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Yet it is not solely for historical benefit that one should read Sentimental Journey. The adventures and amours of Sterne's semi-autobiographical Yorick are delightful. One of the most romantic passages I've read in a book occurs when Yorick inadvertantly takes the hand of a woman and describes in detail the thrill of merely holding it. Granted, hers is not the only hand he will hold, but he writes so wonderfully, candidly and engagingly that it is extremely difficult to hold his passions against the sentimental Yorick. His scene with the starling locked in a cage is pertinent and a touching commentary on slavery. What a guy! My only complaint is the editor of this edition does not feel it necessary to translate the French-of which there is plenty-making some passages difficult to understand at best. However,this is a sentimental journey that I will gladly take over and over.
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After he attempts to kill the British Foreign Secretary on a visit to France, the Prime Minister decides Barry must be dealt with, once and for all. Group 4, the PM's special missions unit headed by Brigadier Charles Ferguson, is given the task.
Ferguson enlists the aid of Devlin and, after he breaks out of the prison, Brosnan, in the mission. There is personal bad blood between Brosnan and Barry. The final confrontation is the best part of the book, when Barry tries to escape England with a stolen rocket-launcher prototype and Brosnan and Devlin hot on his heels.
This book would be enjoyable for Higgins fans, because the characters have either appeared in other Higgins books, or (in the case of Barry) been alluded to. It's nice to get some background on Brosnan, and it makes his actions in "Eye of the Storm" more clear and understandable.
But Barry is the most interesting character. He's Sean Dillon, only less charming and more cold-blooded. The relationship between Barry and Dillon was hinted at in "Eye of the Storm," where Dillon refers to Barry as sort of his mentor. That relationship is interesting, and I would like to see Higgins devote an entire book to it, because I think it could work well.
I would also like Higgins to give us some more background on the time in the late-60s/early-70s when Devlin, Brosnan, Barry, and Dillon were all in the IRA together. Hopefully he'll put out a book on that, too.
As for "Touch the Devil," if you're a Higgins fan, you'll like it. If you're not, it's a good introduction to some of his main characters, but not his best book. I recommend "Eye of the Storm" as an introducition to Higgins, because it'll get you hooked and coming back for more.
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The material was delivered clearly, not necessarily simple... but it is clear. The book is worth all my hard saved money... and im glad to have it, and its fun to read too...
The book wastes no space on trivial stuff like how to open your compiler or use a non-standard C function. Instead, it goes directly into what's important, explaining the concepts and giving concrete examples where appropriate, all using ANSI C.
Since most of the issues aren't dependant on the implementation schemes, almost any advanced programmer would benefit from this book, even if he/she is not programming in C (assuming advanced knowledge of C, of course). The only exceptions are the topics that talk about the ANSI C rules and code organization and optimization. The only disadvantage here is that this book doesn't cover object oriented concepts, but that's not a surprise of course as the book is titled "C Unleashed." But still for anything else other than that, this could be a great help even to C++ programmers.
The book chapters have been written by more than 10 experienced programmers, 6 of them are really good, which makes each chapter standalone as a small tutorial on some issue. The writing style of Richard Heathfield and many of the co-authors is very nice to read and clear to understand. Some parts, of course, do not have that nice writing style, but throughout the book, the technical information is very clear and easy to comprehend.
I wouldn't recommend this book to any new programmers. But for the more advanced ones, this is something they would want to check.
-Mokhtar M. Khorshid
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--Richard Brodie, author, VIRUS OF THE MIND: The New Science of the Mem
--Richard Brodie, author, Virus of the Mind: The New Science of the Meme
Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen are a biologist and a mathematician team who have worked together to write a book on evolution; and not just biological evolution either. They discuss the origin of life, intelligence, consciousness, concepts of reality, social order, cities, and global civilization all within a 299 page volume.
Each chapter is opened with a charming quote, usually drawn from the lore of the behavioral sciences, that illustrates in capsule the content of the chapter. My favorites were the woman scientist and her chimpanzee subject, the viper with its "dead snake" pose, and the parrot whose protest over going through a boring word list made his intelligence far more apparent than reciting the list ever could.
Addressed in these chapters were some pretty heavy duty concepts. It's not that I hadn't come across them before in my reading, but that the authors' approach was novel, at least to me. Their treatment of the statistics of evolution and especially their analysis of the "Mitochondrial Eve" hypothesis were particularly enlightening. Until they likened it to the opening and ending moves of a chess game, with it's myriads of potential moves between beginning and end, I had not given much thought to how misleading are the cladal diagrams of evolutionary trees. They point out that the reductionist view, that looks for a core and a root to everything, is misleading because it neglects the total picture of what is going on in the environment and the emergent aspects of the interactive parts.
In the instance of the mitochondrial studies, they point out that a breeding population would probably have been at least 100,000 individuals, and the theory of 1 Eve and 99999 Adams, doesn't make much sense. As they note, it's much more likely that there were 50,000 of each gender, some of whom carried a particular stretch of DNA. Pointing out that there is a difference between the descent of a molecular sequence and the descent of a species they write, "Possibly there did exist a Mitochondrial Eve, but she is not the Mother of Us All: she represents a particular molecular sequence for mitochondrial DNA, embodied in a population of women possessing the molecule, from whom all modern mitochondrial DNA molecules descend (p. 88)."
More intriguing still was their discussion of complicity, which is a synergy among constituent parts that gives rise to unexpected results, sort of the old saw "the whole is greater than the sum of its parts." They feel that this type of unpredictable interaction among complex variables is what has given rise to human consciousness and even to the group think that occurs in crowd behavior. As they write, "One of the universal features of complicity is the emergence of new patterns, new rules, new structures, new processes that were not present, even in rudimentary form, in the separate components (p. 245)." They note that a complicity between language and intelligence might have worked synergistically, in a lock step fashion, enhancing both characteristics and in combination with what they term "extelligence," the variously stored knowledge of generations of humans, may possibly have lead to consciousness and civilization.
