Book Description
This invaluable book provides a pointed introduction to the fascinating subject of bottom-up nanotechnology with emphasis on the molecular-based study of condensed matter in small systems. Nanotechnology has its roots in the landmark lecture delivered by the famous Nobel Laureate physicist, Richard Feynman, on 29 December 1959 entitled "There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom." By the mid-1980s, it had gained real momentum with the invention of scanning probe microscopes. Today, nanotechnology promises to have a revolutionary impact on the way things are designed and manufactured in the future.
Principles of Nanotechnology is self-contained and unified in presentation. It may be used as a textbook by graduate students and even ambitious undergraduates in engineering, and the biological and physical sciences who already have some familiarity with quantum and statistical mechanics. It is also suitable for experts in related fields who require an overview of the fundamental topics in nanotechnology. The explanations in the book are detailed enough to capture the interest of the curious reader, and complete enough to provide the necessary background material needed to go further into the subject and explore the research literature. Due to the interdisciplinary nature of nanotechnology, a comprehensive glossary is included detailing abbreviations, chemical formulae, concepts, definitions, equations and theories.
Customer Reviews:
A very useful book.......2005-08-16
Reviewer: Juan Carlos Martin Escobar-Remolina
This is a very useful book, particularly for researchers and graduate students. It explains principles of nanotechnology, Monte Carlo and molecular simulation. Some are familiar but many are not described in detail elsewhere. The review of the literature is very comprehensive and up-to-date. The book is unified in presentation. The explanation is excelent from the computer science point of view.
Book Description
"The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there."
Summering with a fellow schoolboy on a great English estate, Leo, the hero of L. P. Hartley's finest novel, encounters a world of unimagined luxury. But when his friend's beautiful older sister enlists him as the unwitting messenger in her illicit love affair, the aftershocks will be felt for years. The inspiration for the brilliant Joseph Losey/Harold Pinter film starring Julie Christie and Alan Bates, The Go-Between is a masterpiece—a richly layered, spellbinding story about past and present, naiveté and knowledge, and the mysteries of the human heart. This volume includes, for the first time ever in North America, Hartley's own introduction to the novel.
Customer Reviews:
Quo Vadis?.......2005-11-29
This is a fine, well-penned book, dealing, ultimately, with loss of innocence and with human selfishness and self-deception. But I'm not so sure that all this twaddle about the horrors of the Twentieth Century and what many readers, and certainly Hartley himself, regarded as the motif for this work (to wit, "The Past is a different Country. They do things differently there.") will really do. It reminds me of Tolstoy's remark that small minded people think that the human condition changes with each generation.
Hartley was more than a bit of a blimp (Americans, read "reactionary") in his later years, and most of his later novels are deservedly forgotten because of their tendentious invectives against the modern world.---He frequently went out of his way to refer to the Working Classes as the "WCs" -another blimpish drollery which I shan't bother to explain to my Transatlantic cousins not familiar with "water closets."
I was raised in upper middle class England during the age of tellies and all sorts of talk about sex. Yet, I still feel that, if confronted, as Leo was, with a similar situation at his age, I would have responded, inwardly and outwardly, much the same: Found myself enchanted with the lovely Marian, awed by the viscount, etc This is why this book, unlike Hartley's other later works, has stood the test of time, it truly does touch on things universal, even if one of those things is nostalgia.
A superb examination of youthful naivete.......2005-10-06
Leo Colston is an exceptionally naive 12-year old when he goes to spend many weeks one early 20th century summer at a friend's English country home. Soon he becomes caught up in the comings and goings of two lovers with a world of class differences between them. Yet he still manages to retain his innocence, a situation author L. P. Hartley makes completely believable. Hartly pulls off the enviable trick of making Leo three-dimensional and fully fleshed-out despite his youth and his obtuseness. This ability to be unruffled by the passions around him is employed as a devastating counterpoint to the emotional implosion that rocks the family when the lovers are exposed.
