This is a great book, very down to earth and practical. It is intended mostly for adults suffering from asthma, but I think it would also be good for family members to read and it gives information on living with children with asthma too. The authors focus, not on the medical aspects of asthma, but on the day to day lives of asthma sufferers and how they can better handle problems in such areas as sex life, family relationships and work. The authors give concrete examples of specific problems and easy to understand solutions. They also give many case illustrations from their work with asthmatics. Most importantly, the book is easy and interesting to read. I was able to pick it up and read just the sections I most wanted to know about without feeling lost. I strongly recommend this book to asthma sufferers and their friends and relatives, as well as to health professionals who want to get a clearer picture of what asthma sufferers and their families go through and how to help them.

Expensive, yes. But there aren't a whole lot of Troubadour or Trouvère anthologies available in print, especially ones with music. And this is an excellent anthology, beautifully produced on light crème-colored 250-year acid-free paper. It's probably the next best thing to owning G, R, X, or W, one of the 4 existing Troubadour chansonniers with music. Notation is mostly the enlightened non-metrical variety proposed by Hendrik van der Werf: noteheads only, with neumes indicated by slurs. The page layout is spacious and delightful, with side-by side text and translation of Old Occitan to English by Margaret Switten and Old French to English by Samuel Rosenberg. Both text editors have given very clear, flowing translations. I especially appreciate Switten for preserving the Old Occitan syntax as much as possible, which makes it much easier to get a handle on the learning the original Occitan while working through a song.

You don't have to be a musicologist to appreciate this anthology. Though solidly researched with sources and key editorial decisions clearly indicated, most of the "critical apparatus" has been left to the editors' previous publications. Commentary is given at the section headings for the various poet-composers along with their vidas (lifes). Pronunciation guides and introductory essays give just enough linguistic, musicological, and historical background and differing opinions to encourage readers and singers to draw their own conclusions and make their own informed and inspired interpretations. To continue the tradition. A small selection of sharply-reproduced facimile pages makes the visual and spiritual link between this rare volume and the chansonniers of old.

The accompanying CD is well performed and a joy to listen to.

Although the Devita text is a good resource, it has important drawbacks. In every edition, including the latest one, too much information has been out of date even at the first day of publication. Several other major oncology texts somehow manage to avoid this problem much better. Also, since the text comes out every two years, information in the current edition is already at least 3 years old or older. Beyond this, the index is detailed but it still is hard to find specific information, i.e., the book is clumsily organized. Finally, the CD version has the worst search program that I have ever used. You can enter information with any degree of specificity and the search will retrieve (at best) a list of chapters and major chapter sections in which to look. You then have to read through miles of text to find the information that you wanted. Searchability is one of the main reasons for buying a CD and I consider the Devita CD virtually worthless.

As a resident, I use this book as a first resource for almost all Oncology reading. By your second year of residency you should be getting a lot of your data from the literature rather than texts, but it is still very useful to have a text summery to start from. Take prostate cancer as an example. You can read the DeVita chapter in a (long) afternoon and have an excellent base to expand from. Furthermore, the hundreds of references for each chapter are essentially a list of every landmark article on that topic. If you are an intern or MS4 and you are going to go Rad-Onc, Internal then Med-Onc, OB-Gyn Onc, or even Surgery or Dermatology then you simply need this book. There is nothing else that comes close. To be honest, if you are building any type of medical library whatsoever, you need this book. By the way, mine came with the CD-Rom version on the inside of the back cover for free! Check with your retailer to see if yours will, too. Best of luck, study hard- CURE CANCER!

this book is considered one of the text...that make the specialest so much satisfied by the quality and quantity of the information it contain and the it is discussed. but for us in middle east it is very [pricey]. you will understand that when you know that my monthly salary as an assesstent lecturer inradiation oncology dept.; Alazhar university, Cairo, Egypt;... a low price edition will be much helpful and very wise to prevent illegal copying of the book. thanks a lote

Remember David Rosenberg? The guy whose strange, awkward but inaccurate translation of parts of Genesis and Exodus led Harold Bloom to expose his ignorance of both the Hebrew language and the biblical world in THE BOOK OF J? Rosenberg is back and ready to make more trouble for anyone who trusts his view of ancient Israel. This time he plays both translator and literary critic, about equally well.

Here is Rosenberg's translation of the beginning of 2 Samuel 11:

"Here we are: a year was passing, and it is the season best for the wars of kings. David sends out Joab, his own retinue, and all of Israel's army; and they bring the Ammonites to their knees, beseiging Rabbah. Meanwhile David lingered in Jerusalem. It happens one late afternoon that David rises from his bed, takes a walk around the palace roof, and from there, his glance falls upon a woman in her bath. The woman appeared very beautiful in his eyes."

Breathlessly dramatic but the tenses are all wrong, and words like "lingered" and "glance" miss the simplicity of the Hebrew text. Rosenberg subsequently has David try to "uncover more" about the naked woman in her bath, and has his messengers "beseige" Bathsheba, just as Joab is beseiging Rabbah. These coy, leering figures are not in the Hebrew text, either, which presents the affair in eight blunt words: Vayishlach David malachim vayikachah vatavo eilav vayishchav imah (literally "And David sent messengers, and he got her, and she came to him, and he slept with her"). This story is filled with ironies. Why is it necessary to add ones that aren't in the text?

