A nice easy to read and follow instruction regime for VFR pilots finding themselves in IFR conditions. Enough IFR information without overload. I'm glad I purchased this book and plan to review it from time to time for that one instance I find myself in IFR conditions. Even if you are thorough in your weather and pre flight briefings, it adds a bit of confidence knowing you have the tools to get you clear. The author covers the phases of flight under emergency IFR conditions up to landing safely.

In this book the authors have taken a fresh look at the conventional wisdom of non profit governance. moving the debate on from the classic boards must govern and mamagement must mange divide. They provide useful insights into a more dynamic and flexible relationship. A good read.

There is however need for more guidance on implementing the model.

While authors Cohen and Taylor ceaselessly document Daley's racism and political power, they explain almost nothing about his family or his true feelings. It is a very shallow, one-sided portrait of someone who was anything but simple. Daley ran the city of Chicago extremely well for many years, but most of the book deals with housing and racism. As a longtime Chicagoan, I was very disappointed with this book. I wanted to know what made Daley tick; this book did not tell me. There was nothing in this book that I couldn't have learned from other sources.

I picked up this book after reading the very positive review in the Sunday New York Times. I knew little about Daley beyond the 1968 Convention. The authors succeed at telling the story not only of this one very intriguing man but also of how the modern city of Chicago emerged during his two decades in office. I would highly recommend the book to anyone interested in biography or modern American history, or of course, Chicago. The book is heavily sourced, both to local news accounts -- something which has been inexplicably criticized by other reviewers in this column -- as well as over a hundred interviews conducted by the authors (e.g., William Daley, Daniel Rostenkowski). This is a praiseworthy and fascinating effort by the writers to tell the story as it happened, not as various political or religious viewpoints would like it to be told.

Cohen and Taylor have written both a masterful piece of investigative journalism and a captivating political biography. In many ways, this book should be required reading for anyone doing college or graduate level research in the fields of American urban or domestic political science or history. Almost like Finley Peter Dunne's MISTER DOOLEY--which it often quotes--this volume takes you inside the Chicago Democratic machine and shows just how omnipotent the organization was during Daley's tenure at the helm, not without an occasional touch of humor and irony. As its subtitle promises, the book also places Daley and his machine in the context of national (and Illionis) politics, over which they had such enormous influence, especially during the late 1950s and all through the 1960s.

The authors paint a portrait of Daley that shows his enormous personal complexity--a devout Catholic and loyal family man who did not hesitate to engage in the most bare-fisted power politics or work to capitalize on the basest human instincts. While I tend to agree with other reviewers that the book focusses a bit heavily on racial matters during the Daley mayoralty, they played a major role during this period and Daley's attempt to balance the competing interests of white ethnics and black citizens ultimately undermined the absolute authority of the Chicago Democratic machine. I disagree with reviewers who say that the authors were too anti-Daley; I feel they made an honest effort to credit him for the considerable accomplishments of his tenure--including the preservation of Downtown Chicago as a going concern when so many other rust belt cities in the Midwest and Great Lakes area were going under (e.g., Detroit, St. Louis, Cleveland, Buffalo, and Pittsburgh). They make clear, however, the enormous price that was paid for his accomplishments, including the subversion of democracy and the exacerbation of racial tensions in Chicago.

I've been reading a lot on the subject of desire v. monogamy and this books seems to have a good grasp on the subject. There are some excellent, almost shockingly *practical* viewpoints that the author advances on what drives people into tri-angular relationships. I think it was very telling of men/women in general, utilizing "when things go wrong" as a point to begin the analysis. I could also recommend "Monogamy" by Adam Phillips for a more agressive, non-committed point of view. Both very thought provoking...

This book was written from a philosophical, non-moral standpoint and presents honest responses from spouses that were, for various reasons, dissilusioned with their marriages. Although this book is earth-shattering (it somewhat made me feel the pain that spouses feel when their husbands/wives cheat) it is crucial that this point of view was presented. It is brutally honest, but still honest. Taylor does testify that the marriage relationship is the best source of happiness in this world but that, sadly, many individuals in a marriage relationship take their spouse for granted. At the time I was reading the book, I felt miffed because there wasn't, in my mind, much pro-marriage advice being given. After pondering the contents of this book for many months, I am now convinced that nothing could be more pro-marriage than illustrating how fragile the marriage relationship can become once the spouses fail to meet each others most important emotional needs. Although I don't advocate that anyone just throw up their hands and resort to having affairs, the only way to truly prevent extra-marital affairs is to understand why they happen. Both men and women can learn from this book that if you don't concentrate on your spouse, someone else will and your spouse will, naturally, be flattered. I am getting married in three weeks and nothing has given me more of a sense of urgency then this book. It has alerted me to the realites of human nature and has, I hope, made me less blind. If you are disgusted during and after reading this book, then the author has successfully done his job. The book's primary purpose, in my mind, is to wake us up to reality.

