This second volume, of a set of two, contains much material relevant to researchers either entering into statistical field theory itself, or into particular methodologies that have proven useful in that field. For example, a chapter on strong coupling behaviors clarifies mean field theory, diagrammatica for high / low temperature expansions and more; so is excellent reading for any beginning graduate student. On the other hand, the chapter on Monte Carlo simulation is a must read for *any* researcher who finds herself anywhere near monte carlo algorithms, while the same can be said for both the chapter devoted to conformal field theory and the chapter covering random matrices / lattices / potentials. While the subject of random surfaces has changed considerably since this monograph was published, the final chapter on that subject remains relevant as a segue into that research area; although it should be understood when reading this chapter that the field has evolved since publication.

As with the first volume of the set, the presentation of this monograph is exceptional: The prose is very readable, material is adequately motivated, rigor is appropriate, and excercises and examples, while well worth the effort, truly compliment and clarify the reading.

I was disappointed with this book becasue almost all of the artists work is sculpture or installations. In my opinion 'art' should include painting, printmaking and all media. The book's title should have been Three-dimensional Art at the Turn of the Millennium. The format and images in the book are very nicely displyed though.

As the title of my review suggests, the book is composed in a form of an imaginary exhibition catalogue, where the artists are featured in an alphabetical order.

The book features the most recent art of the 80's and 90's up to the year 2000, and artsits active during the last 20 years, alongside artists who became known on the international arena only a year before the book was released. The "content" of the book, or the works featured in it, are a matter of taste, of course. I found them to be unindependant mostly ("been there..." was my reaction to many of them). Nevertheless, I find the book to be a very interesting and inclusive document of the art of our days.

It is important to emphasize the book does not include art critisizm, or what we call art history - in the sense that it doesn't examine every art work nor does it attempt to explain it iconographically. Instead the book gives short professional biographies of the artists featured, and references to further bibliography, that's why I still find it safe to say the book is informative.

In conclusion, if there was a different rating to the content of the book as opposed to it's composition, I would rate the first 4 stars as I did, but for the second criterion I would definitely give the whole 5!

I'm shocked to see that the reviews on this page are not more positive. I wanted this book from the minute I saw it in the bookshop-- just the design and the title were enough to sell me. Now that I own it I couldn't be happier This is a sweeping look at the most important artists of the past 20 years or so. A careful, painstaking selection has resulted in a very thorough reference book, with artists listed alphabetically. Each entry has a short biography, list of shows, and (this is great) a little photo of the artist, as well as 2 to 4 pages of illustrations. Every time I've wanted to check out an artist, I found him/her right there in the book. If the high percentage of three (or even four) dimensional work in this book is surprising, wake up-- this is the state of contemporary art. Artists are breaking borders, breaking out of the frame, the two dimensional prison. Color, shape, light, concept, existence, likeness, falsity, video, society, future, installation, performance, touch, provocation, mortality.... art is much more than just painting. Open your mind and this book will blow you away.

Don't look to this work for any information about Basquiat as an artist. This is a book about fame. It took Ms. Hoban 7 years to write about an artist whose career wasn't even that long. This is a book about the eighties, fame, and excess. You will not learn much about Jean-Michel by reading this book. You will learn about the climate of the eighties art world and the ever-present parasites that the enormous speculation over great artists can create(Braghoomian for instance). The photographs of Jean-Michel are interesting, but because of the ownership of the artist's works, none are present to look at while reading this work. Buy a book of Basquiat's work if you are interested in the artist. If you are interested in the vacuum of New York 1980's culture, check this out at the library--it's not worth purchasing.

I really love this book ! I buy a lot of art books all the time. Some of them are pretty bad, and one of the art books I recently bought only because it was published 20 editions already. And that one was really a disappointment. This book, however, is the BEST art book I have ever bought! It is a book I will always come back to read again and again. (I have finished it 3 days after I got it and now I am reading it the second time) If you need only one book about Basquiat, let this one be it, and you will make a great choice. The writer has great knowledge in art, and that make this book so much more valuable!

