Bergman Books

As typical from Nolo press writers, this is a very effective book well structured and with useful materials.
The framework given is very practical and applicable. I strongly recommend for anyone involved in a deposition.
Just to give the proof, it helped me to face 3 days of deposition by a nasty attorney as under handed as you can get....I survived it.
Thanks to the authors and in all cases, be prepared !

Depositions are part of the arcane ritual of American litigation. I was recently deposed (as an expert witness) and found the book full of practical information. I can recommend it to anyone unfamiliar with the process.

As a monitor of the information desk at the Harold Washington Library, Chicago's main library, I regularly make referrals to people looking for all kinds of information. Whenever I'm asked about books on depositions, the first one that comes to mind is "The Deposition Handbook: A Guide To Help You Give A Winning Deposition," by Virginia A. Lathan.

But recently I also came across this book, "Nolo's Deposition Handbook," and I'm thoroughly impressed by the in-depth information it contains on all aspects of the deposition process. Not only is the book well written, but it also has a useful glossary for readily looking up legal terms. It also contains numerous examples of what the author is trying to convey. Additionally, it's well indexed. I particularly found the appendices helpful, because they contain excerpts from the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure and also web site addresses for obtaining information about discovery rules for particular states. I think this book would be a tremendous asset for parties to a lawsuit, people who represent themselves in court, and even lawyers who need to refresh themselves on the many aspects of depositions.

However, because the book is so thorough, I will still recommend people check out Virginia Lathan's book. Her simple-and-concise book reminds me of "Cliff Notes," those handy little pamphlets that highlight key points and make it easier to navigate your way through the voluminous writings of complete texts. For that reason, I suggest that you consider purchasing both books, because when thy're used in unison, you'll have all the reference books you need to help you give a winning deposition.

As a matter of fact, in one of his other books, "Represent Yourself in Court" (2nd edition), Paul Bergman highly praised Virginia Lathan's "Deposition Handbook."

I just went through 13 hours of deposition time and let me clue you, this woman is only giving you the basic bs and I am going to write my deposition book, because the judicial system is at best corrupt and some of the attorneys are absolutely criminals and will lie and cheat - depositions are complexed and a detailed books from a deponent's point of view and with legal ease needs to be done.

Be careful when you are being deposed. Just my humble experience and opinion. This book will not help you in anyway.

If you like your environmentalism in breathless hyperbole; if you like to have an author's central thesis beaten over your head in nearly every paragraph; if you subscribe to the Chicken Little version of the current state of the environment; or if you just want to read a truly bad book, try Charles Bergman's Red Delta. This book tells us in its various sections that (1) the delta is teeming with life, (2) the delta is dead, (3) the delta needs preservation and restoration, and (4) the delta is threatened. So, since these are not all compatible thoughts, which ones are true? And if the Cienega de Santa Clara really once was a mudflat devoid of vegetation, why would anyone seriously consider "restoration"? This book fits perfectly into W's America, where the creedo seems to be: "It is not supposed to make sense!" This book is less about the current state of the Colorado River delta and more about Bergman's adventures there, conversations with people who have more than a vested economic interest in the delta, and opinions on life in general. He's clearly in love with his impressions; every other word seems to be from the following list: "amazing, astounding, magnificent, remarkable, legendary." He's obviously a neophyte concerning natural history, since among other things he seems to find it noteworthy to tell us repeatedly that riparian and aquatic ecosystems depend on water (Duh!). I find it ironic that Bergman, a professor of English, didn't use a copy editor, because this book suffers from excessive repetition, bad sentence structure, and occasional typos ("Glenn Canyon Dam"). The following statement actually appears in the book (p. 165): "In a famous essay in Harper's magazine called `The West Against Itself," the great historian, Bernard De Voto, described the West as a region in conflict with itself." Gee, what a profound and original observation Bergman has made, and with value-added hype! What few facts that are actually presented are riddled with errors. For example, if Bergman really thinks the sediment load in the Colorado River is the highest in the world, perhaps he needs to read about a little Chinese river called the Yantze. If he thinks the Colorado River is the only river to suffer from water diversion, perhaps he should read about a little delta at the mouth of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers. Or the Yantze. Or the Zambezi. Or the Ganges. Or the River Jordan. Or the Sacramento-San Joaquin. I think the title, which is less about the delta and more about Bergman's infatuation with sunrise/sunset photography, would be more accurate if changed to Red Herring. If you want something a little less hysterical, try Salt Dreams, although that book is about the Salton Sea. Perhaps something a little more objective will come out on the delta someday.

