Being a chukar hunter myself, I found this book to be enjoyable. Whether you hunt them or not, the book has a lot of good points. It doesn't tell all, but it does talk about the realities of chukar hunting. If you're looking for a text book, forget it. But if you want to read a book that is factual and fun at the same time, this is a great book.

This is a literate and personal book, and a short one. As a long time chukar hunter, I think that it falls short in a couple of areas, or I would have rated it five stars.

This is not a "how to" book, although it contains a fair amount of information, and tips on gear.

Worth the money, and as I said, the only book (in English) on the subject.

I've hunted chukars with a fever since I was able to carry a shotgun 25 years ago. Buddy Levy writes wonderfully and his passion, respect and understanding for this great game bird and the land they inhabit shines. It is obvious this book is personal and we are fortunate Levy has let us in.

I highly recommend you make the effort to share Levy's love of what it means to hunt chukars....

This is another sumptuously produced book from the National Geographic Society. The text is a little "mickey-mouse" by my standards, but the photos, many from NASA planetary missions are Hubble, are beautifully reproduced and well worth the price of admission.

The book is divided into sections: inner planets, outer planets, and deep space, with text and photos (in that order) for each.
Nicely done and well worth browsing.

The book goes from the sun and the solar system, through galaxies and nebulas, up to the edges of the known universe, giving great and worthy images (and info) in each "station", all printed on a high quality paper, of course. Especially good are the images from the galaxies and nebulas. Those from the near planets I liked a bit less, and I've seen better ones elsewhere...
The text all the way is well written and enjoyable to read. It gives, in addition to the info about each object, some nice (but basic) introduction to astronomy in general - things such as how distance from stars is measured, how light coming from objects is analyzed, astronomy history etc...
However, as it covers the entire universe, it is, as you might think (considering it's size...), pretty basic - both the images and the info. It gives just a small (but good!) taste of everything, not going too deep anywhere.

All in all, it's an excellent book, but I think it'll be worthy to you only if you don't have many other astronomy books, since it's pretty basic.

Although I started out rating this a "4", I changed my mind and gave it a "5", mainly because I found it for half price and also because some of these pictures are so marvelous that it's scary. You've never seen the Eagle or Helix nebulae like this before and some of the pictures within our own solar system give you a good idea of what it must be like if you're out there--scary. Away from Earth and in a desolate zone millions of miles away. Galaxies, star clusters, etc.. are so much more defined than the photographs of these wonders that come from Earth-based observatories. No atmospheric turbulence and also great photos from the greatest scope man has invented. Galileo would marvel at the photographs of Jupiter and its Moons, which he first discovered long ago. He sure didn't see them like this.

Working at PARC in research is something a lot of scientists might dream of. Lots of money and time to burn, living in the beautiful hills of Palo Alto. I used to run my bicycle around there in the morning. Mr. Levy had probably fun writing the book, but I did not have fun reading it. Obviously the author read a lot, knows a lot, but does not get to the point. The story gets lost in a mythical view about paper and information. I have to commit, I made it only to one third of the book, then I gave up, but hey, I don't work in research.
An excellent book about Information in the internet age: Die Bibliothek der Zukunft from Dieter E. Zimmer; unfortunately not in English;

...Our complicated relationship with documents--everything from Post-Its to encyclopedias--is the subject of David Levy's "Scrolling Forward."

Levy, a doctoral computer scientist and calligrapher, is well placed to compare the old and new. His book is organized around broad subjects--reading, writing and the like--but each chapter is a meditation, written more on the "this reminds me of that" principle, than according to something more formal. Such an approach can occasionally get out of control, but at its best the book's style effectively juxtaposes printed and electronic documents and calculates the gains and losses of moving information from one medium to the other.

The fact that Levy is interested in this question indicates a growing maturity in our attitudes toward digital materials. A decade ago, the first important works on hypertext and multimedia--George P. Landow's "Hypertext" and Jay David Bolter's "Writing Space"--declared that, thanks to the computer, the author was dead, the reader reigned supreme, the book was doomed and linear thinking was passe.

They were widely praised within academic circles and provoked defenders such as Sven Birkerts to assert the eternal value of the book. The debate that has followed has largely been beside the point, because it misses several things that Levy wisely considers in depth.