My only real complaint with the book was the introduction of Leo as a grown man towards the end. It felt tacked on, and as though the book would have been better without it--as a sort of fever dream, beautifully written and left alone to stand on its own without the hard addition of reality and adulthood.
Deeply psychological novel.......2004-10-23
Reminiscent of BRIDESHEAD REVISITED, THE GO-BETWEEN is a very similar coming of age tale. Two young school friends spend a summer together, and one of the two carries love notes between two young lovers. Ultimately this leads to a tragic suicide. Fans of psychological literary fiction, and such authors as Iris Murdoch, Ian McEwan, etc., will greatly enjoy this story.
Easy to see why this book is still a classic!.......2004-07-22
On the surface this is a story about a boy's unwitting involvement in facilitating a love affair at the turn of the century (1899 or so), told retrospectively by that boy as a man in his 60s.
On a deeper level one could say it's about our capacity for self-deception, or about the agonies of going from the intense and uncomplicated pleasures of childhood to the tortuous emotions of adulthood. But this makes the book sound detached and overly literary, which it's definitely not. It's involving and dramatic instead.
Hartley's commanding style makes this story extremely gripping; because it's told in retrospect the narrator is as articulate as an adult, yet the emotions expressed (and somehow the ones the reader feels) are the intense and confused ones of a child. Everything seems vivid and yet nothing is completely understandable, just as it is for us as children.
This lends the book a very bittersweet feeling and a magnificent aura of mystery. It's hard to imagine this book will ever go out of style.
Totally convincing.......2004-04-13
A tale of innocence betrayed, in which a school boy is used as go-between in an affair between the lady he worships and a farmer. A vivid picture of Edwardian England, in which the natural ebullience, complacency and optimism of the age give way to emotional defeat for all concerned. Also a good movie, with a screenplay by Harold Pinter.
Average customer rating:
- The Past Is A Foreign Country
- Fascinating stuff
- High, low and in-between
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The Go-Betweens
David Nichols
Manufacturer: Verse Chorus Press
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ASIN: 1891241168 |
Book Description
The Go-Betweens recorded six albums in the 1980s that are among the finest work of the decade, and earned them a reputation as "the ultimate cult band." And as a reviewer of the original 1997 edition of this book noted, "Unlike most rock groups, the Go-Betweens had personalities as well as talent"—which makes for a compelling read, even if you're not yet a fan.
David Nichols relates the Go-Betweens story with wit and verve, and for this new edition he has completely updated the book, adding chapters on the members' subsequent solo careers in the 1990s, the recent reuniting of Forster and McLennan under the Go-Betweens name, and the band's flourishing second life in the new millennium.
Customer Reviews:
The Past Is A Foreign Country.......2007-09-01
In my early days behind the counter at HMV Southend the company used to let you borrow stuff to take home. You were allowed to remove up to three items from the shelves every night as long as you brought them back the next day. In theory it was a way to discourage staff theft but it also encouraged some of us to broaden our music and movie knowledge. The first albums I ever listened to by Bob Dylan, Frank Zappa, John Coltrane, Tim Buckley and many more were those I took home from work. Dylan couldn't sing, Zappa was patchy, Coltrane and Buckley became stalwarts of my music collection.
Regrettably, but inevitably, the system was stopped when it emerged that loads of people were using it to wander off with Beatles and Led Zeppelin box sets and never return them. But luckily this was not before I borrowed a cassette that was to change my life forever.
I have to be completely honest and confess that I only selected The Go Betweens: 1978-1990 because I liked the cover. I have always had a soft spot for sunlight filtered through leaves. I was aware of the band, I could probably have sung the chorus to Streets Of Your Town and realised they were from Australia, but didn't really know anything else about them. This tape was a collection of singles, classic album tracks and rarities and had been released just as the band split up.
I was captivated on first listen. I remember playing it all night long in my tiny bedroom in a shared house in Chalkwell. It was like nothing else I had ever heard but at the same time was like all the great music I had absorbed over the years. It was a new take on an old sound: the songs were catchy, the lyrics were witty and sharp, and there was a certain knowing swagger to the delivery. I loved it and borrowed the tape every weekend for months (we never sold it), realising after a while that I knew all the songs by heart without ever having tried to do so.
