The Franconia, New Hampshire, farm of the American poet Robert Frost was turned into a museum and center for poetry and the arts in 1976. From that time, "The Frost Place" has been annual event wherein an emerging poet has been invited to spend the summer living in the house where Frost once lived and wrote some of his greatest poetry. The Breath Of Parted Lips: Voices From The Robert Frost Place, Volume One is a remarkable anthology of twenty-four poets, each of whom won that honor of a summer's residency and document the success of the original concept as a means of generating outstanding poetry while nurturing the poet's muse in the rooms and views that were once the inspiration of the great Robert Frost. Poem At 40: Windwashed--as if standing next to the highway,/a truck long as the century sweeping by,/all things at last bent in the same direction./An opening, as if all/the clothes my ancestors ever wore/dry on lines in my body:/wind-whipped, parallel with the ground,/some sleeves sharing a single clothespin/so that they seem to clasp hands,/seem to hold on.//And now that I can see/up the old women's dresses,/there's nothing but a filtered light./And now that their men's smoky breath/has traversed the earth,/it has nothing to do with them./And now that awkward, fat tears of rain/slap the window screen,/now that I'm naked too,/cupping my genitals, tracing with a pencil/the blue vein between my collar bone and breast,/I'll go to sleep when I'm told.

The case studies provide an excellent flavor of the mental side of sports for all you "armchair" athletes and sports psychologists to savor. As a psychologist and self-proclaimed athlete, I was entertained and enlightened by the multitude of case studies that Thompson and Vernacchia chose to explore. I found myself relating my own sports-related challenges to those offered in the book. The funnest part was formulating my own hypotheses about the various issues that were presented in each case. This is a must read for anyone who has been frustrated by the challenges of competitive athletics. You're not alone! However, you might find that you're #1 competitor resides in the barriers that you have built in your own mind. Learn how to knock down, or atleast, get around those self-imposed barriers.

Monroe Price and Mark Thompson have assembled a fantastic array of scholars, thinkers, and lawyers who each bring to bear a unique perspective on the intractable relationship between media and conflict. From Alison DesForges's discussion about the impact of hate speech in Rwanda to former U.S. State Department official Jamie Metzl's discussion about United States actions in Somalia, Kosovo, and Serbia the book answers many interesting questions but raises many more. Of particular interest were Eric Blinderman's chapter which discussed the legal rules surrounding, what he terms "information intervention," and Stephanie Farrior's discussion about the legal principles related to hate speech.

The Cossacks are best known as the roving horsemen of the Russian steppes, famed for their ungovernability and violence, epitomized by tales of wild fighters like Stenka Razin and Yermak. In the 20th century, one of the most famous portrayals of Cossacks was in that early classic of Russian cinema, "The Battleship Potemkin", in which a body of these perennial soldiers, dressed in the white jackets of the Tsar, gun down a crowd of civilians on a set of steps in Odessa ("Cossack massacre on the steps" in English works well as a pun).

A little-known aspect of Cossack history is explored in Claudio Magris' pseudo-novel, "Inferences from a Sabre" (1986). In June 1941, shortly after Hitler's invasion of Russia, German agents persuaded General Pyotr Krasnov, "ataman" (chieftain) of a band of Cossacks, to command a battalion of these fighters, famed for their aversion to communism. Krasnov, then 72 years old, was one of the most colorful figures of the 20th-century. As Neal Ascherson writes in his engrossing book, "Black Sea", Krasnov's hatred of "Bolshevism" was matched "only by his contempt for the Judaeo-democratic West." After joining the White Russian armies in the civil war, he fled to Paris, "where, to the astonishment of this tough old soldier's friends, he became a prolific novelist." After World War II, so the story goes, Krasnov was betrayed by the English, handed over to Stalin, and hanged as a traitor.

Magris' "novel" takes the story up in October 1944. Hitler had promised the Cossacks a homeland in Carnia, that mountainous part of northeast Italy wedged between Venice, Austria, and Slovenia, and, the end of the war approaching, these exiles of the steppes were fighting it out with the Italian partisans. The book is a letter by Father Guido, a priest from Trieste, to one of his superiors.

