This collection of observations, opinions and statistics of Mr. Ulyanov certainly isn't what I expected. Typically such texts are filled to the brim with rhetorical catch-phrases, belligerent ranting towards the bourgeoisie and the wealthy classes, and little else. Here, the cases for Lenin's ideas are very strong, and he later used this to an advantage. Not to mention the way he strung his ideas together; Lenin was perhaps the most intellectual and charismatic of all the Soviet leaders, which is why his image is idealized so often in media. You see him on T-shirt and posters, something he never thought he'd ever end up as; then again he probably never assumed that his body would be stuffed and put on display for 80 years..

This is a fine introduction to the thinking of one of the few people in the world who really influenced the tide of history. Along with Leon Trotsky and the Bolshevik Party, Lenin helped establish the first state that was ruled by and for the working class. What went wrong with the revolution is best dealt with by reading Trotsky.

This book really captures the essence of Lenin's thoughts and philosophy. His most famous piece : "What Is To Be Done?" captures the turmoil that was swirling around socialism during that time and esp in Russia. His theory on the development of the class conscious and importance of professional revolutionaries were amazing and showed the vision that this genius held. It's really sad that someone such as Stalin had to destroy something as pure and just as the work of Lenin, Marx, and true socialism!!

This biography of the legendary pianist is very impressive and interesting to read -- what is interesting is the life and anecdote of the pianist; what is impressive is the style of the author. It is a detailed account punctuated by humor and insight. On the other hand, compared to the 'Great Pianists'(also by Mr. Schonberg), the author's stylistic whimsical jokes are handled with much greater care - perhaps not to cause unwanted bitterness among Horowitz fans! Like Hilary and Jacky, this book dashed the mystery most people have towards geniuses. The success of geniuses often results in pain for others, especially those who are close to them -- Sonia Horowitz is an acute example. Personally, I find this one of the most touching episodes in the book. If Rachmaninov is 'god for many pianists', as Pletnev says, Horowitz is surely idol for them.

At last, an in-depth, informative, engrossing book whose subject was a giant.........Horowitz. Mr. Schonberg's articulate style, vast musical expertise and genuine account of this amazing virtuoso is a pleasure to readers of the book... Many thanks, Mr. Schonberg !

Mr Schonberg demonstrated expert musical criticism and personal devotion to his difficult subject. Biographical information is plentiful and accurate, including insight into Horowitz' everyday life and manners. Musical comments on recordings are somewhate more controversial, with a bitterness in respect to Horowitz' last recordings that I find hard to understand. Anyway, an indispensable book.

Reading this book is a great intelectual adventure. There are a lot of information and the author has a very clear and envolving writing, always creating expectative over what's coming next. The author also mixes narrative with a lot of opinions and analysis about the facts. There are, as well, many quottings from other works about Jobotinsky, along with several transcriptions of classified official documents that shed light into controversial facts. The author is not afraid of polemics and gives new perspectives over matters treated as tabu, like Ben Gurion, Weizman, The Zionist Organization and the Histadrut. Much enfasis is given to Jabotinsky's unstopabble fight for the jewish rights in palestine and abroad, as well as his unfearing steadfastness against anyone who denied the goal of creating a jewish state. The book will give a complete understanding of the Revisionist movement, the British Rule in Israel, the internal Zionist Organization politics and its blunders, the arab behavior, among others. By reading this book you will also be able to better understand contemporary israeli politics and the relationship with the arab countries. The book, although very pleasant, takes quite a bit to be read, but it is a must for anyone who wants to know one of the greatest zionist and jewish leaders ever and get into the politics of the pre-state period.

This book is a real eye opener. It completly changed my perspective on the history of the Middle East and how the British, who so often have come accross as the "white knight" was in fact the dirty thief.

The book is a monster in size and in the amount of information it presents. It documented and footnoted to a degree that one would expect from a work of this nature.

I highly suggest it to anyone who wants to find out about the history of modern Israel and how the wolrd powers did what they do best, exploit. I truly learned much!

Zeev (meaning wolf, in hebrew) Jabotinsky was one of the greatest leaders ever, and the greatest liberal Zionist leader. His works can not be denied. Because of his many deeds, he was admired by many - and hated by the rest. And he is the subject of this book, like many other books and articles. But this one is special - the auther spent 7 years of his life reserching and writing it, and those seven years have beared fruit. The writing is of a very high quality, and the contence is extensive. Itws like no other book about Jabotinsky I know. After reading, you will enrich not only your mind - but also your spirit, by knowing this great man. Highly recomended, for all people - Zionists, students, and anyone seeking pure knolage and feeding.

