I've read quite a bit lately on raw foods, and this book is different from them all. I finished it in one sitting because I couldn't put it down. The Boutenko's welcome us into their lives and share their journey from dire illness to raw foods as a family.

Written in such a way that each family member's voice is included, this book chronicles their introduction to raw foods in 1994 when Sergei, then in 3rd grade, was diagnosed with "incurable" juvenile diabetes. Following her instincts, his mother Victoria refused to put him on insulin, instead beginning to research the effects of diet on health.

Amazingly, the whole family went raw together a short time afterward, and this story includes all the thoughts and feelings, all the changes they experienced as a result of their live food diet. Reading it does something that other more technical raw food manuals and cookbooks cannot do: it allows the reader to actually see what life might be like as a raw fooder.

Though the Boutenko's and their children were experiencing health problems due to their diet and lifestyle which strongly influenced their desire to go raw and encouraged them to stick with it, their story offers hope that making the transition with older children is indeed possible.

This is an inspiring book, and it includes a small recipe section and some before and after photographs of the family. A gem!

This Book Changed my Life
Meeting this family Changed my Life
Raw Foods, mostly Raw Foods Diet itself has TRANSFORMED my life.
Food is the first step toward God. As the Food, so the Thoughts.
Food, Head, God.
If you are even thinking about Raw Foods a little bit, this book is an easy, wonderful into. It Makes Sense. It is Simple.
I couldn't put it down. I couldn't wait to see if there were more books written by them.
12-Steps to Raw is also unbelievably Great. I highly recommend it to everyone. These TWO books, along with Rhio's "Hooked on Raw" uncook book are the books that I always recommend over and over agian.
Whatever path you choose, may it lead you closer to Him.

I just love this book. I read it in one sitting and then read it again. The story of the Boutenko family is heartwarming and inspiring. It will make you start eating raw now! Since I had the incredible luck to spend 5 days with the family in Ashland I can tell you that they really have this incredible love and energy that you can almost feel from this book. Awesome book, even if you don't consider raw foods you should read it. I recommend it to everyone.

Olesja

After waiting patiently for a seller who was going to sell this book for a reasonable price, I got one for about twenty dollars. While this book has a lot of good information, a lot of it is obsolete and you'll really have a hard time justifying spending the kind of money people are asking for it.

I have a lot of assemly books and I will rate this one as an advanced book but you can still get a good education from it if you know the basics of assembly language. In my opinion, the difficulty of the language is over rated. A great book to learn the language is : "Assembly Language for Intel Based Processors (4th Edition)" by Irvine. (emphasis on 4th edition cos it covers 32 bit coding)

This book presents a wide variety of topics, but doesn't go into a great deal of detail about any of them. I still recommend the book as an overview to the subject area.

Don't get me wrong this book is awesome. Just know a fair amount of assembler before coming to this book. Goes into great detail on difficult subjects or subjects rarely covered in other books. Proteteced mode, advanced video, data compression, pentium, advanced sound, viruses, advanced low-level disk access and DMA are all covered. My only beef is no PCI coverage, it only seems natural that an advanced book cover this along with the advanced ISA. Oh well 5 stars anyway for all the excellent coverage elsewhere. Although approaching the *outdated material* realm it does go to profound lengths to enable you to write real world assembler for todays still active processors.

This is a good book. I highly recommend it to web developers. The nature of the topic means that it's somewhat prone to obscelescence but there is no excuse for leaving out PHP as a major contender in today's web applications server space. It has been around for a very long time (way before JSP) and it has recently gained tremendous popularity.
Aside from this oversight, the book is an excellent executive summary for a reasonable percentage of the major technologies in this area.

Sergei Dunaev's Advanced Internet Programming is a comprehensive and practical guide to developing Internet applications and e-commerce solutions. In addition to detailed covers of various Internet development tools, programmers are shown how to create and use a variety of applications including applets, scriplets, XML-constructions, JSP, ASP, and more. In short, how to choose the proper tool for a specific Internet need. Additional features include coverage of Enterprise JavaBeans/CORBA and ActiveX/DCOM; HTML; DHTML; ODS; ODBC; SAX; OLE DB; and more. Examples are provided in Visual Basic, Java, C++, Pascal, and LotusScript, as well as the latest developments in Java and XML. Advanced Internet Programming is an invaluable and recommended addition to any serious programmer's reference shelf.

