The author is far closer than he realizes on some points, but he misses on the key points. This book is mainly a collection of ancient stories and myths relating to the flood of Noah. It is a good source book for finding flood legends from around the world, along with some interesting interpretations about how the ancient stories all point to the same event. The main short coming of the book is its the failure to trust the accuracy of the most reliable of all flood accounts, the bible. The theory put forward by the author is that 10,000 years ago the earth was hit by a number of comet fragments which triggered huge waves and other destructive events that are what is behind many of the flood or cataclysm myths nearly all ancient cultures tell of. The book does not support a global deluge, but does present evidence supporting a recent world wide disaster. The book is interesting in that it is written by someone who doesn't believe in the flood or the bible, and yet feels the evidence overwhelmingly points towards a recent world wide disaster of which there where few survivors. For coming so close, I felt this book deserved two stars despite its short comings.

Wilhelm Johannes Schwarz, Heinrich Boll: Teller of Tales (Frederick Ungar, 1969)

"It is certainly too early," Schwarz begins his conspectus, "to assign Heinrich Boll his definitive place in German literature." The Nobel committee obviously thought differently three years after the publication of this slim overview of Boll's work to date; Boll won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1972, based largely on the work he'd published up to 1969. Schwarz says that Boll's novels are overrated at the beginning of the book. That's the best kind of overrated there is, one thinks.

Teller of Tales is not so much a critical study as it is a survey. Rather than delve deeply into any aspect of the short stories and novels of Heinrich Boll, Schwarz seems content to draw parallels between certain types of characters in Boll's novels. Each chapter except the first (Survey) and the last (Conspectus) focuses on a type of character who crops up in multiple Boll publications: the artist, the Catholic, etc. While this is certainly good information to have for one who's working his way through Boll's books, it would have been nice to see an extra hundred pages or so in this volume (which is only 116 pp. sans endnotes, preface, etc.) devoted to giving us more of what, in Schwarz' opinion, Boll was really on about. Instead, Schwarz repeatedly falls back on the claim of the survey writer that such things are "beyond the limits of [the] study." This, combined with Schwarz' parade of disparaging remarks throughout the survey (the "overrated" comment above, the sentence "Whenever he ventures into other techniques [e.g., the ambitious symbolism of Billiards at Half-Past Nine or the metaphysical dream language of The Bread of Our Early Years] his style appears labored and less than fully convincing." In the preface, and other such comments throughout the first twenty pages of the book), one gets the distinct impression that Schwarz' ulterior motive here was to damn Boll with faint praise. There is certainly something to be said for calling Boll to task for the plodding pace of Billiards or the rather deus-ex-machina ending of The Train Was on Time, but with only one or two exceptions Schwarz ignores that which makes Boll such a brilliant writer when he's on his game--his ability to make a reader not care about these things by being able to get his point across so clearly and competently. One must, of course, make an allotment for the possibility that Schwarz simply missed the point repeatedly, but that seems somewhat disingenuous when Schwarz talks again and again about Boll's depictions of life in general after the war. In fact, he devotes a whole chapter to the Homecomer (what today we would think of as DPs). How much of the point could he really have missed? It's also true that this was published five years before Boll's magnum opus, The Lost Honor of Katherina Blum (and one thinks the Nobel committee must have been singularly pleased to see an author they'd given the award to only two years previous pull his finest novel out of a hat!), and perhaps Blum puts more of Boll's stylistic kinks and message-bearing ability into perspective in the earlier novels.

It's a decent place to start for the aspiring Boll critic who wants to see what directions he has to choose when writing a dissertation or a critical article. However, this certainly never approaches the utility for the layman contained in such critical studies as Reddick's The Danzig Trilogy of Gunter Grass (a necessity for getting the full power of Grass' great work) or David Paul Henry's The Early Development of the Hermeneutic of Karl Barth (a necessity for getting anything about Barth at all). As such, it's probably best left until after the layman has read a good stack of Boll novels. ** ½

Over several years, this is the first book I've ever returned to Amazon.com. It just doesn't add anything new to the knowledge I have obtained from reading older magazines and books on natural healing and folk remedies. If you don't have this background, the book may be helpful. Still, I would recommend one of the many books from Time/Life or Prevention for more real substance and fewer pages devoted to oftimes cloying "folksy anecdotes".

