This is the story of Germany's great WWI ace Oswald Boelcke. Boelcke developed many of the air combat principles that are still valid today. He was also a great ace himself, shooting down 40 enemy aircraft. Much of the book is made up of letters and diary entries written by Boelcke himself,which makes the book as much autobiograph as biography.

It's perhaps rather presumptuous, reviewing a book I can hardly read. But this book is mostly to look at, though it may be useful to occult herbalists who are well-versed in High German. Fortunately, Fuchs's text gives Greek and Latin names for the various plants, and the appended materials catalogue them by English and current scientific Latin names.

The chief attraction here, though, is the woodcuts. This is a facsimile of Fuchs's own, carefully coloured, edition of this early printed work. The line art itself is awesome, easily superior to that found in the edition of Culpeper I own, and allows those plants depicted in it to be easily identified by those who know them. The added colours, which graced only a handful of costly copies, are delicate and well preserved, and seem usually accurate. It is as much for these careful illustrations as for Fuchs's own text that this work remains interesting.

The text itself is in a nonstandard early version of High German, printed in a beautiful if hard to read Fraktur-style black letter font. As the prefatory material points out, Fuchs was a medical traditionalist, maintaining that Greek medicine was superior to the newfangled versions imported secondhand from Islamic countries, apparently because it partook of the pure wisdom of antiquity.

Fuchs fully subscribed to the doctrine of the four humours and the four elements, and his text is geared towards that theory. The indications of the medical virtues of the herbs reflect a shotgun approach; it seems there are few human ailments that aren't helped by some, often dozens of them. Empirically, we know now that some work better than others. A brief English commentary at the end discusses some of Fuchs's prescriptions, and considers the remaining validity of his theories about the virtues of the various plants in question.

This is a feast for the eyes, and at once scientific and arcane. Lovers of reproductions of classic books will want this, and herbalists or botanists may also enjoy it.

Set in the Outer Hebrides in 1899, Adriane Hollander went to Weybridge Manor near the tiny village of Thirstlehed. Her grandfather had been a famous painter, Leo Whitsed, who had recently passed away and left the Manor to Adriane's mother. Adriane came in her mother's place to settle all the affairs.

Evan MacKeen was the solicitor and was very helpful in cataloging the painting and placing the manor on the market. He was also very fond of Adriane and found many times to be with her when she went to see the sights of the island.

Nager Saranoff and his half dog and half wolf pet lived close by in Glamorgan Castle. He was also a painter and had spent much time with her grandfather. When Adriane heard about the three women who had disappeared without a trace from Glamorgan Castle, her curiosity demanded she solve the mystery as to what happened to them. Thus she began to dig into a past that some wanted to leave buried!

***** I have always adored Gothics and Patricia Werner is destined to be swarmed with fans for her attempt to bring them back into the public's view! I am among those admirers. Here is one full of danger, mystery, and romance, just begging for readers to try to piece together themselves! Brava, Ms. Werner! Brava! *****

For all those who want to learn about the position of Max Ernst within Surrealism this is an essential book. Scholarly essays by Werner Spies (arguably the foremost authority on Max Ernst) and William Camfield, who writes in fascinating detail about the transition period when the artist moved from Dada into Surrealism. The period comes alive with rare photographs and anecdotes about the struggles of Max Ernst to survive in Germany after the first world war and his efforts to reach Paris, the promised land. Max Ernst, a true pioneer of many of the art techniques taught nowadays in artschools, such as frottage and collage, is celebrated in this book with not only almost 200 colour plates of many of his masterpieces, but also many lesser known works which show how he constructed his collages. Added to this are inumerable black and white illustrations of the sources for many of his most famous paintings. As Max Ernst never wrote an autobiography,a book such as this is a must for all those who desire to know something more about the artist who is quoted on page 28 as saying "A painter is lost when he finds himself." An artist difficult to know, but this book goes a long way in bridging that gap.

