Switzerland Books

Strikingly illustrated by Marshall Arisman, The Wolf Who Loved Music by Christophe Gallaz is an original children's picture book story about Anne, a young girl who is fascinated by the music of the wolves. Anne leaves the house to hear more, yet her curiosity brings a terrible price -- when Anne is found sleeping near wolf prints the next day, the village embarks on a hunt to find and slay the wolf whose song drew her out in the first place, leaving her to wonder whether the true beasts are wolves or men. A tragic and moving tale about keeping an open mind and not necessarily believing every scary story one hears.

As a public librarian who is also in charge of ordering and circulating children's books, I was horrified when I previewed this book. I would never put this book on our library shelves. Even though perhaps the hidden point of the book is to decide who is the actual "beast" in the story, the point does not come across and the young reader stands a good chance of being traumatized by reading this book.

This is the German text edition of "Farewell Sidonia", the tragic, but true, story of little Sidonia Adlersburg who, in 1933, as an infant, was abandoned by her Gypsy mother in the small town of Steyr, Austria. She was eventually taken in by a working class couple with leftist-socialist sentiments, Hans and Josepha Breirather. They became her foster parents, nurturing and caring for the sickly child, until she blossomed under their ministrations.

Unfortunately for Sidonia, the Nazis came to power and with it came the Aryan ideal. When Austria fell to the German juggernaut, fear and suspicion abounded. Anything and everything different stood out, and with her dark, Gypsy looks, Sidonia found herself eventually caught in the eye of a storm. Despite having lived in the town for ten years as the beloved child of her foster parents, who were well-liked by the towns people, forces conspired to end Sidonia's happiness as the Nazis rose to power, becoming a force with which to be reckoned.

In 1943, Sidonia's happiness came to an abrupt end at the age of ten, when she was ordered, against the vehement wishes of her foster parents, to be returned to her Gypsy mother, whom Sidonia never knew. Although the towns people themselves could have assisted in stopping this travesty, as their input was, in fact, sought by the powers that be, they did little to ensure that Sidonia would remain among their midst. Her teachers, social worker, and others gave the powers that be little reason for letting the child that they had known for her entire life stay with the only parents that she had ever known.

Considering that the Gypsies who used to annually pass through their town were no longer to be seen, and the Nazis' opinion of the Gypsies was all too clear, the towns people whose input was sought had to have been cognizant of the fate that was to eventually await little Sidonia were she to be removed from her foster parents' protection. They knew, and they did not care. This was to be the legacy of this town.

While this is a compelling story, I must confess that I did not find the author's writing style to be especially so. Having read the English translation of this work, perhaps it is the translation that hampers my appreciation of this acclaimed Austrian author who has been touted as "one of the great hopes of German-language literature". While this is the second book by this author that I have read, it will probably be the last.

DISCLAIMER: I'm not a kid, I'm just too lazy to bother making an account just to write a review. I mean, come on, that's what this "kid's review" option is really for, isn't it?
THE REVIEW:
This book contains many good photographs of notable bridges designed by Swiss structural engineers, but it's a tad light on providing any technical data... overall, this book's good for looking at bridges from an artistic, design-oriented point of view, but isn't particularly useful if you're, say, trying to DRAW A SCALE DIAGRAM OF A BRIDGE IN THIS BOOK AND YOU WERE TOLD TO BUY THIS BOOK FOR YOUR UNIVERSITY ENGINEERING COURSE because it lacks concrete facts about spans, drapes, or other distances that would be useful. Not a bad book at all; quite good, actually, but not very useful for technical analysis. That salginatobel bridge pops up all over the place, eh?

This is a reasonably interesting re-counting of the tragedy that enfolded Aurora Rodriguez, a daughter of Spain, who, born in 1890, grew up in comfort and privilege as a member of the bourgeois, only to renounce the norms of her upbringing in search for a more perfect recognition of self.

After the death of her parents, Aurora was to scandalize her contemporaries, as well as her brother, with her search for a surrogate father for a child, which she would raise herself in accordance with her own philosophical vision. That vision was a liberal, free-thinking one, in which the world would be made into a better, more Utopian one. In this world, the role of women would be equal with men, which philosophy was very avant-garde for her time.

Aurora met a man who represented that he was a priest, albeit an unconventional one, and agreeing to her terms, they entered into a sexual relationship for the purpose of procreation. Aurora's determination bore fruit, when she eventually found herself pregnant. In 1914, Aurora moved to Madrid, where she gave birth to that child, a girl whom she named Hildegart and to whom she was slavishly devoted.

As her daughter grew up, mother and daughter were as one in terms of ideas and philosophies. Aurora was Hildegart's Svengali, and Hildegart was being made in her mother's political image. It was almost as if Aurora were living vicariously through her daughter, who was highly precocious for her age. By the time Hildegart was seventeen, she was a well known public figure and espouser of liberal causes and feminism, as well as an ardent advocate for a Spanish Republic.