I cannot recommend the book called Widow Basquiat. Because nobody knows who should be called Widow Basquiat. There are at least 2 dozen girls fighting for that title and the money behind it, not-knowing that Basquiat senior has already got the best lawyer and inherited everything from his son.

Phoebe Hoban has shown that she is a great Basquiat expert. She spent 7 years to do research for this book, and that is why the book is filled with credible interviews, comments and fascinating stories. She is so honest and decent, and she is not afraid of affending bad guys or anyone for that matter. She even named all those drug dealers who sold stuff to JMB. I solute and applause to her great effort. In the end of the book, she also did not forget to write her visit to JMB's mother who is apparently suffering from her fraigile psychological condition. The writer told us the vivid scence at her home. The writer asked us not to forget this: while JMB's father got millions dollars by inhariting the entire JMB fortune, his mother who has been long divorced from his father, Basquiat senior, has been living in absolute poverty. Lawyers, this is your chance to make it. Even if you do not have much good conscience, just think about the estimated value of the JMB estate - (now valued over $500 million !) you should go and and visit JMB's mother today and start sueing JMB estate which is run by JMB's father. (by the legal arrangement, each party has 50%) This is one thing JMB himself will be pleased.

I thought the excesses of the 1980's had long since passed but then comes along this massive (and expensive) volume on Jean-Michel Basquiat, one of the Kings of the 80's art scene two decades ago. Sadly, like much art from that period, Basquiat's faux-primitve paintings come across more like deliberate attempts at critical and commercial success than intuitive genius from a true visionary painter. The art world and its consumers were desperate and happy in the 80's to champion "street art" and graffiti with the growing popularity of folk art in the 1970's. The professional art world latched on to it's own, professional artists working in a vernacular style (Haring, Scharf, Basquiat) in order to appear open to less progromatic art. With folk art, critics and museums of modern art were caught looking backward and left behind. Urban street art, positioned as being more sophisticated and hip, was marketed to an eager consumer market. Is this truly great art? Is Basquiat worthy of a ...book signed by a gallery owner (seller)? Is this the best modern art has to offer? Looking at page after page in this retrospective book becomes a tedious task. The words don't add up to the great poetry of Dickens or Whitman. The artwork can be found in its purer form on the streets of any urban city. Try taking a walk through New York city and leave this book behind. ...

I still dind't get this book..but I think it is very nice.My major is visual communication art,so I'm always read books about art.I know many American artist,especially I'm mad about him.If you look his works,you can feel "nature".Maybe It will be a good guide to beginners.

this is the fifth book i have on basquiat and i am very happy to say that most of the works reproduced in this gorgeous book do not appear in any of the other books i have on him. the quality of the work is splendid and the reproductions are gorgeous! and the book is thick and a treat to look at! i would recommend it to anyone who loves basquiat's brillant works. the guy was a genius and he shines in this book!

I agree with Michael. This book is written for Eiffel
programmers. This book does not add anything to GoF,
it just contains more code written in Eiffel.
But for a non Eiffel programmer, the code is not easy to
understand at all. If you need more code for GoF patterns,
and you happen to be a Java programmer or understand Java,
try

Applied Java Patterns
by Stephen A. Stelting, Olav Maassen
ISBN: 0130935387

This book is much more clear and it contains complete code in Java.

If you are a C++ programmer, GoF is still useful.
For VB programmer, there is a good book

Microsoft Visual Basic Design Patterns (Microsoft Professional Series)
by William Stamatakis
ISBN: 1572319577

Dan
Sr. Software Developer,
Sun Certified Java Programmer, Developer
IBM Certified Developer for XML and related technologies

This book is very very very hard to read. The language is extremely cryptic. The words used are so hard that one has to keep an english dictionary handy. In order to lookup a word in the dictionary and then try to understand the whole sentence within the context is really hard. It really easy to loose track of what is it that I was trying to understand in the very first place.

I gave it 3 *s because of the practical approach the book has taken and I dont mind the use of Eiffel as the language of choice for writing the code since it could be a worthwhile excercise to actually develop the full SCM software in Java/C++ or other languages.