An easy but thought provoking read, this book contains short stories of Sergei Dovlatov's true experiences with journalistic manipulation in the Soviet Union. This book will keep you laughing, and also make you wonder if newspapers are as accurate as you once believed.

Living as a Russian journalist in Soviet Estonia, Dovlatov captures the cynicism, emptiness, irony, isolation, careerism, and dissonance of late Soviet communism. It is a work of powerful literary force and profound human awareness.

This book is in Russian, with a glossary of all the more difficult words running down the side of the page in parallel with the accented Russian text. The story is amusing and well-written. I enjoyed reading it with three years of one-hour-per-week Russian lessons.

If you like Dovlatov you must read this. If you never read Dovlatov, read this and you will like Dovlatov. I've read it about a year ago and can't give you details right now, but the description of the Russian immigrant community, as well as all of the heroes of the book is amazing. Dovlatov's satire hits right on target, it will make you smile and angry at the same time. If you are an immigrant, you will see your neigbours in this story, or maybe you will see yourself. If not, try not to make stereotypes after reading this. But as far as stereotypes go, the ones here are some come to life and talk to you from the pages. Just read.

There is much more to this book than the story of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, but it is for the Russian viewpoint of this story that I bought the book. Having read the recently published book The Brother I wanted to read this book to compare the two. Alexander Feklisov paints a kindly picture of Julius Rosenberg as being an individual who sympathized with the plight of the Jews in Germany during World War II. Julius felt the Russians bore the brunt of the fighting against Nazi Germany and he wanted to do whatever he could to help them. Since Russia was an ally of America during World War II he wanted to do what he could to be of assistance since he wasn't in the front lines fighting the Nazis. Julius comes across as a rather kindly and meek individual and a genuine friendship between him and Feklisov developed. Rosenberg's biggest contribution to Russian intelligence was in providing them with the proximity fuse in which an explosive shattered when it neared an airplane causing damage instead of having to score a direct hit on the plane. Julius's wife Ethel was aware and sympathetic of her husband's activities, but was otherwise not involved. Whether she actually did any typing of her brother's, David Greenglass', notes is still questionable. It may very well have been David's wife, Ruth. David worked at Los Alamos in a machine shop and provided what information he could on America's efforts to develop an atomic bomb, but his childish sketches of a lens was of no value according to Feklisov. David Greenglass agreed to turn against his sister and brother-in-law in exchange for immunity for his wife Ruth and a prison sentence for himself. The Rosenbergs could have fled to Russia when things got "hot", but they wanted to remain close to Ruth because she was in a hospital recovering from burns suffered in an accident. From reading this book and The Brother I conclude that the Rosenbergs' hatred was against Nazism and their treatment of the Jews and not against America. As he saw it, Julius was helping an American ally (Russia) to fight an American enemy (Germany). The book is also interesting in showing the precautions spies take in their meetings. At a time when Communism was a hot topic in the early 1950's it is questionable whether the Rosenbergs received the fairness they deserved. The book covers much more including Feklisov's role along with John Scali during the Cuban Missile Crisis, but I'll limit my review to the case of the Rosenbergs since that is the part of the book I was most interested in.

The Man Behind The Rosenbergs is the personal and candid memoir of Alexander Feklisov, a KGB spymaster. This fascinating, compelling account in Feklisov's own words relates his claims of a close friendship to Julius Rosenberg (whom Feklisov felt was wrongly executed) and his duty as a secret messenger who helped bring to an end the terrifying tension of the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962. Especially recommended for students of "Cold War" era, The Man Behind The Rosenbergs is a revealing, gripping narrative, impossible to put down from first page to last!

In "A Russian Gentleman" (also known as "A Family Chronicle," which is both a more accurate description of the work and a more accurate translation of the original title), Sergei Aksakov narrates a few episodes in his family's history from the time that his paternal grandfather Stepan decided to move to the Russian Empire's spacious southeastern provinces until the time of the 1791 birth of Sergei himself. The chronicle is divided into five "sketches": the first discusses the move east and calls upon a few anecdotes to introduce the very fiery-tempered but (we are assured) good-hearted character of Stepan; the second recounts the marriage of Stepan's beloved ward Parasha at the age of 15 to a brutal scoundrel and recalls Stepan's heroic rescue of Parasha from near death at her husband's hands; and the last three discuss the meeting, wedding, and early married years of Sergei's parents, especially emphasizing the difficulties both had in gaining acceptance by their respective in-laws.