As young woman are so often wont to do, however, Hildegart made a brief stab at independence from her mother's intellectual apron strings after she met H. G. Wells. She began thinking of things other than politics and causes. No longer was Aurora the center of Hildegart's world, a fact that caused Aurora much distress. Feeling betrayed by a daughter over whom she exercised less and less control, Aurora had the final say when she put a gun to her sleeping daughter and fired it at point blank range.

This murder was a cause celebre in Spain, where Hildegart in her short life had become a fairly well-known public figure and an impassioned advocate on many issues that were, at the time, viewed as being leftist by nature. The author attempts to reconstruct Aurora's life and paint a portrait of a woman who, born before her time, had sought immortality through her daughter, Hildegart, a child who was raised in the cross-hairs of her mother's singular vision.

Their story is briefly told and is awkward in its construction. Moreover, the portrait that the author paints of his subjects never seems to rise beyond the two-dimensional. Still, for those unfamiliar with these two star-crossed lives, the book provides a tantalizing glimpse into a story of a mother's love gone dangerously awry. It is a tragic reminder that a parent must allow a child to live his or her own dreams and not those of the parent.

Actually, I don't want to review this book since I am one
of the book editors. I just wish to point out that the book
is incorrectely referenced. The actual title, publisher and
editors are as follows:

title: Cellular Automata: Proceeding of the 5th International Conference on Cellular Automata for Research and Industry, ACRI 2002.

Editors: S. Bandini, B. Chopard, M. Tomassini

Publisher: Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Vol. 2493, Springer
Verlag, Heidelberg, 2002.

It has beautiful photos of restaurants with only the briefest information.
Apparently "cool" restaurants are only so for their interior beauty and not for their culinary delights since this book seems to forget that restaurants serve food.

For each restaurant it tells you:

1) Owners Name
2) Chef's Name
3) Interior/Exterior Designer
4) Address
5) Contact Info (phone, web site)
6) Tram Stop
7) Hours
8) Average Price
9) Cuisine (very vague. For example, just "Fresh market" "French" or "cold Japanese")
10)Special Features (i.e. "Self Service")

What's missing
1) Dining specifics: Menu excerpts, famous dishes. What to try, what to avoid. Any mention of food besides describing it as "French" or "Italian".
2) Dress Code (casual, formal, nightclub)
3) Ambiance (i.e. quiet, loud music, lounge, dance club, crowded, sparse)
4) A single photograph with food in it...seriously

I foolishly gave my weatherbeaten hardcover of this book as a gift to a friend of mine when I was thirteen. If only I had known how valuable it was! It's a lovely book, very similar in story and theme to Heidi. Written with the same innocent descriptive tone, but with a few different plot points. Spyri uses a light touch on serious topics, so this book can be a little sad, but never actually scary. Books like it are The Secret Garden, The Little Princess, and of course, Heidi.

This is a pretty good book on how some governments - small Alpine ones - are involved in the economy. It is an extremely welcome tonic (from a neo-Con think tank!) to the idiotically overhyped purely market-oriented policies these right wing groups reflexively advocate. Katzenstien discusses how these governments seek to help local firms and what the costs and benefits are. While no panacea that can replace free markets or entrepreneurs, he shows that they can have many beneficial effects. What a surprise! Governments influence the business environment, so why not use them (from fiscal measures to old-style national champions)? It is a good question, even if the impact is often modest.

I would like to say that anyone interested in C.G. Jung's writings would also probably enjoy this book. It seems to me that the major flaw in this ILLUSTRATED biography is an artistic one. The reproductions of photographs are generally poor, but there ARE some very good ones here. Some wonderful little snapshots could have been much larger, and some of the large pictures could have been much smaller. However, there are many things to recommend this book as well. There are the very nice pictures of the tower at Bollingen - - there are the paintings and mandalas by Jung himself -- the biography is concise and quite good. I wish that everything had been done as well as the dust jacket photo of Jung.

We found the introductions, hotel descriptions and locations maps useful and well presented; however the itinaries sections leaves a lot to be desired. Reading through pages 29-130 one is overwhelmed by the repetitions presented of places, excursions and highlights. Many descriptions appear in several or all chapters listed in the itineraries. In addition the book is flawed by several misconceptions and incorrect spellings, too many to be listed here. In the book on page 73 it says " Spiez is worth a short detour before leaving the lake and heading down the Alpine valley in the direction of Kandersteg." Kandersteg is up the valley. Also on page 85 it says to take a train over the mountain from Kandersteg. Actually one has to go through the mountain as there are no roads over. These are a few examples we found. We have read other books by Ms. Brown and were very dissapointed in this one. We e-mailed Ms. Brown and she was very gracious and hopes to have the mistakes corrected in the next edition. Yours truly, Marian & Erich Tobler PS We will returning the book.