According to Nat Frankel, author of this book, a sargeant in Patton's tank corps, and, after World War II a New York City cab driver, his book documents a regiment of 235 soldiers, all Jewish, on a suicide mission to rescue a relative of Patton's who had been in a German prison war camp since the North African campaign. Only 32 survived. The author feels this account had more to do with Patton's removal from 3rd Army as Commander than his failure to de-nazify the Germans at the end of the war

This book makes one read until the book is finished. The author is relentless in his assessment of the officers and the war. Some names are familiar, but many are not. It is wonderful that they have not been forgotten by the men who fought with and for them. I will have to read it again.

Nat Frankel writes his story in an unpretentious, informal style. He tells his story in such a way that the reader will feel like he or she is listening to an old friend telling them about how things were 'back in the old days...'. If you can find this book, get it!

Smith's poems are a dramatic projection of the mythical poet-naturalist yet made more human in telling journal poems. The style, content,and perspective are located in Thoreau's time and place yet timeless and universal here. It becomes a human and spiritual statement made through the great American Romanticist Thoreau.

Thoreau has spoken through author Smith in this incredible collection of poems. He speaks of nature, daily life, and relationships with sensitive heart. These are the words Thoreau wanted to speak and couldn't. Yet Smith manages to incorporate his own style and keen eye to the poems. Each one is a meditation. I highly recommend this book!

I found this book inspiring, poignant, sometimes funny, sometimes enthralling, always engaging. I've been toying around in the back of my mind with some kind of similar project; now I realize there's no need, because Larry Smith has already done it. In the process, he catches the feel of our lost brother Thoreau's life and times wonderfully.

I recently read this extemely moving biography.The author, Larry Orbach and his daughter, wrote an inspiring story about the life of a young German-Jewish teenager struggling to survive in Berlin.The reader can feel the gradual isolation of Larry, or Lothar, his original name. He and his family were loyal Germans and his father said that he would never leave Germany. After Larry's father dies in a concentration camp, he devotes himself to looking after his mother. What I found inspiring was Larry's accounts of friendship with some Germans who reached out to help him. His mother finds shelter with a Communist family who become close friends.The reader can feel Larry's growing isolation. The few friends he had couldn't stop him from being deported to Auschwitz, but they gave him loyalty and companionship. Larry has to keep moving to avoid being caught, and lives in a variety of places,including a brothel. Larry is very honest and does not to hesitate to relate the incidents where he took part in robberies etc. Some of the events are terrifying, but the book is full of hope. The book shows the reader the effects of both evil and goodness. I will remember all of these characters for a long time. The author describes his friends and enemies very clearly. I would highly recommend this biography.

We had to read a book for school on the Holocaust and I picked this book! Although it's an autobiography, it reads like a story - I couldn't put it down! It's definitely worth buying!

The story is facinating and causes one to think what they might have done if faced with the same danger. Larry tells how he learned his lessons of life from others and how he entered adulthood under such trying circumstances; how important food and shelter was and how he was able to cope while exposed to maximum danger. It will make a great film when someone takes it to Hollywood.

This book has a series of good thought provoking ideas, though in some places, it can be a bit repetitive.

While I think the book is trying not to limit its readers' imaginations, a few more example of where expert systems are or could be implemented would be useful. These example would lend more credibility to the ideas, since they would show that the systems that are vaguely described in the book could actually be implemented.

A must read for those that want to change the world using IT.

I am one of the lucky 10,000+ students who have been taught by Larry Smith in economics at the University of Waterloo. True to his intentions, this book inspires computer scientists to develop a new generation of software tools that will truly revolutionize the world we live in today, namely expert systems. The book does an excellent job at instilling ideas in the mind of the reader of new expert systems that ultimately will be created. Larry Smith has a good grasp on IT as well as economics, and is truly one of the industry's visionaries. Although it lacks in examples, like Prof. Smith said in class, the book is designed to get people thinking about these fantastic expert systems.

The editor and staff did an outstanding job of compiling information about Web Radio! The introduction provides an excellent outline of how Web Radio technology works and has one of the better articles on world time I've run across. The station listings are very well balanced and include broadcasts from around the world. However, like most things about the Internet, Web Radio is a rapidly changing topic and some of the detailed information has become dated since the book was published in April 1997 (hence the 4 star rating). I look forward to the next update!