First, arguments over "the future of the book" focus on books, particularly high literature. But we live in a world saturated with texts: We might not read Dante every today, but we'll read street signs, scan newspapers, select from restaurant menus, answer e-mail, ignore ads, type URLs. To drive the point home, "Scrolling Forward" begins not with a discussion of encyclopedias or the Bible, but with a deli receipt. Even something so utterly inconsequential turns out to draw upon thousands of years of history and complex social institutions, not to mention a host of technologies.

"Over the centuries a complex network of institutions and practices has grown up to create and maintain meaningful and reliable paper documents," Levy argues. This is as true of receipts as it is of Rilke: "To be a receipt is to be connected to cash registers, sellers, buyers, products, expense reports, the IRS, and so on." It takes a village to make a document.

Levy's receipt was a hybrid, a printed record generated by an electronic system; therein lies a second big point. It turns out that documents have sloshed between electronic and printed form for decades. Checks and airline tickets were computer-printed from the 1950s. Mainframe computer publishing systems were developed in the 1960s and 1970s for newspapers and other high-volume publishers. In the 1980s, word processors allowed writers to create digital texts. In the 1990s, Web browsers gave readers direct access to digital works. This last and most-publicized step was a culmination, not a revolution. Seen in this light, the whole print versus digital debate seems irrelevant.

The fact that the debate over "the future of the book" took off in the last decade suggests that what's at stake isn't just materials but practices and cultural institutions. We pick up cues about the utility and reputability of printed sources from the publisher, the feel of the paper, even from a document's location in a library or bookstore; such cues have yet to be reproduced consistently online, and the social networks that add value to printed works weren't threatened by the computerization of typesetting and printing.

Documents, Levy argues, aren't just information; they're also material things and cultural artifacts. Even digital documents aren't "just" immaterial bits. As Levy notes, "the ones and zeros of our digital representations ... are embedded in a material substrate no less than are calligraphic letter forms on a piece of vellum." This is not to say that an electronic document can't have all the qualities of a printed one. It is to say, however, that those qualities can't be programmed as features in the next upgrade: They have to be created in the social world and in the world of human practices and attitudes. Levy wants us to recognize that books and journals are much more than containers from which content can now be "liberated." They have influenced-- often to the good--the way we read, organize our thoughts and create order in our intellectual worlds.

Scrolling Forward is a very fine survey of the changing relationships between ordinary objects - in this case, documents - and modern digital influences. Writing, etiquette, and reading habits are being questioned and changed by new technologies and practices: this examines documents of all kinds, considering what is likely to change and what is/should be preserved in the Internet Age. A fascinating survey of the future of documents and their meaning.

This is a good book-the comments on Fischer are interesting and there are many lesser-known games which are good.

When I was reading this book more than 15 years ago, I took it everywhere! My fascination with Bobby Fischer started here. Although Fischer had become Champion before I discovered the game, his 6-0 matches leading up to his battle with Spassky (unthinkable if one considers the high level of grandmaster play), his sudden adoption of queen-pawn openings.....one of the greatest dramas played out in the history of the game had me spellbound!

The move 1...c5 in response to 1. e4 is baffling to beginners. It does nothing to aid the development of the minor pieces, fails to move out a center pawn and is often followed by even more non-developing pawn moves. Many must surely ask, "How is a defense that seems to flout all the opening priciples so often adopted by super-strong players?" They're right: Fischer, Karpov, Kasparov, Spassky, Tal and others have had the Sicilian figure prominently in their repertoires. Levy an O'Connell do an excellent job of outlining strategies for White and Black in this wide-ranging opening (As far as I can tell, only the c3 Sicilian and the odd gambits are ignored). For those rated 1400-1800, this is a good introduction to the opening. For "A" players, this will provide an excellent foundation for deeper research into the opening. Another fine effort from David Levy.* Highly recommended. (*Excepting his, An Opening Repertoire for the Attacking Player, co-authored with Raymond Keene, which is a clinker -- see my review under that title.)

