Abstract Books

Very Good to create math problems and help my bro with math!

i want to read the answer of this book if i can take it please send to me to my email and help me

this is a very good guide for any serious elvis records collector or aficionado. Not only shows every official Elvis' cd,(Rca camdem budget, greatest hits...) even follow that dream editions and bootlegs and pirate recordings, with comments about the content of every recording, and of course complete song list of every album.A very help for every elvis fan. Good edition with all the covers printed in full color.

This book did not add anything to my collection of Elvis books at all. Yes, there are the standard issues of Elvis records in color, as well as many bootlegs featured. BUT, there are too many records missing to make this book the least complete. Many records are only featured with pictures, no track-listing, why? This information is very easy to obtain on the net. Seems research was very poor.
The bootlegs featured, are from the author's own collection. There are great color photos of the covers, and tracklistings on most of the records. But why limit the number of recorde to his own collection? Again, has there been made a research to complete the book with more material? No.

If you don't have a discography book with Elvis' records, you could buy it. If you have any before, this won't add much. If you don't have any bootleg discography, this book could be worth buying.
There are far too many much better books on the market.

Good introduction to the concepts of groups, rings, and fields. Those wanting information on Galois theory should consult more advanced books however.

I have only used this book as a reference for the class in Abstract Algebra. The book is certainly an introductory text for undergraduate studies. However, I would be very reluctant to use it though, since it is not as comprehensive as it should be. The contents of the book is very good and just by reading the contents you could get a feeling that this is the one, but certainly the text is not so abroad. The author discusses only some main principles and theories of the abstract algebra, where I believe for an undergradute text, in order to get a good first start with the subject, one would require something more detailed in explanation. Also, one of the main lapses is the structure of the book. There are some examples for every chapter or better to say topics covered, and there are solution to exercises at the end of the book. I think the book would be great if there was a little bit more detailed approach to the topics.

I already have Volume 2 of Dian Hanson's encyclopedic _History of Men's Magazines_, detailing what I believe to be the golden age of that genre (the 1950's), so I was really looking forward to getting Volume 1. This volume is presented just as beautifully as the other five volumes in the series, with lots of gorgeous full-page color and B&W photos.

However, there is a very big oversight, not to say error, in the material contained in this volume. Let me explain; Volume 1 bills itself as covering the history of men's magazines from 1900 to the period immediately after World War II. OK. So where are all the pictures from 1900 to the beginning of the 1920's? Certainly, there weren't very many magazines specializing in girlie art or photography before the Roaring Twenties, but France did have several, most notably the famous "La Vie Parisienne", which started publishing in, I believe, the 1870's and ran almost continuously for seven or eight decades. There was a LOT of first-class girlie art in that 'zine from the 1870's to the 1910's (including some classic art produced during World War I) that Hanson could have located and reproduced. Also, what about the Gibson Girl in "Life"? That's not strictly "girlie" art within the parameters set by this series, to be sure, but she was such an iconic figure that she should have gotten at least a couple of pictures. Or what about all the "French postcards" of the Gay Nineties and after? Those directly adumbrated the later girlie magazines, and also go unrepresented, at least in the pictures.

Furthermore, Hanson errs seriously in putting a large number of pictures from the 1950's and 1960's in a volume that is expressly _not_ dedicated to those decades (the 1960's, in fact, get two volumes later on in the series). She may have intended to show how girlie photography developed over the decades, but there was plenty of room later on in the series to do that. The space misappropriated to those pictures would much better have been allocated to the kind of imagery I described in the previous paragraph.

Sorry, Dian. I really like Volume 2. Volume 1, however, is a rather disappointing introduction to what should have been a definitive reference work on a little-studied genre.

I can't think of another publisher, other than Taschen, who would risk publishing a six-volume, extravagantly produced history of men's magazines and who better than Dian Hanson to write it. She has had plenty of experience in this section of the magazine trade.

This volume covers the fourteen years from 1945 and really it is not too interesting until Hefner starts Playboy in 1953. Until then the market was basically down-market cheesecake and burlesque oriented magazines though there are chapters devoted to John Willie's 'Bizarre' and Lenny Burtman's 'Exotique' but these were hardly mass-market titles. Chapter three, nicely, features titles from Argentina and Mexico and chapter six covers England. Playboy was the title that makes this history interesting, unique when it first came out but not for long, titles like Nugget, The Dude, Swank, Rogue and others made this genre of publishing sort of respectable.

The seventeen chapters follow the same format, a few hundred words of copy and then pages and pages of covers and spreads from the various titles. Chapter sixteen features the Top 5 Cover girls, Diane Webber, June Wilkinson, Jayne Mansfield, Bettie Page and predictably Marilyn as number one. Chapter seventeen is a neat finale, devoted to the tacky ads that appeared in the back of many men's titles. Major advertisers totally shunned most of this market for obvious reasons.

