Professor Steven G. Marks' new book: "How Russia Shaped The Modern World" comes out at the time when Russia itself is deep into the sweeping transitions and uncertainties of the monumental post-Soviet collapse of the 1989-91.

Decoding specific Russian roots of various political and cultural movements transplanted elsewhere in the world, the book looks an appealing endeavor in trying to use a unifying approach in showing how this particular blend of Slavic philosophy, based on exaltation of human suffering and repudiation of satiety, went on shaking and reconstructing established human societal and creative conventions in Europe, Asia, Africa and, to a lesser extent, on both American continents.

Author deserves particular credit for elements of the book that deal with the Russian creative influence, still abound around the world today. Sergei Diaghilev in ballet, Leon Bakst in costume design, Konstantin Stanislavsky and Vsevolod Meyerhold in theatre, Vasily Kandinsky and Kazimir Malevich in painting and visual art are all interwoven neatly and convincingly into the paradigmatic influences in their respective and inventive artistic expressions.

Overwhelming amount of reference material and specific reading that went into writing these chapters, which appear to require very little extra in order to turn them into a separate and valuable book on continuity and history in arts, speaks volumes about S. Marks' commendable meticulousness in dealing with people and their ideas.

Continuous relevance of Mikhail Bakunin, the father of anti-bourgeoisie anarchism and radicalism with his passion for destruction, his penchant for secrecy and his willingness to use brutal force to establish new egalitarian order, linked naturally through multitude of revolts, revolutions and "liberation" movements of the XX Century could hardly be denied in the present "(new) terrorism age".

One of Fedor Dostoevsky's brilliant and infectious social admonitions, telling us, that "one (dictator) could rule (despotically), but as long as he took care of the submissive people's most basic survival needs, (and) mankind will run after (him) like a flock of sheep, grateful and obedient", expressed in Brothers Karamazov, persists in bordering on absolute, by the very lure such "economic certainty and psychological protection" brings, in return for our willingness to give up the burden of our personal freedom.

Steven Marks' particular allusion to this forewarning by Dostoevsky, although hidden deeply in the thick of his book, and the substance of this intuitive comment by the great Russian writer, has never been truer in our "liberating" times of neo-liberal governing agendas.

The book's topical chapters, dealing with such specific philosophical torrent as Tolstoy's "neprotivlenie zlu nasiliem" (non-resistance to evil by violence) and, separately, with domestic Russian/Soviet Communism and Dictatorship, including their "export" variations, found elsewhere in the world, are sprinkled with witty observations, and clever remarks, but, overall, are less enticing.
Probably because of the far-reaching nature of writings on philosophy of "peaceful" resistance, exemplified by Mahatma Gandhi or found in texts on the equality rights movement of the 1960s American blacks. And, in second case, because of even more exhaustive multitudes of the anti-Communist writings, that by now, easily form a separate branch of the Western Social Science.

Russia continues to defy conventions and many old and new questions are still waiting to be answered.

XXth Century had proven to be one of the most turbulent in the country's history as it went through two sweeping and devastating societal changes: first in violently replacing old Imperial and Czarist Russia with Socialist ideas and ideals, and forcibly uniting hundreds of the Russian and ethnic millions under its banner, and then, quietly expiring and disintegrating under the unsustainable economic and political burden of its own existence, just over 70 years later.

How could it happen that Russia, whose best intellectual minds felt closest in spirit to German philosophical currents, and drunk freely from Hegel, Marx and Engels, had fought two bloody wars with the Germany's military in a span of less then 30 years?

How, standing (secretly) ready to join the German-Italian fascists and the Japanese in the Axis triangle in 1940, Russia ended up on the victorious side of Western Allies and survived another four and a half decades of the cold war, while the seemingly more "viable" regimes ended in disaster of the 1945 defeat?

Finally, how is the USSR, which was labeled unequivocally and rightly to be a "totalitarian" state, has shown ability not only for the radical internal self-reformation, but more amazingly, the ability to annihilate peacefully in taking the volunteer path to extinction? Extinction that, to be sure, was catastrophic, but came to pass without gory destructions or civil war?

