Mulisch accomplished here again a dazzling novel. It is theatre withing theatre. In intricate winding of lives, the old actor, Uli Bouwmeester performs his last role of the last role of the older actor de Vries in Shakespeares Tempest, Prospero.As magically as Prospero, the author weaves places, situations, characters, times, events in moving, twirling, engaging tapestry. In reference to Poe's "Narratives ..of Pym" the ending takes the reader through the life transforming and time transcending narratives of the protagonist. The novel unfolds with the clarity of greek tragedy. But even more than these (after all 3000 years of development) it provides rare glimpses of insight into the deeper issues of life.

Tracers is a compelling, harsh funny and moving look at the Vietnam War, as told by men who fought there. Originally developed through psychodrama workshops, the play takes several archetypal soldiers- the black militant, the scared kid, the hippie soldier, and places them in a series of vignettes that are frighteningly realistic in what the young men of the 60s and 70s went through in Vietnam. A must read!

I've read the book untill appr. page 400, then I just couldn't stomach it anymore. You can just hear Mulisch brag thrue every sentence. The sentences he makes are art, but to fill a book with good sentences does not necessairily make it a good book. It realy annoyed me that all the men in the book are intelligent and all the woman are stupid and die quickly. When you know a littlebit more about Harry Mulisch you just know that the author is speaking here. The book is very discriminating for women! Never the less, I did like "de aanslag" and "de elementen" (the elements?) written by Mulisch. The elements is a relative short novel, with a lot of philosophy and a great plot. But if he would have lengthened this book by adding another 700 pages, the result would probably have been like 'the discovery of heaven.' Not a sympathetic book!

This is one of the most extraordinary books I have ever read. Though I don't necessarily agree with all the views expressed in this philosophical novel, it must be said that Mulisch has a wide variety of interests, ranging from the development of the arts over the centuries to the changes the Enlightment and Scientific Revolution brang. Mulisch scetches a epic tale of two young men, destined to be pieces on God's chessboard in His plan for mankind. Though the actual setting of the story is not highly likely, credit must be given to the way in which Mulisch develops his plot; he goes out of his way to illuminate multiple coincedents (that in the end don't seem like coincedents anymore) and their part in God's plan. A lot of these things seemed so unlikely in the book itself, until I recognized that a lot in the world does indeed work that way. Though I don't agree with the way Mulisch portrays God, I sure found it a fascinating approach to how God implements His plans in the world!

In an absolute mindblowing tour through theology, politics, ethics, science and the meaning of friendship, Mulisch unfolds the story of two friends, their shared love, and a child that might be the child of any one of the two, who is destined to fulfill the purpose celestial powers have decided upon. The pretty strong hints that connect this book to Goethe's Faust, tell you what this book is: hugely ambitious, but highly succesful in meeting that ambition, and a classic that ranks right up there with the best the world literature had to offer in the last couple of hundred years or so. A must read.

"The Procedure" (2001), by Harry Mulisch (b. 1927), is the thoughtful story of Victor Werker, a genetics scientist at UC Berkeley who explores the meaning of life from a scientific angle, inventing a new form of life called the eobiont, and with a philosophical tone, writing fatherly autobiographical letters to his daughter Aurora, named for the Roman goddess of dawn.

The book starts with the legendary story of Rabbi Jehudah Loew (Löw), a leader of the Jewish community of Prague in 1592, called by Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II to make him a golem, a man-made being of clay. He fears sacrilege, not to mention abject failure, but ultimately agrees. Loew is a man of Hebrew letters, the symbolic glyphs of his faith. Will his knowledge of those sacred symbols help him uncover the metaphysical key to life, bestowing it upon lifeless clay?

From Loew's colorful Prague, we jump back to our own time, to the story of Victor Werker's birth in Amsterdam a few years after World War Two, and the various tales and complications of the pregnancy and birth. Victor becomes a geneticist, and studies the letters of genetic sequencing, A, C, G, and T, the idiomatic symbols of his own profession. Will his education of those four letters unlock the scientific mystery of life, granting it to lifeless matter?

Victor invents an organism he calls the eobiont, "Life's Dawn". He becomes famous, and suffers the jealousy of Barend Brock, a colleague spurned by Victor after he tries to take credit for Victor's discovery. Victor diarizes his relationship to Clara, including Clara's pregnancy and their break-up, through letters to their daughter Aurora.

This novel is foremost of ideas. Today's metaphysical novelist's challenge seems to update the tale of Frankenstein (or Prometheus) to the age of genetics. Rabbi Loew's story is fascinating, and Victor Werker's struggles are interesting, but the book would benefit by describing more clearly the motivations of Loew and the Emperor, or delving more deeply into Victor's goals in life and career. Such details might help flesh the text out a bit more fully. Mulisch is a fine writer, and his novel "The Assault" (1982) is undoubtedly one of the more brilliant pieces of contemporary fiction from Europe today, but "The Procedure" does not weave tight the threads it has spun.