This introduction was, as it happened, an odd approach to the Go-Betweens. I was effectively falling in love with their very best songs as well as their `lesser' tracks at the same time. I wasn't really getting a flavour of the band album by album in the way that original fans would have done.
Not that it mattered. I was hooked. And anyway, there was plenty of time to do that later, as I subsequently did.
The band went through many incarnations but were always centred around the songwriting duo of Robert Forster and Grant McLennan. Forster, all angular posing and art-rock, was the thoughtful one with the sharp turn of phrase. McLennan was the film-buff who wrote the catchy pop tunes. Their work was admired and revered by many, the critics loved them, they were seen as easily the equal of The Smiths, their great contemporaries. But here's the thing. They never had a single hit. Not one of their albums during the 70s or 80s made the chart, nor did any of them spawn a Top 40 single. And that went for Australia too. Forster was once asked to reveal the answer to the most commonly asked question from the many interviews he had given over the years - `well, The Smiths tried' was his response.
Not having grown up with the band - I was 7 when they formed and only just getting into The Cure and Talking Heads when their most successful albums were released - I had not been exposed to television appearances, live shows, magazine articles or interviews. By the time I did discover them it was 1990, the internet wasn't around so there was no obvious way to find anything out. I had to go by sleeve notes and the odd snippet in the press when their solo albums started to appear.
So David Nichols' biography of the band, by no means official but with the begrudging help of the main protagonists, had been on my wish list for some time. So long in fact that it was a revised and updated edition that I eventually received for Christmas last year. Having waited so long to get hold of it, it only took me a day to read. A band's entire career absorbed and devoured in a lazy day within a hammock.
As rock biogs go this is pretty reasonable stuff. It can only be as good as the story it has to tell, and whilst the Go-Betweens were hardly the most outrageous of bands there was enough sex and drugs and fights to make things interesting. The author interjects a little too often with his own views on songs and albums, much of which were at odds with my own so annoyed me, and he isn't a great prose stylist so there is no danger of getting lost in wonderful passages of writing but as a chronological account of their career it does the job very well.
The book itself is in that glossy large format with shiny heavy pages so common with music books. Quite why the publishers of this sort of fare can't produce standard B-formats are beyond me. I am sure they'd sell more if they looked like `real' books as opposed to cut and paste jobs.
The story of the Go-Betweens in this book ends in 2003 when they had released their second comeback album, Bright Yellow Bright Orange. Little did anyone know at the time that there would be only one more release from the band, the Oceans Apart album of 2005 which many see as their finest work, a culmination of nearly 30 years of songwriting.
Grant McLennan died of a heart attack in May of last year, he was just 48 years old. His was the first death to really affect me in any deep way. His music was the soundtrack to my 20s, the decade in which I really grew up and found out what life was about, and his loss resounds around the house each time I play a Go-Betweens song, something I do almost every week.
(Originally reviewed on the Me And My Big Mouth blog)
Fascinating stuff.......2006-03-07
Reading their background, it's easy to see why those GoBs boys turned out the way they did...becoming artists was really the only route for them. Their saga as a band, as has been noted before (particularly with the comparisons of 16 Lovers Lane to Rumours) is much like that of Fleetwood Mac's, given that virtually everybody in the band slept with everybody else. The only difference is the GoBs saga is interesting...
How did they ever, given their artsy, elitist and androgynous ways, avoid a pummelin' at the hands of some of those brutish, thuggy, beer soaked hooligan types you know all those towns in Australia had to be crawling with? Bully for them that they did.
