Bernstein Books

A perfect one-sided story carefully equipped with opinions of heavy-weighted thinkers elaborately designed to persuade, but one-sided nevertheless.

Richard Bernstein is one of the most balanced and deeply thoughtful Americans doing philosophy today. Thoroughly at home in several different schools of contemporary thought, he writes with exceptional clarity and generosity of spirit. This book is one of his most important. At a time when most Americans seem convinced that objectivism and relativism are our only options and that if objectivism is ultimately incoherent nothing remains but a relativism that ultimately makes conversation impossible, this book can be a life-saver! Respectful of what the physical and life sciences can do and contribute, Bernstein makes clear the limits of their methods and the reasonableness of turning to alternative ways of knowing and thinking for other realms of meaning, value, and reality. A careful reading of this book could save everybody years of wandering up and down blind alleys. This is philosophy written to communicate with others and to be helpful, rather than to inflate the author's ego and display sophistication. It can change the way you inhabit the world and put your feet on a path that takes you in the direction of hope and solidarity.

Are we the measure of the all things or is truth independent of our beliefs and wishes? Bernstein begins tackling this question by observing that the real debate is not between absolutism and relativism but between...(well, read the title!) He claims that while few (philosophers anyway) believe that truth is eternal, many at least believe that it is not merely about our own subjectivity. But the real question for Bernstein is Why all the fuss? Is there a certain tone of anxiety present in the discussion? Bernstein says that indeed there is and it's due to conflicts in concern between the need to believe in a stable reality and the fear that rheified cultural schemes can become the basis of intellectual and social tyrany- Bernstein calls this a "pracical-moral concern" and manages to discuss it without presuming that there are no serious theoretical issues involved. I'm an absolutist myself (what a philosophical dinosaur I am!) and I found this book so enthralling that I engaged in frquent, feverish marginal annotating (and in my schools, you didn't buy the texts so you DID NOT mark them up). Whatever your philosophical persuasion, this book should bring some illumination along with many happy moments of reading. At this price, it's a bargain. GET IT!

Richard Bernstein's book suffers from one fault: he offers no answers. Moreover, he does not even try to offer answers.
Bernstein starts by saying "There has to be some way which is beyond objectivism and and relativism". Then he goes on to examine the works of other philosophers, saying what he is for and against. But then, in the end, he offers no solution. Not only does he NOT tell us what this way "which has got to be" is, but he never draws conclusions from his readings of other philosophers. Like a film, which does not want to tell the viewer what to think, Bernstein will not say much. The book, in the end, turns out to be a REVIEW of OTHER THINKERS on the subject of going beyond objectivism and relativism. So one gets some good summaries of other thinkers on a subject with little else. That is why other reviewers of his book, in no way, state what Bernstein believes.

As a book report, it gets 3 stars. As a book with an idea, it gets one.

His essays, in other books, seem to suffer from the same fault.

Equipped with a synoptic point of view, Bernstein has long worked the difficult terrain between continental philosophy and its more positivist Anglo-American counterpart. Here he traces what he believes is a key movement away from the broad modern tradition characterized by Descartes and the perennial search for philosophical foundations. Not always self-consciously, this emerging movement (Gadamer, Rorty, et. al.) rejects the Cartesian search for absolutes as ultimately futile; yet refuses to accept relativism as the only remaining recourse. The book's burden is to show how a viable `third way' is in fact emerging from the overlaps in the movement. His discussion is stimulating, ranging from Aristotle to Kuhn to Habermas, Kant and Arendt. No doubt he has put his finger on an acutely felt issue of our skeptical age, one that lurks ubiquitously in the background of more narrowly framed topics. Yet, how effectively this third way manages to extricate itself from the either-or of objectivism vs. relativism is up to the individual reader to judge. Frankly, I was disappointed, feeling that the results were unduly vague and pointing in the direction of a sophisticated brand of sociological relativism. Be that as it may, the text includes not a single mention of post-modernism, which may date the work in the eyes of some. Still, the meta-philosophical issue Bernstein addresses can be discussed quite apart from those specific to post-moderns and their recourse to outright relativism. As always, Bernstein remains an important interpreter of international trends and is well worth the read.

This book is the required text for a graduate course in database systems. We covered about 80% of in the class. At well over 1000 pages, the book has a lot of information. The chapters are written well. A running case study is presented throughout this book as an example. Most of the chapters are easy to read although it does get dry at times. Some of the chapters were very complex and highly theoretical especially the one on normalization (chapter 6) which perhaps only academics will care to know enough about. Chapters on XML, database indices, query processing, distributed databases and data mining are excellent. This isn't a book you can read in a weekend. It will take a few months to read and assimilate all the concepts presented here but after you are done, you will have a very strong background in this area. Overall I enjoyed the book very much. A broad spectrum of topics with enough detail is provided. Highly recommended for novices and intermediate users alike.

