Pisa, Italy. July, 1944. As the Nazis and Allies collide, Giuseppe Pardo Roques, lay leader of Pisa's Jewish community, is a refugee in his own home. Struggling to display strength in spite of a bizarre and debilitating neurosis, the cultured, learned and generous Pardo plays host to several others, Jews and Christians both, seeking shelter from the battle. The Parnas reconstructs Pardo's final days and his ultimate confrontation with the Nazis. At once memoir (the author knew the characters), psychological profile, and meditation on good and evil, the book's defining quality is compassion. I'll read it again.

This is an incredible story.

Silvano Arieti was an extremely gifted, and very well known, psychiatrist. He was born in Pisa, Italy and, as a child, looked to The Parnas--or synagogue leader, Giuseppe Pardo Roques--as a mentor. The Parnas was mentally ill. His illness inspired Arieti's career--which, as it developed, convinced Arieti all the more that "mental illness may...espress the nobility of man."

Arieti dreamed he would one day cure The Parnas, but The Parnas was murdered by the Nazis in WWII. Decades later, Arieti recreates the last days of The Parnas, providing us with a moving potrait of an incredible man in terrible times.

While Arieti's conclusions are profound, this book is definately accessible to the high school reader.

Never in human history have the nations of the world been closer to each other in terms of access and the transmission of ideas and culture. In spite of this, they are characterized by huge disparities in terms of the level of well-being they are able to generate for their constituents. Yet there is not mucb difference in their formal systems of rules and laws. Thus, while there seems to be considerable commonality in the values and aspirations of most human societies, they vary dramatically in terms of their ability to achieve them. Why? At the most basic level, this is the question that the scholars drawn together in this volume seek to address.

The diversity of contributors seem to reach two over-arching conclusions. First, it is not rules per se, but rather the institutional environment that determines whether or not rules will be effective in regulating human behavior. Second, institutions that underpin smoothly functioning, highly prosperous societies are invariably based on providing strong incentives to individuals. Harnessing individuals' talents and abilities for the good of the many requires rewarding individual enterprise and limiting the role of the state to guaranteeing the safety of both life and private property.

While these may seem obvious truths, they have implications for virtually all policy issues, ranging from re-distribution (you must create wealth before you can distribute it), through environmental protection (nothing protects the environment like giving individuals property rights over it) to good government (if government favors can create wealth, resources will be wasted in currying such favors). 'Liberal' academics, whose prescriptions invariably call for government intervention in the economy seem particularly blind to these truths.

This book really got me thinking about the importance of the constitutional underpinnings to our societies. The editors have really gathered together the leading thinkers in the field ranging from Nobel Laureate James Buchanan through scholars like Dennis Mueller and Bruno Frey to Michael Munger.

As Mueller points out, all constitutions contain fine language - even the Soviet constitution sounded quite admirable - but it is the underlying institutions that determine whether they will matter and be a force for good, or merely serve a decorative function. Munger suggests that passing such virtuous institutions from generation to generation are the key to healthy and prosperous societies. This is where ideology can play a role.

Ultimately, societies must harness the spirit of the individual if they are to succeed in the long run. Rowley points out that the role of the state in guaranteeing individual property rights, as recommended by John Locke, will go a long way towards achieving such individual commitment. On the other hand, excessive state intervention as recommended by Thomas Hobbes, will lead to the stifling of individualism and with it the withering of incentives, creativity, prosperity and human well-being.

This superbly-annotated collection of more than 300 letters between Verdi and his librettist Arrigo Boito shows not only an insight into musical creativeness but also the workings of generous and selfless friendship. Boito invested an immense amount of time and effort in his own opera Mefistofele; as those who witnessed its revival at the English National Opera a few years ago will attest, it is a hack work that can only successfully be portrayed as parody. In these letters, Verdi is ceaselessly encouraging and interested in the work, though he must have known that it was not a work of art. For his part, Boito is touchingly appreciative of his colleague's talent - he habitually addresses Verdi as 'Dearest Maestro' - and in their exchanges the reader can gain a glimpse into the creative workings that, Wagner not withstanding, produced the finest body of 19th-century opera.

There is real spine to the work of Verdi and Boito: it encompasses politics, religion, pathos and tragedy. These letters are testament to the men's friendship and genius; it is a moving and important work, and I strongly recommend it.

Perhaps the most delightful surprise in reading this book is the number of deep-down belly-laughs experienced in reading the letters of Verdi and Boito. The text between the letters often creates suspense even for those moments when we know the outcome. This is a book to own.

Very good!! finally a book on the state-of-the-art in numerical techniques for passive waveguide components. A lot of original and very efficent numerical techniques are described in detail to compute the modal admittance matrix of both common and arbitrarely shaped waveguide junctions. I found simply fantastic the BI-RME method and the integral equation technique, but I'm not so crazy to try to implement them!! However I think It's very important and instructive to know about these advanced techniques.

To be coherent all over the text, the authors deliberately make an intensive use of the concept of multimodal admittance matrix (GAM), although in some cases working directly with the generalized scattering matrix (GSM) is more simple and efficient.

Even though examples of the developed software are available within the book, only sometimes the authors give enough information about the implementation, so the book may be very difficult for the beginner. Hence I think that a good experience in numerical techniques for electromagnetism is strongly required to really appreciate this work.