Kudos to the author, for his erudite scholarship. If not for him, the world would have no way of knowin' this stuff...though, I don't agree with some of his critical assessments. For instance, "Horsebreaker Star" is pretty much GM's best solo work and stands with anything the GoBs did. Not so, according to the author - he deems it a failure. He also doesn't, apparently, rate 16 Lovers Lane as high as I do. Reading between the lines, it seems to me that he's dissing it for being a commercial move. I think it's simply the best thing they've ever done and one of the few truly perfect rock/pop albums in existence.
No matter though - if you're a GoBs fan, this book is a compelling experience that'll have you combing through your record collection to re-experience all the thrills the author describes....
High, low and in-between.......2003-06-09
The book is old news now, however, such is the alure of good music, the band -and this biography- only happened to me much later than the event (note that an updated of the book is planned sometime soon as the bands two songwriters have since reformed as The Go-betweens). David Nichols, a Melbourne writer and some-times musician, tells us in the preface that he began the book with the question as to why people start bands, a seemingly strange premise but he succeeds in showing the apparent cultural vacuum that was Brisbane in the late 1970s through numerous and detailed chapters concerning the genisis of the band. These early chapters in the book are by far the best: several funny anecdotes and personal insights into the founding members of the band and punk music in an ultra-conservative Queensland make for a great read, especially for obsessives of the band such as myself (they are not really a band to have a casual acquaintance with). The latter chapters are much thinner by comparison, which is a shame for their music only (or arguably) got better as the eighties progressed. As relationships in the band begin to deterirate and band politics come to the fore, its as if Nichols loses interest in his subject, the original premise not loose enough to sustain an even and truly thorough examination. There is no question that the author has a great passion for the band and its music (it literally shines through in the first chapters which I have read repeatedly), it is just that the angle comes off as a little superficial as not a lot of insight is given to what makes the bands music and albums so special. Four stars for the first half alone though.
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The GO BETWEEN
Hest
Manufacturer: Simon & Schuster Children's Publishing
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
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ASIN: 0027436322 |
Customer Reviews:
Delightfully witty........2006-07-13
Philip St. Ives of New York City is a professional go-between. That is to say when something of great value is stolen, St. Ives can be depended upon to act as an honest broker when the robber offers to sell the stolen goods back to the original owner. In this particular instance, a priceless African ceremonial shield made of brass has been stolen from a Washington, DC museum and the ransom price is $250,000.
Of course, nothing is as it appears and before St. Ives can make the exchange, a number of people wind up dead. The intriguing thing about St. Ives that sets him apart from most other literary gumshoes is his very sensible adversion to risking his own neck. A refreshing characteristic not often encountered in the ever expanding universe of fictional investigators.
The Brass Go-Between is an outstanding example of detective fiction. As in all Ross Thomas novels there is a plentiful supply of cynical humor and urbane, witty dialogue. Moreover, the story is well plotted and has a surprising ending. Highly recommended.
Ross Thomas was the best........2000-06-06
Maybe you have to read a lot of dreck to appreciate what a good, solid storyteller Ross Thomas was. In this book you have the perfect example of how a master performs his craft. He draws real characters because he has considered that how people behave, speak, dress and think defines who they are. The protagonist Philip St. Ives is never described in any of the novels, but, though his first-person narrative Thomas gives the reader a clear picture of who this person is. The action, violence and greed in this novel is very real. Since the book involved a "kidnapping" of sorts it is not short on chicanery or action, both of which keep the action humming along. But Thomas keeps the characters real all along. That made me concerned about the outcome of the violence (I even wanted some of the "bad guys" to survive).
Average customer rating:
- "I had betrayed them all...Just what the consequences had been I neither knew nor wished to know."
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The Go-between (Penguin Modern Classics)
L.P. Hartley
Manufacturer: Penguin Books Ltd
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
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ASIN: 0141187786 |
Customer Reviews:
"I had betrayed them all...Just what the consequences had been I neither knew nor wished to know.".......2006-07-29
Resembling both Ian McEwan's Atonement and Michael Frayn's Spies in its plot, this 1953 novel, recently reprinted, tells of a pre-adolescent's naive meddling in the love lives of elders, with disastrous results. Set in the summer of 1900, when the hopes and dreams for the century were as yet untarnished by two world wars and their subsequent horrors, this novel is quietly elegant in style, its emotional upheavals restrained, and its 12-year-old main character, Leo Colston, so earnest, hopeful, and curious about life that the reader cannot help but be moved by his innocence.