In their comparison of cellular evolution and village/town evolution, they again appeal to a complicity among parts, in this case individuals-or more correctly among professions-that created towns from villages. As unspecialized bacteria specialized and commingled to form nucleated cells, the members of villages began to specialize and create a larger more resilient town and as that grew, cities.
The most unique concept they presented-at least not one I'd heard before-was the possible explanation for the god phenomenon. They suggest that someone, Abraham for instance, might have been impressed by the extelligence of the environment, that "something outside himself" that knew more than he did. As they write, "It is a very small step from 'There is Something out there' to 'There is a Being out there (P. 264).'"
Steven was right again. This is a wonderful book. It definitely gets one thinking along new channels.
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A brief, yet in-depth (I don't know how that can work, but it does) explanation on how it is currently believed out world works is nothing short of miraculous, especially due to the clarity in which it is explained. Interlaced with a story about the wizards' experiments with their new toy planet, this book is completely riveting and highly informative.
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Again, though, that's a minor distraction that doesn't take away from the enjoyment of reading about the greatest.
The best aspect of the book, I felt, was the immediacy with which Nicklaus writes. When you read this book you almost feel as if Nicklaus is talking to you, just yourself, at points.
Each chapter talks about a particular tournament and what happened before it. Particularly amazing is the clarity with which Nicklaus can recall those tournaments he describes. He describes individual key holes, what was going through his mind, and the general up and downs which accompany a round of golf. After reading this book, we know Nicklaus is a champion: he can win not only when he's up, but also when he's (to some extent) down. Also, as an interesting side note, Nicklaus also gives a few golfing tips - perhaps no one can become as great as him, but it never hurts to try!
And the last aspect of the book I found enjoyable were the photographs. True, they were black and white, but show how he changed over time, and chronicle some of the most memorable moments of his major career wins.
You come away more convinced than ever of Nicklaus' greatness. A great book to read anywhere, anytime.
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The final third of the book also fall a little flat, IMHO. The authors' grand insights seem trivial and unoriginal. One idea in particular seems to be 'borrowed' without acknowledgement from Douglas Hofstadter's amazing "Godel, Escher, Bach" : that a message and its context are inseparable (remember the dialogues with records and record players ?) I came away feeling distinctly un-enlightened.
One aspect that really annoyed me is the use of the awful hybrid words "simplexity" and "complicity", used to describe two quite different concepts. Every time they're used, the reader is left struggling to remember which word is which. I wish the authors had aimed for clarity, rather than playing silly word-games.
And finally, I have to mention the appalling design of the UK edition of this book. The type is far too small, and the cover (white text on bright yellow) is unreadable. There's a quote on the cover from Terry Pratchett, and his name is so prominent it honestly looks as though HE wrote the book. It is possibly the worst jacket design I've ever seen.
I really admired Ian Stewart's earlier books, but my advice is to avoid this one.
TO prove their point, the authors embark on a dazzling tour of biology, chemistry and physics. But something is missing say the authors. What we know, they claim, are tiny islands in a sea of ignorance; it is self limiting as the larger questions get neglected. It is the causes of simplicity, they say - the order that suddenly emerges - that researchers should explore.
So, they conclude, it is time for a new set of questions. Unfortunately, just when we expect something new, it is here that the book gets a bit vague, with the authors falling back on anecdotes and speculation. They try to coin a new vocabulary ("simplexity" for the old and "complicity" for theirs); offer some diagrams of what they want, including an odd picture of mixing smoke with a unicorn head; and they harp on strange and abrupt conclusions, such as the importance of squid fat to the evolution of the human brain. But they do not offer a coherent new paradigm.
An uneven effort, but fun and very funny at times.
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I grinned when Sis, back in high school, told me I reminded her of Heathcliff. I remembered from the (old, old) movie that he was some evil fellow. Then I read the book. And stopped grinning. I'm amazed this book would ever be assigned to high school 'kids.' It's humorless and ultra-realistic. Every page reeks of evil and has selfishly evil (meaning normal) characters. Heathcliff was a tortured being but hardly innocent. Cathy was a solipsistic, driven fool. Even the Cliff Notes booklet for WH is surprisingly short (I read The Notes after burning through the book in a week) as if Cliff's was horrified to study this book! Cliff's good observation about Heathcliff is that his sole emotion is actually pity/affection for Hareton and that his 'love' for Cathy is, in fact, an animal possessive jealous rage. I changed after reading this book. For the better, I don't know. There is a point in the book where Heathcliff's every action evokes disgust and hatred, and then...as a man...I began to feel what he felt. For whatver his faults, I began to connect fully with his insane rage, and that his ideal of 'love' for Catherine--however warped--had been stolen from him forever. I understood his ruthlessness and love for no person or thing after Catherine's death. By the way, not to parrot the critics, but it is true that the marriage of Cathy and Hareton is NOT some kind of full circle, happier ending. It's more like holding hands in Hell. I left this book sadder than when I started it. After reading it, I doubt anyone anywhere is getting 'wiser.'
This book attempts to provide that by persuading the reader to take a step back from the humdrum or obvious and look at their projects from beginning to end, even before it is begun!
There are real-life examples (I had great fun trying out the puzzles) that encourage the ability to ask the right questions and highlight the pitfalls so often encountered in scientific investigation. You'll be amazed at what you learn and how easily you can avoid unnecessary work. By the time you have read this book you should have a great understanding of the reality of experimental investigation: from design of experiments, through analysis and interpretation of data to presentation of results.
Buy this book, adopt this book, recommend this book!