No other book provides the passion and power for establishing mentoring connections for youth as this book. While not exactly a how-to-do-it book, it provides enough details about the "why" of mentoring and disinguishes clearly between mentoring that has value for youth versus other types of well-meaning approaches. Chapters are included by the most well-known leaders in the youth mentoring field, including Marc Freedman and Bonnie Benard, that are not only informative and inspiring, but can can easily yield guidance for anyone associated with mentoring youth. All the authors agree that the power of mentoring is not in the "program," but in the relationship.

This book was the first that explained to me how you can investigate information needs. It makes you think about how a information systems is used. Not how a system is build technically. It summarizes other methods than the questionaire or interviews (Which aren't the best methods to asses information needs). The book might be old but is certainly not out of date.

This new Metropolis picture book is a must-have for all fans and students of Fritz Lang's classic 1927 silent film. Printed in large format and on high gloss paper, this bilingual (German/English) edition is worth the price alone for the collecton of spectacular black and white images, the majority of which deal with the film's production during 1925-6. However, supplementing this, is a comprehensive introductory essay which reveals the often savage reception the film received upon its premiere, along with the overwhelming accolades. In addition, there are articles presenting a concise outline of the director's original film (now severely edited, and with perhaps a quarter lost forever), and a history of the various prints surviving in film archives throughout the world. Finally, a comprehensive bibliography and expansive footnotes add to what is undoubtedly an essential reference text for anyone interested in Fritz Lang's masterwork. Many questions are answered within this book, e.g. the 1968 statement by Lang that Thea von Harbou wrote the novelised version of Metropolis after she finished the movie script, and not before, is significant. It is just one of many such snippets which the German editors of the book have now provided to a worldwide audience. The production by Axel Menges is also to be commended. 28 November 2000

a magnificient book about the last domestic project built by mies, where an extraordinary complexity of details results in a very simple home. truly the work of a lifetime achievement.

Basically, it is a book about literature review but with well organized ideas proposed by the author himself. The author covered almost everything in the area of numerical simulation of CVD and focused on the transport phenomena simulation. The boundary conditions are described in detail. However, for the radiating heat transfer the description is not very useful for a beginner. There are only very general descriptions on this topic which interests me most. Some equations are somewhat confusing to the reader in the conjugate heat transfer part.

This book brings together 40 prints of the artist's paintings in beautiful colour, as well as a lengthy text which precedes them, with photographs of Modigliani, and examples of his sculptures and caryatids. Werner presents M as a tragic figure since his health was poor - he suffered from tuberculosis all his life, and he died relatively young at 35, without receiving any substantial recognition of his work. Much is made of his excessive social life in Paris, though M was Italian, where he is said to have indulged in alcohol and hashish. He focused on painting after he was unable to continue with sculpture because of his lack of money, the difficulty in obtaining materials, and the affect of the stone dust on his weak lungs. Werner also tells us that M suffered from a psychoneurosis, and calls him a "solipsist who produced exclusively self-portraits, symbolic representations of his own tortured soul". However these arguments do not appear to relate to the nature of his painting. His work is calm, not tortured, and the idea that his infamous style of Expressionist distortion is meant to reveal a "paranoiac autism" seems silly. The photos we see of M show that he does not resemble his skittle-shaped, swan-necked, almond-eyed portraits. Even the notion that some of the subjects having closed eyes meaning an inner directed concentration based on a fear of the world, does not appreciate the stylistic choice he made to express his form of conception upon reality. He had trained as a draftsman and considered his work "illuminations", accentuating attributes to the point of caricature. The faces of his sculptures bear the same kind of visage. His work is both striking in his use of colour, where he favoured strong lines and prefered primary blacks and reds; and tender in the delicate way he treats the subjects, whether they be Parisian socialities, other artists, his two mistresses - Beatrice Hastings and Jeanne Hebuterne, or working class models like maids and peasants. What ultimately makes the work of Modigliani great is how one can return to the prints again and again, to revel in their mannered elegance, their sadness and beauty, and his unique balance between naturalism and abstraction.