Maybe this book will illustrate how important it is to love, understand and appreciate your spouse. If you find it difficult to love, understand and appreciate your spouse, you'll discover that you have the minority opinion as competition will naturally come knocking.

In my late twenties, I found my marriage falling apart and shortly thereafter I found myself in an intimate relationship with my best friend. My best friend was married and he decided to stay with his wife. I was hurt and devastated and was deeply searching for some help understanding what I had felt and how to comprehend everything that was going on. This book helped greatly. I recently recommended the book to a mother of a friend who's daughter is in a similiar position. I am now actively dating, with a better understanding of who I am and the confusing elements of relationships. Someday, when I do find Mr. Right, I'll be much better prepared to establish a relationship, using many of the tools I was able to develop by reading this book.

A good book for someone who wants to learn the mathematics and mechanics of the various financial instruments.

This book gives an excellent elementary introduction to investment techniques and concepts for the beginning student of business or economics. It is full of useful examples and solved problems as is characteristic of all books in this series, and it also gives adequate explanation of the terms and results in most areas of investment activity. Some of the parts of the book which are particularly well-written or helpful include: 1. The diagram of the corporate bond rating process . 2. The flowchart detailing a primary offering made through a syndicate of investment bankers. 3. The summary of the different security market indices. 4. The discussion of the "naive buy-and-hold strategy" and their use as benchmarks against which other investment strategies may be compared. 5. The discussion of the Dupont framework for analyzing equity returns and growth to reveal the sources of the growth of the firm. 6. The discussion of time-series comparisons for the ratios of a firm. 7. The discussion of the various problems involved when doing financial statement analysis. 8. The discussion on arbitrage. 9. The treatment of moving averages and the accompanying illustration of different moving averages. 10. The discussion of the random walk theory in the context of the efficient markets theory. The random walk theory has been been taken to be axiomatic by most financial analysts but has recently been challenged recently by empirical studies of financial data. 11. The treatment of the different levels of market efficiency, including the weakly efficient, the semistrong efficient, and the strongly efficient market hypotheses. 12. The discussion of the anomalies in market data that point to deviations from the efficient market hypothesis. 13. The chapter on portfolio analysis via the use of covariance and the treatment of the efficient frontier. 14. The treatment of the capital asset pricing model.

i will like to know how much i have to pay to get this book

This book is very imformative and educational but I don't recommend this as an animation handbook. It offers very helpful hints and displays various animation styles. I don't think it will teach you much on how to animate. More like a reference and animation library than a how to book. Great read and somewhat obsolete.

This is a good book for looking over different types of animation methodology. The best section by far in this book is the one on stop motion animation. It showed the step by step building of two stop motion characters using two different types of joints. It included suggested tools you should use in building your character. It also included the pro's and cons of different types of set construction. Also included in this section was how to set up the studio for filming. The type of camera lense you should use. The visual effect different types of lenses would have on your scene. The cool thing about all this detail was that it was not drawn they showed actual full color photographs!

Once in a lifetime a book comes along ... that is so arm-wavingly silly that it's almost Pythonesque. This book, "Nietzsche and Wagner: a Study in Subjugation" is actually less reliable than Robert Gutman's or Marc Weiner's Wagner books, which were previously the record-holders. But Kohler beats them hollow. I'm sorry to say that this book has the scholarly merit of a UFO abduction memoir.

Kohler doesn't even bother to try to substantiate his various untrue and silly claims. One of these claims is that Nietzsche was homosexual, for which Kohler (as several critics have pointed out) adduces no evidence at all. Maybe Kohler thinks that Nietzsche calling a book "Die Froeliche Wissenschaft" (The Gay Science) makes Nietzsche "gay" in the current sense. (The meaning of "gay" seems to be changing again, but that's another story.) But we have plenty of evidence of Nietzsche's heterosexuality and no evidence at all of same-sex desire or practice. Nietzsche was a misogynist, hostile and contemptuous towards women, also clearly afraid of them, but that doesn't make him homosexual. Kohler seems to think that claiming something is the same as making it so.

