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Stephen Brook has been a freelance writer for many years specializing in wine and travel books. He won the André Simon Award in 1987 for Liquid Gold: Dessert Wines of the World, and has written several other excellent travel and wine books. He has been learning about and drinking California wines since the late 1970s, and finds that California wines appeal to him strongly for their generosity: "California wine regions routinely succeed in offering rich, full-bodied, fleshy, opulent wines that make an immediate sensory appeal." This is a generous book that beautifully expresses the "instantaneous pleasure" he finds in California wine.
Brook briefly summarizes the history of wine in California, relying gracefully on the works of Charles Sullivan. He has a short, but excellent, summary of the "rules of California wine", asserting that California as an independent country would be the world's fourth largest producer after Italy, France and Spain. (A telling comment: "By and large, California wineries are not keen to dupe the consumer, although the overall laxity of the regulations often makes it easy for an element of deception to creep in.") Brook devotes about a quarter of the book to the wine regions, a quarter to grapes and types of wines, and the balance to a "Gazetteer" of various producers throughout the state. Throughout he relies on personal relationships with hundreds of grape growers, wine makers, writers and wine lovers.
Brook emphasizes that: "There were no secrets, no mysteries, about wine. My questions, whether about viticulture or winemaking techniques, were readily answered." In a favorable review of the book published in "Decanter" recently, Gerald Asher emphasizes that "this willingness to share information has made it possible for Brook to track changes that amount to a U-turn in all things vinous in the state. When talking to growers elsewhere, I am often amazed to hear them make references to a California that no longer exists - they cannot imagine a place where change can be so rapid and so fundamental."
Brook is quite skeptical about the AVA system, but his summaries are clear and historically accurate. Similarly with his descriptions of the various types of wine; I found his section devoted to Zinfandel particularly enlightening. But the heart of the book is a series of short, elegant essays on hundreds of different wineries; there are no tasting notes to speak of, but he captures the styles of wines made by many of these wineries in quite a remarkable way. And he captures the history and the character of the wineries with conciseness and clarity.
For example, I have just finished reading Robert Mondavi's autobiography, Harvest of Joy, admittedly a book that could have benefited from tighter editing. Brook's four pages captured the essence of Mondavi's story with style and warmth.
It would be fun to quote dozens of these essays; here's part of one favorite just to give you the flavor of the whole: "Newton's vineyards are not open to the public, which is a great shame since these are arguably the most beautiful in all of California. Peter Newton's wife Su Hua is Chinese, and the terraced vineyards are reminiscent of Chinese landscape paintings, the whole effect enhanced with red-lacquer gateways, wooden pagodas, and other Chinese ornaments. ... Peter Newton told me that Su Hua is now the winemaker, even though she also pursues a separate career in San Francisco. It's perfectly conceivable that this immensely dynamic and talented woman does indeed make the wines. She has been a model, a scientist, designed much of the vineyard and winery buildings, and has formidable expertise as a wine marketer. There is a mysterious personage at Newton called Luc Morlet; he is the director of oenology, but I have never met him and don't know what he does. The team is completed by the consulting services of Michel Rolland, who only advises on his special subject: Merlot."
I can only agree with Gerald Asher that only a person who finds great pleasure in California wine could have "devoted himself to a study of this magnitude. I give it a 'thumbs up'." Highly recommended.
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I loved this book. When I was in seventh grade I checked it out of our little school library because it had a lot of points--we'd read books, take a test, and receive a certain number of points for that book. If we got everything correct, we got full points, and we needed many points to pass English every trimester.
I didn't realize I was going to fall in love with the characters. Each person is beautifully made, intricate, and unique. You grow to know everyone in the story. Margaret Mitchell doesn't let any detail slide. She describes Scarlett beautifully.
Scarlett is perhaps the most interesting character I've ever read. I hate her completely, and yet love her just the same. She was the most spoiled brat, and yet I felt like I was part of her, or she was part of me.
Also, Margaret Mitchell does a good job of justifying the Confederate's reasons for breaking off from the United States. Although I don't agree with slavery at all, I could see where the southerners came off, believing as they did, and even felt a little angry at the northerners for being so hotheaded themselves.
For those of you who have seen the movie and liked it, buy this book, its ten times better. And for those of you who disliked the movie, still get the book. It is very much different from the movie, you get in the whole world, and they left out so much in the movie. For instance, Scarlett ... well, just read it, it's good.
The attitudes which feature in this book, although sexist and racist to us now, were perfectly normal for Civil War Southerners - Margaret Mitchell really understood the way people behaved at this time, and did not make them behave out of period or in anachronistic ways. Like Georgette Heyer and Regency England, she has a true understanding and insight into the period she is writing about - she LIVES it, and her people could have been alive then without unduly standing out as unusual or unremarkable.
