Put this one on your 10 - 14 year old's reading list but don't forget to read it along with them.

Set in 1942 in the ethnically mixed Vajdaság region of Hungary, the story traces the gradual descent into madness of one E.S., railway clerk, who realizes that insanity is the only dignified refuge left in an ever-darkening world. The first part of the novel is a grotesque, rambling catalogue of E.S.'s acquaintances, friends and family who all meet horrid ends as the wheels of the Holocaust start to churn. E.S.'s world slowly slips into the abyss as the pogroms, persecutions and deprivations slowly evolve into a full scale death factory, serviced by the same railways that E.S. is convinced are the only refuge of sanity and international neutrality in a Europe turned upside down. The truly fiendish irony is that these mobile 'Switzerlands' as E.S. calls them are what made the Holocaust possible in the first place. Fast, accessible anywhere and keeping to time, they fed the hellish ovens with their human fuel.

In the rest of the novel, E.S. lucidly describes his 'work' duties in a slave labor battalion, where he and his group of comrades were forced to make bricks under bestial conditions. All the while, E.S. writes down his 'Diary of a Madman,' no doubt a reference to Gogol's masterpiece, where an unknown inquisitor (Kafka's Trial?) mercilessly interrogates E.S. about the minutiae of his simple existence. Struggling to give some sort of rational explanation to the whole chaos surrounding him, he falls deeper into the black hole of madness. As does anyone who tries to rationally understand the inane senseless of the Holocaust.

Yet, despite his impending destruction, E.S. maintains his humanity. How? By writing it all down. Making that 'bourgeois horror novel.' By creating something out of the void and thus giving us hope that we shall all earn some measure of eternity by what we leave behind.

One of the trains he takes eventually must lead to a concentration camp. But the journal of the final months of his life is told with such authority in this imaginatively constructed story that the doomed character appears to be in command of his own destiny. ''Hourglass,'' translated from the Serbo-Croatian by Ralph Manheim, is evidently rooted in firsthand family experiences. The reader is informed that a letter attributed to E. S. in the novel is based on an actual letter written by Kis's father two years before his death in Auschwitz. But the universal elements in the story - the attempt to carry on the everyday routine of life and the disbelief in an official policy of genocide - offer a parable about the extermination of the Jews by the Third Reich and its collaborative governments in occupied Europe. Trains were essential for the Third Reich to fulfill the quotas for the Holocaust, and trains play an essential part in the novel. At one point, the narrator sees himself, with trembling hands, gathering up his papers in his seat in the first-class carriage and stuffing them into his briefcase along with bottled beer and smoked-herring sandwiches. The author then transforms an ordinary train ride into an act of terror: ''Who was standing beside him at that moment? A young blond conductor, who was aiming his nickel-plated ticket punch like a revolver at the star on his chest.''

The interrogation of the narrator is bizarre. It shows the police mentality at work in a police state anywhere. The narrator is questioned about a piano in his home. The line of questioning goes: Can the piano be used to send signals? Where in the room is the piano? Can you describe what it looks like? Why was an open score on the music stand? How do you account for the fact that the piano was open and that someone had been practicing so early in the morning? Inevitably, the answers to dumb questions sound somehow suspicious and lead to more questions.

The nameless E. S. wonders how he can avenge himself against the armed police. He indulges in a small act of defiance for his own self-respect: ''Several times he had blown his nose into a newspaper with the Fuhrer's picture on it. Was he conscious of the danger he was courting? Definitely. He always folded the paper as small as possible before throwing it into dense brambles or the river, thus doing away with the corpus delicti of his insane and dangerous act.'' There are deliberate breaks in style as the author shifts back and forth in chapters that are labeled ''Travel Scenes,'' ''Notes of a Madman,'' ''Criminal Investigation'' and ''A Witness Interrogated.'' The year 1942 is a crazy time in the Danube Valley for the first-person narrator. He is trying to maintain a semblance of sanity while composing a letter to his sister that forms the spine of the story. If there is a theme in the novel, it is summed up in the last sentence of that letter:

''P. S. It is better to be among the persecuted than among the persecutors.''

''Hourglass'' owes a debt to ''The Trial'' by Kafka. In the narrator's musings, Kafka is cited: ''Everything that is possible happens; only what happens is possible.'' What distinguishes Kis's novel is its authorial independence. A conventional narrative structure is ignored; it is the author's musings and diversions that magically build suspense. Some paragraphs run on for pages, others suddenly break into short questions and answers between the omnipotent state and its helpless victims. Kis forces the reader to work for him, to pay attention. That he succeeds is a rare achievement...

It is worth getting your hands on this book just in order to read "The European," which reminds us that philosophy must above all be practical.

When you get to the command that you have a question about, there is a wealth of information. You not only have the command, but the icon also, if there is one for that command. You then get the command line reference, and a picture of the dialog box (again, if there is one with that command) In the command line feature, you also get the way to type the command, with a hyphen, to use the command in the command line only. You also get a brief description of options, related commands, system(s) variables, and quite a set of tips. They also tell you if a command has been renamed or is an undocumented, by AutoDesk, command.

All in all, you get very good information for a basic grasp of the command. This will make it easier for you when you go to more in depth resources for AutoCad.

Some other good features of the book are: 1) pictures of the function key and their functions on the inside cover, as well as some of the Control key combinations, 2) Command prefixes on the inside front cover, 3) 29 pages of system variables, 4) Commands that have been removed, and 5)some miscellaneous information on the inside back cover.

I would recommend this book to anyone that is now using AutoCad 2002. I would also suggest that anyone thinking of purchasing AutoCad 2002 to pick it up and see what it has to offer.

After investing in public and private companies for over 30 years, serving on numerous public and private company boards, reading dozens of books and hundreds of articles on improving company boards and better corporate governance - this is the best I have come across. Companies should provide a copy of this book for each of their directors as a matter of policy, and investors should read it to discover valuable new insights into the crucial but often forgotten links between director quality, accountability, conflicts of interest and stock price performance.

Authors Bruce Bassett et al deserve a literary medal for making such a rich topic so easy to digest.

They write with the consummate ease of travel writers.
Destination: space-time.
Mode of transport: Einstein's mind.

It's a complex task making relativity simple.
I'm really grateful someone finally did it!