The Sicilian is a bizarre animal: 1...c5 opens no lines for Bishops, prepares no pieces for development and fails to place a center pawn into play. Yet it is Black's most formidable defense to 1. e4. The authors do an excellent job of explaining why and provide ideas for both White and Black in a variety of settings: The Maraczy Bind, Sheveningen, "Little Center", Dragon, ...e5 systems and closed formations are all covered. Only the Morra-Smith gambit (and other lesser gambits) and the c3 Sicilian have been left out. If you are a 1400-1800 player and want to get a handle on the Sicilian, this is the place to start.

David is an enthusiastic and inspiring writer. This book can effectively take you through the very beginnings of variable star observation and set you on your way to becoming a productive observer able to submit valid data to organizations like the American Association of Variable Star Observers. Get it.

A great book for the amateur astronomer that is looking for new stars to observe or wishes to contribute observations of variable stars to professional organizations. David Levy is an excellent writer and does a fine job of explaining the tricks and tips of observing these peculiar objects.

I actually like this book -- I paid for my copy while in London in 1992. I was going to be on a plane for several hours and was looking for some puzzles to solve on the way home. Published in 1980, the most recent games and positions are from the late seventies so players new to chess may not be familiar with the more famous shots illustrated here, but veteran readers will recall many from the pages of Chess Life & Review and the Informator series. After a too brief introductory chapter, the author divides tactics into themes like "Decoying Combinations" and "Line-opening Combinations". Later chapters include, "Sacrifices associated with specific openings" and "The psychological aspects of sacrifices." The latter is somewhat interesting but the former tries to cover way to much ground in 25 pages. My guess is that there are about 250 positions in the instructional chapters. Additionally there is a 30 question quiz and 10 sacrificial games including the wildly entertaining game, Portisch-Kavalek, Wijk aan Zee, 1975. For the price, I'd buy DuMont's, The Basis of Combination in Chess and still have enough cash to pick up Evans', New Ideas in Chess and Renaud & Kahn's, The Art of the Checkmate.

I bought this book almost a decade ago and thoroughly enjoy the storytelling and examples Levy uses to instruct.

When Levy has you play through the Russian North Pole vs. South Pole game (played by radio), he not only teaches you about chess, he allows you to relive a piece of its history. This storytelling doesn't interfere with his instruction however, but instead provides a much richer learning experience that will stick. When I play now I think.. "yeah.. just like the queen sacrifice from that 1850 opera house game." Not, "oh yeah, like example #935."

I've purchased several other books on sacrifices and combinations; most with a dizzying number of contrived postions littering each page. Every time I buy one of these I hope for the experience I had reading this book for the first time. I am always disappointed.

I really enjoyed this book although I thought at the beginning that it was really going to be dreary. I actually read it in a class taught by the editor of the book, David Levy. His insights during class made the book more interesting to me and I ended up really liking it. The utopia that it presents is unusual and quite unlike any I have encountered in any other piece of literature. The end of the novel does seem to kind of go off track into a seeminly endless socialist rambling, but overall the book is very good. Seeing our society from the Altrurian's point of view was kind of jolt and made me look at many things differently. Overall, I would recommend highly recommend this novel.

Although this isn't considered one of Howells' better novels, it's one of my personal favorites. Towards the end of his career, this "dean" of American letters became increasingly concerned with political issues. In particular, he began to align himself, to an extent, with the socialist movement. He never became a full-blown socialist, but he did appreciate their philosophy and understand the limitations of our American democracy. As a result of this growing interest, Howells' fiction turned from socio-cultural concerns to matters of politics. A Traveler from Altruria is a fine example of this change in subject matter. Despite the fact that many critics have interpreted this ostensibly utopian novel as a blind--and rather naive--call to socialism, I heartily disagree. In fact, I contend that Howells was self-consciously and ironically questioning the socialist movement and the utopian tradition. Howells' underappreciated effort is concise, witty and sophisticated. I recommend it to all fans of American literature and to all students of political science. The Bedford edition is exquisitely packaged and shrewdly conceptualized. The introduction, appendices, and other ancillary materials make for a thorough and savvy document.

Those who are interested in chess programming certainly know how difficult is to find books on the subject. David Levy's book is, without a doubt, the most complete reference so far on chess programming. This book is out of print and extremely difficult to find, but if you have the chance to get your hands on it, don't loose it.

Very good self explanation with updated information.