There is a ton of information in this book, and the information flow from section to section is pretty decent, but I wish there were more examples or more thorough examples. I'm the kind of learner that needs to see things worked through to get a good grip on it. The book does this sometimes, but in many of the more complex examples (when really needed) the explanations and visual representations are often quite slim. In most cases, it would take an entire page or two to show the beginning information, the steps between, and the final result, but I would rather have a thicker book that I understood more thoroughly.

The book goes into detail about several topics without being too advanced to understand. It constitues a decent reference to introductory Database Theory, but should not be used as a reference for more advanced topics or SQL queries themselves on working systems.

As a not-very-academic veteran software developer, I enjoyed this book immensely. In a clear and breezy manner it provides the academic underpinnings of what I've been doing in the corporate world for so long. And the breadth. In addition to the basics, topics such as ER Design, Object Databases, XML, Web Services and Data Mining are covered. Highly recommended.

This book tries to be too many things to too many people. According to page xxiv of the Preface:

"In addition to an introductory database course, the book contains enough advanced material so that it can be used for the following courses:

- An undergraduate or graduate course in transaction processing for students who have had an introductory course in databases
- An advanced undergraduate or a first graduate course in databases for students who have had an introductory course in databases
- A course in electronic commerce and Web sevices."

The first half of this book is made up of the material from its "Introductory Version" brother (ASIN:0321228383). The last half is the additional material to be used for the other courses listed above.

The problem is that the book reads more like a brain dump of everything the authors know about databases instead of like a textbook tying to teach some reasonable subsection to us ignorant masses. More specifically, each section (and sometimes each chapter) should probably be an entire textbook in itself. As an example, Chapter 15 talks about XML and Web Data. It starts by talking about how data on web pages is semi-structured and how this can lead to problems getting that kind of data into a database. It then introduces XML to the reader as a possible way to overcome this difficulty. Then, the authors basically dump the entirety of the XML language's syntax and semantics on you (XML Elements and Database Objects, XML Attributes, Namespaces, Document Type Definitions, Inadequacy of DTDs as a Data Definition Language). Since that section ends with the inadequacies of XML, the authors then go on to do the same thing with a revision of XML (XML Schema: XML Schema and Namespaces, Simple Types, Complex Types, Putting It Together, Shortcuts: Anonymous Types and Element References, Integrity Constraints). Now that they've told us everything that we'd ever want to know about the data handling capabilities of XML and it's revisions, they go on to describe (in detail) the syntax and sematics of four different XML Query Languages (XPath: A Lightweight XML Query Language, XSLT: A Transformation Language for XML, XQuery: A Full-Featured Query Language for XML, SQL/XML). Mind you, this is ONE CHAPTER (almost 100 pages long). Most authors would have treated this as a textbook (and course) in its own right. But, this is just one of 26 similarly-written chapters in this book.

Also in the preface, the authors state that "rather than focusing on how to build a database management system (DBMS), our approach focuses on how to build applications that use such a system. We believe that many more students will be implementing database applications than building DMBSs." That might be true. But, since I started with only a light dusting of knowledge of the workings of DBMSs, and the first half of this book is supposed to be an "introductory database course, finding out how to build a DBMS would probably have taught me more about how they work than what the authors present.

At a more pedantic level, my next biggest gripe is with the amount, type, and degree of contextual references in the book. There are tons of backward references to absolutely vital, detailed tables in the book. Unless you have a phenomonal memory, there's no way you can get by without constantly paging back (in some cases, hundreds of pages) to see what the authors are talking about. In the authors' defense, I can see why they did this: the book is already almost 1,200 pages long. If they had copied those tables to every place they reference them, this unwieldy tome would have been even larger. But, worse than the backward references are the FORWARD references. They're not as prevalent as the backward ones, but I can't come up with any real justification for them. In many cases, the authors reference material that's several pages ahead of where they are. It's not like the paragraph ends way up there and that's the first chance they get to include the material. In several cases, they included the reference way past the end of the SECTION (not just paragraph) where they were talking about it. Very irritating.

As an aside, Florida State University (FSU) uses this book in its COP 4710 course: "Theory and Structure of Databases." With a professor available to TEACH the material in the book, this book is probably acceptable. But for the individual reader (like me), it's not very useful. I rate this book as 2 stars out of 5.

Richard Bernstein, as he self-professed at a small lecture of his I attended a few years ago, is no conservative. Indeed, his politics are almost the exact opposite. That's what this book all the more an eye-opener -- a devastating critique of radical multiculturalism by a liberal. Bernstein travels the country examining the topic, and his writing style keeps you focused on his journey. As a teacher, I found the story of Brookline, Mass. quite interesting; indeed, I have encountered similar aspects of that vignette around my own district, unfortunately.