The Opera Journeys Mini Guide Series is just wonderful; it's like a "Cliff Note" of the opera, and extremely informative and educational. I particularly like the size; these guides are not cumbersome and fit right into my shirt pocket. The ladies will find sufficient room in their pocketbooks.

The story narrative with the music examples is excellent. I prefer it to a libretto; indeed, it's a much easier way to follow the essence of the story. The essay is magnificent; very well written, not pedantic, and extremely insightful and comprehensible. I congratulate Burton Fisher for a job very well done and Amazon for making these handy, information-laden booklets available. The Opera Journeys Mini Guide Series is a wonderful contribution to opera education and opera appreciation.

My tip: acquire the entire collection because you will be in easy reach of superbly presented opera guides consisting of story analysis, principal characters in the opera, story narrative with music highlights, background, analysis, and commentary.

Heinz Dinter, Ph.D.

You can get PostScript files for all chapters of the book at ftp.ens.fr/pub/dmi/users/longo/CategTypesStructures

"Cuckoos" is a 3-character, 3-act play by Giuseppe Manfridi (who is described on the book's back cover as "one of Italy's leading playwrights"). The English version is by Colin Teevan. This book also contains a short preface, entitled "Manfridi and the Theatre of Excess," by Peter Hall.

"Cuckoos" is an absolutely outrageous comedy. It opens with two of the characters (a man and a woman) naked, and painfully locked together in an act of sodomy. When the young man's gynecologist father arrives to try to help separate the two, the play becomes even more outrageous. As the characters explore both their present predicament and their past lives, the audience hears a story of sexual shame, secrets, revelations, and anger.

The play is full of sexually explicit language. There are some slapstick sight gags. The dialogue crackles with naughty wordplay and insults. While "Cuckoos" may be offensive to many, I found it to be a marvelous and memorable reading experience.

It is a difficult but inspiring book written by one of the leading world experts who, in spite of the relatively young age, has obtained an impressive record of new results in the field of galaxy dynamics. If compared to the standard reference in the field (Galactic Dynamics by Binney and Tremaine), the book stands out for conciseness, clarity and homogeneity of treatment. Bertin, in fact, puts emphasis on physics rather than phenomenology and succeeds in compressing the huge field of galaxy dynamics in a relatively short book structured in few chapters. Each chapter is focused on a different physical mechanisms which is then used to gain deeper and deeper insights into the structure of the stellar systems.The book is up to date and provides the reader with an exhaustive list of references. An excellent book to be recommended to graduate students as well as to researchers active in the field

Verdi's two Comedies philosophically, and emotionally, frame his long career. While writing Il Giorno di Regno, his first comedy, and only his second opera, the rather naive young Verdi lost his first wife and their children in a fire. Needless to say, the opera wasn't very funny, and the audience booed it off the stage. Verdi quit Opera...he thought for good. However, his self-imposed exile didn't last long, and Verdi eventually wrote several of Opera's greatest masterpieces. He also loved Giuseppina, first as his paramour, eventually as his second wife, became one of Europe's most generous philanthropists, and admired his great rival Richard Wagner, who referred to Verdi simply as "pig." Arrigo Boito, a genius in his own right (if you don't believe it, get a good recording of Mefistofele), testified in Italian newspapers that Verdi's "old ways" of writing Opera were permanently invalidated by Wagner. Yet one day, eight years after Verdi had retired for the second time, Boito, the great Verdi hater, came to Sant' Agata, hat in hand, to ask Verdi to compose music for two Shakespearean music dramas he had written. The second of those music dramas, Falstaff, was to be Verdi's second comedy, and his last opera. Falstaff is a towering monument to artistic collaboration. In it, Verdi, Boito, and Shakespeare tell us that life is a great cosmic joke, and, since we cannot escape being its brunt, we might as well laugh along. Dover republished an early Ricordi edition of Falstaff. Ricordi is, simply put, the most useful publisher of late romantic Italian opera, especially of Verdi and Puccini. The scholarship is top notch, making this Dover edition quite a useful volume. The book itself is, as always, well crafted and easy to read. The score may be too large, and the book too small, to make this volume useful for the podium, but at home, in front of the stereo, it's invaluable. Falstaff is one of the west's great example's of existentialism expressed in artistic form. If you are not familiar with this opera, I strongly recommend you buy this score, and a good recording to go with it, and knock yourself out.

The Opera Journeys Mini Guide Series is just wonderful; it's like a "Cliff Note" of the opera, and extremely informative and educational. I particularly like the size; these guides are not cumbersome and fit right into my shirt pocket. The ladies will find sufficient room in their pocketbooks.

The story narrative with the music examples is excellent. I prefer it to a libretto; indeed, it's a much easier way to follow the essence of the story. The essay is magnificent; very well written, not pedantic, and extremely insightful and comprehensible. I congratulate Burton Fisher for a job very well done and Amazon for making these handy, information-laden booklets available. The Opera Journeys Mini Guide Series is a wonderful contribution to opera education and opera appreciation.

My tip: acquire the entire collection because you will be in easy reach of superbly presented opera guides consisting of story analysis, principal characters in the opera, story narrative with music highlights, background, analysis, and commentary.

Heinz Dinter, Ph.D.