Aksakov refers to himself not as a novelist but as a "chronicler of oral tradition," and the book very strongly retains that feel throughout, bringing us more intimately into the concerns and struggles within the family than an author who only had recourse to his or her imagination realistically could. While most of the characters are fairly well-drawn, the two most memorable ones are Stepan and Aksakov's mother (named Marya in real life and Sofya in the book), the latter of whom shows a great deal of both familial devotion and intelligence without ever seeming to be unrealistically glorified.

The portrayal of Stepan (the "Russian Gentleman" whom translator J.D. Duff chose to recast as the title character) seems a little more suspect, which is unsurprising since Stepan died when Sergei was five years old, so that Sergei had to rely almost exclusively on questionably-accurate oral accounts of Stepan's doings many years after the fact in order to get a sense of his character. Throughout the work, pretty much all of Stepan's attributes are carried to at-times implausible extremes. Early on, Aksakov portrays Stepan during his angry spells as nothing less than a madman who obliges his whole family to hide from him for days on end, but at the same time as a brilliant judge of character (which Sergei seems to extrapolate merely from the fact that Stepan was the only member of the household to disapprove of Parasha's husband and to approve of Sofya). In the last sketch, Stepan doesn't even care whether his granddaughters live or die but dreams constantly of a grandson; while Stepan was surely eager to have his "noble and ancient name" carried on, one gets the sense that the picture painted in the book is more a reflection of the vanity of the author (who was Stepan's first grandson) than of Stepan's actual feelings (at least, one hopes so).

All the same, part of the charm of oral tradition lies in the exaggeration that comes along with it, and the particular items which get exaggerated can tell us a good deal about the psychology of the storyteller and the values of the culture. As such, A Russian Gentleman gives us an enjoyable and informative glimpse at life among the traditional middling gentry in Imperial Russia at a pivotal point in that country's history.

Those who think the "Russian classics" are huge books should take a look at this very enjoyable book, a combination of fiction and memoir. The shift from the "heroic" age of the Russian patriarch to the domestic and more feminine world of his successors is interesting. Dostoevsky is urban; try this as one of the depictions of the Russian countryside. A keeper.

This is an accurate,clear and very well documented Biography
that is worth for everyone who is interested in the composer and accessible to the uninitiated.
The requirement for brevity compelled the author to
fly rather fast over Prokofiev childood. The best and most amazing source for this period is the composer own autobiography
Prokofiev by Prokofiev now unavailable. I suggest to read both if you can find Prokofiev own autobiography used or in a public library.
The early years are very essential and enlightening even if not from a strict musicologist point of view.
The photos in this book are very beautiful and well coupled with the text. In some cases they speak alone.For example the very expressing '46 photo with other soviet composers included Shostakovich is worth the price of the book for an almost fanatic Prokofiev(&Shostakovich) lover.
Personally I would have prefered a less fastened and concise
overlook. Such a life deserves a narration that leaves you breathless. This is not achieved by Jaffé biography.
He gives well structured information but he doesn't pretend to offer good literature . I would have both, but maybe I ask too
much and the alternatives aren't better written,for what I know(they 're only less concise and more aproximative). Probably only the massive Dorigné Biography (available only in french) can stand up.
So I strongly suggest this book.

This is another solid entry in Phaidon's 20th Century Composers series -- heavy-stock paper and great photos (including one of his first performance of "Peter and the Wolf" for a group of children) add to Jaffe's text. Jaffe offers the best answer I've found (searching through several books) to the question of why Prokofiev returned to Russia at the height of Stalin's terror. Apparently it was a combination of homesickness, vanity, political naivete, and aesthetic theory. The Soviet regime promised Prokofiev an exceptional privileged status, which appealed to his vanity -- he was overshadowed by Stravinsky in the West, where he never felt he was properly appreciated. And the turn to "social realism," forced on Soviet artists by Stalin, coincided with Prokofiev's voluntary turn away from modernism toward simplicity, melody, and populist narratives. I enjoy both the early and late Prokofiev, but I can see the point of those who claim that his later works are more accomplished. While his music is not on the cutting edge, and thus he was never a critics' darling, Prokofiev's music is marvelous.

