stefan sagmeister is one of my favorite designers. this book gives an inside view to the world of design through the sometimes demented eyes of sagmeister. this book is pure genius.
buy it...now.

When I read it (it's something you rarely say about a design book) I felt like I'm thinking as one with Stefan. This book is so packed with brilliant design, tricks and humor that every page becomes memorable. It's going to be hard to top this, even for a seasoned designer who decides to write another design monograph.

What a joy, Stephan!

with honesty, wit and personal style... this book inspires you through his passion and dedication towards design. Of the unfinished business on his "Things to do before I die" list, one is to "touch someone's heart with graphic design"- I think he can cross it off now.

I love Edward Lear's story and James Marshall's illustrations are magical. I don't like the version with Jan Brett's illustrations. I've never liked Jan Brett's illustrations. I've spent hundreds of hours looking at children's books and I always pass over Jan Brett's books. Her illustrations just don't appeal to me. Her illustrations are distinctive and I can always recognize her work but I don't like them. There is just something missing--they don't have any life to them or something. I can't explain it. I have always loved James Marshall. His genius transcends understanding. His illustrations complement Ed Lear's beautiful tale perfectly.

A very good illustrated version of the classic poem- the pictures are beautiful with a distinctly exotic flavour, great for all ages!

This book is just so cool. Longing for a trip to the tropics? Read this version of the book to your little one and you can at least feel like you are there. The illustrations are really sweet. They have a lot of details so that kids kind find new things with each reading. My two-year old loves this book. It is a great twist on an old tale

How the author captured the intricate part of the three main characters healing with no one left behind is the freedom any person of childhood trauma hopes for. My beliefs went to a different level of hope as the story evolved. The story touched my emotions so deeply. I felt closer to the author and the characters The ending totally surprised me and I cried for quite some time trying to process it all. It is a story of trauma, secrets, unconditional love, and the need for one another that we all internally hope to get in life. There was no codependency in these relationships, but a genuine dependence on God.

The rage I felt inside picturing my own child in a house of darkness hoping I would rescue her hit me more deeply than anything I have ever read. The author characterizes the people involved so well, I felt like I knew them.

I was really moved from the beginning. I was very impressed by the book. How one character saves the other is truly from and about God. I had tears in my eyes at the finish of the book. God will use this book for healing. The overall spirit of the book, is that there is a God.

I think the best advice I can give is to READ THIS BOOK.

It is a wonderful collection of human feelings and emotions, and it makes you feel, understand and love the characters portrayed in each story.

In particular, Letter from an Unknowned Woman is the best love story I have read. It is simple, short, dramatic, unexpected and so profound, I am still in awe at what I read.

Zweig is a brilliant author, and even when translated his books maintain this magical aura that simply makes them shine.

Don't pass up the opportunity, you won't be disappointed.

Each of the novellas composing this book would need an independant review to give truth to it. I'm surprised at the Editor's selection of novellas and i'm still wondering why they've been put together...

The Master Game is a story about the power of the mind - and our adaptability in traumatic situations. And it is centered on a game... But I ain't say no more!
The Letter from an unknown woman tells the tragic destiny of an unknown adolescent love. A true romance hidden for more than ten years...

Overall an excellent book, but if you don't know Stefan Zweig, that might be a difficult introduction to his work. Try Amok first!

THIS publication marks the 100th anniversary of the birth of a writer who, as John Fowles remarks in his useful short introduction, has been all but forgotten since his suicide in 1942, but who was during his lifetime ''arguably the most widely read and translated serious author in the world.'' The quintet of fictions in ''The Royal Game'' are brilliant, unusual and haunting enough to ensure that Stefan Zweig's time of oblivion is over for good.

