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The elegant layout somewhat masks the thoroughly researched nature of the work-- a look at the bibliography reveals a goodly number of cocktail books that could represent a good history of beverage-craft in the United States.
An excellent book.
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I don't think I have ever read a book that includes so many different aspects of intrigue and action taking place around the world.
Hope this duo writes another.
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I like best when Fraser talks about the regimental history and lore of the Gordons when he's taking a break from McAuslan. There are some truly wonderful characters and events related here, all factual enough and displaying the honors and traditions which existed in old Highland regiments like the Gordons. Fraser is at his best when he talks of these traditions and one can see that he relished his hectic years with this famous Highland regiment.
The downsizing of the British Empire and the changes this would wrought in the army as well as the world are the backdrop against which these stories are told. This is not a book about war, but about a time when national service was apart of nearly everyone's life. Some of Fraser's opinions may not be considered PC for today, but this in my opinion adds to the charm of these stories. The war and its aftermath left lasting impressions on those who took part. The Gordon Highlanders are sadly no more, having been downsized in 1994. In this book you will find many funny and amusing tales which made them the fine regiment they once were. Those who have followed Fraser in his Flashman series will find a different style here, but equally entertaining in its own right. The McAuslan stories form part of a number of works that were written about the post war years in Britain. "Tunes of Glory" is another more serious example by Kenneth Kennaway.
The McAuslan stories have been recently gathered together into a triology which is not available from Amazon.com in the States. The book can be ordered from Amazon.com.co.uk and is well worth the extra pennies to do so.
Here's to the Gordons! Long may their memory live!
THE GENERAL DANCED AT DAWN is a work of wry humor, inasmuch as Lt. MacNeill describes the unintentionally comic situations encountered with his Jocks (men) during garrison life both in Scotland and abroad, mostly the latter. The book is actually a series of short stories, in which a common thread tying all together, besides Dand himself, is Pvt. McAuslan, the dirtiest, most slovenly soldier in His Majesty's service. As described by MacNeill:
" ... he lurched into my office (even in his best tunic and tartan he looked like a fugitive from Culloden who had been hiding in a peat bog) ..."
McAuslan may be the focus of a particular chapter, as when he is court-martialed for refusing an order to enter a pillow fight contest to be held during a gathering of the various Highland regiments. Or, he may make nothing more than a brief cameo appearance, as when he is upbraided by MacNeill for fighting one of the crewman aboard the coastal steamer ferrying the battalion's soccer team on a road-trip against the teams of neighboring British commands - a fight brought on by the sailor's comments regarding McAuslan's unsanitary appearance.
The squalid presence of McAuslan notwithstanding, the central character of the book is Dand MacNeill, whether he's coping with the unfathomable questions of the officer selection board, pressed into command of an overnight troop train from Cairo to Jerusalem through unruly Palestine, mounting the ceremonial guard at Edinburgh Castle, or taking lessons in regimental piping history from the god-like Regimental Sergeant Major. Dand's narrative of military service is of such good humor and wit that it's evident his alter ego, Fraser, remembers his own time in uniform as an enriching life experience, despite the hardships of WWII combat. This positive slant on the book's theme, and Fraser's/MacNeill's fine sense of the ludicrous, make the volume one that I couldn't put down. (I've encountered so-called "thrillers" that were less absorbing.)
Note: THE GENERAL DANCED AT DAWN is currently out of print in the US. However, it and Fraser's two sequels in the McAuslan series, MCAUSLAN IN THE ROUGH and THE SHEIKH AND THE DUSTBIN, are all contained in THE COMPLETE MCAUSLAN, available from Amazon.co.uk. This is a superb volume, worth to an Anglophile every pence spent in postage to deliver it across The Pond to The Colonies.
George MacDonald Fraser has written the stories of this regiment and its most infamous soldier, Private McAuslan, in three collections: "The General Danced at Dawn", "McAuslan in the Rough", and "The Sheikh and the Dustbin".
Through the narration by platoon commander Dand McNeil, McAuslan comes alive as the dirtiest soldier in the world, "wan o' nature's blunders; he cannae help bein' horrible. It's a gift."