Nonetheless, "The Procedure" is a well-paced novel (230pp), and contains a number of interesting ideas, regarding the nature of life, love, and history. It can be recommended to anyone who wants to think about the nature of life, and reflect upon the often discordant dichotomy between the spiritual and the scientific.

Genetic engineering, the mapping of the Human Genome, and Cloning are all intensely debated issues at present. All are generally viewed as parts of the absolute leading edge of high technology. Genetically engineered life forms have been patented, the Human Genome has been mapped, and despite the political and religious protestations, cloning has continued to duplicate ever more complex replicas of life. And while laws are contemplated and passed forbidding the cloning of a human, it is not only likely, but also probable that such research proceeds somewhere.

The creation of life by mortal man has been routinely held as the ultimate taboo against nature and deeply held religious beliefs. Harry Mulisch writes in his book, "The Procedure", of two instances of creation and demonstrates the idea and perhaps the practice is not only far from new, it is centuries old. In the late 16th Century a Rabbi creates a Golem for a King, the procedure for which is outlined in a 3rd Century Text. Then in the 20th Century a Scientist creates a very primitive organic organism from non-organic materials, which gains the name eobliant. A Golem and the primitive organism that is created 400 years later have little in common as final products. The latter is a test tube creation while the former is, well the book will explain.

The commonality between these two events is obvious, and if I read the work correctly, the obvious is not what the author intended. The writing is deceptively straightforward to read. The Rabbi has an arguably valid and selfless reason for what he does, our contemporary scientist does not. The author diverges along the way with the tale of Frankenstein, the author and her contemporaries, but writing about an act and practicing it are widely separated issues.

Our scientist is also portrayed as being at the very least eccentric. He relates much of his story through letters he writes to his daughter who never lived. While the letters are to her, they are sent to the woman who would have been the child's mother. She left him for he failed her at the critical moment in their relationship, a moment that should not have been an issue for a father much less a man of science, and a man who was manipulating artificial life himself. For all the notoriety his creation has brought him, he gains no piece of mind, and constantly erodes as a person until he is having fictional conversations with a woman that would have been his wife about the cloning of their stillborn child. Cloning is a physical reproduction only, the mind, or the soul, if you prefer, is not replicated.

As I mentioned the book can read as deceptively straightforward, and my reading may be completely off the mark. Either way the book is a great piece of work, and a tremendous read. More than one reading would probably be appropriate.

In many ways, I admire this book more than Mulisch's deservedly decorated opus The Discovery of Heaven. The Procedure is a tightly written novel that manages to incorporate a number of TDOH's humanist themes in a more complex and disturbing manner. This book is much, much more than a re-telling of the golem myth and a cautionary tale about pride. (And in case you hadn't noticed, Mulisch is proud to be an egomaniac so he ain't about to warn anyone about pride anytime soon.) The two odd chapters that open the book are easy to overlook once the narrative begins to unfold, but they ultimately serve as a sort of Rosetta stone for unraveling the novel's mysteries. When a book has the epigraph "So cleverly did his art conceal its art," the author is warning the reader to pay very close attention. I don't want to argue that this book displays an "either you get it or you don't" dynamic, because it's complex enough to yield new interpretations every time you read it, but, of the dozen or so reviews I've read, only one mentioned what I believe to be is the central metaphor of the novel. I find this troubling only because the mainstream reviews suggest that this is a minor, simple work that is easily digestible and of little consequence. Newsflash: when the brain and book collide, it's not always the book that is wanting. While the protagonist's creation of an a simple organic lifeform from inorganic matter does parallel the rabbi's creation of a golem, the novel's initial chapters suggest a much more immediate parallel to the golem than the largely undefined lifeform created by Victor. I don't want to ruin it for anyone, so I'll just say it's the best novel of the year (outside of Franzen's Corrections) and that everyone should read it. If you haven't read THOD, you should read that first, since it's more straightforward than this book.

I've had Vincent Heuring as a professor. All I can say about the book is that it's a good reference for a professor doesn't cover his own material well. He attempted to explain things in class, but could never quite come through. The books helped greatly in clarifying his lectures.

Heuring & Jordan covers all of the key areas of computer architecture but has sparse description. I did not like this book as a course text when I was in college and I still do not care for it as an engineering reference. For all aspects of computer architecture I find Patterson & Hennessy's explanations more clear and their examples more illuminating.

This is an excellent text for learning architecture. Ideal for anyone who needs to discover how computers work.