Kohler also claims that after the Nietzsche-Wagner split Wagner conducted a relentless and vindictive campaign against Nietzsche on the grounds that he (Nietzsche) was homosexual. Again, Kohler doen't support this claim of a homophobic campaign by Wagner with any evidence. But then, how could he? There was no such campaign. Instead there was the famous letter from Wagner to Nietzsche's doctor, expressing concern for the health of "our young friend N."and suggesting that Nietzsche's nervous problems might be caused by excessive masturbation.

Wagner's letter is splendidly dotty, but it also brings Kohler's claims crashing to the ground. (1) Masturbation is not the same thing as homosexuality. Wagner did not think Nietzsche was homosexual; instead, prescient in so many things, Wagner was the first major thinker to call Nietzsche a wanker (just kidding, Nietzsche fans). (2) A kindly meant, if eccentric, letter to Nietzsche's doctor is not quite the same thing as persecution. It's clear from Cosima Wagner's Diaries that Wagner's private reaction to the split with Nietzsche was regret, a wish to have the breach healed, and an undoubtedly patronising pity for "that poor young man" Nietzsche. These are not the sort of feelings that lead to persecution or a campaign of vilification, as Kohler claims.

As well, Wagner's actual attitude to homosexuals (there were no gays in the 19th Century) is suggested in an earlier letter to a homosexual friend. Wagner suggests that his friend "try to cut down a little, on the pederasty"... The attitude is one of amused tolerance, which won't do now, but it was progressive and liberal by the standards of his time. Wagner wasn't a homophobe.

In fact Wagner didn't respond in public to Nietzsche's repeated attacks (except once, a very indirect reference in one of his essays, without mentioning Nietzsche's name); contra Kohler, the abuse was very much a one-way street, and not in the direction that Kohler suggests.

Kohler also presents a Nietzsche who wrote antisemitic passages in his works during the alliance with Wagner, but who stopped after the split. This is simply and flagrantly untrue. The post-Wagner Nietzsche attacked antisemites, but he also continued to attack and insult Jews. There are many, many antisemitic passages in Nietzsche's work - Nietzsche fans, like Kohler and the reviewer from Kirkus Review quoted above, like to overlook Nietzsche's antisemitism, but antisemites find Nietzsche a useful supporter and resource. You'll find plenty of antisemitic quotes from Nietzsche on proud display on the Web's neo-Nazi sites, and the vast majority of these antisemitic passages were written AFTER the split with Wagner.

And there's Nietzsche's attack on Wagner in which he claimed that Wagner had a Jewish father. There is irony, of course, in claiming an antisemite has Jewish parentage. But it reflects what Wagner himself seems to have believed, that the man who was almost certainly his real father, Ludwig Geyer, was Jewish. For this attack Nietzsche must have drawn on his private conversations with Wagner, in which Wagner poured out personal fears to a man he believed was his friend. The nastiness in Nietzsche's attack is in the betrayal of confidence, not in the claiming that Wagner had a Jewish parent.

I mention this attack by Nietzsche, couched in antisemitic terms and involving personal betrayal, because Kohler skips blithely over it. Imagine what he'd said if it had been the other way round; Wagner attacking Nietzsche in antisemitic terms while betraying an intimate confidence. But in fact there are suspiciously few quotes of any kind from Nietzsche in Kohler's book. Given the book's profound ignorance of the details of Nietzsche's or Wagner's life and philosophies, I suspect this is not so much because Kohler wants to keep it simple, but because he is not particularly familiar with his subjects' work. Given the sort of book he's written, he didn't need to be.

By the way, an earlier book by Kohler, that's only just been translated into English, "Wagner's Hitler", is now available. Friends who've read the German edition tell me that it's even more fanciful, nonsensical, dishonest and incoherent than this book. I'll look for it in a remainder bin.

