The authors present a self-contained treatment of the geometry of length spaces. They begin with the definition of length spaces, and by the final chapter cover almost all of the material in the well known survey paper by Burago, Gromov, and Perel'man. Overall, the book provides an interesting and and accessible introduction to an important class of spaces (length spaces arise as limits of sequences of Riemannian manifolds). I found it exceedingly interesting that one can build analogues of most of the concepts from Riemannian geometry using only the intrinsic metric. There is great emphasis on exposition in this book; Burago makes great effort to motivate definitions and provide interesting examples. The reader is cautioned, however, that numerous typographic errors are to be found (some in fundamental definitions).

My only complaint is the uneveness of the treatment. The authors spend two chapters developing some of the basic tools of Riemannian geometry in the setting of surfaces in R^3. It seems unlikely to me that a reader who is interested in length spaces would not already have at least passing aquaintence with Riemannian geometry. This, however, is a minor point, and I can recommend the book very highly.

Aksakov's book belongs in the rich tradition of memoirs. It is the kind of book in which the author tries to "recover" those days of learning and growing up, which made us be what we are. Sincerity and honesty are crucial to accomplish the task, and in this book, Aksakov gets the upper hand. The style is dry, but not boring; the images are beautiful, both in moments of joy and of sorrow. Inevitably, Aksakov's voice is nostalgic: he longs to be there once again, trodding the streets and rural roads he used to walk with people long gone. His style is practical and direct, and there is not an excess of ornamentation or digressions. Besides, it is an interesting glimpse into life in Russia during the Nineteenth century, full of memorable moments and images.

The authors have done an excellent job of presenting the method of discrete vortices. If you require a very thorough, mathematically intensive presentation of votex lattice theory, including the requirements for numerical stability this book will provide it.

The book requires a very good mathematical background if the book is going to be of use. I would recommend the book for those studying at post graduate level and higher in fields of computational fluid mechanics.

If you landed here through a title or subject search, you've probably already seen this book in the library. You have my sympathy on learning that it is out of print. (If you came here through my personal page, I'm flattered!) This is a book of photographs of Russia from the decade before World War I. Thing is, these are mostly _color_ pictures. This early color process produced images that are about as good as the color photos in the Sunday newspaper today. The photographer, S. M. Prokudin-Gorskii, showed the images in the form of a slide show to Tsar Nikolai II, in hopes of having similar exhibitions in Russian schools.

The subject matter is fairly prosaic. The images are postcard views of rustic villages, broad rivers, wooden dams, happy peasants at work and at leisure, exotic Caucasian and central Asian tribespeople in colorful native dress, lots of onion-domed churches and shrines. Prokudin-Gorskii meant these pictures to show the pageantry and glory of Mother Russia.

Today, they are painful reminders of a world that has been smashed forever. The peasants would die in the Great War, or starve in the postwar famines, or butcher each other in the Civil War, or be executed in the Red Terror. The public works would go to ruin due to the incompetence of the commissars who would run them after the bourgeois engineers had been eliminated. The colorful tribespeople would be exiled. The churches would be looted and demolished. The peaceful meadows would be paved over by ill-conceived, gigantic heavy industrial plants. The villages would be burned by civil war and foreign invasions. Seeing all these images which look like they were taken yesterday, and knowing the fate that awaited their subjects, is quite an experience.

Contrast this book to another book of pre-war Russian color photographs, _Leonid Andreyev, Photographs of a Russian Writer_. His vision is much more personal, but no less poignant.

A great introduction to the life and works of Sergei Rachmaninoff. This book is geared towards younger readers (teenagers) but adults will find the text and photographs to their liking as well.

Firstly, the name of Maestro is spelled -PARAJANOV- with "J" and NOT -paradjanov- with "dj". Visit Parajanov.com for details.

The authors claim that the book is the first to appear in English, which is probably true, however it ISN'T really by Sergei Parajanov, but is simply a partial collection and translation of just 7 of his scenarios.

The last scenario in this book is "Confession", the last and unfinished film of Parajanov. Sadly, it is missing the very 1st page, where Parajanov himself outlines the film with his out-of-this-world vocabulary. This page is essential in understanding the scenario and the film. Visit Parajanov.com for more info.

