Welcome to "Animal Farm" as performed within the setting of the Soviet National Writers Union during the communist era. We all know the AF credo: "All men are born equal--some more so than others" could have been made to order for the bloated pompous Soviet bureaucracy of yore. Fur Hat was my first introduction to Vladimir Voinovich: after reading this delightful satire on corruption/cronyism/toadyism within Party machinations, I nominate Voinovich on a par with Vonnegut. Readers will meet lots of Party types in this story: typical system hacks (Pyotr Lukin), over-decorated pompous military types (Karetnikov) and blatant anti-Semites (nearly every character in the book). Even our hapless protagonist, Yefim R, is married to a devoted Party member, "...but underneath her bra she wore a cross..." All kinds of deceit and posturing go on on a daily basis..the politics and pecking order of the national Writers Union come front & center as smug leaders pass out fur hats to its members, according to their rank and file within the group. Of course, celebrated writers who've won (dubiously so, albeit) titles and accolades get the top fur hats like reindeer and rabbit. Our hero, Yefim, receives the lowest ranking hat: fluffy tomcat. Poor Yefim. He is not disrespected by the powers-that-be because of his mediocre talent, but because he "writes only of good men challenging earthly elements." Union officials don't approve of Yefim's "writing about decent people & pretending there's no such thing as the Soviet state, or district and regional committees." Yefim's determined efforts to get a higher-ranking hat for himself ("even rabbit would be better!!") unfold into sublime absurdity as he goes from one Party official to another, encountering toadyism/nepotism/bribery/euphemisms and underhanded tactics. "Even on an iceberg, a Soviet collective will have its careerists, stool pigeons and at least one KGB agent." An exiled scribbler from the Soviet Union himself (1980), Voinovich rips on the Russian mentality that delight in military over-decoration and its writers that write just to receive titles and headlines. And international headlines themselves does our Yefim make as he finally loses his temper with one especially dull Party hack. When the western media ggets hold of this incident, they blow it all out of proportion (as western media is wont to do). Then our hero gets blacklisted as rumors of his "treason" spread like wildfire (the perfect example how rampant paranoid delusions become in police states). The western media dubs Yefim a dissident and builds his literary reputation up far beyond even his own imaginings! You'll have to read the book to see how the 'fur hat debacle' turns out. DANGER: THIS BOOK IS AN EQUAL-OPPORTUNITY BASHER! ENJOY!

Propelled by the need for recognition, a Soviet writer loses all perspective in this saga of his craving for the "fur hat" which is awarded by his writers organization. When he finds his hat will be common "fluffy tomcat" he is unhinged and tries to manipulate all the channels possible to him to get a fox hat...or perhaps even wildcat? The pathos of Soviet life and the repression of art takes its toll on the writers and the artists involved here, and the making of a martyr is all wrapped up in the most gut-wrenching humor imaginable.

Vladimir Voinovich is the premier Russian wit of the 20th century. This novella is fresh and sharp, with a hint of the Soviet sarcasm that Voinovich is all too famous for. A good, quick read--and a rollicking good time!

Its not the book, and its not the film. So what is it? Its the screenplay of course! Chances are, if you are reading this, its either because you saw the film and liked it; a fan of Stanley Kubrick: director of the film; or you read the book Lolita and the Annotated Lolita and figured "I might as well read the script;" or just a big fan of Nabokov and its the one book you dont have in your collection. Whatever the reason may be, it falls between the book and the film. This is Nabokov's version of the script that was cut, recut and then edited by Kubrick (incidentally, Nabokov still recieved on-screen credit for the screenplay). It may hold water on its own, but in comparison to either the book or film it cannot stay afloat.

By his own account, only about 20% of Nabokov's 213 page screenplay ended up in Kubrick's film. Even so, the author's opinion of Kubrick's end product was high, and the screenplay itself is a fine cinematic representation of the novel.