Laon

NW is not the most academic of books in form, but readability and lack of footnotes do not make a book worthless. Köhler may not have enough evidence to convince the critical, but the material provided is well worth the read. Homosexuality/onanism/anti-semitism: these elements are simply not central to either individual (Wagner's anti-semitism may be the exception). Some of Köhler's conclusions may be questionable, but his observations are not what make the book. The content itself is very interesting, and the intelligent and familiar (with RW/FN) will come away with a great degree of insight. To anyone sincerely interested in either, it is requisite. Perhaps you will not agree with Köhler, so what? The book is simply worth the read. My opinions didn't change from the book, but I have a much richer picture of both men. (I am honesty surprised that anyone could find this book upsetting [see review below]. It's a fun little book, if you hate it, you really ought to relax a bit. Not for tyros: if you've only read a bit of FN or seen an opera, and you want a key to understanding either, forget it. But if you are deep into either, you skip it at your peril.

The author of _Zarathustra's secret_ takes us through the period encounter between Nietzsche and Wagner in a quite graphic tale of one of the first of the modern celebrity farces, that of Wagnerian ego and its hangers on. Although the account is well done, I should wonder if a clever cutpurse like Nietzsche was ever really subjugated and whether he didn't, despite an series of emotional shocks, achieve the net equivalent of going undercover as a Wagner disciple, to his profit or loss in unclear. For all the background music of the philosophic, more than musical, leitmotiv (Schopenhauer gave it away with fake hint, the 'will') this account of artistic overdrive twice over is a remarkable tale of psychological helplessness, in Wagner and Nietzsche. Anyway, worth reading.

This could have been an important book about greater Virginia's westward expansion during the Revolutionary Era, a place and time with lots of information inaccessible to most general readers and historians. Instead, the authors present a hodgepodge of bad history, narrow research, and distracting bias.

The "history" in the book is dismal, replete with errors, exaggerations, and bias. The errors started early with a wildly inaccurate map labeled "The thirteen colonies, 1776" (xiii); only coastal Delaware, New Jersey, and Rhode Island could be considered accurately drawn for that time. And the errors continued to the closing pages, where the authors mistakenly date the last native American/Indian uprising east of the Mississippi as 1814 (228), thus omitting the three Seminole Indian Wars (1817-18, 1835-42, 1855-58), among other conflicts.

Possibly, the book's problems stem from inadequate research. The authors make some unusual claims and attribute lots of quotes without citation. The bibliography is both dated and slim. It has very few unpublished primary sources, which means readers probably will find very little they haven't already known about. There is only one article from an academic journal and there are no dissertations, despite that one author is a university professor. Further, there are some obvious missing sources, like Fischer & Kelly's Bound Away: Virginia and The Westward Movement. This widely reviewed book covers much of the same ground and was published two years before Virginia's Western War. As a consequence of scanty research, readers lose one of the traditional benefits of "local" histories: new sources for their own research.

One widespread problem with the book warrants special notice. The bias is incredible. The triumphalist version of Virginia's role in our country's founding is breathtaking. Except for Virginia, the new United States probably would have been limited to only east of the Appalachian Mountains. And, although many new states ceded territory to the new federal government, the authors considered Virginia's claim legitimate, but New York's claim "illegal" and land claims by Connecticut and Massachusetts are not even mentioned

Another illustration of bias is the authors' labeling. African Americans/Blacks are identified only as "Negro" (e.g., 63, 69, 72, 106, 184), which I don't think I've read before in a book published after 1975. The authors usually use "Indian," though occasionally they use "squaw" (69, 202) and "savage" (184). Similarly, Loyalists are named "Tories" or "turncoats" (xxxv), and Scots are called "Scotch" (xxxv, 66). All of these labels are antiquated. Even more, they imply an incredible bias. But the authors explicate their bias with statements like "the majority [of slaves] remained loyal to their masters" (xxxviii) which supposes slaves had a choice and freedom of movement. And throughout the book, battle atrocities by Indians are detailed while atrocities by whites are hardly mentioned.

By the way, bias is not about political correctness, it's about the lack of objectivity and balanced story telling. Even more, here, the use of antiquated labels suggests that the authors are, at best, unfamiliar with books written after the 1970s-and that shortchanges all readers.

All in all, readers interested in the Revolution, westward migration, pioneering, and/or Virginia and Kentucky history should look elsewhere.

Why would the authors of this book, in their preface, write: "Some may feel we used too much minutiae, but details make true stories interesting." Very defensive, a preemptive strike against potential critics that ought to warm readers up front that what one is about to get is a chronicle of events rather than interpretive history. Why else complain, as the author's do, that previous studies of this ilk focus too much on class, or politics?

The "Introduction" to this book is hardly that--it is a chapter, and should have been designated as such. It is not an intro in the traditional sense of providing a brief synopsys of what we're about to read. I blame the editor for this, as he/she ought to have corrected this error.