Red Delta is the ecological story of fighting for life at the end of the Colorado River discusses keys to understanding environmental collapse and recovery in the Southwest. The Colorado River Delta was an 'accidental delta' created by developers who never fully realized their goals. Red Delta explores the environmental consequences of that Delta, which may now be realized as an important key to the Colorado natural area surrounding it.

Red Delta explores an amazing, almost forgotten section of the world. Through gorgeous photography and evocative writing, Bergman brings the Delta to life -- the land, the animals and the people. It's clear why the book has won three awards - and counting, i'm sure - and I highly recommend it for anyone interested in US water policy, the Delta, or both.

Deeply felt, and vividly descriptive, this book examines and explains in a clear yet poetic and personal manner the very complex and desparately contested issues concerning the Colorado River and its end at its Delta in Mexico at the Gulf of California.
This is an important story that no one else has told! This is the story of one of the largest and least known man-made environmental catastrophes in history. It is also a story of hope - there are signs of life in the Delta. Parts of it have come back to life with no help from humans. Bergman also lays out the solution to the Delta's woes: "the 1% of the Colorado's water for the Delta" idea. This will rejuvenate the greater Delta with very little effort and at virtually no cost. Bergman tells the poignant stories of the endangered people and cultures of the Delta, and skillfully weaves them in with stories of the endangered and threatened flora and fauna of the Delta and the Gulf of California. A book illustrated with beautiful photographs, thoroughly researched, and passionately executed in every detail. Inspiring! An important book! An instant Colorado River classic! A book no truly committed environmentalist should be without, and an easy way into the issues of Southwest water for the casual reader.

I have used the 1980 edition of this book. The main thing I liked about it is that it provided both the Pinyin and the romanized transliteration, which I assume is Wade-Giles. Each English word also includes the simplified Chinese character to help when trying to communicate with Chinese friends.

What I didn't like about it is that it is very basic and I would often find myself going to a more complete dictionary to find many words, but hence they would only give the Pinyin. Having both transliteration methods in this book made it much easier for me to get close to the correct pronounciation.

My Chinese friends found the list of words in the simplified Chinese characters by stroke count too limiting. They would often prefer to use a more complete dictionary...or their handheld translation computers.

This book is very helpful for beginners to get started on useful vocabulary and by filling in needed words for today's word usage from other sources. Some words may be outdated for todays usage, but will be understood by "patient" native speakers. Column format especially helpful for self-study on Eng-Chin, Chin-Eng (in Pinyin) and reading Chinese characters (caution: simplified characters used). Caution on some mispels and column misprints, very few though. Zai Jian.

After heaving read "Trier about von Trier", an interview also conducted by Stig Bjoerkman, it became unavoidable to read the Bergman book, too. So many references to Bergman's films, so huge a relevance he has for today's film-makers not just in Scandinavia, but all over the world. The Interview was conducted quite late, I think 1990, so many films are far and lost in the momories of an old man. He is also very humble about many films, pretending not to remember them propoerly or waving them off as unimportant. Those where he accepts the discussion must be wort seeing, however, and the comments by the two interview partners give you some exciting insight in what it must be like to experience them for the first time (in some repsect, this means, I can be glad that I have hardly seen any Bergman film so far, only "Snake's Egg", I think, and he does not seem to like that one). In particular, I think, the following ones should be on the shelf soon (and maybe seen in the order of initial release): (not sure about the respective English titles): "The Summer with Monika", "For one Summer", Wild Strawberries", "Scenes of a Marriage", "The Silence", "The Face","Hour of the Wolf:, "Light in Winter" "Persona", "Shame", "7th Seal", "Fanny and Alexander". And so on... There's a task at hand!

Ingmar Bergman fans should all get to know this book. It's a series of interviews done in the late 1960s, in which he discusses his entire career in relevant but not excruciating detail. My local art house cinema just put on a big Bergman retrospective, and it was fun to be able to see the films and then read the director's comments on them. The photos are nice too; they include such famous sequences as the first dream from "Wild Strawberries" and the opening of "Persona."

I have a couple of small objections. First, the book stops in 1970 (not that big a problem, as most of his really good films were made before that date). Second, there are some issues I wish he'd covered in more detail; sometimes the journalists direct the conversation too much. But these are minor flaws in an essential book on one of cinema's great directors.