Lolita: a Screenplay is recommended reading for anyone who loved the novel and appreciates Nabokov's wonderful sense of humor. The story goes that Nabokov presented his screenplay to Kubrick, who told him, "Look, regardless of how brilliant it may or may not be, it would take eight hours to film." So it's unfilmable; if Borges can write literary criticism about books which don't exist, surely it's not so radical to devise screenplays which are never meant to be filmed. Nabokov adds much to his existing work, including a psychiatrist who speaks directly to the camera and a cameo for himself. One wishes that Adrian Lyne had added a few of the humorous elements of the screenplay to his film, which is fine but perhaps a bit too reverent which it should be audaciously funny. All in all, I highly recommend picking up what amounts to one of the 20th century's great geniuses playing hooky.

The AMG guide is a major resource for anyone interested in jazz at any level. They claim that over 20,000 recordings are reviewed and I believe them! The reviews and articles are excellent. However to publish this new edition and keep the page-count constant with the 3rd, they have reduced the size of the type. It can be read if one has normal sight--but with difficulty. Older readers might well need a magnifying glass.

I have read the accompaning review and almost past the book up. I was called to its attention by Billboard magazine. So I went back and read that review. They devoted a half page January 11 by Steve Graybow and I decided I could not pass it up. Billboard, in my opinion has never been wrong.

This book is a necessary addition to the library of anyone who already knows a fair amount about the Russian Revolution and Russian Civil War. It provides for the first time in one volume the advances in understanding that result from availability of Soviet archives and close cooperation between Western and Russian scholars. It also points out numerous topics on which further research would be useful.

However, it has its flaws. Some topics are covered redundantly in various essays, and not always the ones one would expect; other topics get inadequate attention. Makhno's anarchist army in Ukraine, for example, is barely mentioned in Mark von Hagen's essay on Ukraine, given an unsympathetic paragraph in Vladimir Chernaiv's essay on anarchists, and a longer and somewhat more useful paragraph in Orlando Figes' essay on peasant armies. Given that at times Makhno's army was the most effective military force in Eastern Ukraine, and that all other combatants in Ukraine had to worry about what Makhno was going to do next, this is fragmented and incomplete treatment of an important topic. As another example, the description of what happened in Latvia between 1917 and 1920 is seriously incomplete; the bitter division between pro-Bolshevik and Latvian nationalist elements is not brought out clearly, nor is the intensity of the war that took place in Latvia, with many Latvians, German troops (the von der Goltz Iron Division) and some Russians (the Bermondt-Avalov force) on one side, and the Latvian Bolsheviks and the Red Army on the other. One would not guess from this book how disastrous this was for Latvia; by the end of the fighting, about half the population of Latvia had fled the country or died.

Rather than cite other such topics, I'll turn to the observation that most of the bibliographies of these essays consist mainly of secondary rather than primary sources. This is a drawback in a book which implicitly assumes that the reader already has a general familiarity with the subject matter. To be sure, not all primary sources that presumably exist are accessible even now; in particular, one suspects that somewhere in British government archives are documents that would clear up various puzzling issues. But there is a conspicuous lack of references to the extensive German political and military archives related to the Russian Revolution and Civil War. Indeed, the German role is so incompletely treated that one suspects some of the authors are, quite understanably, not familiar with this material. But from 1917 through mid-1919 the Germans deliberately shifted their weight to keep any of the forces contesting for power in Russia from winning a clear victory; the Germans occupied here, distributed weapons there, stirred up trouble over yonder, and generally tried to make sure that revolution and civil war in Russia would not spread to Germany. A careful discussion of German policy and its effects on the course of events in the first half of the Russian Civil War would be extremely helpful; lacking that, a good bibliography of the primary sources in German would be most useful.

Despite these criticisms, the book is a big step forward in understanding what really happened and who did what to whom in the Russian Revolution and Russian Civil War. I hope that a decade or two from now there will be a second edition clarifying some of the topics not easily understood from this first edition.

This is a solid, definitive, wide-ranging and in-depth look at the Revolutions told from a variety of viewpoints, ideologies and mindsets. Modeled after the Foucoult/Ozuf Critical Dictionary of the French Revolution, this is an excellently assembled book, with very current material, well worth having by any scholar of this period.

