If you are a skilled pianist, try the Op. 28 Fantasie. This work, sadly, is rarely recorded but is one of the most incredibly gorgeous things ever written for piano. The only other copy of this I own is in a Hungarian edition not available in the US, so rejoice if you play piano.

Dover prints music that is easy to read and the editing is usually blameless. This book is no exception. Highly recommended for serious piano students.

This collection of mostly unrelated works by AlexanderNicolyavich Scriaban (1872-1915) is most undoubtedly the crown jewelof Twentieth-Century piano music; yet it is almost totally overlooked historically as well as musically. It represents not his ordered compositions, as do his preludes and etudes, but rather his sporadic, sometimes psychotic thoughts; it is a veritable musical diary of the very bizarre and mystical life of the great Russian enigma. It belongs on the shelf of any serious music student, especially those of Russian music, for in this myriad of masterworks are the very core of the underappreciated and often entirely overlooked Alexander N. Scriabin.

This is a short book of three chapters: Chapter 1. Van der Waerden's theorem on arithmetic progressions. Chapter 2. The Landau-Shnirelmann hypothesis and Mann's theorem. Chapter 3. An elementary solution of Waring's problem.

These are all difficult problems from the theory of numbers and I think that the elementary proofs that Khinchin describes here are original. This book is a challenging but enjoyable read.

I also recommend his other book on number theory: "Continued Fractions".

In his "Mathematical Foundations" books Khinchin develops a sound mathematical structure for the subject under discussion based on the modern theory of probability. His primary reason for doing this is the lack of mathematically rigorous presentation in many textbooks on these subjects.

This book contains two papers written by Khinchin on the concept of entropy in probability theory and Shannon's first and second theorems in information theory - with detailed modern proofs. Like all Khinchin's books, this one is very readable. And unlike many recent books on this subject the price is very cheap. Two minor complaints are: lack of an index, and typesetting could be improved.

The results are exactly the kind of works most working modern artists or their patrons would be dismayed over. Get this book. It is a fascinating and entertaining read. One interesting note from the book - the editor of The Nation said that when they published the results of this poll it drew an avalanche of reader mail. It generated the largest reader response of anything they'd published in the history of that magazine to date. Several newspapers interviewed owners of prominant NYC art galleries as well as some prominant artists. All of them were horified by the results of this poll. One commentator sniffed the poll just proves Americans are boors when it comes to art - prefering only the safest, most banal subjects. What is interesting is that the book shows the results of this poll were duplicated in many other countries around the globe. Countries as diverse as Kenya and Iceland showed their own polls duplicated the preferences of the average American - i.e. a liking for landscapes with peaceful blue skies.

The book reproduces in full the entire questionaire used by the polling company along with an interview with Momar and Kelamid. The two Russians also gained notoriety by creating pictures of each countries most-preferred and least-preferred paintings. Each painting had the canvas divied up to match the percentages shown in the poll that respondents wanted (or didn't want in the case of the 'Least Preferred' paintings). Thus if the poll showed 65% preferred landscapes with a blue sky then 65% of the painting surface had a blue sky.

Interviews as well as commentary on the nature of art and what this might mean also fill the book. There is even a chapter by one of my favorite modern-day philosophers - Arthur C. Danto (I have several of his books). He asks the question "Can It Be The 'Most Wanted Painting' Even if Nobody Wants It?"

The results in this book lead to many questions. Not the least of these is 'what is art?' and 'what does this say about human nature?'. One article from the Jan/Feb 2002 issue of American Spectator illustrates this problem very well. It seems a few months ago a very famous photographer was holding a one-man exhibit at a London gallery. He is quite famous for the nauseating and offensive subject matter of his work. That night he gathered together the cigarrette butts, empty paper cups, and other assorted trash from the opening-night party and "artfully" arranged it in a pile in a corner and took a picture of it. The pile was promptly announced by a London art-critic to be worth at least 5K (in pounds). Unfortunately, someone forgot to tell the janitor that night that the pile was art, not trash. So you can guess the ending of this story.

I recount this to make a point. That is, this book will shed some light on why so many people have trouble - even the U.S. Supreme Court - on saying exactly what Art is. Get this book. It is fun and fascinating look into not only the tastes in art around the world but also a window into the science of polls and polling.

The consequences were also human: the loss of the prime years of a man's life, a life without the love of a woman, a father worrying about the fate of his young daughter thousands of miles away. Solzhenitsyn does a masterful job of rendering the real world behind philosophy and ideology, the world the USSR lost sight of when they placed ends before means.

In the end, what is perhaps most frightening is that the face of evil is so banal.

I believe that Solzhenitsyn is the best writer of the 20th century, or at least he's the top writer I've read so far (and I've read a lot of books). Maybe that's influenced by my early exposure, but I don't think so; I find his works just as compelling now as I did then.

The First Circle is one of his most "accessible" works (that is, you can just jump in and start reading) and probably one of his best. A very compelling story; his portraits of the various vile creatures of the Soviet government have been shown to be quite accurate, and the way the various plots intertwine and are resolved is wonderful.

The First Circle gives great insight into a culture totally foreign to most US citizens, as the book's a mixture of spy novel, guide to life in a Gulag camp, and brief introduction to Soviet society of the 1950s. A depressing place to be sure, but fascinating. Well worth reading.