This is a set of word lists of 1,000 entries in 26 languages. As a dictionary, it's not very satisfying since chances are, the word you are looking for won't appear in the 1,000 entries. Also, each entry is only one word long, so there are no explanations to clarify meanings. On the other hand, the word lists can be somewhat illuminating if you're studying the inter-relatedness of vocabulary across the Indo-European languages. In that case, you can choose any particular entry at random and see at a glance how close the Indo-European words are to each other and how different they are from the non-Indo-European words. The multilingual words lists comprise the first half of the volume. In the second half are 26 monolingual indices that allow you to look up the meanings of individual words from each of the covered languages. The languages in non-Latin scripts (Russian, Greek, Arabic, Hebrew, Yiddish, and Japanese) only appear in their native scripts in the indices. To see their entries in Latin scripts, you need to check the word lists- -and vice versa, since the word lists only show the entries for these languages transliterated in Latin script. Due to the small number of entries, the uses for such a book are limited. On the other hand, if you are doing research that involves cross-linguistic comparisons, this dictionary can come in handy.

I continue to think how fortunate I am that I found this book when it was first released. I searched many auctions to find a copy for a friend who also writes. If I could give the exciting word adventure that I found in this book, I would give it to everyone I know; not everyone would appreciate it, but the thought counts.

There are only 1000 words, but those words can be the canvas for your word pictures. I find myself thinking about the stories that Scheherazade told every night for 1000 nights; the stories that saved her life. Perhaps that is where the use of 1000 was derived.

The book has sufficient white space and is in a font that does not disappear unless you have a magnifying glass to make it easy to read. The main index is in English, and under each word is the corresponding entry in each of the twenty-six languages; these lists are the only definitions. The languages are: English, French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Rumanian, German, Dutch, Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, Polish, Czech, Serbo-Croatian, Hungarian, Finnish, Turkish, Indonesian, Swahili, and Esperanto plus the six which are transliterated from Russian, Greek, Arabic, Hebrew, Yiddish and Japanese into Roman spelling; these include the original script as well.

Many programs and on-line searches will give you other languages for whatever word or phrase you want. However, how many will strike a creative urge? Words such as svila (Serbo-Croation), seiyem (Hungarian), kinu (Japanese), silk (English) can take your imagination into new worlds.

To me, nothing is quite as good as a hardback with a worn cover, the smell of dust, and yellowed pages accumulated from years of usage. This is one of my treasures, and it is always on my desk. For me, it is, and always has been, five stars.

Victoria Tarrani

This book is recommended reading to all DSP engineers at our company. It covers only Baseband digital communications which is perfect for people interested in backplane SERDES, Ethernet 10/100/1000/10GBASE-T, and magnetic recording applications. Not covering passband carrier modulation and analog communications lets one concentrate on the above fields of interest. It avoids too many mathematical derivations and covers a great deal of material in a simplified manner. However, in my opinion this book would make a terrible introduction to the subject. Unless you already pretty much know the subject, following what is presented is very hard. Once you know the subject to some extend then it might be a very good book to reference as I don't know any other book that covers so many related topics -- some to great detail. There are 3 chapters on timing recovery; chapters on Viterbi coding; Equalization (Linear, Partial Response, DFE); Modulation and Encoding. The book has an interesting way of presenting mixed discrete time and continuous time signaling. It has excellent references to published papers and other books. (Although they might be a little dated.) There are people who told me that the book is very easy reading, but once again, unless you somewhat know the material already I don't recommend this book as an introduction to the subject.

Since I was somewhat not satisfied with this book, I ordered "Precoding and Signal Shaping for Digital Transmission" by Robert F. H. Fischer. It seems to cover similar subjects but in a more standard manner.

This is an excellent introductory text for optical recording (CD and DVD), magnetic recording (hard disk drives, tape), and baseband receivers (DSL). In its treatment of recording systems, it presents in a coherent and unified fashion information otherwise found only in journal papers. It also covers some of Dr. Bergmans' own work done at Philips, one of the creators of CD (along with Sony). It is written at a level of mathematical rigor accessible to senior level electrical engineering or applied mathematics students, grad students and working engineers.

The book deals primarily with the signal processing techniques used to convert the noisy, corrupted analog readback signal (or the received signal in the case of a baseband receiver) into a stream of 1s and 0s. It also provides an overview of the types of modulation codes used to encode the digital information prior to recording or transmission, and why they're important. (Also see the book by Immink, another Philips alumnus, for a more detailed treatment of modulation codes.)

Note that the Bergmans book does not include many aspects of a complete data storage system, since such a magnum opus would require several volumes. For example, it excludes control theory as applied to actuator motion control, disc and file formats, MPEG compression, host interface protocols, or other "higher level" functions. It also doesn't cover Reed-Solomon or other error control codes. There are other excellent texts on ECC (Wicker; Lin and Costello; etc.). That notwithstanding, this text is in fact a self-contained treatment of what is customarily called a "read channel" in the data storage industry.