Many of these and other important questions are just as sure will perpetuate the nature of Russia's mythical influence in the world, as has always been the case, and insure our unrelenting continuing fascination with it in times to come, as this book ably affirms.

Steven Marks has written a most original book. While historians almost invariably deal with western influences on Russia, he is the first to demonstrate that there was also a reverse process, especially from the late nineteenth century on. He traces these influences in the fields of politics (revolutionary terrorism and anarchism), psychology (Dostoevsky), religion (Tolstoyanism), destructive Judeophobia (The so-called "Protocols of the Elders of Zion") as well as modern ballet, theater, and design. The two concluding chapters deal with the influence of Communism on Fascism and National-Socialism. While these two chapters are somewhat weakened by the author's ambivalent attitude toward the concept of totalitarianism," they nevertheless provide useful evidence to validate it. In all, an impressive achievement.

Don't be put off by the title, this book by Steven Marks covers new ground which should please both academics and the general public. While the thesis behind the book at first seems all encompassing, each chapter builds a case in detail bringing together several seemingly unrelated strands.

The book is well researched and very readable. It makes accessible little known facts about anarchists, expressionism, dance and politics. The chapter on the origins of the Protocols of Zion is not to be missed, Marks objectively tells the story of the single most influential Anti Semitic documents of the 20th Century.

I'd recommend this book as an addition to both a personal library and/or a college level text.

What do you expect from a cognitive science book, which neatly separates all the major fields (Cognitive Psychology, Artificial Intelligence, Linguistics, Neuroscience, Philosophy, Language Acquisition, Semantics, Natural Language Processing, Vision), into chapters? First of all, it is not a mile-wide inch-deep book. Quite the contrary, it has remarkable detail, and it's definitely not an easy book for the beginner. However the fragments are not well-connected to each other, and there are no threads of thought one can follow through the text. Probably the most important problem of cognitive science is the gap between the disciplines, and the lack of a common terminology. The authors have adopted an information-processing view, and overstepped this problem rather than solving it. The result is a biased book, which is really nice if you like the information theoretic approach (like I do), but as a course-book, I suggest it as the supplementary reading.

Cognitive Science: An Introduction - 2nd Edition is a fascinating undergraduate text that accurately shows all of the subsets of the cognitive sciences. Cognitive Science: An Introduction - 2nd Edition introduces the advanced undergraduate student to cognitive science subsets such as cognitive psychology, cognitive anthropology, cognitive computational intelligence, cognitive linguistics, cognitive nurro-science, and the philosophy of the cognitive sciences. The diagrams in Cognitive Science: An Introduction - 2nd Edition are very vivid to demonstrate exactly what a philosophers/scientists sees in the subject matter of the cognitive sciences. The undergraduate text provides a very a empirical perspective of the cognitive sciences that differs directly from the classical transcendental perspective of cognition that the philosopher Immanuel Cant demonstrated in the Critique Of Pure Reason. The cognitive sciences can be very difficult to understand, but Cognitive Science: An Introduction - 2nd Edition is one of the best resources to explore the new empirical study of the science of the process of thought.

Please feel free to send questions or comments to mmount@essex1.com

Although there isn't enough information presented here for the truly novice brewer(just a short formulation chapter at start of the book and the appendixes in back)I found this book to be very interesting to read. People have come up with all sorts of recipes, who'd ever have time to try them all?, and such names! The names these guys have come up with are almost better than their recipes. I especially liked the chapter on hombrews made with honey, those might be the easiest for a novice and seem to be hard to find.

Karl presents a comprehensive collection of ale and lager recipes. The recipes include both extract and all grain recipes at about a 50/50 porportion.

I enjoyed the book immensely as I was departing from kits and following recipes. All the recipes I made came out fantastic and I still make some of them today.

Some of the things I exceptionally, liked are:

Several recipes come from competitions. I had found these recipes came out exceptionally well.