The ending of the book will disappoint those who want a happy ending, or just an ending with all the loose ends tied up. In real life, though, loose ends usually stay loose. My thought is that Solzhenitshyn intended the reader to understand that for the characters and the society who are so damaged by the past there can be no happy endings; the best they can hope for is to continue from day to day, grasping at whatever happiness briefly comes their way.

The content of "Gulag Archipelago" is quite extraordinary. Solzhenitsyn includes countless anecdotes of prisoners and their families in various phases of arrest, interrogation, imprisonment, slave labor, death, or release. He buttresses these stories with statistics, and with his own personal narrative of his years in the Gulag. The information in this book is simply staggering, not only for the cruelty and evil it describes but also the folly. The Soviet government murdered indiscriminately across all lines of race, class, and gender. In many cases, it murdered the most brilliant and productive members of its society--the very people who could have built it into something great.

Many people take umbrage with Solzhenitsyn's style, which involves a lot of ranting and run-on footnotes. Personally, I find his narrative interesting and invigorating. Solzhenitsyn's narrative is vigorous, untrammeled and loaded with sarcasm. While many find this gimmicky or uncultured, it helped buoy me through the unbearable sadness of the book's subject matter.

Obviously this book isn't for everybody and it requires a considerable degree of fortitude to get through it. But I think it is essential in all our lives to read this book or one similar to it.

Like other great men, Solzhenitsyn's early life gave little indication of the monumental importance he would one day achieve. But one day, while serving as an officer in the Soviet army during WWII, something happened to our author that happened to so many others under the Soviet regime: Solzhenitsyn was arrested for insubordination, sentenced to eight years, and thrown into the gaping maw of the Gulag prison system. Unfortunately for the memory of the 'Great Father' (read Joey Stalin), this obscure army officer lived to tell the tale of all he saw and heard during his imprisonment. The result is the voluminous three volume series presented here in translation. 'The Gulag Archipelago' serves as both an indictment of the evil Soviet regime and as a memorial for the untold millions who died in the camps.

The overarching theme of this book is the process, from start to finish, of internment in the Gulag system. Starting with the dreaded 'knock in the middle of the night,' the author traces the nightmare of incarceration through the interrogation, the sentencing, the transportation to the prison camps, the grinding work conditions of the camps, and the eventual release into eternal exile or tentative freedom. Solzhenitsyn repeatedly delves into historical analysis, biography, journalism, philosophical musings, and literature to present his account. What emerges is page after page of heartrending suffering that is nearly incomprehensible to any sane human mind. The endless accounts of cruelty sicken the soul and should strike anyone who thinks communism is a great system of government deaf and dumb.

Volume one begins the harrowing odyssey into madness, outlining Solzhenitsyn's own arrest, the endless waves of people that fed the prison system, the interrogation procedures used to elicit false confessions to meaningless crimes, the dreaded Soviet criminal code containing the notorious 'Article 58' under which millions went to jail as political prisoners, the disintegration of the Soviet legal system to what basically amounted to a rubber stamp type of sentencing, and the transportation of prisoners via train to the eastern reaches of the Soviet empire.

Volume two deals mainly with camp life, with all of the trials and travails a person faced and how people struggled to survive. It is here we learn about Stalin's canal building projects and the thousands who died to fulfill the sick dreams of a ruthless sociopath. We see the horrible rations prisoners were forced to survive upon while having their ears filled with disgusting propaganda about how their work was important in helping to create the worker's paradise. The second volume also contains a history about how the gulag system emerged and how it spread, a discussion about loyal communists who so internalized the party belief system that they refused to believe Stalin sold them out, and chapters about the different types of people confined to the gulag (trusties, thieves, kids, women, and politicals).

Volume three focuses mostly on prisoner defiance of the terrible conditions in the prisons, discussing escape attempts (especially Georgi Tenno, a hero to the human race and indefatigable in his disobedience of the Soviet authorities), and outright prison revolts where the entire population of a prison banded together against the common evil. We then see Solzhenitsyn's release into exile and his ultimate 'rehabilitation' after the death of Stalin and the rise of Khrushchev and his 'moderate' reforms. The series ends with a call for more investigations into Soviet atrocities committed in the gulags.

No summary could completely outline the scope of this book; so enormous is the amount of detail held in these pages. The reader is tirelessly assailed with the names of those butchered under the hammer and sickle. Predictably, most of the blame for these murders falls on Comrade Stalin, author of the kulakization pogroms, the endless political purges, and the continuous sufferings inflicted on the various peoples under his control. Always referring to this beast in the most insolent and sarcastic tones imaginable, Solzhenitsyn rightly calls Stalin 'Satan.' Hitler was a mere schoolboy when held up to the unholy terror of the 'great' Dzhugashvili.

Still, one gets the sense of the majesty and power of the great Russian people in these accounts. Nothing will keep these people down for long. Everything the camps threw at these many of these wondrous creatures failed to break their spirit. They figured out how to lessen the back breaking labor of the camps, learned how to stay alive on rations barely fit for a dog, struggled to escape the chains that bound them to the death camps. Although the author laments the docility of those serving sentences, there are enough tales of bravery and defiance to warm the most cynical heart.

I highly recommend reading the unabridged version of 'The Gulag Archipelago.' There used to be an abridged version of some 900 pages floating around, but only the 2000-page edition brings home the full scope of the evils of communism. Accessibility is a problem, but stare into the eyes of Yelizaveta Yevgenyevna Anichkova on page 488 in the first volume and tell me her memory does not deserve an effort on your part to read every page of one of the most important books ever written.