The chapter 6 and chapter 7 are really so good that it can be worthwhile going through the painful exercise of looking up every 3rd word from a dictionary.

I would really recommend that the book be rewritten by some technical writer.

After reading Jean-Marc Jezequel's excellent first Eiffel book, I was looking for more information on "Design By Contract", and its impacts on real-world projects. Based on the author and subject matter, I immediately ordered "Design Patterns and Contracts."

I was somewhat disappointed with the first section, covering the basics of UML, Design Patterns, and Design by Contract. There are many other references that do a better job of covering these basics. It also had the bland feel of an "Executive Summary" chapter, complete with an overabundance of whitespace, diagrams of questionable value, and concept definitions that would probably have been better off in a glossary.

Things rapidly improve after the first short section. The second part of the book is an excellent resource for the most common design patterns. This section makes a great reference, and I find myself refering to it from time to time for guidance, even when not using Eiffel.

I also greatly enjoyed the third part of this book, which brought the whole discussion into concrete terms by describing several case studies based on the authors' works. This section was very helpful in seeing the design patterns in action.

The one missing piece that would have forced me to give a 5-star rating would have been more discussion of how Design by Contract had a measurable impact on their work. For example, did the use of pre- and post-conditions allow them to find any esoteric bugs that might have gone unnoticed in another implementation language? Did they find that their software was measurably more reliable then systems built using other languages? But these are minor complaints, and can be satisfied through a literature review. This book is an excellent companion volume to your other software design volumes, and is a bargain at its retail price.

WOW, I have read all the previous reviews on Kevin Youngs' To Repel Ghosts and I hear two etremely different views. I read the book. I did not buy it and thought it was not worth buying. I agree that it is pretentious and nothing more than a romantic way of looking at Basquiat. I also agree that one doesn't need to be poor to write about the poor but the flip side to that is to understand more and not simply romanticise or exploit. Like painter, Julian Schnabels' film adaption of Basquiat(titled the same! I apploud those who champion Youngs' work. They are fighting for a voice that repels more than ghosts.

I'm mystified by some of these negative comments, which all seem to be either about some meta-conversation about the book (was Basquiat exploited? sure, but not by Kevin Young!) or its author (how the hell does anyone here know how poor or rich he was growing up?). Those who have actually read the book know how thoughtful, gorgous and rich it is; those who have not yet ought to, especially before writing barely-literate rants against it.

Let me see if I understand the previous reviewers problem with this book. Much as he states that the words didn't do enough for him, the most straightforward attack seems to be that Kevin Young wasn't poor as a child! IS the reviewer suggesting that only poor people can write about poor people, Southerners about the South? It's a silly line of reasoning that eventually leads to everyone just telling their exact life story again and again. It's a very boring literary legacy that the modern age of poetry and prose believes that just because you say exactly how something happened you've done something profound. The most profound thing an artist can do is to take the incomprehensable world and polish it until we can see and understand it better. This is what Kevin Young was trying to do with the book and the degree of success or failure shouldn't have much to do with whether or not he born in a mansion or a mudhut.

This book is poorly written. Nothing new at all. Conceptually weak. This book is very difficult to follow, it doesnt flow very well. There is also little documentation and no formal references listed anywhere.

The book is a list of crisis situations and scenarios, most of them backed up with recommendations based on the authors' experience. The recommendations might be useful when taken individually, however, they do not fall together in a general framework. In my opinion, the book lacks a systematic, or processual approach. There is no justification available for the organization of the book and of the chapters: if the book itself is a long list, what is the logic behind it? What were the criteria upon which the construction of the list was based? In other words, why discuss these topics, and not others? It might appear that the chapter titles are meant to offer a typology of crisis situations, at least in the first part of the book. If this is so, this taxonomy should be explained and justified.

The book also lacks theoretical rigor, because the authors fail to provide and stick to a rigorous definition of their domain of study. They do not define nor distinguish between risk communication and crisis communication, thus overlooking to draw the fine but important line between these two types of communication.