Richard Bernstein, as he self-professed at a small lecture of his I attended a few years ago, is no conservative. Indeed, his politics are almost the exact opposite. That's what this book all the more an eye-opener -- a devastating critique of radical multiculturalism by a liberal. Bernstein travels the country examining the topic, and his writing style keeps you focused on his journey. As a teacher, I found the story of Brookline, Mass. quite interesting; indeed, I have encountered similar aspects of that vignette around my own district, unfortunately.

Contrary to what one reviewer here claims, Richard Bernstein's analysis of political correctness is trenchant and scrupulously fair to all concerned. What may be especially disconcerting for the ideologically-committed leftist reader is that Bernstein's critique comes not from a right-wing mindset, but from a traditional liberal, pragmatic point of view. What Bernstein nails so accurately is how utterly anti-intellectual political correctness is. He also takes some of his examples from outside the academy, something sure to rile PC cultists who know full well how ridiculous their views are when exposed to the daylight outside a college classroom. History teachers should pair this book up with Richard Hofstadter's "Anti-Intellectualism in American Life" for a lively discussion of how American culture acts instinctively to repress original thought.

Some will dismiss this book as "right wing extremism," but much of what left wing extremists tiresomely brand with that distinction is in fact mainstream conservatism, common sense moderation, and a great deal of old fashioned liberalism. In fact, a few of the brave souls cited by Bernstein for their unpopularly heroic stands against multi-cultural mumbo-jumbo have impeccably liberal resumes.

Bernstein himself is not someone who falls into the ultra right wing category. A former journalist for publications not known as sympathetic to conservatives," he occasionally mentions that he favors multi-culturalism but obviously worries about what happens when it is taken to the extreme levels he documents as being the norm in many educational institutions from grammar schools up through colleges.

Bernstein offers a broad summary on the diversity craze that has engulfed much of academia, government, and corporate America. Through the examples he cites, he astutely reveals one of the fads' practitioners' most punitive pursuits--their unabashed willingness to smear anyone who merely questions any segment of this shaky doctrine. Proponents of this brainwashing technique never catch the irony that they are squashing all diverse opinions in favor of one tolerable mindset. That this is all done in the name of tolerance and diversity would be amusing were the stakes not so high.

The book's highlight and one of the most significant assaults on the diversity warfare is the detailed effort against New York City's planned rainbow curriculum close to a decade ago. An uncoordinated effort of multi-racial voices valiantly fought and successfully defeated the city's wacky plan to teach alternate sexual practices beginning with books like "Heather has two Mommies" in kindergarten.

Bernstein's assault on "Political Correctness" (a term you don't hear much any more) has some validity. But after a while, it degenerates into a case of blaming the victim. For example, I checked out all of the references to gays. They were all entirely negative, snide and dismissive in tone, without the slightest acknowledgment that gays really have suffered. It would be nice if Bernstein had shown some balance.

All major points discussed. I was able to browse and learn many points in a matter of minutes. I like this book. It is really good.

Every year this series of books is a must have for tax preparers and for the do-it-yourself taxpayer with deductions. Any place you get confused while doing your taxes, just look it up in the tax guide and you can find your answer.

Not the most entertaining reading, but a necessary read... every now and then. I hope that it will prove to be a valuable purchase at tax time.

This tax guide is the best I've seen yet. It explained everything step-by-step in a way I could easily understand. I'm not the best with taxes, but this book made everything so easy. It helped me organize my paperwork and it's motivated me to stay organized so that filing for my taxes in the future will be that much easier.

Although theis guide is generally fine, I am dissapointed that no update service is available, either on line or by written suplement. Late changes in law (such as AMT adjustments) and changes in tax forms are so important that they take away from the effectiveness of the guide.

While there are many who feel it's not football if its not played indoors and for millions of dollars, I am inclined to prefer college football, particulary the Ivy League. The history of college football is the history of the Ivy League schools, and it is a riveting and fascinating history. Too bad that this book is so poorly written that it hard to find. It has its moments when you get lost in the history you're reading, but then you're awoken sharply by a mistake - no, not a factual mistake (although it has some of those) but simply a gramatical mistake, or a spelling mistake, or a word where it shouldn't be, or a word missing. Normally I wouldn't care, but the frequency with which I was annoyed by these mistakes was too much to overcome. The material is good, but the author and publisher bring it down.

This could well have been not only the definitive history of the Ivy League, but also one of the seminal works on the subject of football. The history of football by necessity goes through the Ivy League and the intrigues among Princeton, Harvard and Yale were to affect the college game for years and decades to come.

The Ivies have always been an enigma, an asterisk on the history of college football. Once boasting the most dominant teams in the country, the Ivies haven't boasted a national champion since Cornell in 1939. Finally, they were demoted by the NCAA to its Division I-AA in the late 70s. There would be no more national glory, and football became just another thing to do in the autumn, instead of being an obsession, which it is at Division 1-A colleges.