Yet McAuslan is one of the most loveable creatures in all of literature. He may be grungy, filthy, clumsy, and disreputable, but he tries to do his best. Through his many misadventures, McAuslan marches into the heart of the reader, right leg and right arm swinging in unison, of course.
McAuslan, outcast that he is, experiences some infamous moments in his career: court martial defendant, ghost-catcher, star-crossed lover, golf caddie, expert map reader, and champion of the regimental quiz game (!). His tales, and the tales of his comrades-in-arms, are poignant at times, hilarious at others. These tales are so memorable because they are based on true stories.
The reader basks in all things Scottish in the stories. The language of the soldiers is written in Scottish brogue, although Fraser says in his introduction, "Incidentally, most of this volume is, I hope, written in English." Don't fret - a glossary is provided. (Reading the glossary alone causes some serious belly laughs.
If you read only one book this year, read this one. And if you know any veterans, give them a copy. It's a volume that the reader will not soon forget.
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Hey, Cambridge-- when are you going to do Leibniz?
So, for part one. Hegel is difficult. It was, as I learned, his distinguishing mark in early years: "more obscure than Fichte!" was something like a slogan. Pinkard does a marvellous job of showing the diversity and complexity of Hegel's experience (the chapters on his university friendship with Schelling and Hoderlin are especially absorbing) and pulling out some of the more unexpected sources of his thought. (Adam Smith and Gibbon and the New Testament, for example.) Ever since Dilthey more attention has been payed to Hegel's early work and for good reason. Moving from this account Pinkard gives excellent insights into the genesis and exposition of Hegel's notoriously difficult "system." Having been absoloutely dumbfounded by Hegel in the past I think this book is the best possible introduction to what Hegel is up to in his Philosophical work. Pinkard in addition to being keen has some serious philosophical chops so he brings out some aspects of Hegel that get overlooked.
As for the second front Pinkard does a great job of countering some of the more cartoonish and absurd pictures of Hegel: the pioneer of German nationalism, the doddering obscurantist, the proto-fascist conservative. Pinkard does a good job showing how the most common images of hegel are thorough characters whose longevity has more to do with the fact that few people actually read or know much about Hegel. I particularly liked the way Hegel's complex political commitments were mapped out and how the more intimate aspects of Hegel the person (his addiction to whist, his love of coffee) were brought out.
I am given to understand that Hegel scholarship is experiencing something of a revival these days, and by my account Pinkard's biography should be at the forefront of any movement. He deserves a great deal of credit for producing a skillfull, well-written and insightful work on an extremely difficult thinker.
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I can attest from personal experience that the book is well-written; indeed I worked through it chapter by chapter. But today there do exist a plethora of other treatments that can at least rival this text in lucidity, organisation and coverage. For example, for general topology, there is an excellent text by Willard titled 'General Topology',as well as Hocking and Young's old 'Topology'. Both of these go much further in the realm of point-set topology than Simmons. Similarly there are any number of well-written texts on functional analysis that cover the subject of Banach spaces, Hilbert spaces and self-adjoint operators very clearly. Indeed in some respects I feel the Simmons book was inadequate by itself and needed to be supplemented by a text on linear algebra; self-adjoint operators -- and by implication, the Spectral theorem -- need to be seen and manipulated in the finite-dimensional version before one examines their infinite-dimensional generalisation. The Simmons book is a bit weak here; one needs to be playing with matrices.
These are, however, minor quibbles. The book can be recommended to a junior- or senior-level undergraduate.
The author's attitude can only be characterized as magnificent, and, if one is to judge his utterances in the preface by what is found after it, one will indeed find perfect evidence of his delight in mathematics and his high competence in elucidating very abstract concepts in topology and real analysis. Indeed, this has to be the best book ever written for mathematics at this level. It is a book that should be read by everyone that desires deep insights into modern real and functional analysis.