Fascinating though the book is I do have a major disappointment (so four stars) and that is the paper, a matt stock that soaks up the ink so that none of the covers sparkle. I've bought several other pop culture Taschen books this year and they have all had semi gloss stock that reproduces covers and illustrations so well. There are a few hundred color covers in 'The History of Men's Magazines' and frequently the whole page ones look soft and grainy, they are, after all, reproduced from something already printed, a different paper would have mostly avoided this. Another slight annoyance is the three-language text (English, French and German) all set in the same typeface so at the end of a column one naturally goes to the next column and it is German. To my mind it would have been preferable to run each language in its own text block.

Apart from the paper I thought the book was well worth having and if you
read the Product Description you'll see what the other five volumes cover.
When complete I think this will become the definitive work about this
corner of the publishing world. I'm already making shelf-room for the set.

The authors explain, with numerous photos, how to set up a 4'x4'x1' sandbox table, full of 1600 pounds of sand, all "floating" on partially inflated inner tubes for making your own holograms. That way, when the garbage truck goes past the house, no vibrations will disrupt the inertial stability of your optics lab. And you can put the lenses and mirrors on long sticks and just push them into the sandbox! This is a real how-to manual, with numerous practical tips for setting up lasers, mirrors, shutters, exposure meters, timers, viewing objects, and the hologram-capturing film that will become your own holograms, if you follow the steps and invest about $1000.

Where to buy lasers? How does it all work? How do I set up the tabletop? This is a lab manual that doesn't subject us to much optics math, but rather inspires us to marvel, and guides us with easy to follow sketches to find personal and expansive philosophical answers, without really telling us what we'! ! ll find when we have so followed. There is a even section on "the holographic brain", "holocosmology" and other artistic and philosophic excursions.

Wonderful photos show Dr. Dennis Gabor who conceived of a hologram in 1948, while working on the electron microscope, 13 years before the laser was invented. One shows him accepting the Nobel Prize. He looks a little like Salvador Dali.

This book could perhaps be the basis for a "hologram merit badge" for, say, a group of kids from ages 9-13, let by an adult who needs an excuse to actually set this all up. Laser safety is explained, too.

"These are the early days of holography," the author muses in the preface, "we might compare ourselves to photographers working prior to 1860....We welcome you, as a fellow pioneer, to join in the excitement of being involved in it from the beginning."

And you won't need much more than this book to delve deeply into this wizardry, either. W! ! ell, ok, the sand.

The idea of using a sand table for home holography keeps appearing over and over. As any optician knows, sand and grit are what are used to grind glasses, and they're also what cause people to buy new ones.

A sand-based optical bench sounds like a great (read "cheap") idea, but it's simply impossible to get rid of the floating grit. Even if it's later sealed up, pouring the sand gets grit all over. It only takes one tiny speck to throw Newton's rings all over a setup. OK, that's relatively harmless (unsightly, but harmless), but it could equally well get into and ruin a spatial filter.

I found the theory section of this book hard to follow, despite several degrees in engineering.

This is by no means a bad book. It has much useful information. Go to the library and borrow this one, then make use of the good parts. But buy Iovine's excellent book "Homemade Holograms" instead.

Standard material, and honestly, there are better texts out there, even online. The proofs are clear, but my feeling is that the author could have picked up speed a bit faster without sacrificing neither depth nor clarity. Look somewhere else or check it out in your library before buying.

I have had this book in a course in Galois correspondence. It was ok, but I felt that I should have had more group theory before I started with this book. I also missed solutions to the exercises given in the book. But all in all good book.

As a working politician over the past sixty years in the liberal wing of the Democratic Party, I experienced first-hand the sinister and underhanded role of Communists as putative allies and ultimate enemies. From the American Student Union in the 30's ("The Yanks are not Coming!) to the subversion of the McGovern campaign in 1972, American Communists, as disciplined and treacherous as their counterparts in Russia, sought violent Revolution as their doctrinaire goal under cover of a liberal "alliance" both here and more importantly in the unstable Fourth Republic. Gertje Utley's book, "Picasso, The Communist Years" shows bit by closely honed and researched bit, how Picasso lent his name and prestige to this debilitating process in France. With neither the background nor the political intellect to comprehend the logical consequences of his support for a repressive and hypocritical dictatorship, Picasso became the willing dupe of his Communist masters draining support for liberal political leaders and causes in France and elsewhere during the critical years of Communist dominance over the peoples of Eastern Europe. Utley connects Picasso's art and personality during this period with political views which were naive and egotistical in their origin and mischievous in their application. It is difficult to think of a greater challenge to an art historian than to attempt to describe the aberrational behavior of a great artist and the tangential effect of that behavior on his or her art. Utley's book is a readable and fascinating description of the macabre process by which Picasso was drawn into a realpolitik which aimed to destroy the very basis of his own artistic liberty.