I was looking for a guide to recent rock recordings. This was not it. Most of the groups I looked up weren't listed (P.O.D., Incubus, et. al.). You'd be better off just going to their website or reading reviews on amazon.

For anyone who wants to build a collection of the best popular music on CD this is a really useful guide. The Editorial Review (above) gives you a good guide to the structure of the book, so I won't repeat that.

The digital revolution, with a great deal of music now readily available in a lightweight compact format has created a new dilemma--what to buy.

An artist you like, say Diana Ross or Miles Davis, might have sixty or a hundred albums listed in a catalog or on a Web site. If you wanted to build a music collection that contained just one example of their best work, which of these would you buy?

This book will help you make that decision and, most importantly, help you avoid buying duds that you will later regret.

The question has been raised as to whether this book is necessary, as the Web site version is fuller, not to mention free. I guess that answer to that is that it depends on what you want it for. The book is a handy reference that you can read in bed, in the bathroom, take with you to the music store, read on the beach etc. So you don't have to buy it, but if do want a print version, here it is. It would also be (or is) a valuable reference work for any library, radio station, print publication, or as a starting point for anyone doing any kind of research into poular music. I imagine that it would also be indispensable for anyone who purchases music for any kind of musical library or collection.

It probably isn't so great if you want information on recently released music. After all, it takes a while for an initial critical evaluation to take root. Just consider how many Grammy winning or best selling albums start to look quite shabby once the initial acclaim wears off. Where is M.T. Hammer now? But for a survey of the whole library of recorded popular music, you can't beat it.

This is THE guide to 20th century popular music. It examines the merit of recordings _within the context of their genres_. Useful star ratings are combined with (usually) paragraph-length reviews. Good artist biographies are also included. ...

It is odd that no one else has noted this. But this book is specific to pool checkers, even though he calls the game American Checkers throughout and has separate books with the name Pool Checkers in the title. Key differences between regular, ACF checkers and Pool checkers: (1) regular pieces can capture both backwards and forwards in pool checkers, but only forward in regular checkers; and (2) kings in pool checkers can move any number of squares along a diagonal; in regular checkers, kings can move only one square backwards and forwards.

If you don't play pool checkers, this book is not for you.

A very useful book to understand how translate a postion in a winning position(if it's possible). You can learn to understand how implement your idea to try to win a match. At the same time you learn to avoid not strong positions. A very beautiful book.

Vladimir Kaplan`s second masterpiece "The Key to Sucess of American Checkers" is a must-reed for anyone seeking to understand checker law. The principles of play are worked in different types of position. There is an invaluable chapter about the complicated strategy of center encirclement.. This book helped move my skill at checkers to completely new heghts.

Vladimir Ilyich Lenin remained a dedicated Communist to the last days of his life. The last two years of his life, partly covered by this collection of Lenin speeches, etc., he was not completely sane. The details of this may be found in Dmitri Volkogonov's excellent bio of Lenin--a "must." To the end of his life, Lenin favored an ever larger Soviet Union; a "Soviet of the Whole World," as he declared on many occasions; he never retreated an inch from the idea of the dictatorship of the Communist Party, though he loathed the bureaucratism that had sprung up within it. Perhaps his insanity prevented him from acknowledging that he himself was responsible for this concentration of power at the top in the hands of a few. Of course, Lenin feared the growing power of Stalin. Yet it was he, Lenin, who had created this Frankenstein Monster (e.g., by appointing Josef Djugashvili (Stalin) General Secretary of the Party in 1922). This book, in a sense, attempts to "pardon" Lenin. However, as Volkogonov and many others have pointed out (esp. in Russia since the demise of Communism there), Lenin's behavior, including that near the end of his life, remains unpardonable for its brutality and fanatical commitment to Socialism and Communism. Lenin was a hopeless elitist whose self-assuredness and arrogance, disguised with mock humility, knew no bounds.

"Five years after the victory of the October 1917 revolution in Russia, V.I. Lenin waged his final political struggle.