The Vienna of Stefan Zweig was a world of bright, brittle superficialities, in which the bourgeoisie ''gradually elevated the eternal business of seeing and being seen to the purpose of their existence.'' To break through the facades of this society, Zweig developed a remarkable literary and psychological method, which is brought to something like perfection in the five long stories that make up this collection. Zweig's method was monomania. His central characters are all men and women possessed -by an amour fou or an adolescent hate or an ineradicable guilt or (in the title story) the game of chess. Narrowed by single-mindedness, they become knives which Zweig uses remorselessly to cut through to the dark heart of his superficially glittering world. The story that most clearly exemplifies Zweig's method here is ''Fear.'' Its heroine is Irene Wagner, a society lady, ''the wife of the best-known defence counsel at the law courts.'' She is having an illicit affair with a young pianist and, from the first sentence, suffering ''that senseless stab of fear,'' the fear of discovery.

In ''Letter From an Unknown Woman,'' once superbly filmed by Max Ophuls, Zweig gives us another woman destroyed by love. A teen-age girl becomes infatuated with a writer who lives in the apartment across the hall, and she continues to love him throughout her life without his knowing it. She gives herself to him twice, once as a young woman and again years later. ''The Burning Secret'' returns to the theme of extramarital sexuality. This time the monomaniac is a young boy whose jealous and half-comprehending hate of the affair he senses between his mother and a philandering baron prevents the liaison from getting anywhere. 'Amok'' is another powerful variation on mad passion, and ''The Royal Game,'' perhaps the most extraordinary of all these tales, uses the game of chess as a terrifying metaphor for schizophrenia. A prisoner in solitary confinement begins to play an entirely mental game of chess with himself, in which he is obliged to divide his being in two, until this ultrasolipsistic feat brings him close to madness. In Zweig's hands, ''the royal game'' becomes a symbol of the tail-swallowing terrors of the life of the mind.

These unique tales possess a resonance and a narrative force that make them compelling. Stefan Zweig was a dark and unorthodox artist, he was one of great power; it's good to have him back...

I am new to David Morrell's works, but that will soon be remedied, after I listened to the unabridged version of his short stories.

Not only are the stories EXCELLENT, but I imensely enjoyed the author's commentary before and after each one.

And he makes his points, plots and story lines, with little vulgarity, which is becoming much too common in the latest Stephen King works.

Kudos and I will be hearing more.

There have been several times that I have bought an anthology like "Prime Evil" so that I could read an otherwise unreleased Stephen King or Clive Barker story, and ended up being blown away by the stories of David Morrell. Finally, K-Tel-like, everyone can enjoy these powerful, imaginative stories without having to buy a dozen other books.

While this collection does not contain all of Morrell's short fiction, it does contain all that I had read in other anthologies, most notably the powerhouse novella "Orance is for Anguish, Blue for Insanity," one of my all-time pieces of fiction, short or otherwise. I am a fan of author notes in collections, and Morrell doesn't disappoint. While he doesn't expound the way that, say, Harlan Ellison does, there are short notes before each store in addition to a Foreword and Afterword, and these add a texture to the book that I think makes your first read more enjoyable and increases the re-readability. Plus if you've already read a couple of these in anthologies it is nice to see the author's perspective instead of the anthology editor's perspective before the stories.

I read this during a particularly hot summer week and found it to be perfect for this setting...the stories are engrossing enough that I forgot about the heat, and a few times I caught a genuine bit of a chill! Anyone who enjoys dark stories or speculative fiction should give this great book a read.

Ordinarily I am not a huge fan of horror stories, but I can honestly say that Black Evening is frightfully fantastic. This spine-tingling collection of sixteen tales explores the dark side of greed, power, and madness. Morrell is able to pack a lot of punches and twists into his short (but not so sweet) stories. Moreover, his writing expresses his compassion and intelligence like that of an accomplished literary great.

An added bonus to this book is the foreward at the beginning of each story. Morrell discusses his development as a writer and shares with the reader his personal tales of triumph and tragedy: from his meeting with his idol, writer Stirling Silliphant, to the death of his teenage son to bone cancer. Each story seems to be weaved around an event that touched Morrell's life. This authenticity makes for a more eerie read. For example, "But at My Back I always Hear," is about a professor who is stalked by a female student infatuated with him. Morrell himself faced this dilemma while teaching at the University of Iowa. Other scary topics covered include an art historian who follows his subjects' break with reality and ultimate demise; an amateur writer who becomes a best-selling novelist with the help of a ghostly typewriter; and a high school football team that is victorious because the coach is dabbling in witchcraft and produces an evil good luck mascot.