After a brief and informal overview of set theory, the author moves on to the theory of metric spaces in chapter 2. His emphasis is on the idea that metric spaces are easy to find, since every non-empty set has the discrete metric, and that metric spaces are good motivation for the more general idea of a topological space. The Cantor set, ubiquitous in measure theory, dynamical systems, and fractal geometry, is constructed as the most general closed set on the real line, i.e. one obtained by removing from the real line a countable disjoint class of open intervals. Continuity of mappings between metric spaces is defined, and also the concept of uniform continuity, the latter of which is motivated very nicely by the author. Then, the author takes the reader to a higher level of abstraction, wherein he asks the reader to consider all of the continuous functions on a metric space, and turn this collection into a metric space of a special type called a normed linear space, and, more specifically, a Banach space. Thus the author introduces the reader to the field of functional analysis.
A lengthy introduction to topological spaces follows in chapter 3. The author motivates well the idea of an open set, and shows that one could just as easily use closed sets as the fundamental concept in topology. And, most important for functional analysis, he introduces the weak topology, and shows how to obtain the weakest topology for a collection of mappings from a topological space to a collection of other topological spaces. The reader can see clearly that the weaker the topology on a space the harder it is for mappings to be continuous on the space.
Compactness, so essential in all areas of mathematics that make use of topology, is discussed in chapter 4. It is motivated by an abstraction of the Heine-Borel theorem from elementary real analysis, and the author shows how well-behaved things are on compact topological spaces. Some important theorems are proved in this chapter, namely Tychonoff's theorem, the Lebesgue covering lemma, and Ascoli's theorem.
Recognizing that the only functions able to be continuous on a space with the indiscrete topology are the constants, and that a space with the discrete topology has continuous functions in abundance, the author asks the reader to consider topologies that fall between these extremes, and this motivates the separation properties of topological spaces. Chapter 5 is an in-depth discussion of separation, and the reader again confronts function spaces, and their ability (or non-ability) to separate the points of a topological space. Spaces that allow such separation to occur are called completely regular, and this property has far-reaching consequences in analysis and other areas of mathematics. The Stone-Cech compactification is discussed as an imbedding theorem for completely regular spaces, analogous to one for normal spaces.
The intuitive idea of a space being connected is given rigorous treatment in chapter 6. Certain pathologies can of course arise when discussing connectedness, and the author shows this by discussing totally disconnected spaces, remarking that such spaces are very important in dimension theory and representation theory. Indeed, computational and fractal geometry is much harder to study because of the existence of these spaces.
Chapter 7 is important to all working in numerical analysis, wherein the author discusses approximation theory. The Weierstrass approximation and the Stone-Weierstrass theorems are discussed in detail.
A slight detour through algebra is given in chapter 8. Groups, rings, and fields are given a minimal treatment by the author, discussing only the basic rudiments that are needed to get through the rest of the book.
Banach spaces make their appearance in chapter 9, with the three pillars of the theory proven: the Hahn-Banach, the open mapping, and the uniform boundedness theorems. These theorems guarantee that the study of Banach spaces is worth doing, and that there are analogs of the finite dimensional theory in the (infinite)-dimensional context of Banach spaces. The theory of Banach spaces is very extensive, but this chapter gives a peek at this very interesting area of mathematics.
Banach spaces with an inner product are considered in chapter 10. These of course are the familiar Hilbert spaces, so important in physics and the subject of a huge amount of research in mathematics. The presence of the inner product allows constructions familiar from ordinary finite-dimensional vector spaces to carry over to the inifinite-dimensional setting, one example being the transpose of a matrix, which is replaced in the Hilbert space setting by a self-adjoint operator.
As a warm-up to the infinite-dimensional theory, finite-dimensional spectral theory is considered in chapter 11. The famous spectral theorem is proven. Then in chapter 12, the reader enters the world of "soft" analysis, wherein topological and algebraic constructions are used to study linear operators on spaces of infinite dimensions. Putting an algebraic structure on a Banach space gives a Banach algebra, and then the trick is deal with the spectrum of an element of this algebra. The reader can see the interplay between algebra, topology, and analysis in this chapter and the next one on commutative Banach algebras. Indeed, the Gelfand-Naimark theorem, that essentially states that elements of a commutative Banach *-algebra act like the functions on its maximal ideal space, has to rank as one of the most interesting results in the book, and indeed in all of mathematics.