This beautifully-illustrated book studies Pablo Picasso's artistic and political work after he joined the French Communist Party in 1944. `An illustrious son of democratic Spain', he opposed Franco, aided the resistance in Paris and championed France's post-war cultural renaissance.

Utley details Picasso's creative efforts and depicts the care and constant reworking with which he conceived, executed and reproduced his designs in different media, whether murals, paintings, sculptures, posters, postcards, prints, brooches, key chains or pottery. She disposes of the well-travelled lie that Picasso admitted that his work was all a blague, a trick played on the public. In fact, as she shows, the alleged conversation was drawn from Il Libro Nero, a collection of fictitious interviews written by Giovanni Papini.

Utley shows how `a strategy elaborated at the highest levels of the American government' presented the art of the New York School as a living manifestation of democracy as opposed to communism. The US state promoted Abstract Expressionism, to make New York supersede Paris as the capital of Western art. It promoted the notion of the Nietzschean artist, the individualistic, introspective genius in his ivory tower, free from all social and political concerns, casting Picasso as the `anti-artist', compromised because committed.

Yet this is a deeply anti-communist account of a good communist. Utley sneers at what she calls the communists' `illusory goal of bridging the gap between art and the people', and at `the inadequacies of the artistic policies and aspirations of the French Communist party'. It is clearly beyond the comprehension of the author, an American academic based at New York University, that Picasso was a loyal and active Party member for the rest of his long life - which says more about the author's limits than the subject's!

Her stale caricature of `repressive Party' and `servile member' fails completely to explain how people of the calibre of Picasso and his friends Paul Robeson, Pablo Neruda, Louis Aragon and Paul Eluard could be Party members. Were they all dupes? Unlike, say, an American academic, who cannot imagine how anyone cannot trust the US state?

Sean Scully has had a successful career for the past few decades painting what he loves most: line and bars of color that are immediately recognizable as his work but at the same time presenting an endless exploration of light and color using this format the way a conjurer would. His paintings have not varied in style but his palette his grown progressively more sophisticated.

This major volume by Thames and Hudson explores the life of Scully from the 1950s in England to his various studios throughout the world. Not only is the book filled with very fine color reproductions of his work, but it also enters his studios, showing us the artist as personality.

The text is by David Carrier and instead of the usual 'point and tell' manner of writing he uses the background of his experience as an art historian and critic to unveil the mysteries of Scully's paintings. This is not unlike the manner in which other writers have approached painters such as Mark Rothko, where the words enhance the appreciation of the wash of color that sweeps through this book. Highly recommended - the finest monograph on this uniquely successful painter. Grady Harp, December 06

Beautiful illustrations but all of the text is in French. I guess Thames and Hudson think only the French have an appreciation for great art.

How could I have lived for over 50 years before ever hearing of Maria Helena Vieira da Silva? Such events provide much evidence to support the theory that malign spirits guide our destinies.
This Portugese-French expressionist (actually closer to Tachisme and Surrealism) has created some wonderful paintings that would, to my mind, qualify her to be the official painter of libraries everywhere. Take a look at this, entitled "Bibliotheque" 1949, one of many paintings depicting the infinite universes contained in libraries.

[...]

Vieira da Silva has said: "When I paint a landscape or a seascape, I'm not very sure it's a landscape or a seascape. It's a thought form rather than a realistic form."
I give this volume only 4 stars simply because, although Taschen has done an admirable job in its production, and Gisela Rosenthal certainly does no worse than many in providing commentary, I can imagine a much more splendid book that would truly do justice to this creator of masterpieces. I will make it my quest to seek out and find.

This book gets off to a brilliant start, with Gisela Rosenthal covering Da Silva's childhood in ample detail and accounting to the reader some of her important childhood experiences (her father's death, her many tours of European art galleries) whose impact eventually infiltrated her artwork. Although few of the earliest works depicted in this collection hint at her later virtuosity, it is astonishing to learn at what an early age Da Silva was already a master of concept - able to discern the vital characteristics of each separate art movement, past and present, while using those ideas to vault her into a style uniquely her own. It is simply breathtaking to see her development of both style and ability throughout her early career, as each successive print in the first half of this book reveals a work of improved technique, greater cultural relevance, and heightened emotional impact.

