation.

4. Reflexive scholarship tends to move backward from unknowns to knowns (i.e. the castle is God, the beetle is oedipal frustration, the penal colony is fascism, the singing mouse is a writer, and writers are those who express CONTENT and represent THINGS). Rather we should take Walter Benjamin to his limit, by acclimatizing ourselves to a mode of literature "that consists in propelling the most diverse contents on the basis of (nonsignifying) ruptures and intertwinings of the most heterogeneous orders of signs and powers"(xvii).

5. Renovate the battlefield...: reterritorialize Kafka's "metaphysical" estrangement onto the concrete political arrangements with which he engaged throughout his life. Understand the political or "fantasmatic" nature of Kafka's simulations, that his fictions are not merely an allegory of resistance to fascism, but the infiltration of a ruptured sensibility into the fascistic functioning of the Law, a node of deterritorialization inside the torn apart.

6. The desire for innocence is as pernicious as the fetishization of guilt, since both imply an Infinity by which we can define and calibrate Judgement. Justice is desire and not law. Desire is a social investment traversed and legitimized by Kafka's literary machine, which "is capable of anticipating or precipitating contents into conditions that...concern an entire collectivity"(60), which speak for a people that may not be prepared to live through its message.

Perhaps I'm trying too hard to cram difficult arguments into tiny hard-to-swallow capsules. The text itself has to be read to be believed. Perhaps in response to those who felt *Capitalism and Schizophrenia* did not provide enough "concrete examples," D & G have steered their war-machine onto one of the most treacherous and misunderstood literary oeuvres of the preceding century. The result will either leave you cold (as is the case with virtually every reader I've conferred with on this text) or revolutionize your jilted perceptions of a great author.

The detailed concepts on how Gilles Deleuze read Kafka still amazed me. To understand Deleuze, one must read Deleuze in relation to Kafka.

Before reading this book, I was neoconservative (often called a "classical" liberal). That is to say, I accepted the very basic principles of Liberalism while rejecting some of the more radical elements established during the 20th century. After reading this book, however, I can now say that I am a "classical" conservative. Don Sarda reveals in an easily understood manner the errors of Liberalism, especially how even the smallest amount of it is poisonous. Neoconservatism is just the first step in the process that produces the philosophies of communism, radical feminism, and other errors of "modern" society. Liberalism is a Sin articulates the idea of a Catholic state well, and explains how human reason is not and should not be the sole arbiter of what becomes law or what opinions we should hold. Though it was written well over 100 years ago, everyone, especially conservatives, should make it one of the books at the top of his or her to-read list- if only to see what 19th century conservative theory was like.

Liberalism Is a Sin is a hard-hitting book written in Spain in 1886 and its content is more relevant today than when it first appeared. Although written from a catholic perspective, this book is an eye-opener for catholics as well as for open-minded non-catholics. The moral depravity existing in our country today is a consequence of liberalism (pervasive in television, movies, literature, public and private morals) deeply enmeshed in our society. Liberalism asserts the sovereignty of the individual and social reason and enthrones Rationalism in the seat of authority. "It knows no dogma except the dogma of self-assertion." You will learn in this book that the non-logical thinking of liberalism which infects most people today is the rebellion of the human intellect against God. This book contains the answers to the questions that people today are almost universally asking, "What has happened to our society? What is wrong?" I highly recommend this book..

Mendelssohn is traced through his life as to influences, both spiritually, musically and elsewhere.

Raised in upper class surroundings, he and sister Fanny were certainly cultivated in rich musical and literary heritage. So no surprise that Mendelssohn honored his musical heritiage and was fond of Bach especially.

Climb to fame capsulated well in this biographical look with specific references given at appropriate times on musical and theological insights. This all culminates late in his life with tension over all his duties both musically and family and they take their toil.

Never happy living in Germany, persistently traveling which also for sure took its toll. Creative output continues to reverberate throughtout concert halls.

Truly a tightly written account of significant musical contributor.

With a smooth and easy-to-read style that is brimming with factual details and emotive feelings, Mr. Mercer-Taylor's writing provides a concise and highly articulate story of Felix Mendelssohn's life. Mendelssohn's many significant contributions as a composer, musician, conductor, teacher and adminstrator are presented in an interesting collage of personalities and historical events of the times. In particular, the author's description of Mendelssohn's music captures its essence perfectly. An extremely enjoyable reading experience.