In 1944 Guido was sent to interecede with the Cossacks and try to mitigate the cruelty meted out on the Carnians. While he was there, he thinks he met Krasnov, whose life and death intrigue him from then on. The crux of the book is the "enigma woven around the death of Krasnov", an enigma that begins on 2 May 1945. As the Cossacks flee on horseback through the Val di Gorto to hide out in the forests of Austria, one of them is shot dead by the partisans. His companions bury him in a poorly marked grave and throw in a broken sabre. Father Guido explores the possibility that, contrary to the official story, this soldier was Krasnov.

Blurring the lines between fiction and reality, Magris plumbs the depths of Krasnov's character. Apart from the fact that Guido never existed, this lyrical "novel" would be an interesting work of speculation. Magris "plays through the pathetic coda to Krasnov's life". We see the Cossack commander and his men as living contradictions, romantic figures ("the flash of the blade in the air evoked for a moment the vague yearning glow of certain brief, blustery evenings, of curling sea-waves that seem to shine with the promise of everything we lack"), medieval men, "untamed and feudal" who "saw the revolution as the anonymous assault of modernity, the sunset of the individual, the end of adventure", yet also as anti-Semites, butchers, and the enemies of their own dream ("the Cossacks reached that corner of the world [Carnia] to build themselves a house and to take shelter from the indeterminacy of nothingness, and instead they destroyed the hospitable order enclosed by these walls and delivered it back to formlessness.")

The novel is a great read, one of the best I've read this year. I also recommend Magris' depressing book, "The Other Sea", about an Italian on the plains of Patagonia, plus Ascherson's book mentioned above.

One of the best ways to learn about a subject is to talk to people who have been successful in the area. I enjoy the Leaders of the New Century Series because their interviews are close to having the conversations myself.

This edition has a strong orientation to the stock market / investment world. Between the interviews with Schwab and the heads of Nasdaq & the NYSE, I gained some real insight to the people controlling the stock market world.

There were some surprises as well. I have never heard Charles Schwab talk about how he had to overcome his learning disability before. It added some fascinating human elements to the leadership discussion.

I would have liked to hear more from Lance Armstrong. His segment was supposed to be short, but I would have liked even more.

This series is very strong. By hearing the actual interviews with these leaders, you pick-up much more than reading a summary.

This was a very worthwhile edition and I recommend it highly.

Herb Kelleher gives an extraordinary description of management and entrepreneurship that I want all my friends to hear. In 15 minutes, he unleashes what it takes to conceive a company (on a paper napkin), rally the troops to build it and inspire customers and employees to make it the clear winner in the business. Here's a tip for anyone who buys this CD. The Kelleher interview is in two parts, so be sure to get CD #5.

Herb Kelleher is a master of his craft -- having created one of the best airlines in history and certainly one of the most profitable of all time. His simple secret is to treat his people like gold, so they'll treat customers the same way! This series is a must-listen for any aspiring managers.

This is the most amazing audiobook I've ever heard on the topic of leadership. A refreshing approach to hear directly from artists, CEO's and even President Carter about what inspires leadership. Listened to it in my car and it set the tone for the whole week.

This book is a welcome introduction for readers who are comfortable with basic differential equations and vector calculus. As an applied mathematician interested in learning the fundamentals of MRI, I had grown quite frustrated with the simplified literature on one hand ("MRI for technologists", "MRI for medical people", "MRI for dummies"...) and the professional literature on the other, which is directed at people already immersed in the study of MR technology. In contrast, this book is an excellent introduction to the subject for applied mathematicians (though this may not have been the intended audience), as it makes no assumptions regarding reader's science background and thus explains thoroughly all relevant E+M, physics and signal processing. But most importantly, it does so without cutting mathematical corners. This results in a far more lucid and logical exposition than books which try to protect the reader for his/her own good.

This was a wonderful book. It has short stories, even cartoons, about Oz and its characters. All of these are written by famous Oz authors, such as Baum (of course), Denslow (who illustrated the original "Wizard of Oz"), Thompson, and many others. For anyone who loves Oz, or any other good read, this book is for you. P.S. I have to say, some of the stories in here seemed like they were written by Baum himself, though in fact, only 2 out of the 16 were actually written by him. If you decide to buy this book (which I recommend) read "THE EMERALD CITY OF OZ" by Walt Spouse. It's a funny comic strip about the book, The Emerald City of Oz.