Although one would think that the recipes from competitions would be more complex, but in fact they were not.

I used the book for extract recipes only, so I cannot comment on the all grain recipes. However speaking for the extract recipes, it is certainly a book I have read time and time again as I select what type of beer I am going to make next.

An interesting & detailed look into the hunting methods & machinations of the notorious corporate raider of the 1980's , Carl Icahn . A shylock-like shady character from Brooklyn ,Icahn comes across as a brilliant Machiavellian Wall Street shark whose humble lower middle class origins seemed to have whetted his appetite for his soon to be corporate preys.Interestingly , like some other legendary investors ( George Soros , Jim Rogers, Benjamin Graham etc) Icahn was drawn to philosophy from an early age and went on to study it at Princeton ______after all Schopenhaur himself was a hard-nosed savvy investor! Also like most legendary investors he grew up poor .This book dissects in detail the anatomy of Icahn's raids on Texaco , TWA and others, along with the doomed(for most investors) but brilliant(for Icahn & his clique) concept of taking control of susceptible companies through leveraged buyouts financed with junk bonds & subsequently selling off the family silver to line his own pocket! He also perfected the art of "greenmail" by blackmailing vulnerable managements and thus enriching himself at the expense of his fellow shareholders . Icahn comes across as a lean,mean, street-smart SOB who had the brains and the chutzpah to take on the most entrenched managements on Wall Street .

This book is fantastic. It is brilliantly written and lets you get right inside Icahn's head as he stalks each prey! You can almost feel the squirming of the CEO's he tortures. The descriptions of his strategic thinking are amazing. This book is a MUST READ for anyone interested in activist investing. My most influential book.

This book has a format very similar to that of Homebrew Favorites but has about 20 more recipes, many of them still carrying outrageous names. I liked the later chapters on fruit beers and the herb & spice beers, the idea of using hot peppers (they advise caution) as a flavoring has appeal to me, might help with the flavor some. Chapter 15, the last one, has mead recipes again, I appreciate that one, it'd be the one I'd most want to try.

Before I bought this book I looked at a couple of others first. I thought about Papazian's "Homebrewers Companion" but it had a lot of things other than recipes that I didn't need, and I thought about Higgins "Homebrewers Recipe Guide", but I didn't believe that even 3 people ever really brewed and tested 200 recipes, so I was left with Lutzen and Stevens two books "Homebrew Favorites" and "More Homebrew Favorites". I bought them both.

The books contain lots of recipes (240 in the first volume, 260 in the second) and in every single style. The recipes are evenly split between easy extract recipes and the more advanced all grain recipes. (Good! I can be challenged when my skills improve.) Most important to me was that the beers were brewed by a lot of different people, and a lot of them won awards in lots of different contests and lots of them include some comments about how the beers turned out. This gives me confidence that th! e recipes really worked and the huge number of recipes gives me lots of options and even helps me create my own variations, picking elements I like from one recipe and combining them from another.

The two "Homebrew Favorites" books are probably the best recipe collections on the market, at least for my needs (and probably most other homebrewers too). The books really are on target as far as knowing what homebrewers do in their kitchens.

The only reason I didn't give it 5 stars is that there are some recipes in the book that too simple for me or that are kind of goofy (I don't want to make beer with hot peppers in it!) Maybe you would like this though, so look at it and see.

I rely on this book to pull me through.

I've been brewing for just over 6 years. I do mostly partial-mash/extract brews. This book has been invaluable not just for the recipes it contains, but also for the examples of styles and their ingredients that it presents.

Recipes are convieniently grouped by style and clearly labeled by difficulty (all-grain, extract, etc.). Most recipes also feature brewers and/or judges comments which can be valuable when improving upon or creating your own recipe.

I highly recommend this book to anyone who is just starting to brew their own or has been making kits and is looking for more of a challenge.

For the serious all-grain brewer, this book will be less than you're looking for. You should try "Year of Beer" by Amahl Turczyn.