Scarlett is a rebel, but she does not go as far as a modern author might make her heroine go. She loves her family and her land, though she may deny it, and she is very proud. She is an inspirational woman, a true forerunner of the power woman of the 1980s - a sensational concept, even for the 1930s! The clever thing is how, in such a huge and spreading book, everything comes together. It may seem trivial and unnecessary to discuss Aunt Pittypat's drawing room, or go into the minutae of Scarlett's wardrobe, or to discuss events that happened a long time ago, but believe me, it is all very important in building up a coherent and very accurate (scarily accurate, for 1930s historical fiction - Heyer and Mitchell, as far as I know, were the only authors at this time who really bothered to research in depth for their "lightweight" historical fiction writing.) Gone With The Wind is a masterpiece. It must not be read with modern eyes, but as an amazing study of how people behaved, lived, and survived throughout the Civil War in America on the losing side.
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After a brief historical background and a discussion on how to compile programs in C, the author discusses the basic data types and character strings in C. The author emphasizes the lean nature of the C language, and gives an elementary discussion on debugging in C. A good discussion is given on integer and floating-point underflow and overflow and also the mechanics of argument passing via the stack.
The author then discusses the operators and control statements in C. He includes a discussion of Lvalues and Rvalues, and this is helpful since many books on C gloss over this. Good examples of the ability of C to do multiple assignment are given. Side effects, which are modifications of data objects, and sequence points, which are points in program execution at which side effects are evaluated before proceeding to the next step in the program, are briefly discussed. An understanding of side effects is crucial to programming effectively in C. Type conversion, forbidden in some other languages, can be done in C, and the author gives a fairly good discussion of type conversion and the cast operator. Nine examples are given that effectively illustrate the different uses of "for" loops. Unfortunately, the author includes a discussion of the "goto" statement, but does admonish against its use.
The author then moves into more about input and output and how to use buffered versus unbuffered input. Some of the discussion on how to create user interfaces is antiquated given the current state of graphical tools to do this.
C functions are defined and their use encouraged as building blocks. A program ideally should be written as a collection of function calls, and the author is sympathetic with this approach. The importance of function prototyping is discussed, along with a detailed discussion of recursion. The &operator is covered in the context of function calls the modify a value in the calling function without using a return value. This peculiarity of C is a sticking point to mathematicians when they attempt to program in C. The author explains fairly effectively the reasons for doing this in C, giving examples of what can happen when one adheres to a practice of never producing side effects in function calls.
The most difficult feature of C for newcomers is the existence of pointer variables. These are first discussed in the context of function calls and then in terms of the creation and initialization of arrays. Pointer arithmetic, an anathema to some programmers is given a fine treatment, along with how pointers are used to manipulate character strings and string functions.
The file communication capability of C is given a lengthy treatment in the book via standard I/O functions. The ability of C to support both global and local variables is discussed, with the important concepts of file, block, and function prototype given detailed treatment. The volatile, const, and restrict keywords are discussed also.
Data structures, the tour de force of C programming, is discussed in great detail by the author. He shows how to create nested structures, and most importantly how to define and use pointers to structures. This is one of the most powerful features of C, and is responsible for its continued use in performance-intensive applications.
Readers interested in the more "low-level" features of C will appreciate the discussion on bit fiddling. Indeed in embedded systems and cryptography an understanding of this is crucial for designing effective programs.
The important technique of conditional compilation, using the ifdef, else, endif, and ifndef directives are discussed with many helpful examples. Memory allocation, with malloc(), free(), and calloc() functions is given ample treatment. Anyone who has done any type of debugging of C applications will realize the importance of a complete understanding of this topic. Memory leaks and dangling pointers can cause great distress in applications written in C. The author should have spent more time here on dynamic memory allocation in C.
Some discussion is given on the more advanced data structures in C, such as linked lists, abstract data types, and binary trees.
It got me right back into the mindset quickly (I started with the pointers chapter, where all the action is), and helped me get the rust knocked off quick. The examples are well-explained, small and easy to test, and the progression of the book is logical and sane. Buy it and you can wait a year before needing another book on C.
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In this case his story is the traditional "Condensed Version" of the story of the princess and the frog prince. Mitchell has remarked somewhere that the characters in this old Grimm's fairy tale were crying out to be deepened -- and so his retelling of the story deepens them into, respectively, a self-possessed Tao-Te-Ching-quoting princess and a meditative but seriously lovestruck frog.
The tale itself is transformed into a parable of love and spiritual transformation -- or were Mitchell's insights already present in the original tale just waiting for someone to bring them out? (Does it even make sense to suggest that these meanings were "in" the story _rather than_ "in" Mitchell's elaboration of it?)
Be that as it may, Mitchell's interpretive rendering is as lovely and captivating as anything he's ever written. I won't spoil anything, but Mitchell reminds the reader very early on about a point we often forget about the original tale: the frog doesn't turn into a prince when the princess kisses him, but only when she hurls him into a wall.
(The lesson here is not, of course, that if you don't like your lover as he is, you should throw him really hard against a load-bearing structural member and hope he changes into something you like better! It's that real love requires an unwillingness to settle for less than each other's best, together with a complemetary willingness to undergo difficult-but-necessary transformations oneself. But you'd probably figured that out already.)
