A start in analysis.-- For some number of years, Rudin's "Real and Complex", and a few other analysis books, served as the canonical choice for the book to use, and to teach from, in a first year grad analysis course. Lieb-Loss offers a refreshing alternative: It begins with a down-to-earth intro to measure theory, L^p and all that...It aims at a wide range of essential applications, such as the Fourier transform, and series, inequalities, distributions, and Sobolev spaces,--- PDE, potential theory, calculus of variations, and math physics (Schrodinger's equation, the hydrogen atom, Thomas-Fermi theory... to mention a few.) The book should work equallly well in a one, or in a two semester course. The first half of the book covers the basics, and the rest will be great for students to have, regardless of whether or not it gets to be included in a course. This choice of book is also especially agreeable to grad students in physics who need to read up on the tools of analysis.

By the end of the sixties Dyson and Lennard, for the first time, proved that matter is stable. More precisely, they proved the thermodynamic stability of Coulomb matter. This was a landmark of mathematical physics, and a huge one: a very long and hard paper. A few years later, Elliott Lieb and Walter Thirring substantially improved the great Dyson result, dramatically cutting its length while improving important estimates. A very good review of these results can be find in the volume 4 of Thirring's "A Course in Mathematical Physics". Even the book version is a bit hard to read, as much mathematical analysis is required. The "Analysis" of Lieb and Loss is a book on analysis which has as a theme the great result of Lieb and Thirring. It is a real book on analysis. The chapters are named "Measure and Integration", "Lp-spaces","The Fourier transform", "Distributions", but also "Potential Theory and Coulomb En! ergies" and "Introduction to the Calculus of Variations", where nothing less than the Thomas-Fermi atom is rigorously studied. In order to leave no doubt that hard analysis is present, there are two chapters on Inequalities. After studying this splendid text the reader will be a better analist and, if he cares to, can start reading the proof of stability of matter. The proof of the pudding is NOT in the eating!

Co-edited by John T. Shawcross, whose synopses of the arguments and critical and bibliographical history of Milton's prose works in the Appendix would alone make it a valuable addition to any reader's shelf, this book contains a collection of essays by some of the most prominent scholars of the genre (including Profs. Shawcross and Lieb). It is a "must read" for anyone interested in Miltonic thought, and though out of print, will be worth the effort to locate.

In this critical study and new reading of Milton, Michael Liebexplores the poet's texts through a vision of Milton as self-imagedbisexual with fears of dismemberment. Milton's hidden message, according to Lieb, in texts like Lycidas, A Mask, Paradise Lost, and Samson Agonistes, as well as in the sonnets and some of Milton's polemic tracts, is the poet's own internal vision of self which Lieb sets up in his introduction with the story of the disinterring and sparagmos of the poet's corpse and the subsequent arguments over the authentication of the body.

Lieb's approach to Milton is in three parts, in which he describes Milton in terms of the archetype of the Orpheic poet torn to pieces by wild women, the Old Testament view of the virgin-matron, and then integrates these images with his interpretation of Milton as artist and politician who re-visions himself in the context of such mythic images and in light of Milton's own discourse with contemporaries. Lieb begins each section by setting up the recurrent theme of violent dismemberment and loss in Greco-Roman and Biblical myths which he sees as the basis of Milton's works, discussing the stories of Orpheus, of the Levites concubine ravished by the Benjaminites and of blind Samson.

He also discusses the violence inherent in the political-religious arena of Milton's day that allowed the beheading of a king, the mutilation and disembowelment of the regicides, and atrocities like massacre of the Waldensians at Piedmont in 1655. Pointing to Milton's Sonnet 18, written in response to the incident in Piedmont, Lieb argues that Milton's abhorrence of extreme violence involving mutilation, dismemberment, or any rending of the physical body stems not just from his equation of the individual body with the rending of the Body of Christ, i.e.: the Church. Lieb, while recognizing the Milton's equation of the Orpheic poet torn apart by Bacchantes with the crucified Christ as integral to Milton's own religious vision, also sees a deeper "Secret History" in Milton's work in which Milton is relating his own identification with and fear of physical dismemberment or sparagmos. To emphasize his point Lieb draws directly on Miltonic texts and sets up parallels between these and specific incidents in Milton's personal life and career.

