I went to Columbia, with the most prominent 'great books' curriculum still in existence. 25 years later, I'm finding myself re-reading and discussing many of the titles. The Penn Greek Drama series is a handsome library of new translations that give fresh takes on the classics. It's useful to have Euripides on the shelf when you return home from the recent bravura performance by Fiona Shaw as Medea--it settled an argument too on how it 'originally' ended.

This is a great coffee table book for all of those interested in the history of flight or the history or Western Pennsylvania. I helped to transcribe a lot of the tapes of interviews for this book and these guys love to tell stories about their early days in the airfields.

This is one of the best reference books thus far in my personal medical library. The information provided is in a concise, clear manner that places the book on top of the list. It offers excellent pictures, and a couple of very useful chapters on automated visual fields interpretation. Books to compare to: Clinical Ophthalmology by Kanski, but this is an "improved" version! This is definitely a must buy.

This was a good survey, and well-grounded mathematically. It is kind of scattershot, and if you primarily want to do practical projects like predicting financial markets, a lot of the sections won't be relevant. But if you want a broad-based approach, emphasizing a variety of network designs fro different purposes, this book is very good.

This book is written from a mathematical perspective. The book introduces the Hopfield Neural Network with history and applications. The authors solve the network problem and develop the Hebb Rule. Links are made to Ising Spin models and stochastic problems. I find this book to be one of the best written mathematical guides for Neural Networks.

Aside from having one of the most beautiful cover jackets I've seen on a book in a long time, this is an engaging, lovely book to read. I have to take issue with the reviewer from Publishers Weekly above - once you know that Oscar has suffered a stroke, I don't think it's fair to expect a perfectly written or perfectly structured book. What we get, instead, is a collection of reminiscences - nearly all of which shine with Oscar's warmth and intelligence and extraordinary feel for his subject: the life of a jazz man. Here's a good example, where he discovers a new piano, as a child:

'Early on I imagined that all the pianos I would play would be uprights. Not so! One day I was sent to the auditorium of my High School on an errand, and there stood a beautiful baby grand piano. I couldn't resist it: the errand vanished from my mind as I sat down to play this exquisite discovery. It was fantastic! The sound from its horizontal strings was a revelation after the vertical, harp-like strings I was used to: it seemed to reach inside me and grab at the pit of my stomach. The bell-like treble end particularly intrigued me, as I tried out numerous harmonic clusters in my left hand against moving phrases in the upper register, and I came away determined that one day one of these musical marvels would be mine. My own grand piano.' (page 297)

I can truly recommend this book if you're a fan of jazz piano. According to the book, there is a CD available of some of Oscar's best work to tie in with this, but I have not seen it anywhere yet.

'A Jazz Odyssey' is far from artful (though never less than readable), but I can think of no other jazz autobiography that has made the mysteries of music-making so readily accessible to the lay reader. Even those who dislike Oscar Peterson's playing will find his book informative - surely a near-unprecedented achievement. The result is a memorable contribution to the literature of jazz, and one can only hope that other musicians interested in telling their stories, whether on paper or into a tape recorder, will take it as a model. (Review by Terry Teachout)

No other book has ever attempted to catalog the hundreds of martial arts movies on the market, or to seperate the good from the bad, like this one. You won't find every title here, but they come awfully close, and the authors obviously know and appreciate the subject. But a book this pricey should be nearly perfect, and this one isn't. My primary gripe is that the reviews often devote a coupleof paragraphs to the plot of each film, and even a die-hard chopsocky fan like me will admit that this is often redundant. On top of this, the portion of the review that describes the quality of the martial arts in the films is usually brief or simply missing. So a three-paragraph description of the standard "young man learns kung fu to avenge his teacher" plot finishes off with "the fighting here is only average, two stars." The format of the reviews is not consistent, and sometimes it consists of only, "Available on videotape." Not the most usefull piee of information. Not that this is a bad book, I have never regretted buying it and refer to it often. It just could have used some tightening up, rewriting, and refocusing. It's still the one book a martial arts film devotee really needs to have, though. Now that it's been a few years, and martial arts ovies are much more in vogue, how about a second, updated edition, with a little more editorial input?

I'll get right to the point: You will find no other book that researches so many martial arts films as this one. Most books on the market are about a quarter the size and usually just touch on the more popular films that we are allready so familiar with. Here find obscure American B Karate films among the even stranger Bruce Lee rip offs starring Dragon Lee or Bronson Lee! It is written in a very text-like manner which is better in my opinion as the point here is to find out as much as one can about a given film and not so much to be impressed by the writer's descriptive flare. If you can still get a copy (and afford the well worth it price tag) by all means grab it up.

It's a graet book its was exhilariting book. I have read it 5 times. It has helped me with my school work very much. Iam doing better its my classes. This is great for all children. When you see this book in a store never pass it by. It couldn't get ant better.

Decent overviews but... A lot of pages devoted Bruce Lee and Japanese Samuri stuff. Goodly amount of pictures and info but I found lots of mistakes and the literary emphasis is on cinematic development rather than who is in what and when. This book is more for the person interested in the Martial Arts movie as an art form rather than someone who wants to know what is good to rent.

For many years, Philip Larkin wrote reviews and essays on Jazz. He fell in love with the music as a young man. This love might seem odd, because Jazz is a distinctly American form of music (and Larkin almost never travelled abroad and never to America) and it is also dominated by African-Americans (Larkin has unkind things to say about minorities in his Collected Letters). Nevertheless, Larkin found in the music of Armstrong, Ellington, Basie, and others a joy that was missing from much of the rest of his life. One warning for serious Jazz fans -- for Larkin, the downfall of Jazz began with Charlie Parker. He had no interest in Parker, Mingus, Miles Davis, or almost anyone who recorded after the later 40's. In fact, he lumped Charlie Parker with Ezra Pound and Pablo Picasso as person with reputations as great artists, but whom he felt had a terrible effect on their art. In some ways, this book tells you as much about Larkin as Jazz. Nevertheless, the enthusiasm he had for Jazz, and his skill as an essayist make this an enjoyable book.

Lots of pictures and easy to understand text which delivers a great deal of information about the title in a short 106 pages. Can't wait for future volumes!