"He was fighting to maintain the communist course with which the Bolshevik Party had led the workers and peasants to power over the landlords and capitalists of the former tsarist empire and defeated the invading armies of fourteen nations.

"At issue were the burning questions of the day:

***How to forge a union of workers and peasants republics and defend the rights of historically oppressed nationalites

***The basis for the New Economic Policy and its place in the world struggle for socialism

***Strengthening the alliance between the working class and the peasantry

***Defending the state monopoly of foreign trade

"This book compiles the speeches, articles, letters, and memos in which Lenin took up the battle inside the Bolshevik Party. Many of these documents were suppressed for more than three decades by the murderous regime, headed by Joseph Stalin, that represented the bureaucratic ruling caste. Some appear here for the first time in English, including one never before published in any language" (from the back cover).

Vladimir Lenin, perhaps the most important historical figure in the twentieth century, not only fought against the tyranny of the capitalist class, but he also tried to fight against the growing bureaucratism in the Soviet Union that eventually led to Stalin's takeover of power. We see here his fight to spread the revolution and make it a truly a world revolution, not confined to a backwards country in Europe. He wanted to free mankind from subservience to a ruling class. The new biography of Lenin, written by a former Stalinist-turned-capitalist, is completely rebuked here. The biographer Volkoganov is a typical bourgeous seeking to denounce anything that smacks of true revolution and is quick to make friends with his new masters by writing his attack on Lenin. I suggest that anyone truly interested in Lenin read Lenin's works, and for a biography, read Trotsky's book on Lenin.

Reading through this book gives excellent insight into one of the greatest thinkers of the 20th Century. The letters are arranged in chronological order, so reading through them gives a perspective on Lewis' life that I found to be better than any biography. This is a very enjoyable collection, and if you are a fan of C.S. Lewis: Read these letters and get inside this great philosopher's mind!

This is fine reading for the tired hours of the day. The little biography by his brother Warren is first rate, and the letters themselves are windows looking into the garden of C.S. Lewis' life and thought. They are varied, usually insightful or edifying, sometimes splendid. This edition, edited and enlarged by Walter Hooper, includes a few marvelous additions but also what appear to be some errors in the text, especially in the (fortunately rare) bits of Greek. Let's hope that the Collected Letters (published by Fount in the UK and apparently available through UK) will become available in the USA.

While standard biographies are the medium people often turn to to find out more about someone, the letters an author pens often more revealing. I thoroughly enjoyed this (much needed) updated version of the letters of C.S. Lewis from 1916 - 1963 to his various correspondents. They are at various times funny, full of good advice, intentional nonsense, great learning, wit, homely (talking about the every day events that go on in life), and all in all intensely interesting. In addition to this fine volume, you might want to try his volume of Letters to Arthur Greeves (originally published as They Stand Together), C.S. Lewis Letters to Children, or The Latin Letters of C.S. Lewis. They are all quite good.

A good, albeit highly idiosyncratic, guide to Statistical Learning. The highly personal account of the theory is both the strong point and the drawback of the treatise. On one side, Vapnick never loses sight of the big picture, and gives illuminating insights and formulations of the "basic problems" (as he calls them), that are not found in any other book. The lack of proofs and the slightly erratic organization of the topic make for a brisk, enjoyable reading. On the minus side, the choice of the topics is very biased. In this respect, the book is a self-congratulatory tribute by the author to himself: it appears that the foundations of statistical learning were single-handedly laid by him and his collaborators. This is not really the case. Consistency of the Empircal Risk Measure is rather trivial from the viewpoint of a personal trained in asymptotic statistics, and interval estimators for finite data sets are the subject of much advanced statistical literature. Finally, SVMs and neural nets are just a part of the story, and probably not the most interesting.
In a nutshell, what Vapnick shows, he shows very well, and is able to provide the "why" of things as no one else. What he doesn't show... you'll have to find somewhere else (the recent Book of Friedman Hastie & Tibs is an excellent starting point).
A last remark. The book is rich in grammatical errors and typos. They could have been corrected in the second edition, but do not detract from the book's readability.