Cricket the grand old English game, the gentlemens game. More research should have explained the games heritage and how it was introduced to the countries that were under English rule, thus giving a greater understanding of how the game came to dominate in the former English colonies. I think that this emphasis would have made for not only a deeper understanding of why Cricket has failed to establish itself as a serious sport in many countries that were not part of the English commowealth but also why the game is steaped in English tradition.

This book is best suited to somebody who has witnessed some cricket without having a clue what was going on. The book is filled with answers to questions typical of the ones a novice might ask (why do they all wear white? don't they all get bored? who's WINNING???). Fun cartoons throughout. I understand that the UK edition of this book is called 'what is a googly?'.

I want the cricket big pictures please get me that i will be thank ful to you

With this novel Mark Twain confidently changed the way Americans read as well as viewed literature. Through the careful construction of the two main characters Huck and Jim, Twain explores the questionable moral values and hypocrisy of society. Against all odds Huck and Jim form an honest relationship that rises above race, slavery, and southern society. Twain's story is told through the voice of boy who has not yet been "sivilized" by society, and is still able to live outside of convention. This novel combines the strong language that Twain has been remembered for, and a message that is as relevant today as it was in the early nineteen hundreds. As a college student who has read this book in middle scool, high school, and college, I can say that The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was written for all ages and is an important and necessary educational tool.

I read this, since it was my school's outside reading assignment. The printing was so small, that I first thought it would be a boring read. But I soon figured that I was wrong. I found myself slowly slipping into the story as if it was all happening before my own eyes. The characters were very interesting. Especially Huck Finn seemed like a very likable person with a strong identity, wit, and a soft heart. He does not want to sit and let the world rule over him, but instead test his own ideas and proves to the world that he can be better than what the society expacts him to be. And although many say it is a racially biased book because of its frequent use of N word, nobody can deny that it was a commonly used word in the 1800 where the rogue institution called 'slavery' was considered healthy and inevitable. As a matter of fact, this is a book that actually tries to tell the world about the evilness of racial prejudice not promote it. One should read between the lines, in order to acknowledge Twain's subtle attempts. It was a thrilling experience and I recommend people to have for their own!!!!

Mark Twain's classic novel, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, tells the story of a teenaged misfit who finds himself floating on a raft down the Mississippi River with an escaping slave, Jim. In the course of their perilous journey, Huck and Jim meet adventure, danger, and a cast of characters who are sometimes menacing and often hilarious.

Though some of the situations in Huckleberry Finn are funny in themselves (the cockeyed Shakespeare production in Chapter 21 leaps instantly to mind), this book's humor is found mostly in Huck's unique worldview and his way of expressing himself. Describing his brief sojourn with the Widow Douglas after she adopts him, Huck says: "After supper she got out her book and learned me about Moses and the Bulrushers, and I was in a sweat to find out all about him; but by and by she let it out that Moses had been dead a considerable long time; so then I didn't care no more about him, because I don't take no stock in dead people." Underlying Twain's good humor is a dark subcurrent of Antebellum cruelty and injustice that makes The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn a frequently funny book with a serious message.

As a beginner using 3D Studio Max, I did not like this book. The way the book was set up made it difficult for me to read. Examples/ tutorials would be thrown (in little boxes) into the middle of paragraphs giving explanations. I know 3D Studio Max is a complex program to learn, but this book gives so much information at once that it's overwhelming. I think I am just going to stick to a good old fashioned class teaching me 3D Studio Max rather than learn it using books. If you can, as much as possible try to buy the training videos for 3D S.M. They're , but you will get much better results with your work and you will understand the program much better.

Note: 3D Studio Max is supposedly the industry standard, but most of the industry uses Maya or Lightwave. Try to learn those if you can.

I've spent hours carefully reading through 'Inside 3D Max'. Here's what I like: 1) Great explainations of graphic concepts 2) Visual inserts of the graphic panels helps one understand how to use the tool and its features 3) The author provides project files for most the chapters. 4) The book focus heavily on creating geometry through meshing, lathe, extrusion, and lofting. 5) Outstanding explanations of texture maps. 6) The author goes beyond just the technical how-to but helps one use the tool in a creative manner. 7) I found the Inverse Kinematics chapter very helpful. 8) The demos are very entertaining.