For Nabokov, nothing was ever as simple as it seemed. In fact, "simple" and "sincere" were two adjectives that he despised. While teaching at Wellesley College and later at Cornell, Nabokov would give a low mark to any student who used the words, "simple" and "sincere" in a paper.

Nabokov was a writer who celebrated the complexities in life. He looked for unexpected meanings in even the most banal details of existence and the test questions he set for his students were notoriously eccentric, e.g., Describe Madame Bovary's hairdo; What sort of paper covered the walls of Anna Karenina's bedroom? for Nabokov, God was a subtle being, but tremendously inventive and perhaps a little sly.

Nabokov believed that "the unraveling of a riddle is the purest and most basic act of the human mind." He probably would have loved this remarkable book, an attempt to unravel the riddles and hidden meanings Nabokov, himself, embedded in Pale Fire.

When Pale Fire first appeared in 1962, reviewers said, correctly, that it could be enjoyed without puzzling over its hidden meanings but that it obviously hid many levels of complexity. In a now-famous article, Mary McCarthy called Pale Fire "a jack-in-the-box, a Fabergé gem, a clockwork toy, a chess problem, an infernal machine, a trap to catch reviewers..." But she also thought it was a thing of perfect beauty, symmetry, strangeness, originality and moral truth.

Even on a first reading of Pale Fire, we understand that Nabokov is playing a most elaborate literary game. Kinbote is hilariously mad, and his efforts to interpret Shade's poem as a commentary on Zemblan events can be seen as a satire of imaginative academics.

But Nabokov also scattered less obvious clues throughout the book. McCarthy decided that the "real" author of the commentary was yet another Zemblan who is barely mentioned, V. Botkin. And there are those who believe that Nabokov is telling us that John Shade didn't die but simply wrote the commentary under the name of Kinbote as a way of disappearing.

Boyd now interprets Nabokov's intentions in yet another way. He believes that both the poem and the commentary were inspired from beyond the grave as well as by Shakespeare's many ghosts.

Nabokov's Pale Fire is a monument to a brilliant scholar's persistent love affair with a book and its author. For more than three decades now, Boyd has made Pale Fire, and Nabokov, his obsession, much in the way that Nabokov, himself, was obsessed with butterflies. In 1990 and 1991, Boyd published his excellent two-volume biography of Nabokov and established himself as the world's premier Nabokovian.

Pale Fire, however, remained central to this thinking. When Boyd was asked to discuss Pale Fire on the Electronic Nabokov Discussion Forum, he discovered that his own views about this remarkable and original book were changing. Those views form the heart and soul of his own vibrant and energetic work. Even if we do not agree with all of his theories (and anything, at this point, must remain only a theory) we have to admire his scrupulous intelligence and dedication.

Boyd does not disdain eccentric flights of imagination. Nor is he afraid of being thought of as obsessive. There was a sweet madness in Nabokov, and quite obviously, Boyd has assimilated some of it, all to the good.

Nabokov's Pale Fire is more than a wonderful book; it is also a labor of love of the highest order. It can only enhance your understanding and love of both Nabokov and Pale Fire, and perhaps give you some insight into Boyd, himself.

Obviously I must not be as big a Nabokov groupie as other Pale Fire enthusiasts, because when I read Pale Fire in a college seminar, most of us spent weeks admiring Nabokov's academic satire and what we then thought was a purposefully horrible poem. Now I feel somewhat shamed because Boyd seems to think the poem itself is great poetry -- I cringe because our class read out loud particularly funny lines and laughed at what a good "bad" poem Nabokov wrote. Maybe Boyd does miss some of the humor, but that is all he misses. I don't think he leaves one line, joke, pun, or obscure reference unexplained. I enjoyed the first few chapters more because they stuck to many of the more obvious discoveries Nabokov intended his readers to make. By the middle, Boyd had my head spinning with some of the leaps of analysis -- I was too confused to agree or disagree. But by the end, his overall surprises and theories come together and make sense. No matter what you make of Boyd's theory, I applaud the book for its emphasis on close reading and for its obvious love of this great writer. Nabokov is one of this century's best and deserves this kind of in-depth reading. In the final chapter, Boyd answers some of the criticisms about his theory (by Michael Wood, for instance, a Princeton prof) and almost ends up sounding like Kinbote for a moment in his defensiveness. This book is a true discovery for a devout reader because it shows how to read better and more closely, how to link (bobo-link) seemingly unrelated bits together. Hats off to a great work of Nabokov scholarship -- Boyd brought in lots of information from Nabokov's other works that proved to be quite important.