The illustrations chose are in some cases, well, not really appropriate for an adult book. See pgs 112, 57 and esp. page 131 for examples. Several of the maps or graphs really do not explain much and should have been interpretated, e.g. pg xxiii.

For those wanting to read about the trans-Appalachian settlement in the mid to late 18th century, they will find much to like here, but this is certainly not a scholarly study or the last word. The fact that 2 of Allen Eckert's books appear in the bibliog ought to alert the scholar to this.....

Contrary to popular belief, the Revolutionary War was not fought all on the East coast. Some of the hardest fought and bloodiest battles were in the western country, territory that would one day become Kentucky, West Virginia, and Ohio, but during the Revolution were considered part of Virginia.

"Virginia's Western War 1775-1786" tells the history of these interesting and important events. Beginning with the settlement of Kentucky by Daniel Boone, Richard Henderson, James Herrod, and company, the western frontier is soon engulfed in fire and blood as the Indians, opposed to white expansion into their lands and supported by their British allies who hope to attack the rebellious colonies on their vulnerable western border, launch a massive campaign to destroy the settlements. With action at Wheeling, Boonesboro, and Harrodstown, the western frontiersmen are forced to esentially fend for themselves against the hostile tribes and British rangers as the Continental forces back east cannot afford to spare money or troops to defend them. In 1778 Virginia launches a campaign led by Gen. George Rogers Clark to reduce the British posts on the Mississippi and Wabash Rivers, which ultimately, following his extraordinary victory at Vincennes, succeeds in winning virtually the entire Northwest Territory for the Americans. Despite these victories, Indian depredations would continue in this region until 1786, followed by the retaliatory strikes by expeditions under Clark, John Bowman, and Benjamin Logan, thus earning the region's macabre name of "that dark and bloody ground".

Despite the Treaty of Paris in 1783, the Revolution never truly ended in the west, with Indians continuing to fight the Virginians over the Ohio country into the 1790s. This book helps to shed some light on a little-known but fascinating aspect of the war that is too often overlooked.

Joachim Köhler argues that Adolf Hitler was merely a puppet of dead composer Richard Wagner. The destruction of democracy, the German conquest of most of Europe in pursuit of a dream of world domination, the mass murders of European Jews, the whole Third Reich: all Wagner's idea.

Really? Let's see. Overthrow of democracy? Wagner supported constitutional monarchy, with political parties of "men with equal rights"; the monarch to stay above politics and ensure stability. His essay _State and religion_ is clear enough.

German conquest of Europe, and world domination? Wagner's _What is German?_ specifically condemns German attempts at military conquest, saying that German culture and polity never prospers when Germans rule other peoples.

The Holocaust? Wagner's most antisemitic essay, _Jewishness in Music_, calls on German Jews to abandon their separate culture and assimilate into German culture. That's racist, but did it influence Hitler? Since Hitler preferred racial segregation followed by extermination, it would seem not. Nor could Hitler have been comfortable with Wagner's opposition to the rule of one "race" by another, nor his suggestion that Europeans get used to racial intermingling (_Heroism and Christianity_). Meantime Köhler ignores the mainstream antisemites of Wagner's day, who really did influence Nazi racial policies.

(Wagner privately made some loathsome antisemitic remarks to Cosima Wagner, who duly recorded them in her diaries for Köhler to make the most of. But they weren't published till after Hitler's death, and for other reasons can't have been an influence.)

Look up "Wagner" in the indexes of Hitler's books and speeches, and accounts of his conversation by Speer and other eyewitnesses, and you find, despite Köhler's picture of an "obsessed" Hitler, that Hitler hardly ever mentioned Wagner. Köhler even admits this, but claims - seriously - that it's part of a conspiracy to hide Wagner's posthumous puppet-mastery. But Hitler never once referred to Wagner's ideas or essays, only to music. Hitler didn't even find Wagner's antisemitism interesting or important enough to mention.

It's clear that Wagner's influence on Hitler is essentially the same, that is, emotionally intense with without intellectual content, as his influence on Theodor Herzl, the founder of Zionism. Both men were passionate Wagnerians. Herzl loved Wagner's music, regularly attending Wagner operas and concerts for inspiration and renewal while he wrote Zionism's founding texts. But that doesn't make Wagner the founder of Israel. Hitler likewise loved the music but showed little interest in Wagner's ideas.