I strongly recommend this book for people who already have some experience with MAX. You must atleast read the "3D Studio MAX Fundamentals" book before reading this one. The book is perfectly written and contains all the information you need to work with MAX. However the CD is a little messy but it doesn't affect you so much.

i thoroughly enjoyed this book, read it straight through. it gives lots of good information on early church history and beliefs, which are often denied or ignored by the current church, but which came back to haunt it with the hoffman forgeries. this history is told in an engaging, quick-paced manner. while i would've loved footnotes, that's not really the province of true crime paperbacks........ this book will give you many such thoughts to consider.

Mormons have a reputation as having both the best morals and weirdest beliefs of any "Christian" sect. Discounting the high rate of suicide and divorce in Utah, Mormon beliefs are based on Joseph Smith's wild (delusional to be charitable) claims of golden plates, magic glasses, heavenly babies, Egyptian writing in New York (???) and other such oddities. Despite the fact that the Book of Mormons has undergone literally thousands of edits (its prophecy and history are bogus) it is still revered as the WORD by the faithful.

This book presents an excellent look at the cutthroat politics of Mormonism, the fear of undisclosed revelations and the lengths to which the church will go to keep such revelations from being brought to light. The loss of faith by a Mormon missionary set in motion a chain of events that culminated in the taking of human life. What is particularly sad is that all this evil was so unnecessary.

The fear here is that newly discovered documents showed Smith as a charlatan and the Book of Mormons as phony. Belief systems by necessity ignore scientific and historical evidence contrary to their teachings. DNA demonstrates that Indians are of Asian - not Jewish - origins. Archeologists have never found a scintilla of evidence of advanced Indian civilizations. Anthropologists have dismissed stories of writing, libraries and exotic animals as sheer fantasy. If these finding have not bothered the Faithful why did church leaders think a few old papers would be any different?

This is an engrossing mystery and its setting makes it all the more enticing. The research was stunning, particularly the disclosures into the ins and outs of church life. Buy a copy today.

The author (although I thought Gregory White Smith helped write this) did a lot of work talking to the victims, perpetrators, investigators and others, on the events before, during and after the incident. It is quite a story and does not paint a rosy picture of the LDS Church hierarchy, including Mr. Hinckley who is now the Prophet. An excellent insight into LDS politics at both the local and higher levels.

I also thought that I read that the proposed mini-series got nixed because of pressure by the church.

I guess I expected that a platform independent standard such as XML would have been better expained using a platform independent language such as java. For the unix/java engineers out there....this book contains much useful information and don't get me wrong, I learned a lot. The question is, would I have learned as much or possibly more if I didn't have to put up with 90% of the code examples written in VBScript? Many examples require Internet Explorer. Content was up-to-date and informative but somewhat repetative (12 authors).

The book covers too many topics and just few are developed in deep while others are superficially introduced because not yet standardized at the time of print. The book claims it covers the following topics: XML, XSLT, DOM, DTD, SOAP, XLink, XPointer, XPath, WAP, WML...and more; but just XML, Schemas, DTDs and SOAP could almost fit the book's size.

Chapters don't follow a very logic thread and it doesn't deal enough with very relevant subjects. Wrox probably planned to make this book the XML bible but I think they are far from the target.

The XML declarative language, with its adaptability and expressive power, is continuing to become the language of choice for reporting and classifying information. XML is a formal grammar that captures the syntactic features of a document type definition, and its properties, syntax, and applications are discussed effectively in this book. It covers XML as formalized by the W3C and the authors show how to use XML in Web-based and database applications. Readers who have developed applications in HTML will probably view XML as somewhat more abstract, since the visual representation of the content of a document is not emphasized in XML. Readers are expected to have a background in HTML, JavaScript, Java, and ASP in order to read the book. Although XML can be learned by reading the W3C specifications, these documents are frequently difficult reading, and this book makes the learning of XML much easier than reading these specifications. They include the W3C specifications for XML 1.0 in an appendix to the book for the interested reader. The book is a little dated, since the W3C has been updating XML specs since the time of publication (especially with regard to schemas), but there is a 2nd edition coming out soon.