This book is a well-chosen cross-section of Chinese Zen poetry. It also supplies one of my favorite items in translations of foreign poetry - the original text. The strength of this book is the broad stretch of time covered, as indicated by the organization of the index: pre-T'ang dynasty, T'ang, Sun, Yuan, Ming, Ch'ing. This breadth also means, however, that not all the poetry is of the quality one find's in more focused collections ephasizing the masters Wang Wei, Han Shan, Li Po... Several of these collections appear as "selected sources" in this book.

My favorite in this volume is The Flow and Seed Sequence, a series seven poems written by the Zen Patriarchs beginning with Bodhidharma (d. 536) with poems added to the series nearly 2 centuries later. The translations do an excellent job of retaining the concrete imagery typical of Zen poetry e.g. from Liu Chang Ching "All along the trail of moss, / I follower your wooden shoeprints". We find inventive descriptions of concret images in Liu Fang-Ping "The Big Dipper slopes; / the Great Bear bends down". There are also unusual mentions of doubt from Wang An Shih "Often I doubt the Buddhist way, / that nothing truly exists".

Despite its many good attributes, this collection failed my ultimate test: rarely was I enticed to read and reread a poem. I would still recommend A Drifting Boat or Cold Mountain first. But to even be worthy of comparison to those volumes is strong praise.

Larry Smith's book Hope for the Hard Times is a good book for Christians who need hope in their lives. His book is filled with insight and inspirational ancedotal tales to make it an interesting read.

It's a pretty good boook to get you oriented with visual basic and learn some simple visual basic commands. When it was writen they were using windows 3.1, so if you're using Windows 95 there is a couple things that might confuse you, but nothing major. It doesn't cover a broad range of topics, so it's best to use just to get started. I would recommend it to a beginner, but it's not the best book in the world

Instead of wasting money on a useless book written by Serge Lang, I would strongly recommend a Linear Algebra book by Howard Anton and Chris Rorres. Every Serge Lang book I have read lacked examples, or if there were examples, they would be too general and not helpful in learning the material you need to know. His books seem to be more based on theories which to me are not helpful for one to learn calculus. Aside from the way it is written, compared to most other Linear Algebra books, it is too small. His book does not come close to any other Linear Algebra book I have read, so there are obviously many concepts and exercises lacking. When one has trouble in a course, their text is supposed to be helpful and used as a resource, and Lang's books are anything but helpful. The only thing this book will be good for is the fireplace when I am done with it. Unless your a super genius or don't need a text except for the homework problems, I would avoid this book or course which uses is.

I had this book as the text for my second course in Abstract Algebra, having already taken some elementary Linear Algebra course. I might argue that this is not the best subject for such a course, yet this is very irrelevant here.

All through the class I struggled to understand concepts. I did not. That was not due to the book since I did not even bother opening it. After finishing the course, I realized that the material of this book is of the most importance to anyone planning on continuing his/her grad degree in math, so I decided to read the book. The mission was accomplished in a matter of a couple of weeks.

I do not claim that this is the easiest book to understand the material. In fact, Lang's books are remarked for their dryness. Motivation is almost nonextant. If you, however, have a fairly good background in Linear Algebra (something like the material of Anton's "Elementary Linear Algebra" or the like) and Abstract Algebra (an excellent introduction can be sought in Herstein's "Abstract Algebra") you would much benefit from this book.

The book is a very good book for a second course in linear algebra, that is, it is not a good book for those who had no experience with matrix theory before. The reason is that the book does not mention anything about Gaussian elimination and treats the solutions of n equations in m unknowns using dimension theorems, which is not the standard way of proving existence of such solutions. One more thing is that it does not talk about elementary matrices (one can interpret column or row operations by multiplication of elementary matrices to the right or left). I am not saying the book
is bad, I am saying it is not the right book for a beginner.

The book introduces the basic notions of vector spaces, linear mappings, matrices scalar products, determinants, and eigenvalues and spaces. It then moves to unitary, symmetric, and Hermitian operators and explores their Eigenvalues. Polynomials have a whole chapter followed by triangulation of a linear map. The book concludes with applications of Linear algebra to convex geometry.

I might disagree with the definition of the determinant the author offers, but I would have to admit that his approach is the traditional one.

The subjects of the books must be mastered (or at least absorbed) by anyone who wants to go to analysis (Functional analysis to be precise), Algebra, Geometry, and Differential Equations. To ensure this you should do almost all the exercises of the book since they are so excellent and help a lot in understanding the material presented.

I found the book to be very thorough and well written. It seemed very easy to understand except for the chapter on Jordan Canonical Forms. However, I would not recommend this book to someone who is learning it for the first time, unless they have a high degree of mathematical maturity. Try the beginner book by Howard Anton.