Amazing! When reading this insomnia-inducing book my head kept spinning with the mirror-like mirages of Pale Fire and I felt that everything I trusted and relied on when first I read that book were crumbling around me.

I have read Pale Fire twice and still only feel that I am barely familiar with how the common household objects in the place Kinbote is housesitting helped to create that zany land of the north, Zembla.

I dont want to spoil some of the surprises in this book (Boyd has gone back on his stance of Shade being the author of both poem and commmentary which he supports in his biography of Nabokov). But let me just say that these surprises provoked me in the middle of long nights to exclaim "What is goint ON? " and pace around frantically.

A haunting question (and by the way the ghostly aspects of Pale Fire which i had only felt in a vague way are exposed by Boyd to be something richer than i would have ever imagined) is not only how much control Hazel Shade had over the commentary but also how much control Nabokov's playful shade is exerting upon Boyd. The reviewer below me is onto something.

Boyd brings to Pale Fire his thorough knowledge of Nabokov's other works - for example his thesis - anti-thesis description of chess in Speak Memory or that bizarre short story The Vane Sisters - and illustrates how they help to see into the mystery of some of Nab's more complex works.

After reading Pale Fire twice, I naively thought that i understood it (yes that Bodkin in the University was suspicious, and yes the existence of internation thug Gradus i had previosly questioned) but i was only approaching the intitial layerings of this beatifully layered world. Im not saying that i am necessarily convinced with all Boyd has to say, but he has dazzled me with his insights and made me fully realize that I am far from understanding fully this work of art. It is to Nabokov's supreme credit that he could create a world that seems as immense, varied, and impossible to appreciate fully enough as the one we live in everyday.

Having read what little Nabokov anyone has read (Lolita) I exchanged this book for a Bogart biography I received as birthday present. I was hooked and, having read the whole book through in a few days, I bought the second volume and I wasn't let down. The book is a jewel and Nabokov becomes almost as close an acquaintance of the reader as Johnson became per Boswell's book.

The elegiac childhood that Nabokov enjoyed as the son of an upper class family of political liberals and Russian patriots is hard to imagine given the awfulness of Russian history since the 1905. After the death of his grandfather Nabokov became a millionaire at age 10. His family was close knit and loving (which may explain his deep love for his wife Véra and his son Dmitri, named after Vladimir's father). The Nabokovs managed to escape Russia from their Crimean summer house and eventually ended up in Germany, where they endured hardship and persecution. Nabokov's father, who had been an Education Minister during Kerensky's brief democratic administration, was murdered by an extreme-nationalist from the "Black Hundreds", a paramilitary organisation. Amazingly, Nabokov never bored to learn German although he lived in Germany for twenty years because he felt German would destroy his gift for Russian. His French was flawless, though (he died in French Switzerland). His meeting of the beautiful, brilliant Véra is touching, a rare moment of perfection on this cursed globe, and they became a very close couple. Mrs Nabokov was much more than a wife: she was a soul-mate and a loving collaborator in all Nabokov's efforts. Nabokov, in spite of his poverty managed to continue to live with aristocratic non-chalance and was always able to afford extensive and elaborate holidays that nowadays are only possible for the very well-to-do. The book ends as the Nabokovs and young Dmitri move to America, barely escaping France before the German invasion. Better times were yet to come, and they are aptly told in the second volume.

Most of the books Nabokov wrote in this period were in Russian and thus they have not been as widely divulged as his books in English. I can't appreciate their quality, not reading Russian, but Boyd notes many references of experts which regarded them as some of the best writing in Russian in the 20th century, and more deserving of a Nobel prize than either Pasternak or Solzhenitzn.

The title of my review will probably be deplored by many Nabokov fans, but in fact I was deeply attracted to Nabokov's elegance, charm and tolerance, by his revulsion to snobbery (he was always annoyed by some Europeans' disdain for US culture or some Russian emigrés' disgust at the accent of Jewish Russian speakers), by his unerring political sense that led him to distrust most extremisms of the last century (he was one of the few important authors not to have written blatant political nonsense), and very much enjoyed his curious interest in butterflies (his fantasy of a lavish, multi-volume Encyclopedia of butterflies of the Russian Empire smacks of Borges to me), and his extensive work at Harvard concerning them (he does have a species to his name). Boyd's descriptions led to me seek Nabokov's literal translation of Pushkin's epical poem, Eugene Onegin (I found the translation unreadable, as many people have), and, in spite of Boyd's wonderful summaries, I couldn't really get into some of Nabokov' other works in English (Ada or Ardor and Pale Fire I thought too modernist for my taste- his literary criticism was great, although I winced at his evident distaste for Jane Austen- and shared his love for Dickens). But Nabokov is as great a writer as he as a biographer's subject, and Boyd's book is probably the best literary biography after The Life of Johnson. I heartily recommend it (it's great even if you haven't actually read Nabokov).