This is a very readable book by an authority on this subject. The book starts with the statistical learning theory, pioneered by the author and co-worker's work, and gradually leads to the path of discovery of support vector machines. An excellent and distinctive property of support vector machines is that they are robust to small data perturbation and have good generalization ability with function complexity being controlled by VC dimension. The treatment of nonlinear kernel classification and regression is given for the first time in the first edition. The 2nd edition includes significant updates including a separate chapter on support vector regression as well as a section on logistic regression using the support vector approach. Most computations involved in this book can be implemented using a quadratic programming package. The connections of support vector machines to traditional statistical modeling such as kernel density and regression and model selection are also discussed. Thus, this book will be an excellent starting point for learning support vector machines.

Vapnik and collaborators have developed the field of statistical learning theory underlying recent advances in machine learning and artificial intelligence (e.g. support vector machines). This book almost accomplishes the formidable task of comprehensibly describing the essential ideas of learning theory to non-statisticians. It contains ample theorems but almost no proofs.

This is a pretty good collection of Interviews with Nabokov and Nabokov's letters to editors and stuff like that. For people who want to find out more there's the comprehensive two volume biography of Nabokov by Brian Boyd.

Nabokov's opinions in a nutshell?

Thought everything written by James Joyce was completely mediocre except for "Ulysses," which towered above the rest of his ouvre as one of the supreme literary masterpieces of the 20th century. Loved Flaubert and Proust and Chateaubriand, did not like Stendhal (simple and full of cliches) or Balzac (full of absurdities). Loved Tolstoy's "Anna Karenina" (considered it the greatest novel of the 19th century) and "Death of Ivan Illych," hated "Resurrection" and "Kreutzer sonata." Liked Gogol, despised Dostoevsky as a melodramatic mystic (he even once gave a student an F in his course for disagreeing with him). Loathed Conrad and Hemingway, but liked the description of the fish in "Old Man and the Sea" and the short story "Killers." Hated Andre Gide, T.S.Eliot, Faulkner, Thomas Mann and D.H.Lawrence and considered them all frauds. Thought Kafka was great, Orwell mediocre. Despised Camus and Sartre, considered Celine a second rater, but liked H.G.Wells. Loved Kubrick's film of Lolita (thought it was absolutely first-rate in every way) but later in the '70s regretted that Sue Lyon (though instantly picked by Nabokov himself along with Kubrick out of a list of thousands) had been too old for the part & suggested that Catherine Demongeot, the boyish looking 11 year old who appeared in Louis Malle's 1960 film "Zazie dans le Metro" would've been just about perfect to induce the right amount of moral repulsion in the audience towards Humbert (and prevent them from enjoying the work on any superficial level other than the purely artistic). Liked avant-garde writers like Borges and Robbe-Grillet and even went out of his way to see Alain Resnais' film with Robbe-Grillet: "Last Year at Marienband." Didn't care for the films of von Sternberg or Fritz Lang, loved Laurel and Hardy. Made a point of saying how much he hated Lenin when it was fashionable to blame the disasters of the Soviet Union on Stalin. Supported the War in Vietnam and sent President Johnson a note saying he appreciated the good job he was doing bombing Vietnam. Never drove an automobile in his life & his wife was the one who drove him through the United States on scientific butterfly-hunting expeditions, all through the many locales & motels & lodges that later appeared in "Lolita."

Seem interesting? You're bound to be offended even if Nabokov is one of your favorite writers. Genius or madman? I would say both, the 'divine madness' of the greatest of artists. Highly recommended for a peek inside the artistically fertile mind, and the tensions that need to be maintained to produce it.

An entertaining read for fans of the man, but probably not for others. Learn what it was about VN that to this day causes well-meaning fans to rave in such affected (and misspelled) tones. See below and you'll know what I mean.

Probably, or better yet most definitely, Nabokov was and is the greatest thing with flesh huddling by its bones and peeping with two ice-cube eyes this miserable little golf-ball of a planet will ever see. This is that man sounding off and checking the dunderheads and charletons who plague or lives with false sympathy and athletic stupidity