Two of the stories in Black Evening won Best Novella, Horror Writers of America Award. One story was a nominee for this same award and one other story was a finalist for the World Fantasy Award. Morrell stated that the first piece of advice he received as a young writer was to write about what he feared most. Obviously he took that advice to heart and left us with some chilling entertainment.

Portraying Marie Antoinette as an "average woman," as the title of Zweig's work provocatively suggests, is a debatable proposition. On the one hand, as Zweig shows throughout this study, Marie Antoinette was no prodigy: she was flawed, egotistic, intellectually limited and ... indiscreet. Her greatest passions were for clothes, vast flowery gardens, [fancy] jewelry and good looking Swedish men; she was a compulsive spendthrift; her political self-awareness was zero and her policy meddling was uniformly disastrous. Her indiscipline at court was flagrantly exploited by her political enemies - notably her jealous and ambitious brothers-in-law Louis and Charles (the later Bourbon Restoration kings) - who portrayed her as a modern day Jezebel. In all of these respects, her life was far from "average". But the "ordinariness" within, argues Zweig, left her ill-equipped to deal with the challenges of an extraordinary life.

Once the Revolution happens, however, Zweig's "averageness" argument makes a dog-leg turn. Under the extreme pressures of her imprisonment, her husband's guillotining, her separation from her beloved children and her state trial for treason, she rose above the "average," drawing on her Habsburg dignity and treating her Committee inquisitors with the contempt they deserved. In death, if not in life, she proved herself to be a true daughter of Maria Theresa. Even ordinary people can be martyrs, Zweig seems to be saying.

Zweig is a natural storyteller, and the fact that he, like Marie Antoinette, was Viennese gives him insights into her sensibilities and predilections. Another Viennese voice can be heard in this narrative: the psychological narrative owes much to Dr. Freud - particularly when we come to her early womanhood. Can it be, as Zweig dares to suggest, that Louis XVI's early impotence, and young Marie Antoinette's consequent frustration, fueled her shallow materialism? Was her scandalously profligate lifestyle an outlet for ... frustration? Did one man's "shortcomings" thus cause the revolution? And what of the bizarre Strasbourg ceremony whereby the newlywed Marie Antoinette was forced to [unclothe] at the frontier, lest the new Dauphine of France cross the border wearing foreign clothes? Surely an emotionally scarring experience? Her tale is a gift for the Freudian, and Zweig milks it for all it's worth.

Marie Antoinette... many things go through one's mind when thinking of that name. Many say she was cruel, pampered, and spoiled, and that she was the main couse of the French Revolution, yet, she was just a woman, a woman born a princess in the Austrian court, married to a French boy whom she had never met by the age of 15, crowned by 19, and beheaded by 35.

Life went by so fast by Marie Antoinette!!, and never gave her a chance to choose what she wanted out of it.

Stefan Zweig is a marvelous writer, and manages to gives us an intimate portrait of at times very hated, at others very loved and admired woman, an ordinary person who only wished for a normal life with her family, a little place of her own, where she didn't have to adjust and adapt to the many different rules impossed on her.

He describes the life of the French court as only he could, and you feel like you are part of the story, hearing about Versailles, Louvre, the revolution and the people involved, which makes this an excellent book to learn about history, about life in the French court, and about France's last great queen.

So, was she cruel, spoiled, and ignorant? read and decide for yourself....

Zweig's biography is so fascinating, I can't believe it's been allowed to go out of print. He does a remarkable job of delineating a light-headed, pleasureseeking woman who was thrust into circumstances she couldn't have anticipated or coped with. Marie Antoinette becomes a real woman, not a figurehead or a scapegoat. No one could ask for anything less.