Throughout the first half, the author communicates the major events of da Silva's life - her marriage to the artist Arpad, as well as their exile from France during the war - and in every case, does a fantastic job of interpreting the works created during these years, relating each work to both her life and the world around her. Given the incredible evolution of da Silva's work, the reader cannot help but wonder what form of expression her many talents will take next.

Then the final chapter happens. Entitled simply, "The Labyrinth," this rambling, uninformative portion of the text leaves the reader questioning who has become lazier, Rosenthal, who restates her one or two theses ad nauseum (by the end of this chapter, you had BETTER realize that the "labyrinthine" spacial conceit in da Silva's work is a metaphor for uncertainty in the postmodern world!!!!); or da Silva, whose plethora of works represented from this period - though revealing an unbelievable attention to detail and outrageously advanced conception of line and space - are, in all honesty, only slight variations on the same basic idea. In addition, Rosenthal pulls up the authorial slack by using a quote from da Silva seemingly every other line, several of which rehash the same material covered in the previous paragraph. While it is valuable that Rosenthal attempts to place da Silva's unique work into a cultural context, she spends so much time covering the "labyrinth" idea and pontificating on the grand purpose of da Silva's art that she fails to provide the reader with pertinent biographical information about da Silva during this time period, only infrequently addressing the specific meaning or importance of particular works. Toward the very end, we are treated to such "penetrating" insights as "the question of meaning could no longer be raised under the conditions of the modern age," and, "[following the death of Arpad], da Silva's paintings served as a means of grieving." Forgive me if I think these comments fall short of qualifying as illuminating.

As usual with Taschen, the prints are amazing, providing a good introduction to an important artist at a reasonable price; and although the first half of the book is intensely enjoyable, one wishes Gisela Rosenthal had planned more material for the last 30 or 40 pages.

I read about 20 books on Abstract Algebra, but I still find this book excellent for Math students who have not been exposed to Abstract Math before. This book serves as a bridge from High-school 'computational' Math to the University Math which is based on abstract proof of Math structures.

I have not seen a similar excellent book on Abstract Algebra which could cover the vast topics in such systematic manner: from Set, Relation, N,Z,Q,R,C, building a solid foundation, before attacking the 'gems' in Group, Ring, Field, Polynomial, Matrices & Linear Algebra.

The selling point of this book is the 450 exercises at end of each chapter. Keeping the core definitions and theorems at each chapter while leaving the proofs later in the exercises, this allows the reader to browse thru' the topics quickly without being burderned by the nitty-gritty details of proof which would slow down the reading.

Granted, Galois Group is not covered in details. However, one has to compromise that the Galois Group is too advanced a topic to deserve another big volume to cover. The example given 'Gal C/R' explains, to my opinion, a clear view of what Galois Group is: Group of automorphism of functions, sub-field (or splitting field), etc. You can grasp what a Galois Group is in 1 single page, rather than reading a 100-page book but still have a faint idea of what 'Gal K/F' is?

My only comment is there are quite a few typo mistakes in Definitions, Theorem reference numbers, which are easily spotted if you understand the topics.

I sincerely hope there will be a 3rd edition of this book soon.

I think that most of schaum's series are out of date. In particular, Schaum's "abstract algebra" is not an exception. I bougut this book to prepare my course, Abstract Algebra 1. But this book was full of stuff which is not relevant to the subject. For example, it deals in matix and boolen algebra, which are excluded in most of Alstract Algebra courses in universities. And it doesn't contains stuff about Galois' Theory. Galois' theory can be called the aim to learn Abstract Algebra. I cannot help confessing that to read this book is to waste time. It would confuse you rather than help. You cannout build the outline of Abstract Algebra with this book. I think that it is becase this book was too old-fashioned.

I was not impressed with this book. The author appears to make quite a few errors, both in the definitions and in the examples, enough so that I could not be sure what was intended. I cannot recommend this as a tutorial in abstract algebra. However, the confusion did force me to think about the subject.

~I usually gave books I bought not bad reviews. But this one, I hate to put it in this way, is full of wrong concept, unclear definition, misleading explanation, incomplete proof, ... A mathmactics book like this is a real shame!

The reason I did not give it one star was I like Schaum book's style: definition, then example, then exercise, then answer at the end (this one doesn't have).

In sum, you can't use this book for any purpose, except as one reviewer pointed out, the errors really~~ make you think about the concept. But before you can do that, you should already know some basic abstract algebra and have a logic mind.~

This book is full of wrong concepts, wrong definitions, misleading explanation, wrong proofs, ... A math book like this is a real shame! I have thrown this book to the garbage!
As it is possible that nobody has corrected this book before putting it in the sale?