Leo's summer visit to a friend at Brandham Hall introduces him to the landed gentry, the privileges they have assumed, and the strict social behaviors which guide their everyday lives. Bored and wanting to be helpful when his friend falls ill, Leo agrees to be a messenger carrying letters between Marian, his host's sister, and Ted Burgess, her secret love, a farmer living nearby.
Catastrophe is inevitable--and devastating to Leo. In descriptive and nuanced prose, Hartley evokes the heat of summer and the emotional conflicts it heightens, the intensity rising along with the temperature. Magic spells, creatures of the zodiac, and mythology create an overlay of (chaste) paganism for Leo's perceptions, while widening the scope of Hartley's focus and providing innumerable parallels and symbols for the reader.
The emotional impact of the climax is tremendous, heightened by the author's use of three perspectives--Leo Colston, the speaker, as a man in his 60's, permanently damaged by events when he was 12; Leo as a 12-year-old, wrestling with new issues of class, social obligation, friendship, morality, and love, while inadvertently causing a disaster; and the reader himself, for whom hindsight and knowledge of history create powerful ironies as he views these events and the way of life they represent.
Some modern critics have commented on Leo's unrealistic innocence in matters of sex, even as a 12-year-old, but this may be a function of age. For those of us who can remember life without TV and the computer, it is not so far-fetched to imagine a life in which "mass communication" meant the telegraph and in which love and love-making were adults-only secrets. Mary Whipple
Book Description
"Based on a broad array of sources, including extensive archival research, this book presents a provocatively new interpretation of indigenous-European relations in Portuguese America, as they unfolded over the course of the sixteenth century.... The topic is fascinating and the sources extremely rich and suggestive."
—John Monteiro, Anthropology Department, UNICAMP, Brazil, and Visiting Professor of History, Harvard University
Doña Marina (La Malinche) ...Pocahontas ...Sacagawea—their names live on in historical memory because these women bridged the indigenous American and European worlds, opening the way for the cultural encounters, collisions, and fusions that shaped the social and even physical landscape of the modern Americas. But these famous individuals were only a few of the many thousands of people who, intentionally or otherwise, served as "go-betweens" as Europeans explored and colonized the New World.
In this innovative history, Alida Metcalf thoroughly investigates the many roles played by go-betweens in the colonization of sixteenth-century Brazil. She finds that many individuals created physical links among Europe, Africa, and Brazil—explorers, traders, settlers, and slaves circulated goods, plants, animals, and diseases. Intercultural liaisons produced mixed-race children. At the cultural level, Jesuit priests and African slaves infused native Brazilian traditions with their own religious practices, while translators became influential go-betweens, negotiating the terms of trade, interaction, and exchange. Most powerful of all, as Metcalf shows, were those go-betweens who interpreted or represented new lands and peoples through writings, maps, religion, and the oral tradition. Metcalf's convincing demonstration that colonization is always mediated by third parties has relevance far beyond the Brazilian case, even as it opens a revealing new window on the first century of Brazilian history.
Customer Reviews:
Interesting, insightful.......2006-03-09
Brazilian colonialism is unlike its sisters in other places. Unlike the Americas the natives were not exterminated or removed. Unlike Africa, race did not divide people in sexual relations. In short Brazil was a hybrid. It was a hybrid because of the all important 'go betweens' that this book examines, the priests, slaves and natives who lived together and worked together and produced off spring together. An interesting book.
Seth J. Frantzman
Book Description
William Coleman shows parents and their adult children how to enjoy each other, and develop and nurture the kind of mutual respect that draws them together in love, not duty. Filled with helpful and practical applications that will guide both adult child and parent to a more satisfying and harmonious relationship.
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