This is the best single book available at the moment for anyone who wants to know more about one of the greatest early 20th century composers!

I am a music student in college, and this book was a Godsend for me when I found a Rachmaninoff song I wanted to sing. Not many musicians in the US know Russian and this book made pronounciation very easy. The word for word translation was also very important. I think all college music libraries should have this book.

I had no idea where to begin when I began working on my Rachmaninoff song. Then, I found this book and it did wonders for me. It is clearly the most complete and best organized guide to pronouncing Russian. I recommend it for anyone who is interested in singing in Russian. It is a little costly if you are only doing a few songs, but the trouble, frustration and anguish it will save you is well worth it.

As a brutal manipulator of people, there are few historical figures that can match Joseph Stalin. However, there was a time when he was not absolute ruler of Russia. There was a key point in the early thirties when the block of remaining old Bolsheviks seemed to be coming together with some of the newer figures to mount attacks on Stalin to reduce his power or even have him removed as leader. This opposition was jelling around Sergei Kirov, the leader of the Leningrad party and a member of the ruling Politburo. In 1934, Kirov was assassinated by a dissident party member, thereby removing the focus of the anti Stalin opposition.
In this book, the author describes the events of the crime in great detail, including how, in a very short time, the witnesses also began dying, as well as those who witnessed their dying. After describing the events, Conquest goes to great lengths to present an even-handed reconstruction and finally conclude that the murder and subsequent deaths of all others involved were at the orders of Stalin himself. While you cannot help but admire his principles in avoiding any leap to the result, there is no question Stalin was the force behind the events and that conclusion can be reached well before the author does.
In criminal trials, circumstantial evidence can be very convincing and in this case it is overwhelmingly so. The pattern of deaths and forced confessions of high ranking officials is clearly one that could not have been managed by anyone not possessing power on the order of Stalin. Having Kirov murdered was the first step in his final movement to absolute power and he of course succeeded, with consequences that destroyed many people.
Stalin was responsible for the death of millions of Soviet citizens at the hands of their fellow citizens, all directly traceable to his policies. However, there is one death that stands out and made more difference than all the others. This is an account of how that death took place, and is an example of how power can be executed by a policy of execution. It is an excellent example of how the Soviet Union was governed under one of the most brutal men the human race has produced.

Stalin hatched a devious plot to assassinate his comrade in arms Sergei Kirov. The " Congress of Victors" , that is the Congress of the Communist Party which celebrated the fulfillment of the First 5-year Plan, convened and secretly voted to have Stalin replaced. This was a secret protest vote against the brutality used enforcing Stalin's 5-year plan, which involved the starvation of 7 million in the Ukraine, millions more sent to the gulag to perish in slave labor, as well as millions of deportations of peoples to remote resettlement areas. All the while the Soviet regime was exporting grain in exchange for Western industrial expertise and machinery in order to comply with Stalin's massive heavy industrial buildup. It is for these reasons that the Congress secretly voted for Sergei Kirov to replace Stalin as the leader of the Bolshevik regime. Stalin's leadership was considered disastrous. Kirov was one of the most popular Bolshevik leaders, and therefore wa! ! s the choice of the Congress. Stalin had the vote falsified, and after the Congress adjourned, plotted to avenge himself against the 1000 members of the Congress and against Kirov personally. He plotted with his secret police, and then carried out an incredibly bold assassination of Kirov. He then launched one phony investigation after another in which he blamed the act of terror on different groups. He created an hysterical witchhunt atmosphere, which he used as the basis for his purges and show-trials of the thirties. All in all, there were four different phony explanations that were carefully laid out one after the other over time to explain Kirov's assassination. But the real criminal was none other than Stalin himself. During the purges of the thirties, almost every member of the "Congress of Victors" was murdered, thus earning them the title "Congress of Victims". This book puts the issue of Stalin's guilt, long suspected, beyond doubt, and is also ! ! a fascinating crime story. Robert Conquest is one of the to! p scholars of the Stalinist tyranny. Since the book was written before the fall of communism, the newly opened secret Russian archives will supply fascinating confirmation of this book.