Brian Boyd's scope and research in this book are just outstanding. I'm not usually that interested in biographies of writers, often the biographer does not relate their life to their literature in a way that interests me, but Nabokov is one of my favorite writers, so I thought I'd give this book a try. First you should note that it is a huge book that spans a large time frame, but you shouldn't be put off by the size, because Boyd's prose is very succinct and the chapters are manageable. It's clear to me that he appreciates Nabokov's works, as the best chapters are the ones detailing the periods of time when Nabokov is writing his works. There is so much great background information to be found here, that Nabokov wrote on index cards, the road trips that influenced Lolita, and Nabokov's relationship with his wife, Vera. This is what literary biographies should be like. I highly recommend this to any fans of Nabokov who want to learn more about his life and his writing.

Both volumes of this set are excellent. This is the way literary biography should be done. It's so good, in fact, that you wouldn't necessarily have to be a huge Nabokov fan to want to read both books. (Of course, I am a diehard Nabokovian, so I raced through them even more eagerly.) Bravo to Brian Boyd.

I read this book to my 4 year old neice, and to my two year old son. They both LOVED it. They asked me to read it over and over again! It has silly rhymes that can twist your tongue if you go too fast! The pictures aren't what you would expect for a children's book, but they are wonderfully done and even I like to look at them. I now have the book memorized and can tell it in no time flat. My husband likes to hear it becuase it makes his brain think if I tell it to him quickly. A must have for any book shelf!

My husband and I started reading this book to our newborn son, who was immediately taken with the silly, repetitive words, and was captivated by the fabulous, large, multi-color illustrations. Now, at 15 months, this is one of the only books we can be guaranteed that he will sit through to the end...it's a repeat favorite and is an excellent read aloud for even the youngest infants. A great gift idea, especially for parents and/or caregivers who want to share and instill multi-cultural values in their growing children. This very lighthearted story is about the 3 brothers and the 3 sisters with silly names who marry and have kids -- all are of different ethnic persuasions, have different interests and occupations -- and all are different sizes and shapes.

I am a first grade teacher. My kids absolutely love this book. You really have to practice reading the book aloud before you read it to anyone else. My class wants me to read this one over and over again. Check it out!

This is a true piece of art, a compelling love story wrapped into the trials and tribulations of humanity's pursuit of balance with being true to oneself and to those you love. This true story is beautifully told of the tribulations faced by a woman in pursuit of mathematics in a world unaccustomed or accepting of women. I couldn't put it down!

We enjoyed this book immensely and recommend it to all readers who enjoy history. The book captures the struggles of women who persued higher education in a time of world governmental and social change. The romantic twists and turns of the characters are sure to keep the reader's interest from cover to cover.

I highly recommend this book! From the very first page, the story engages the reader and the writing dazzles. This true story is about the trials and struggles of a brilliant, Russian female mathematician, Sofya Kovalevskaya, in the late 1800s. This was not a popular time to be a woman in Russia, and certainly not popular to be a smart woman -- especially if you wanted to study mathematics! However, the development of mathematics and science in Europe at this time was on fire (as was the politics), and Sofya was right in the thick of it all.

This work of historical fiction is well researched, with information gathered from many sources (including translations of personal letters), and masterfully retold. It's romantic, exciting and fascinating. A true gift to be able to walk these years in Sofya's shoes.

If you've ever struggled against societial prejudices, or struggled to succeed in a field of work not intended for your race, sex or color, you'll find this book an inspiration.

I anxiously await the sequel!

a satirical, very funny and clever dystopian novel

For irony and surrealism this story is a ten. It is, again, a wrenching look at Soviet life, and another Voinovich masterpiece. I won't retell the plot because another reviewer did that well. The society of Moscow in 2042 is based on the droll equation - "Output=Input", and whatever one receives is directly proportional to what one turns in in the way of output. And this is just what it sounds like. Read this book and hope it doesn't happen.