Prior to reading this book, I had read the excellent three volume set "Gestapo Chief" by Gregory Douglas. I bought this book, hoping to get additional information on Heinrich Muller. Unfortunately, this book was apparently written to discredit Douglas' 3 books. The book's cover is even identical to Volume 1 of Gregory Douglas' books. This book is essentially a rehash of previous books on the SS and Gestapo, ... and much unsupported conjecture about the career and subsequent disappearence of Muller. ... If you want to know the truth about Heinrich Muller, read Gregory Douglas' 3 books. Together, they are the standard work on the Gestapo Chief against which all other books on the subject must be judged.

This book appears to attempt capitalize on recent interest in SS-Gruppenfueher (General) Heinrich Mueller's career, particularly noted in the series of books by Gregory Douglas based on primary sources available since the early 1990s (to Douglas, at least). This book reads well, but is not referenced in a manner that will be useful to readers who prefer documentation (and yes, there are publishers who allow it!). For the general reader, who isn't interested in such distinctions, it may be a good read, but absent any analysis of Mueller, his career, or recent findings, the book fails to hit its intended mark.

This is a rambling account of Mueller's career, poorly supported by the limited research performed by this author. Although it is mildly interesting or entertaining as a"spy" story (which Mueller wasn't), it certain is not an authoritative or accurate account of the subject. It presents theories for what happened to Mueller, but no real answers.

I am a college student in history, and this is the second book on U-234 I have read. There has also been an excellent History Channel episode on U-234 and the possible use of enriched uranium captured from the German submarine, by the Manhattan Project.

The information in this book is lacking. It seems that there is a lot left out, and little data to support the authors conclusions.

Who ever postulated that the Japanese might have dropped a bomb on LA or San Francisco is not a historian. It would have been virtually impossible for Japan to deliver a nuclear weapon to the West Coast in 1945. In "Japan's Secret Weapon" it is well documented that if Japan had been able to construct a nuclear weapon, its delivery target would have been invading U.S. forces. That is why the ME-262 was on board the U-234. Anyone who believes that Japan would ever have invaded California during WW II neads to re-read Alfred Thayer Mahan. The lines of communication required to sustain an invasion force on the U.S. West Coast by Japanese Forces would have been impossible to maintain. The same wisdom needs to be used in suggesting a nuclear attack after May of 1945. That dog just ain't gonna hunt.

Looks like we have an historian and a novel writter for authors. Tear away the fiction, beef up more historical data, and you would have a great book.

Also . . . DNA extracts from a skull fragment in Moscow identify it as Hitler . . . . this is old news. Leave the escape of Hitler to South America to the novel writers.

An extremely bad misrepresentation of Schenker and his work. In the first place the author uses only his own translations in the text, and very many of them are mistranslations of a more or less serious nature. For example, he mistranslates the verb "besteht [in]" (consists in) as "gets its start in"; this mistranslation has fateful consequences for his reading (misreading) of Schenker's interpretive practice. (There are literally scores of translation mistakes, some of them involving the most elementary German.) The author's attempts to portray Schenker's thought process in analyzing music are ludicrous, the work of a person who entirely lacks the requisite training for such an endeavor, and has no conception of who Schenker was and how he thought about music.

This book is the first study on spectra of rare earth ions. it has teorical and experimantal calculations on emissions of divalent and trivalent rare earth ions in crystals. i think this book is usefull for luminescence study on rare earth ions doped crystals.
such as Zircon, LaF...

Thirty days hath September, April, June and November;
February has twenty-eight alone, All the rest have thirty-one,
Excepting Leap-year, that's the time
When February's days are twenty-nine.

When will these so called "authors" learn?