Lord Byron's parting gift to his friend, Tom Moore, was the publication rights to Byron's autobiography. Moore, however, yielded to pressures from Lady Byron, and burned the autobiography, thereby assuring, among other things, that Lady Byron would have the rest of her life to vilify her late husband without the risk of contradiction. (Do get a copy of Doris Langley Moore's The Late Lord Byron for the details of this story.) In return, Moore was given the rights to prepare an authorized biography, which would say nothing to harm his friend's reputation. The result would have been a long, tedius book, of interest only to scholars and insomniacs -- if it weren't for one thing: in addition to Moore's writing, there are large collections of Byron's letters and journals. Byron was to letters what Pepys was to diaries, and his prose is fresh, sprightly and gossipy. The letters reveal more of Byron than any of the poems, with the obvious exception of Don Juan. They can be read for fun as much as for literary or historical insight. For the modern reader, there are far better biographies of Byron, but for anybody who has become interested in the poet, this volume combines a passable biography with an excellent collection of Byron's own writing. For those wishing to do more detailed studies, the fact that this is the closest thing to an authorized biography makes the Moore volume an essential starting point.

I bought this book because I have started teaching my daughter Karate. I wanted a book that gave her some morals and values about violence in regards to Karate and I gotta say this hits the mark. She has taken the book to school for their reading time she liked it so much.

My seven year old son loved this book. As a beginning reader, he never balked when told to sit and read. It provided a great springboard for discussions for bringing history to life and encouraged a love for history and reading!

This book is really well done by Proff Leo and Thomas! It goes in greaat deapths of detail about the history and the argumentative sides of the Miranda debate! Ive also taken the criminology class with prof leo and this book it great for academic reading and for leisure reading.

Young Indiana Jones is on a two-year lecture tour with his mother and father and they stop in Oxford to pick up his privit toture Miss Semore and they head to Egypt, the first country of the lecture tour. while there indy meets T.E. Larence or ned and uncovers a mummy and solvs a murder.

I received this as a gift and it was great fun to read. It contains 26 short stories revolving around Xmas by some of the great writers such as Agatha Christie, Ngaio Marsh, Ellery Queen, Damon Runyan, etc. A great gift for the mystery lover!

Winston Smith, member of the Outer Party, a small, petty cog in the great machination of "Big Brother", tries to step out from the shadow of his life in George Orwell's now masterpiece, "1984". Written over 50 years ago, this book was to serve several purposes, one being a warning to the present that a future like this, however fantastic and unbelievable, could be in the making should we allow for it to happen.

Winston leads the dull life of a worker, not encouraged to think, or dream, for feel for himself. His whole life must be driven to support the Party, which promulgates an apparent non-entity Big Brother as the supreme one. Winston early on shows the spark of individuality that the Party so wants to extinguish; by daring to write a journal on his own, he seals his fate early in the story. Soon he meets Julia, another worker, who charms and dares him even further to enocurage having an affair. Together they make a lethal pair, and some lethal decisions, which leads to the great climax in the Ministry of Love.

What lies in the story is an amazing prophecy of government gone mad. The Party believes in creating present truths by writing and rewriting the past on its whim. The Party understands in order to control the people, it must control the language, thereby, creating "Newspeak". The Party makes people simply vanish, eradicating them from existance. The Party realizes the people who follow are merely plebians in society, and therefore, should be encouraged to not think for themselves. In fact, the Party is able to directly lie to the people, using "doublethink", where they say one thing but mean the other.

How much of Orwell's nightmare is something that can be true today? Do we have a government out of control, one that manipulates information for its own benefit, to justify war, ensure fear and terror reigns over the country; one that illegally detains people without trial, right to counsel, or even being charged with a crime; one that wants to extensively monitor our personal phone calls, e-mails, the books we check out of the library, the things we buy in stores. The dots are there to connect them; the challenge is, will you dare to do it, like Winston Smith dared?

I believe 1984 is ultimately a hopeful book. Orwell wants to challenge humanity, that during times of crisis, we are able to rise up and change things, so the fateful prophecy so nobly and horrifyingly espoused in 1984 , will only stay between the covers of the book. The choice is up to us.

This biographical encyclopedia will interest college-level libraries, providing a strong set of profiles of over four hundred scientists who've won the Nobel Prize in physics, chemistry, or medicine. Entries provide basic bibliographic information along with details on the scientist's career and other achievements. An excellent reference.

I highly recommend "Optics of Nanostructured Materials" to scientists and aspiring scientists who work in optics or whose work is even tangentially related to optics. Though the book is an edited collection of chapters there is a certain consistency of in the level of presentation. That level of presentation is better described in the plural: levels of presentation. The chapters tend to have extensive discussions of the physics and of the new intuition required to understand the sometimes quirky world of nanoscale physics: that regime where our classical and quantum views of the world meet. The intuitive picture is always accompanied by a thorough mathematical development of the subject matter. The mathematical presentation may be somewhat beyond the level of some undergraduates, though an undergradute with a grasp of PDE's and some exposure to quantum mechanics should have little trouble. There is very little taken for granted in the reader's background, though each chapter does move very rapidly from basic principles into the main discussion. For instance, the first chapter which deals with photonic crystals starts with Maxwell's equations but then progresses to a discussion of band structure in about two pages.

The text is prossibly of greatest value to graduate students and researchers. The subjects are, of course, bound together by the common thread of nanoscale optics. Beyond that common thread, the topics seem somewhat ecclectic. There are chapters on main stream subjects such as photonic crystals and quatum dots, but there are also delightful forays into subjects such as fractals, chaos, nonlinear spectroscopy, and the optics of smoke. For the active researcher, these chapters are a guide into new areas with multidisciplinary applications and where a wealth of open problems await discovery. These chapters differentiate this book from the all too common edited collections that seem to appear every few weeks whose contents may have great archival value but are completely uninspiring. A read through this book will leave any scientist with a pulse ready to run to his or her lab and get back to work, possibly on one of the topics discussed here.

This historically-grounded sociological study attempts nothing less than a general theory of religious movements. Supported by inventive statistical research into antebellum revivalism, Thomas argues that in times of cultural change, the more a movement is similar with the surrounding socioeconomic culture, the more people it can mobilize in support. Consequently, he rejects "crisis-theories" that maintain antebellum revivalism was merely a response to dramatic socioeconomic change. Rather, antebellum revivalism was successful because it had a high degree of similarity with the new socioeconomic order. Ultimately, he offers a model of social organization that does not require every human motivation be reduced to material self-interest. Thomas's insights into antebellum revivalism are convincing, and his work deserves more attention than it has received in the historiography of antebellum reform. I recommend this work to students of antebellum religious history and the sociology of religion.