What strikes me most about this book is its friendliness and readability. The book is written in an easy and flowing manner, using day-to-day language. It's assembled in template style, which makes it extremely easy to implement its ideas. While this may not sound like much, these attributes make this book quite an entertaining read that scores high on effectiveness. Supplemented by an effective website...it does still suffer from some lack of depth and detail, though.
The fully detailed "Sample Master Test Plan" provided by the book serves as an example for its mixture of usefulness coupled with a relative lack of depth. While quite effective, and certainly a nice feature that's easy to learn from, it is not the most fully detailed test plan I have ever seen, nor is it a match for a big scale project's master test plan. However, it is the best example for a test plan that I have seen in any testing book.
Further comparisons with other testing books I've used make it clear: Applying the Pareto principle on it, this book gives you the 20% that you need in order to perform 80% of all you will ever want when it comes to testing. It may not sound like much, but this is a mighty achievement.
The bottom line: This book will probably serve anyone who is into software testing. However, if you are looking to kick-start your organization into proper testing methodologies, or if you are new to the software testing arena, it would be a sin not to give this book a try.

Books on software testing are usually something you read because you have to, not because you want to. Authors Rick Craig and Stefan Jaskiel have set out to change that, and the result is the best current book on software testing. A combination of the timeless and the cutting-edge, Systematic Software Testing is all you need to get to work and to get the job done well.

The authors begin with the basics of software testing, including the evolution of the discipline over the years. They continue on to discuss STEP methodology, and then launch into the fundamentals of testing. Among the covered topics: risk analysis, test plans, automated test design and implementation, IEEE/CMM/ISO guidelines and standards, and test execution. For those who are going to be managing their own test groups, there is additional material on who to pick for the job, what those jobs are, and how to organize your testing.

For both the software engineer and the engineering manager, this text is an invaluable resource. The methodology is sound and up to date, and following the clearly enumerated steps in this book will surely result in a superior product. If this isn't enough to convince you, the text is also FUN to read. This isn't your typical bare-bones textbook, as exemplified by Rick Craig's amusing and memorable anecdotes and the occasionally apt quotation. The wording is clear, everyday English and key points are clearly visible. The book is very well organized by topic and subsections, making it great for refreshing your memory on particular details.

Even if you are not directly involved in testing, this book is worth reading. Just understanding the software lifecycle process is a major help when it comes to improving software quality, and this excellent text will grant you that understanding.

This book is written for the software tester and/or test manager, and lives up to its title. The book explains how to go about planning a testing effort from a top-down perspective, discussing how to put together a master test plan (Chapter 3), and then drilling down into the nitty-gritty details (Chapter 4). Chapters 5 (Analysis & Design) describes some common testing techniques, which while not as comprehensive as some other s/w testing books, is perhaps unequaled in it's readability (Kudos to the copy-editor).
I like Chapters 6 (Test Implementation) and 7 (Test Execution) because they make for a good checklist for the tasks that need to be done to support the test execution phase, again what strikes me most about this book is the easy read, something especially useful when covering such potentially dry subject matter as "test status reporting".
Chapters 8 (Test Organization), 9 (The s/w Tester), and 10 (the Test Manager) touch upon the "soft issues" related to these roles - discussing such items as "the cornerstones of leadership", "career paths", and "how to hire testers". Finally, Chapter 11 discusses how to improve the testing process - no matter where on a "maturity" chart your organization resides.
One thing I did find interesting, was the prominence Risk & Stefan attached to using Risk as a means of guiding the entire testing effort (a mentality I personally concur with), this is evident in their decision to discuss this aspect of testing right up front in Chapter 2, and continually referring to it throughout the rest of the book.
In summary, I think Rick & Stefan have done a fantastic job of describing a systematic approach to software testing.

In the vain of "full disclosure", you should know that I've known Rick & Stefan for many years, and consequently I cannot be considered a completely impartial reviewer.