I've used this book extensively, and I'd highly recommend it to any read channel engineer working at a drive or IC company, or to any student planning to enter the data storage industry.

This book is strong with data and valuable information collected from various journals and reports. Taking this into consideration a reader can find easy to understand information on the political, social, economic, legal, and structural aspects of the European electricity market (in the first part of the book). The second part of the book presents studies of markets in countries including France, the UK, Nordic countries, and Hungary (I think the publisher forgot about hungary..but it's in there). The only weakness I have noticed in this book is the presentation. Having numerous authors may have made it difficult to avoid repetitive analysis and redundancies. Some sections treat similar issues in similar manners while some other sections treat them in very different ways making it hard to find continuity through the whole book (actually through any part at all). Although the reader will want to start with part-one before attacking part-two, he will be able to read chapters in each part in any order. Overall, the topic of this book is so broad and complex that a reader can only expect a good bigger-picture understanding of the subject. The appendix section containing definitions makes this book a challenging but feasible venture for a beginner in the field.

This book is strong with data and valuable information collected from various journals and reports. Taking this into consideration a reader can find easy to understand information on the political, social, economic, legal, and structural aspects of the European electricity market (in the first part of the book). The second part of the book presents studies of markets in countries including France, the UK, Nordic countries, and Hungary (I think the publisher forgot about hungary..but it's in there). The only weakness I have noticed in this book is the presentation. Having numerous authors may have made it difficult to avoid repetitive analysis and frequent redundancies. Some sections treat similar issues in similar manners while some other sections treat them in very different ways making it hard to find continuity through the whole book (actually through any single part at all). Although the reader will want to start with part-one before attacking part-two, he will be able to read chapters in each part in any order. Overall, the topic of this book is so broad and complex that a reader can only expect a good bigger-picture understanding of the subject. The appendix section containing definitions makes this book a challenging but feasible venture for a beginner in the field while the references and links provided in this book offer resources for further studying.

I purchased this songbook on the advice of my musical director as a good source of under used material for auditions, etc. They are particularly good for a more "legit" vocal type and are more contemporary than alot of other selections typically sung by "trained" singers. A great book for a singer's library.

Sourced from direct experience inside official US government (USG) arms sales, this work documents a key programme supporting a friendly Arab country - Morocco. The US programme was the result of a mid 1970's visit by Henry Kissinger, who noted that French armor had replaced superannuated Soviet equipment, and that technical support teams accompanied such arms sales.
On the one hand, the French cast-offs were worn out, on the other hand such technical support provided privileged two-way channels with a friendly Arab country strategically located across from Gibraltar. To nudge out both French and Soviet influence was tempting.
The delivery of one battalion's worth of aging M-48 Patton tanks from the Wisconsin National Guard turned into a full-fledged multi-million dollar ground forces modernization program, managed by the author.
Arms for Morocco provides insights into selected operational and business aspects of a USG arms sales programme. Horizontally, the programme covered tanks and anti-tank, artillery, armored infantry units with arms, training, and collateral hardware. In depth, it ranged from the decision level in the capitals, through the training of personnel at US sites, to the deployment of complete regiments on the edge of the Sahara.
In clearing bureaucratic hurdles, the author found that every significant decision had to pass by the person of the king, Hassan II having become very careful after several assassination attempts of which one involved US materiel (jet fighters). Washington DC added its own twists, when Morocco's tank ammunition was diverted to backfill Israel's requirements - an extremely sensitive moment. Further, the USG sold the arms subject to the proviso of not using them. But Morocco had a most pressing need: the struggle with the Polisario for the Western Sahara territories.
The author, arriving from an assistant professorship in economics at West Point and armed with a just-completed MBA, attempted to apply modern business management practices to a program that was virtually dumped in his lap. Himself a West Pointer with recent Vietnam combat experience, he appreciated the ultimate application of the program and the international and cultural settings, but had a great deal to learn about Byzantine relationships, on both sides of the ocean.

This is a great Algebra 1 book. It is good solid math from beginning to end, with carefully thought out explanations and example problems, and excellent exercises. The book does *not* have all the silliness and distractions that so many math books seem to have these days; it's just good, clearly explained math.

The only negative is the last two chapters. They are great chapters, but they are material that is typically covered in Algebra 2 (exponential functions and logarithms). So if you are using this book for Algebra 1, the students have to carry around an extra two hundred pages all year. That's the only reason I didn't give it 5 stars. It's still a great textbook.