The tale is notable as much for its style as for its substance (if these two aspects of Mitchell's work can be clearly differentiated at all). The narrative is filled with little frame-breaking devices, excursions into spiritual insight (and sometimes into just plain fun), and small touches that add texture to the physical and "historical" background of the story. As the events in question take place in Renaissance-period France, Mitchell works in not only some fine detail about e.g. the exquisite trappings of the royal palace but also some gentle twitting of French culture.
The insights themselves are, as is usual with Mitchell, the narrative center of gravity. I won't spoil these either, but they come from sources as diverse (or are they?) as the _Tao Te Ching_ and Spinoza, Japanese haiku and Rainer Maria Rilke. The sources will be no surprise to any readers familiar with the rest of Mitchell's ever-growing oeuvre, but they're worked into the story remarkably well.
Oh, and if you like this, see whether you can find a used copy of Mitchell's 1990 book _Parabales and Portraits_. It's currently out of print, but it's excellent in general and in particular it contains a one-page prose poem entitled "The Frog Prince" with which the present work is thematically unified.
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The big problem with this book is the typos. I swear I've never seen so many in a single book! Even the cover has a typo (on the back, near the bottom): "Covers: ANSI/IOS C++". "IOS" should be "ISO". Just thumbing through the first several chapters, I found at least a dozen or more typos. I found three typos in a single diagram, and three more on the facing page. And this is the third edition?
If Sams and Prata would just proofread this book and correct some of the dozens of typos, "C++ Primer Plus" would definitely become one of my favorite introductory C++ books.
Concepts I learned in this book, I've used as a video game programmer (working with DirectX and C++ under Windows), and even as a Java programmer; the grounding in object-oriented design you get from this book is solid enough to carry to things other than C++ quite well.
I cannot recommend this book highly enough; it is NOT the only book you will want for learning C++, but it is definitely one of the first and most valuable!
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Rilke presents a collection of remarkable responses that he wrote to a young would-be poet, on poetry and on surviving as an insightful observer in an insensitive world. Rilke's simple style of writing within his letters reveal clear and positive messages that open the reader's mind up to a more thoughtful and fulfilling world. Rilke uses many similes within his letters to compare certain aspects of life with other objects. This gives his receiver a more hopeful view on the world. The author also uses imagery within his letters by his selective wording and phrasing. The reader is given the ability to draw a picture of either the place or event in which Rilke discusses. Rilke also uses many metaphors or inspirational sayings or quotes to interpret life to his reader. This provides his audience with a new sense of hope for their future goals and present difficulties.
Rilke's overall message throughout this novel is that one can become anything they want to become as long as they do not give up and have confidence in what they do. If one cannot think of anything else to do in the morning but sing, then they are a singer. If one cannot think of anything else to do in the morning but write poems, then they are a poet. Rilke's concept of life displays a great enthusiasm that encourages his audience to go for their goals, and I believe this is the greatest message any author can ever send out to an audience.
Since I heard this quote, I tracked down a copy of the book after searching a half dozen bookstores and libraries, and it was worth every minute of work to find it. This book has been put on the highest level of appreciation in my mind, up there with Richard Bach's 'Illusion' and 'One'; my two other favorite books. Rilke's book was written for the artist; the person who wants to live life to its fullest and explore both the inner and outer world and their connections.
Although, as another reviewer said, this book will not be fully appreciated by all readers, it is a must read for everyone, especially those who appreciate spirituality, art and living.
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Rilke read a lot of Nietzsche prior to writing this book, and many of the same themes Nietzsche contemplated in The Gay Science and Thus Spake Zarathustra are reworked by Rilke in this novel. It is my interpretation that Rilke was trying to work out a theory of modern, fragmented, existential subjectivity and then offer some way to make such a life livable. Rilke explores such themes as memory's transience, unpredictability, and instability, the role of a God in a world after the "death of God", and a dissolving of the conceptual categories between the self and the other, or the inside and the outside, all play into this fascinating book.
The book is written in notebook form, which plays into the notion of fragmentary identity and problematic narrative. Entries jump from the past to the present to imagined futures in an often random and chaotic order. There is no "plot" to speak of, although there are bits and pieces of narratives, but nothing sufficient enough to create a comprehensible 'Malte'. All the while, you are in the mind of a character that is trying and failing to make sense of it all (to 'impose' a narrative).
The later Martin Heidegger always lauded Rilke (despite Rilke's being too metaphysical) for being able to express ways of interacting with the world that were non-humanist. He was especially interested, and wrote significantly about, a passage (p. 46 in the Vintage paperback edition) where Malte imagines a house and its inhabitants from a single mutilated wall that is left remaining. I'm not too sure what his relation to the text as a whole was, so I'll leave it at that.
This book is an intellectual paradise and is rich in treasures as long as you are willing to look for them.
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