Divine Inspiration is an unusual coffee table book because the pictures do tell a thousand words, and because the text is helpful and interesting, not just filler. It is a good, respectful introduction to the Yoruba religion and its many offspring in the Americas.

This is the most wonderful and facinating book on symmetry I have ever read! Everyone who applies symmetry concept should read it. There are many many books on symmetry. Many of them simply treated symmetry as a mathematical attribute. Joe Rosen is the first one firmly treated symmetry as a property of a system (very similar to a thermodynamic properties). The author has rediscovered the symmetry principle (Effect is more symmetric than cause), as some of the most important literature was published 90 years ago and not in English. I recommended many colleagues to read it. You will like it! Shu-Kun Lin, PhD http://mdpi.org/lin.htm

This is a beautifully written and illustrated book on a noble subject. On the basis of that rarity alone it deserves five stars.

This book stimulated my interest in trying to figure out how music works more than anything else I have ever read. Sure, it is not the latest word, the most comprehensive or closely argued, but to get the interested amatuer started down the path of analysis of musical forms, why it sounds good, and what the big three Classical Era composers did to create a large chunk of our western musical heritage, this is the place to start. Rosen steered me toward many, many other books, cited in his bibliography and notes, on related topics, such as sonata form, how it works and does not. Sure, scholars can quibble and somebody else could and should write a followup to answer the complaints, but until then, Rosen is the place to start. His other books are just as good, but not as enjoyable. Dense, you bet, but worth it.

As a music lover with a superficial knowledge of the technical aspects of music-making, I found this book to be a real challenge. It took me several attempts over the course of a couple of years to get through it. But having expended that effort, I can say that every minute was worth it. I now have a good understanding of what "classical" music (in the stricter definition of "classical") is about, and why its three great Viennese exponents were such masters. I now can listen classical music -- indeed, to any common-practice period music -- with much more insight, understanding, and enjoyment than I could heretofore.

Pierre Curie developed the idea of symmetry in 1894. He later won the Nobel Prize with his wife Marie for their studies of radioactivity. But Pierre Curie's greatest legacy may end up being his work on symmetry, which forms a rare link between science and art. But symmetry is a complex subject for general readers, as illustrated by the following concise definition of it: Physical processes require environmental dissymmetry, and although the symmetry of a product can exceed that of its cause, any dissymmetry of a product must have existed in its cause. The value of Rosen's book Symmetry Discovered is its success in reducing the complexity of the subject. Cambridge University Press originally published the book, and this edition is a reprint with a new preface and supplemental references including an English-language treatise from the Moscow University symmetry school, world center for this topic. Symmetry Discovered is an easily understood beginner's manual.

When it was first published in 1975, this book filled a gap in the literature. It still does. Simple and unassuming, it is the best introduction to symmetry that I ever read. A perfect introduction to the two subsequent books by Rosen himself, and to more advanced treatises, like Weyl's.