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breath-taking. The words in this book are not fancy, but candid, convincible and colorful, it is the true life of Lorreta Lynn that wins the heart of millions people.
How poor is being poor? What is the struggle to escape from being
poor? How Lorreta Lynn became a country music diva from a coal miner's daughter? From this book, we share the life of Lorreta Lynn with our own, we see the souls and dreams as well as day to day lives of many ordinary people, especially the humanbeing under poverty.
Lorreta Lynn was born into a very poor coal miner's family in a remote Kentucky hillside. Her father had little money to feed Lorreta and her family, one Christmas, her Daddy had only thirty-six cents (!) for Lorreta and her three brothers. The work was very hard for her Daddy, he had to crawl on his hands and knees to work inside the ream of coal, of only three feet high. Until seven years old, Lorreta always wore flour sack her mummy sewed as dress. However, with her unyielding spirit and unceasingly struggling, Lorreta went on and up, became the queen of country music and a millionaire.
I didn't know the name of Lorreta Lynn until I watched the movie"coal miner's daughter", this movie led me to this book. The movie is fantastic, but this book let you know more and think more.
Either you like county music or not, either you are poor or rich,
this book is absolutely good, inspiring, touching and unforgetable.
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In fact, it demonstrates conclusively that the American people suffered a collective fit of halluciantion when they voted this incompetent man into office.
The book has some nice information about Crawford, Texas and the Bush's dogs -- but it does not tell us anything about the psychology of the Boy Emperor. Perhaps this is becuase the BE has no particular psychological nuance to display? Perhaps.
Leadership, as Fred Nietzsche once opined, is about breaking the rules when others think that rule breaking would be a mistake.
Bush's "leadership," as noted by the author, consists of learning the rules and efficiently applying them with charm and gingerly worded disinformation. Then again, maybe the book isn't half bad. I learned how to be manipualtive and nice at the same time.
If you want to enhance your ability to lead - read this book. Mine is covered with notes and I bought one for each of my staff!
Then after reading the first few chapters, I realized that this book was not about President Bush's politics (although there was some strategies revealed) or about his faith (although his personal convictions are the heart of his core values) or even about his IQ level (his emotional intelligence is recognized as highly intuitive). This was a book was about how an average person can become the leader they want to be.
I finished the book quickly from a purely biographical point of view and now am going back over each chapter to concentrate on the leadership competencies and how I can learn from the examples. The authors know what they are talking about but they also made it real easy for the reader to put into practice the lessons that need to be learned.
After reading this book, I also came to appreciate and admire President Bush and how his personal discipline is one of the timeless principles of his leadership. I am glad that I read this book at this time in history.
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We all know Beverly Clearly is an awesome writer and she wrote this book so well.
"Being twins are harder then you think." Mitch and Amy said in unison. Trying to be able to win the argument over who got the bathroom this morning. I can believe it is. Mitch and Amy is one of my favorite books of all time. It has family life, twin arguments, and school issues. Over their summer vacation, Amy would brag on what page she is on, she knows Mitch has problems with reading. Then on the first day of fourth grade, Mitch brags about multiplication tests on the fist few days of school. Mitch knows Amy has problems with multiplication. , Mitch and Amy would often feel bad for each other.
I found this book tops because I can relate to it. Even though, my two little brothers, (5 and 7) equal one Mitch and my older (15) sister is another Mitch. I, unfortunately (13) am just one Amy. Only, just like Mitch and Amy, we do get along, sometimes. I do believe that it was a page-turner. I just had to know what Amy did at fights. So now when my two Mitches start a fight, like they always do, I will do just what Amy did. I would certainly say that the end of the chapters had a cliffhanger. Examples, "You'd be surprised, Amy." Amy went into her room and put "Mitchell was a pest," before drawing a skull with cross bones below it. Another ending was he did not want them to see him come with a broken skateboard and...