Rosenberg doesn't translate any of the poetry included in 2 Samuel -- David's lament over Saul and Jonathan or the two psalms in chapters 22 and 23--but his translations of other psalms suggest his need to compete with his text, to substitute his own poetic idea for that of his source:

you turn men into dust

and you ask them to return

children of men

for a thousand years

in your eyes

are a single day

yesterday

already passed

into today

a ship in the night

Rosenberg needs to import the cliche of ships that pass in the night. There are no ships in the Hebrew. This is Psalm 90:3-4, which literally runs: "You return mortals to dust and You say: Return, children of earth. For a thousand years are in Your eyes as a day, as yesterday when it has passed, or as a watch in the night." (Tashuv enosh ad-dakah / Vatomer: shuvu, b'nai adam. Ki elef shanim b'einecha ka'yom ethmol ki ya'avor / v'eshmorah ba'laylah.)

(The blurb to Rosenberg's book calls him "the leading translator of biblical poetry... of our time." I hope he isn't starting to believe his own publicity!)

Rosenberg provided the translation for The Book of J, in which the Yale critic Harold Bloom had fantasized that "J" -- the author of those parts of Genesis in which God is called YHWH -- was a princess in Solomon's court or that of his son Rehoboam. For Bloom, "J" and "S" were husband and wife, sharing ideas and developing similar turns of phrase during their pillow talk. Rosenberg evolves a slightly different version of this fantasy. Rosenberg's "S" is a royal prince operating as a scribe and translator in the court of Rehoboam, a son of Solomon or perhaps a cousin. His mother had been a princess of one of the indigenous nations (Moabites, Amorites, Ammonites) whose struggle for autonomy had been quashed by the Israelite monarchy. This for Rosenberg is the key link between David and "S," for he guesses that David too was the son of "a Canaanite princess" who became "Jesse's last and youngest wife." For Rosenberg "J" is an older woman who becomes the companion rather than the wife of "S," and commissions him to write the Succession Narrative because of his similarities to David and their common sympathy for the indigenous nations Israel has displaced. How Rosenberg knows all these things is not clear, unless he too is the son of a Canaanite princess, and consequently has a privileged understanding of his subjects. For the Bible contains not one word about how many wives Jesse had or who David's mother was -- not altogether surprising given how seldom the Hebrew Bible mentions any individual's maternal descent.

Perhaps it is interesting to read the book of Samuel in terms of the conflict between Israel and the Canaanite cultures it displaced, but Rosenberg's ideas about "S" and his vision are undermined by the question whether there ever was an "S" in the sense that there was a "J." "J" has a unique vocabulary, but stylistically, there isn't any real difference between Rosenberg's Book of S and most of the rest of the book of Samuel. And you get the same dramatic ironies from the outset, from the story of Hannah and Eli, in the first chapter.

In my opinion, this book is a full scale disaster, dreadfully misleading to those who trust Rosenberg's translations or ideas about tenth-century Israelite society. Avoid this book, or better, buy Robert Alter's The David Story, with a superb translation of all of Samuel, together with fascinating commentary that is generous to all the scholars that went before him.

There are many reasons to by this book, but two come to mind most clearly...

First, the brilliant modern translations of portions of the story of David from 2 Samuel, and several of the most beautiful Psalms.

Second, the tale of the remarkable relationship between "S", the writer behind much of 2 Samuel, and "J", the writer of the Pentateuch. (The first five books of the bible - the books of the law.) According to Rosenberg, J, the brilliant woman writer and poet of Solomon's court, most likely acted as mentor and mother-figure to the young male prodigy S. Many of the Psalms and stories of David seem to reverberate with this close relationship.

As well, Rosenberg studies the indigenous or "Shamanistic" nature of S's relationship with the land, as reflected in his poetry, which provides new insight into the intense yearning for Israel experienced by Jews through the ages.

I highly recommend this book both for its scholarship and its artistic qualities. Anyone with any interest in David, the Jewish experience, Biblical studies, or poetry in general, will find this book a delight.

What a revelation! It's hard to read a novel or poem again in the same way after the illuminations in The Book of David. I suppose this must be infuriating to some who want things to stay just as they are, but I was glad to see that the Publishers Weekly review had an intelligent response: (Oct.13, 1997) "In this imaginative and provocative work...Rosenberg's interest is in evoking the characters who inhabit the biblical narratives, and his translations and transformations of the text are powerful and moving...It tells David's story in a way that reveals the characters of David, Rosenberg and "S"." What Publishers Weekly leaves out is that this will not only change the way a reader thinks about the Bible but also how we view contemporary writers as well. I always thought there was an element of creative fiction and poetry in the Bible, yet now I can see just how it was transformed by great writers.

This is by far the most up to date factual history breaking book wrtten by an uncontemporial authour on a topic so controversial and world affecting this century.