Köhler deals with these intractable realities in five ways:

1 Make stuff up
Here's Köhler describing Hitler in the bunker, 1945: "As the outside world disintegrated, it was to his inner world ... that Hitler turned ... Like a film projected onto the screen of his consciousness, he was suddenly gripped by a vision". Köhler then describes Hitler's "vision", which turns out to be about Wagner and to support Köhler's thesis. But no source mentions this "vision". Köhler seems to have invented it because the historical record wouldn't give him what he needed. There are many other examples.

2 Footnote fakery
Though the book is festooned with footnotes, they only add credibility if you don't look them up. For example that "vision" passage is footnoted, but follow it up and you won't find a source. Instead it says that an irrelevant phrase Köhler threw into the passage echoes words Hitler used in 1936. Soon after, Köhler describes a 1944 meeting between Hitler and Wagner's grandson Wieland, with Hitler dismissing Wieland's claim to Wagner's manuscript scores "over supper". Follow up the footnote and you find that no meeting took place. A little further Köhler alleges that Hitler's words "The people will not tolerate any act of clemency", in relation to the murders after the Reichstag fire, are "taken almost literally from _Rienzi_". The footnote directs you, rather vaguely, to Act II, which I have just checked in vain for those words or anything like them. And so on.

3 Twisting words
Köhler's quotes from Wagner tend to give only two to perhaps ten words at a time, wrenched from context and ascribed sinister meanings. Thus Köhler describes Hitler's "orgies of killings in dark, secret places ... 'in the bosom of darkness and death', as Wagner once put it." But check "in the bosom of darkness and death" back to the source and you nothing whatsoever to do with "orgies of killing": Wagner meant "caves". This is no occasional slip-up; it is systematic. Almost all Köhler's Wagner quotes are twisted in this way.

4 Irrelevancy
Köhler's deceptiveness on that non-meeting between Wieland and Hitler is odd, because Wagner's grandson's access or non-access to Hitler in 1944 is irrelevant. Some of Wagner's descendants and their partners supported the Nazis, some went along, and some defied them. Köhler spends much of the book showing that some Wagner descendants were contemptible, but the Wagner Köhler wants to arraign was then long dead and gone.

5 The big lie
Sometimes Köhler just lets rip, and it's breath-taking. Try this, about the _Ring_: "The gods in Valhalla had ordained that the destruction of their 'deadly enemy' must precede the age of the 'master race'." That would certainly be damning, if true, but instead it's bizarre nonsense. Other claims, especially about the operas, are similarly fantastic.

There's much more, shonky chronology, dodgy sources, etc, but I'm out of space. Of course there's much to condemn about Wagner, but that's no excuse for fabrication. This is a bad book, partly for untruth concerning a flawed man, mainly for its evasion of the actual historical persons and forces that led to Nazism, the Holocaust and attendant horrors. Neither the far-right political parties, unions and associations, nor the antisemitic Christian right groups, nor the opportunistic business backers, nor the street thugs behind Nazism and neo-Nazism cared then, nor care now, a hoot about opera.

Misdirection like Köhler's not only tries to cede to Nazis a cultural treasure that they do not deserve, but by obscuring the actual historical origins of Nazism it gives comfort to those who deserve none.

Cheers!