The book has some interesting biographical facts, however some still have to be verified and some are not quite so accurate. The book also has Parajanov's filmography, with a few mistakes in translation of the film titles and the year of film release.

The book is very small 4x6 with only one, poor photograph on the cover. In short Maestro Parajanov is worth far better quality. In fact he is worth only the very BEST.

This book is not for those who wish to learn about Parajanov. The ones that know Parajanov and his art may be disappointed. On a positive note the authors should be thanked for simply trying to translate as best as they could the "untranslatable" Parajanov!

Parajanov.com would like to thank you for your interest in Maestro Sergei Parajanov.

I am the translator of "Seven Visions" and would like to comment on a couple of the points made by the preceding reviewer.

First of all, "Seven Visions" does not pretend to be *about* Paradjanov; it is a collection of seven of his scenarios, as clearly stated on the back cover. It is indeed *by* Paradjanov in that he is the author of the scenarios in question, and that he intended them to be published together in book form. Those wanting a biographical and/or aesthetic study of Paradjanov and his work, with photographs of the artist and stills from his films, may wish to consult Patrick Cazals' "Serguei Paradjanov," in the Cahiers du cinéma collection.

Film release dates were all drawn from Western and Soviet sources, including both books and periodicals on cinema. Every effort was made to insure their accuracy. The same is true regarding the integrity of translation. As for the "missing page" from "The Confession," I worked from what was to my knowledge the only published version of this scenario, which I translated in its entirety. In that version, "The Confession" contains no additional pages or material of any kind.

Finally, concerning the spelling of his name, "Paradjanov" (with a "d") is the standard Western transliteration. It is also written without the "d," albeit less frequently.

Regrettably, it was not possible for me to post this clarification without rating my own translation.

Unless as one writer suggests, new documentation with the credibility to give the information credence is introduced, this book offers very little in any event. There were some photographs that I had not seen in other books, and the floor plan and the alleged positioning of security was interesting. For this book to suggest this killing has the same mystery surrounding the Kennedy assassination is absurd.

There are many who believe that Kennedy was not solely the victim of Oswald, and while one can speculate who actually pulled the trigger in the case of the murder of Kirov, it is the less important part of the incident, what Soviet History might have been under Kirov is the story.

Kirov embodied many things that Stalin did not and could not emulate; he was charismatic, "The People" truly liked the man, and he was not the disfigured paranoid maniac that was Stalin. When the fateful vote took place and Kirov had clearly become a rival to Stalin's power, it was only a question of how soon he would die, and how large the purge that followed his death would be. It would indeed be massive, for how else was Stalin to show how devastated and full of revenge he was, for the death of his "friend" Kirov? Stalin had no friends.

Stalin wanted Kirov dead, he ordered the killing, and whether the NKVD, or as is likely the poor guy they picked up and pinned it on actually did the killing, the killer is secondary. The story here is that Stalin could carry out the hit on Kirov, knowing he would be suspect number one, and further being 100% confident that no individual or group would accuse him, that is part of the interesting History here. The bloodbath that followed was just Stalin getting rid of more of his "enemies" real or mostly imagined.

If there were a book written for the purpose of identifying every killer Stalin employed, the number of books would run into the tens of millions. The fact that he could kill on such an unprecedented scale, that he could remain in control, that he managed to always have enough believers/supporters/future victims to back him is what fascinates. Kirov may have been the marquee kill of Stalin's reign, but he was just that, one more body

I would like to read a well written historically based work of fiction that posits what would have happened had Kirov not been killed, what if Stalin was blamed, what if Kirov took control of the former USSR. That is where the interest lies.

The title of this book is bordering on misleading. Nothing inside the book is as intriguing as the question asked on the cover wishes you to believe.

A very interesting biography of the Bolshevik leader Kirov, in counterpoint to Stalin. The author's research into formerly secret Soviet archival material shows that Kirov opposed Stalin in certain respects, which may have provided a motive for Stalin to have initiated a plot to assasinate Kirov. The book is more a political biography of Kirov than a whodunit, however. There are some bizarre circumstances to the Kirov murder, which this book details, such as the "accidental" death of Kirov's bodyguard while en route to be interrogated by the KGB. In sum, a very interesting book about a sinister and fascinating era in modern history.