In part two of his book, Lieb introduces the story of the rape and death of the Levite's concubine and discusses Milton's treatment of females images, particularly in Paradise Lost. Lieb's argument here is that Milton is revisiting the issue of female rape from a sociopolitical perspective. Lieb feels that Milton's own gender crisis stems from his university days and a nickname he acquired, "the Lady of Christ's College," which was based in the fairness of his coloration and an effeminacy of carriage. Lieb takes this incident a step further insisting that Milton's own fragile sexual self-identity was shaped here and, further, that it is then reflected in his treatment of female figures in his text. Milton, Lieb says, is seeking to subsume his own internal female/bisexuality in the gender role reversals of "dominant female" figures like the Domina defending her chastity in A Mask, and Eve coercing Adam in Paradise Lost.

Lieb also points to Milton's divorce tracts, claiming Milton's intention here is a more liberal interpretation of the issue of fornication and adultery, which, according to Lieb, stems from Milton's own identification with the Levite's concubine of Judges 19 and reinterprets female "whoorishness" as not simply a sexual behavior but as woman in argument with male authority. Lieb claims Milton's own sexual identity is at issue here and uses Rabbinical critiques to reinforce his view of Milton's text as reflecting Milton's struggle to come to grips with his own bisexual leanings. Milton, says Lieb, must reevaluate and reinstate the female through his writing to come to grips with his own internal virgin-matron complex.

Milton's struggle with self-identity is also the focus of part three of Lieb's book in which Lieb now places a new historicist twist into what has, so far, been a psychological (almost Freudian) interpretation of Milton the poet. Here Lieb makes his most far-reaching claim, that it is Milton's own self-fashioning that is revealed in Samson Agonistes. Lieb draws from Milton's polemic tracts, specifically Pro Se Defensio and Defensio Secunda, to define what he calls Milton's "theatre of assault" in which the now blind poet is effectively reshaping and reclaiming his own reputation and reestablishing his self-identity as masculine, virile, and physically whole. Quoting Milton's condemnation of those who would mock him, Lieb points out Milton's feelings of self-rightness and divine favor and sees them in a Pauline paradox of "strength perfected in weakness." By refashioning his own physical bodily repristination in the destruction of his adversaries, Lieb argues, Milton is protecting himself from the internal femininity and the external dismemberment, sparagmos, he has always feared.

Throughout his work, Lieb uses Biblical references to tease out hidden meanings in Milton's texts. He supports his arguments with both textual material from Milton's writings and anecdotal evidence from Milton's life, and yet one can't help but feel that Lieb is occasionally reaching too far in the conclusions he draws, particularly in the third section where he sees intentional direction on the part of the poet as "self-refashioner." Lieb does argue with great erudition, which is apparent both in his conscious use of language and his remarkable ability to draw inferences from Milton's sources in both Classical and Biblical myth. He does tend to build, not on, but rather more often against, the current criticism of other Milton scholars. Over all this is an exceptional piece of scholarly piece of writing, aimed at serious Milton scholars and well worth reading whether or not one accepts Lieb's thesis on the crisis of Milton's self-identity. What Lieb has provided here is a fascinating, and well cross-referenced, theory that is not for the faint-hearted or fair-weather scholar.

Skip this book if you're into alien, u.f.o theories.

I'm looking forward to the release of this book. Over the years I've been conducting research into Ezekiel UFOs catastrophism and the end times. From time to time quality books appear. The latest on Ezekiel received through Amazon is by bible scholar Moshe Greenberg. I'm sure this book, released December 98, will prove another vital resource for any serious researcher, judging by the author's past work listed by and available through Amazon.