In Chapter 1, XML is introduced as a mark-up language and its inherent extensibility emphasized. This is followed by a detailed treatment of XML syntax in the next chapter, with emphasis placed on the hierarchical nature of XML. The authors do include a discussion of Processing Instructions (PIs) for users who want to use XML in this fashion.

Document Type Definitions (DTD) are the subject of Chapter 3, where the authors communicate effectively how DTDs formal grammar is used to specify the structure and permissible values of XML documents. The formal DTD structure is discussed, and the principles behind writing DTDs are effectively outlined. They also discuss the problems with using DTDs.

Data modeling with XML is discussed in the next chapter, with information modeling via static and dynamic models treated in detail, and the authors carefully distinguish these two approaches. The actual designing of XML documents is given a nice overview as well as the role of schemas in XML. This is followed in Chapter 6 by a discussion of the (tree-based) Document Object Model, which overviews how XML documents can be accessed by various programs. Some helpful examples are given on how the DOM can be used to create an XML document programmatically. An alternative way of processing an XML document is discussed in the next chapter on the (event-based) SAX interface. The authors outline in detail the benefits of using SAX rather than DOM. In Appendix B the reader will find the Internet Explorer 5.0 XML DOM 1.0 W3C specifications. In addition, in Appendix C, the specification for the SAX 1.0 interface is given.

The shortcomings of DTD are addressed in terms of XML Schemas and namespaces in chapter 7. Since this book was published, XML Schemas have reached W3C recommendation status as of Nov 2000. The authors give a good overview of namespaces and schemas, with helpful examples. This is followed in chapter 8 by a discussion of how to link and query into XML documents using the XML information set, XLink, XPath, XPointer, XML Fragment Interchange, with XLST covered in the next chapter. For database applications, the authors outline the differences between relational databases and XML documents. A very detailed treatment of how XLST transforms the source document is given, and the authors compare XLS and DOM transformations. An Internet Explorer XSL reference is included in one of the appendices of the book.

More details on the relationship between databases and XML is the subject of chapter 10, wherein the authors show how to store XML and how data can be communicated between different servers using XML. The issues involved when moving data from RDBMS to OODBMS or from Oracle to Sybase, are discussed by the authors. This is followed by an interesting discussion on how to use XML as a distributed component model for server-to-server communications via XML-Remote Procedure Call and Simple Object Access Protocol.

E-commerce applications are discussed in the next chapter, with EDI and its improvement via XML. The business markup language cXML , which allows business to business electronic commerce transactions across the Internet, is also treated in detail.

The authors then finally discuss how to render XML documents more readable and pleasing for the viewer in the next chapter using the style languages CSS and XSL. The discussion is really interesting, for the authors dig a little deeper into the foundations of style languages. The discussion of style languages as rule-based languages is particularly illuminating.

The next chapter is very interesting and its inclusion is actually very surprising, namely a discussion of the Wireless Application Protocol. The authors give an introduction to the Wireless Markup Language and WMLScript. The book ends with four useful chapters on case studies for data duality, distributed applications, a book catalog information service, and SOAP.

There are many applications of XML in many different areas, such as CellML (proprietary) used in cell biology, CML (Chemical Markup Language) for molecular chemistry, IML (Instrument Markup Language) for control of laboratory equipment, BSML (Bioinformatic Sequence Markup Language) for gene sequencing, and MathML for formatting of mathematical equations. I find XML an extremely powerful approach to information reporting and I am currently developing a package called NMML (Network Modeling Markup Language) for use in reporting results in simulation and mathematical modeling of networks, and FMML (Financial Modeling Markup Language) for use in reporting results in the modeling of financial instruments. This book, along with the W3C specifications, has been a tremendous help in the development of these applications.