The famous dissident writer Vladimir Voinovich wrote this book a couple of years before the downfall of the Sovient Union. So, in how far this satire about life in the communist "Moscow Republic" of 2042 is still relevant?

I would not exclude the alarming possibility that Russia might still evolve in something like the nightmare of "Moscow 2042".

In this book the Russian author Kartsev, living in München in 1982, makes a time travel to the Moscow of 2042. After the "Great August Revolution" the new leader "Genialissimus" has changed the Soviet Union ... up to a certain point. After Lenins dream of a world revolution and Stalins experiment of 'Socialism within one country', Genialissimus has decided to build "Communism within one city", Moscow. The ideology has changed somewhat, into a hotchpotch of marxism-leninism and Russian orthodoxy (Genialissimus himself is also patriarch!) The decay, from which the Soviet Union suffered, has gone further and further. The rest of the Soviet Union, where people barely survive, has been separated by a Berlin type of wall from the "paradise" of Moscow, where communism has been (sort of) realised. Within the wall everyone gets everything "according to his needs". Only their needs are not decided by themselves, but by the wise Genialissimus. And of course, most people have "ordinary needs", but a chosen few have "extraordinary needs". For the first class, life is dismall even within the priviliged "Moscow Republic". At last, the situation gets so desperate, that people throw themselves in the arms of a "liberator", a fellow dissident writer and (kind of) friend of Kartsev, the extreme Slavophile Sim Karnavalov(probably inspired by Solzjenytsin), who enters Moscow on a white horse and proclaims himself Tsar Serafim the First. Now a new kind of nightmare starts...

This novel is a masterpiece of satire, almost as funny as "The life of Iwan Chonkin" and "The pretender to the trone" of the same author. In my opinion, Voinovich is entiteld to the next Nobel prize for literature.

Mayakovsky was one of the foremost futurist poets of the early 20th centuary. He wrote anguished (and mildly egocentric) pieces about being alone and unrequited in love. He also wrote political poems that were supposed to moblize the workers and shock the borgeosie establishment. This book is worth buying for the two epics "A cloud in trousers" and "The backbone flute" alone. The other poems are the icing on the cake, sounding off his thundering poetic voice. His final poem, "Past one o'clock.." starkly contrasts the others with it's muted depression. He would include part of it in his suicide note, changing the line "now you and I are quits" to "now life and I are quits." The Bedbug is a savage satire of Soviet society, and (had he not shot himself) would probably have gotten him arrested during the imminent Stalinist purges. After his death, Mayakovsky was lauded by Stalin. His pro-Bolshevik political verses were glorified and proudly shown off by the state, whilst his other poems and satirical plays were quietly supressed. Get this book if you want to see every side of Mayakovsky, and not just the one that has been publicized for years as propaganda.

His verses are curses,
His words are sharp swords,
His phrases are races
Of animal herds,
He slashes and bashes,
He kicks and he bites,
The world of the uselessness,
Bleeds and than dies.

Well, I love pre-Revolution Russian literature, so I guess I'm a little biased towards this book, but it really is good. Even the introduction is fascinating and inspiring if you ask me.

Like his books on classical mechanics, a book that theoretical physicists should read. Unfortunately, the discussion of local integrability is too abstract and there is no distinction made with global integrability. Also irritating: because of a singularity at the origin the damped harmonic oscillator is not recognized as integrable in spite of the existence of a global conservation law, excepting one point in phase space. Integrability is an extremely difficult subject and maybe Arnol'd could have taught us more about it. I've discussed integrability/nonintegrability from a physicist's perspective in my Classical Mechanics (Cambridge, 1997).

Be aware there are 2 versions of this book
available in English; this one from MIT press
is (contrary to one of the reviews above) is
translated from the *first* Russian edition;
there is another version from Springer-Verlag
translated from the *third* Russian edition.
They're translated by different people so
some wording etc is different but otherwise
they're similar, though not identical. The
later edition has some reworked passages
and modest amount of new material, but it's
not a hugely different book.

Both are excellent, are are all the other
books & papers I've seen by V.I. Arnol'd.

It is hardly needed to add words to the existing positive reviews of the book. In the line of previous comments, I just mention that it is an enjoyable book on a basic subject of great interest also for engineers and physicists. The matter is treated with the evident purpose to make the reader fully aware of the interesting geometrical and dynamic implications of the conclusions reached at each step. It is a nice counterexample for those who believe that, to be rigorous, a mathematical book needs to be very hard to read.