This is as great a satire as Catch 22. As in Catch 22, underlining the satire is a passion for humanity and a merciless assault on those who abuse it and profit from preying on it. It is far superior to The King David Report which is not at all funny -- as Voltaire has shown in Candide, ridicule is the most potent weapon in social criticism.

there are only numerous books can be said that are as good as this one (one of them is also by stefan heym - king david report). layer upon layer of plots all conected and interconected. challanges the free mind as only a "prisoner" by choice in e. germany (Mr. Heym) can invent. walks on thin lines between christianity and judeism leaving no mythical stone unturned. if u were lucky enough to hear about this book, BUY IT, READ IT and tell your friends. p.s : for true lovers of literature

"The Wandering Jew" is based on an old legend which narrates the tragic life of Ahasverus, condemned to an ever-lasting life of misery, until the second coming of Christ, for having refused his master Reb Joshua (Jesus) a resting place when on his way to the Golgotha. It is a personification of exile and Christian condemnation of the Jewish people. Stefan Heym has elaborated on this legend giving it a broad philosophical dimension, with deep moral passion. Ahasverus is a moral character, standing between evil and good, with a revolutionary mind and wishing to understand and improve human condition. Thre are three parallel, interlock plots, the main one taking place in Luther's Germany where the Minister Paul von Eitzen strives holiness through his ministry (disguising his ambition, greed, and sexual impulses), and at the same time fascinated by the power of evil. Although the moral issues brought up are not a novelty, S. Hyem shows courage and passion in his convictions and invites the reader to thoughtfully participate in a dramatic show of human nature. A most wonderful book!

Besides two long and boring passages that, in my opinion, do not add anything to the main story, this book is Stefan Zweig's masterpiece.
The emotions, repressions, frustrations, fears, joy, expressions, gestures, are well studied and described by the author, with the most intimate and subtle details.
The most poignant scene is when she caressed his hand. He did not love her, just pitied her, but what he felt when she caressed his hand was stronger than making love to any woman he had ever desired before. The description of her caress - and of his emotion during that caress - is irrefutably the strongest in literature. A moment of pure bliss...

"Beware of Pity" is a brilliant book by one of the world's great writers.

This fascinating "psychological" novel is reminiscent of "Rebecca" in the way the story unfolds slowly and then totally envelops the reader. I actually read it straight through the first time, had to miss the next day's work. I've loved it just as much with each reread.

Zweig writes beautifully. He demonstrates elegance, economy, subtlety. There is never a wasted word.

While you are at it, read his short story "The Royal Game."
These are two examples of fiction at its very best.

The scenario is settled at the beginning of the XXth century, right before the outburst of WW I with the murder of the prince of Austria, an event subtly knitted to the action taking place in the novel.

25 years old lieutenant Hofmiller, protagonist and narrator, is the prototype of the young man who has never cared much about anything but his own career and who has taken everything for granted during his whole life. Being good hearted, he hasn't yet experienced a strong attachment to a woman, nor he had even been deeply loved by any.

He describes himself as a not very thoughtful or introspective person, whose only worries were related to his horses and his position in the army.... until he meets Edith Von Kekesfalva. She is the lamed daughter of a Jewish rich man who became an aristocrat by purchasing the nobility title and changing his name.

Due to a gaffe Hofmiller commits [inviting the girl for a dance] a dense and excruciating relationship between both starts. The author delves deep into all the intricacies such a bond entails and the situations which arise when pity rules human behavior and is entangled with sincere love. Although the book may not seem very engaging at the beginning, the interest grows as the tension increases between the characters, leading to the dramatic circumstances that trigger the wonderful end.

This book is really not a book but a pictionary. The text not only falls short, but is actually full of false statements and wrong proofs. However, nobody buys it for the text, they buy it for the illustrations. If you have a real core textbook and Agamemnons color atlas next to you, you can't fail Physiology. And this make it worth the money.

I teach Physiology at University and this book is my first port of call in areas in which I am not an expert. It is the easiest way to jog my memory as the index is good, the text is concise and the figures add a lot to my understanding. The only trouble is that it is getting a little old, so although it is great for most of the basics, it lacks a bit of detail on signal transduction pathways etc

This pocket manual is an envaluable reference tool. All experimental physiologists, biochemists and pharmacologists should own a copy of this color atlas. It is extremely well illustrated, clear and simple, but at the same way complete and deep in summarizing every aspect of human physiology. I can not recall any other full size book that is comparable to is one for the huge amount of information, written and illustrated. More precisely, there is no equivalent to this book in any other branches of biomedical sciences. We hope that the booklet will be periodically updated, also to honor the memory of its main author and revisor, Professor A. Despopoulos.