Sergei Kirov's assassination in 1934 has often been compared to President Kennedy's assassination some 30 years later. Indeed both shared similarities such as inexplicable bullets and the murder of an eyewitness shortly afterwards. But whereas Kennedy's death led to the rise of LBJ and his "Great Society" initiatives, Kirov's death led directly to Stalin's great purges preceding World War II, with the Soviet slaughter of approximately a million individuals.

For many years, information surrounding Kirov has been shrouded in official secrecy. Now, however, much more information has been made available by the Russian government, and historian/researcher Amy Knight has delved into primary documentation that has been heretofore unavailable. Knight is no stranger to Russian historical research, and her experience pays off with an intriguing and fascinating story. Tracing Kirov's impoverished roots in the north, to his revolutionary political activities as a college student, through his meteoric rise in Bolshevik politics, and finally examining the mysterious circumstances surrounding his murder, Knight gives us a primer in early Soviet history and introduces us to the major historical characters who were intertwined in Kirov's life.

Inevitably, Stalin is implicated as being complicit in Kirov's death, and perhaps arranging it for political purposes. That Kirov's murder was used as an excuse to launch his purges is without doubt. Knight has done an exceptional job of research and has gone the extra mile to produce a readable and interesting book.

This short compilation of memoirs was published from the Karta Journal web site for Russian war veterans. The contributors include officers of the Spetznaz and air forces, and professional mercenaries. Basically, these are standard Soviet war memoirs: fairly impersonal accounts of battles, ambushes, casualties. Caravans of foreign weapons and jihadists constantly intercepted from Pakistan. The Afghan government forces ("tsarandoi") were considered soft targets by the rebel mujahedin ("dushmani"), and often proved to be of little help to their Soviet comrades. The book contains details of a couple of notorious massacres, in which Russian platoons were abandoned or even betrayed by their Afghan allies. And there are some curiously indifferent accounts of torture at the hands of mujahedin. Although translated from the veterans' own words, the anecdotes and interviews give little indication of their writers' emotions. The translation itself is barely adequate. The overall quality of the book is below average. It appears to have been printed on a Xerox machine. Pages alternate between text and illustrations, the latter consisting of small, badly-reproduced sketches and photos. There are approximately twenty different illos, which are repeated in series. Each one appears over a half-dozen times, apparently for the purpose of "padding" the contents. ...! Overall, these memoirs are interesting, and valuable as historical reference. ...

This book is a compilation of what Richard Taylor considers to be Eisenstiein's most important and relevant writing, not only on film but also on Russian history, politics, and Eisenstein's eclectic influences. While I think the book is very well put together, Eisenstein's writing itself can be esoteric and hard for the reader to decipher. However, if you can get past Eisenstein's puzzling language, you can glean a great deal of valuable insight into the work of a man who has been called one of the most influential directors of all time. I was most interested in Eisenstein's writings on other art forms that informed his film making, particularly Kabuki theatre and Japanese Haiku. However, if this is your first time reading about Soviet cinema, I would recommend starting with some of Taylor's other works such as The Film Factory or Inside the Film Factory.

Although sometimes listed as 228 pages, this oversized quarto (@ 9"x12") is really 225 pages plus title page and endpapers. There are 98 full color plates and 80 black and white plates, plus black and white photo illustrations illustrating the life and work of Ivan Bilibin, Russia's most famous turn-of-the- century artist and illustrator (1876-1942.)

The book includes 28 color illustrations from his best-known early period, including watercolor illustrations for "Vasilissa the Beautiful", 29 illustrations from his later work, including "The Golden Cockerel", 28 color examples of his theater design work and approximately 11 color examples of his landscape paintings (I'm missing 2 pages of my copy) in addition to black and white illustrations which include paintings by and of Bilibin.

A biography of the artist is, of course included. It provides a general overview of his life from his student days, his first commission to illustrate Russian folktales, his exile to Egypt following the Russian revolution, his work as a theater designer, his return to Russia in 1936 and his premature death during the siege of Leningrad during World War II.

The art is wonderful, but the book could be better organized.