Laon

Overall,I found Herr Kohler's book quite interesting. The workwas well researched and the "connection" between thesubjects certainly established. The Wagner-Hitler relation to history has been expounded upon in many works but I don't know of any complete volume other than this one, so I would call this the definative work on the subject. Kohler as a writer can be a bit emotional at times as he makes his case. I don't agree that Wagner can be "blamed" for the atrocities committed 50-60 years after his death(he died in 1883-Hitler came to power in 1933). No doubt, Wagner had a tremendous influence on Hitler, especially when he was a lonely youth in Linz and Vienna Austria in the early 1900's. It is interesting to me that Hitler's favorite opera was "Rienzi", a work of Wagner's that is rarely shown today, hardly touched upon in studies of his operas, and extremely in tradition of grand opera. Wagner composed this opera with the "guidance" or should I say the "influence" of the Jewish composer Giacommo Meyerbeer. It has even been suggested Wagner copied certain styles of Meyerbeer's when writing the music for this piece. Knowing what I know about Wagner and the contradictory nature of his personality, his witty although sometimes assinine prose writings, and certain facts concerning his life, there is more of a Wagner-Jewish connection than that with Hitler. Wagner envied the Jews and secretly deferred to them. To be sure, Wagner attacked them in the press and in his essay "Judaism in Music" but all his life he continued to associate with Jews and in his final years most of his retinue at Wahnfried consisted of Jews like the set painter Paul von Joukovsky and his "Parsifal" conductor Hermann Levi. His former favorite conductor Hans von Bulow stated that in order to be successful at Bayreuth it was necessary to be circumcised. Wagner had evidentally refused to sign an anti-semitic petition presented to him which Bulow had signed, much to his embarrassment. Many forget that Hitler had another favorite musician in the composer Anton Bruckner. He spoke mostly about the music of Rienzi or Bruckner, not about the 'ideas' of Wagner. "Parsifal" was not a favorite and was actually banned during the Third Reich. The quote from Hitler that "from 'Parsifal'I shall make my religion" comes from Hermann Rauschning's "Hitler Speaks" a dubious book of which it's authenticity has certainly been questioned. The Nazis themselves were not enthusiastic about Wagner either. They tolerated Bayreuth but for Hitler. You can "read" the Third Reich in the "Ring of the Nibelung" with it's Nordic heroism,the Aryan 'savior'Siegfried, the lust for power and final cataclysmic destruction, but for all that, Wagner shouldn't be made responsible for Hitler, any more than the Beatles can be held accountable for Charles Manson. There is also no proof that Hitler ever read any of Wagner's prose works(I don't think Hitler read a book cover to cover in his life. He read only to confirm his own outlook on the world. Most of his reading consisted of newspapers and periodical scribblings)which contain all of his ideas on art,race,and humanity that can be contradicted in his thousands of letters as well as by his life's actions upheld by the people who knew him. I believe the only writing of Wagner's Hitler read was the scores to the operas which he did seem to know pretty well, as many of his secretaries and associates confirm. The book is fascinating but the reader should bear in mind that it is only another interpretation of a very contraversial and contradictory "connection".

In Wagner's Hitler: The Prophet And His Disciple, Joachim Kohler, scholar of philosophy and German literature, persuasively argues that Wagner's influences played a vital role in shaping the cultural context in which Nazism developed. Kohler begins by tracing the legacy of the German romantic tradition and the irrational, egocentric, nationalistic, and intolerantly utopian features which Wagner and Adolph Hitler shared. Kohler goes on to trace Wagner's influence on Hitler from his days as a young and failed Austrian artist, to his triumphant days as dictator enacting megalomanic Wagnerian visions of a Germany that would rule the world. Also shown is how Wagner's family in Bayreuth supported Hitler from the beginning of his political career, and aided his introduction into highly influential social and political circles. Wagner's Hitler is insightful, provocative, engaging, challenging, and at times controversial, but always fascinating reading and recommended for students of Germany history in general, and the Nazis influences on German culture in particular.

With great excitement, I bought the first book (to my knowledge) to teach English through the Internet. However, after reviewing both the workbook and the teacher's manual, serious flaws begin to appear. Most puzzling to me are the first four chapters. They teach students how to use basic Internet functions like e-mail and search engines. However, the language required to understand these instructions is far more difficult than the language actually taught in later chapters.

The rest of the book is also puzzling. You don't need the Internet to do most of the exercises, and most of the topics are fairly bland and very limiting ("Find a review of your favorite movie on the Internet. What does it say?") This has almost nothing to do with language, in my opinion, other than hitting "ctrl-c" and "ctrl-v" and "ctrl-p" to print out the review nicely.

As a last kick in the rear, an appendix is devoted to teaching how to do html programming. What has this to do with language at all? There are tons of authoring tools that take care of the programming for students.

Students aren't dumb, they probably know how to use the basic Internet functions. If they are dumb, they couldn't understand the first 4 chapters anyway without doing the rest of the book first (which would be impossible without knowing how to do the first 4 tasks) yadda yadda.

While it is a commendable attempt, I think an English course based on the Internet should spend more time teaching language, not the Internet.

As an IT trainer, I found the most dificult barrier for People here in the Middle east is the English language chalenge. We have too much Internet cafes, but in my estimation, average people can't understand more than 30% of English. This is why I thought of a solution to author a book in called Internet English. The problem is that me also is not a native. This is why I found this book valuable when I suddenly found it at amazon.com. Brilliant Idea.