My main dissatisfaction stems from the fact that the authors take a cookbook, list-like approach to crisis communication that is not backed up by some fundamental theoretical principles with general applicability in crisis situations. I would have liked to see a framework for evaluating and managing crises, rather than a long list of things to keep in mind.

However, there are still a lot of things to learn from the book: one can be prepared for a number of situations that are likely to come up in certain types of crises and can find some basic advice on how to deal with them; the case studies provide nice illustrations. The book is easy and pleasant reading, informative and entertaining, but I don't consider it a major enlightening contribution to the field of crisis communication.

Communicating in Crisis is both a concise theoretical formulation and a practical guide to managing the crises that corporate and other enterprises inevitably face. Responding to a need long recognized in departments of corporate communication, Drs. Ogrizek and Guillery have produced an in-depth analysis of the field and a step-by-step approach to preventing full-scale, uncontainable disasters and corporate relations fiascoes, from which companies may never recover.

The book is based on a wide range of examples and case studies, including an alleged worm infestation of McDonald's hamburgers and the worldwide recall by Perrier's of 160 million bottles of mineral water when word spread that the product had been contaminated by a toxic compound. For every instance cited, an appropriate communications strategy is suggested that would gain public trust and support, as well as keep business going. In addition to product use, the authors discuss industrial and institutional crises and the kinds of endemic panic to which enterprises are subject.

Communicating in Crisis is indispensable for anyone involved in the management of an organization, whether it is privately or publicly held, and for courses in corporate communication and corporate risk.

Contents Foreword, Stephen A. Greyser Introduction · What Is Crisis Communication?

1. Product Risk and Crisis Communication · Rumors · Product Contamination · Accidents · Boycotts · New Risks and New Product Crises

2. Industrial Risk and Crisis Communication · Major Technological Accidents · Setting Up or Expanding an Industrial Site · Industrial Waste Management

3. Institutional Risk and Crisis Communication · Corporate Identity Crises · Media/Legal Crises and Scandals · Industrial Restructuring · Financial Communication in Times of Crises · Internal Crisis Communication

4. Major Collective Fears and Crisis Communication · Terrorism · Major Health Fears

5. Communicating in a Crisis · Major Principles · Developing Scenarios · Communicating with the Victims · Internal Communication First · Crisis Communication and the Media · Symbolic Communication

6. Crisis Unit Organization and Operation · Unit Organization · Unit Members and Their Roles · Working Methods · Managing the Postcrisis Period

7. Training and Preparing for Crisis Communication · Case Studies · Setting Up a Crisis Unit · Simulation Exercises · Preparing for Crisis Prevention and Avoidance

Conclusion

References

Michel Ogrizek, a medical doctor by training with a background in social/cultural anthropology, is Director of Corporate Relations worldwide for the Unilever Group.

Jean-Michel Guillery, a medical doctor, is an expert consultant in the prevention and handling of risk..

I am a chemistry TA and am currently being forced to use this book in an analytical class I am taking. Kellner has succeeded in putting together an utterly useless book in his "Analytical Chemistry." Skoog makes a much better instrumental textbook. In Kellner, Equations are derived and used with no definition of variables, and the same variable (with different, unknown meanings) are used in later equations as well. In the text, terms coined by Kellner are used, but never explained. Reading Kellner only confuses the reader. To add insult to injury, there are very few example problems. Overall, I would never recommend this book to anyone for anything. Needless to say, intuitive knowledge is more useful than the text.

I lecture Analytical Chem at Stages II , III and MSc level at a NZ University. This is the best book in Analytical Chemistry (and particular instrumental methods of analysis) I've come across. Will be replacing Skoog with it.

With a written essay to introduce the Blueberry Sage so far and a two-page bio of the writer and the artist respectively other than the additional 14-page story " three black stones", this paperback collection of Mr Moebius' masterpiece is a must-have for both new and die-hard fans alike. Yet the big drawback of this book is that it's considerably downsized to 7><9 inches and printed in B & W. So quite a lot of details are reduced to zero.