Bernstein does an excellent job of narrating the history of the Ivies. Every school is included, and there are loads of anecdotal sidelights that will delight the reader. The book is also thoroughly researched and is marked by a lively style not often found in university press publications.

Then why do I say that this could have been the definitive history of the Ivy League? One word: editing. One would naturally take for granted that a book from a university press would be well-edited, and a book from a press of the University of Pennsylvania being such should be a no-brainer. But the book is spoiled by numerous errors, errors that could have been caught by an editor's sharp eye. Other reviewers have pointed out some of the more outrageous errors as pertains to football, but I give you the most egregious of all:

"In many ways, the teens were a decade of Ivy prominence. Both presidential elections were all-Ivy affairs: Theodore Roosevelt defeated Woodrow Wilson and William Howard Taft in 1912, and Wilson beat Charles Evans Hughes in 1916." (p. 95)

HOW'S THAT AGAIN? ROOSEVELT DEFEATED WILSON IN 1912?? This will come as some news to American Historians. Obviously, history is not a core curriculum course of the University of Pennsylvania these days. I don't blame the author (though he should know better, being a graduate of Princeton), I blame the editors. They're the ones who are supposed to catch these mistakes. I admit that a mistake concerning football history can slip by, but this is a basic fact of American history that slipped right past. Shame on the editors.

Nonetheless, I do recommend the book for its strengths and its well-written narrative and lively style. Perhaps the mistakes can be corrected for the paperback edition.

Mark F. Bernstein's history of Ivy League football is generally interesting, though it doesn't offer a lot of new material. The bibliography is fascinating. Most problematic however, is the proliferation of mistakes, sometimes self-corrected later. A good editor should have caught these. Consider the following:

1) On page 199, Mr. Bernstein implies that Princeton, Dartmouth, Columbia, and Cornell dropped Pennsylvania from their schedules in 1951 and 1952. In fact, Pennsylvania played all of these teams in both of those seasons and the author even refers to the 1951 Princeton-Penn contest on page 209.

2) On page 257, the author writes that "(Penn coach Jerry) Berndt continued to win, claiming a share of still another Ivy title in 1988, with Cornell....". However, this is not correct as Berndt left Pennsylvania after the 1985 season, which the author correctly indicates on page 258.

3) On page 242, and again on page 280, Penn receiving legend Don Clune, is referred to as Don McClune.

4) There is no mention of Frank Riepl's miracle kickoff return for Pennsylvania against Notre Dame in 1955, Coach Ron Rogerson of Princeton's untimely death in 1986, Brown is continually called the "Bears" when their nickname was the "Bruins" until recently, and I swear, somewhere in the book Bob Blackman is called Bob Blackmun.

All in all, it's a good book with a decent balance of coverage of each of the eight teams, though Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and Penn get by far the most attention. The beginning takes a bit to get through as well and of course, please check the facts, ma'am.

Even though I have not yet finished reading this excellent book on football and the Ivy League, I already have enough tidbits to keep up a lively conversation at holiday cocktail parties. Before the end of the first chapter, I found out that there really is no Ivy League. And who could resist dropping on their friends from Cornell the fact that one of their college presidents refused to let "thirty men travel 400 miles to agitate a bag of wind". The tales are intriguing, and Bernstein's writing is engaging. If you have an Ivy League graduate or any other football fan on your gift list, this would be a great choice.

Mark Bernstein's terrific new book shows that the Ivy League invented and struggled with the same problems, and the same glories that permeate college football today.
His is a story of the game: the players, coaches, fans, institutions, that shaped everything about football from its rules to the way it is televised.
He shows how football's founding fathers had the same arguments, debates, and trash-talking disputes that coaches have today.
Anyone who thinks cheating or hooliganism or sportsmanship or glory are any different now than they ever have been, should read this wonderful and entertaining account.

From a Princeton football star who died a Fitzgerald-esque figure and mercenary soldier of fortune, to a princeton football star who then attended 450-some straight Princeton games, the people who skirmished are here. From the rules changes that ended almost a decade of 0-0 ties (in some years, teams would win a few games, tie the rest and win the title) to the rules changes that allowed the forward pass, to the rules changes that knocked the Ivies out of major college football, it is all here.

Beautifully worded, with glistening anecdotes and a sweeping overview, football's pageant it is all here.

And it is wonderful.

It took me about 2 months to finish reading it, not because it wasn't a page-turner, but because it was a long book and also I'd been busy. It was actually a great page-turner. I could read on and on for 5-7 hours without a break.

Bernstein's personal letters to his friends and colleagues, including Aaron Copland, his thesis at Harvard, etc. were all very inspiring to read. There were quite a bit of poems he wrote also. The positive and negative sides of the great man were also well delivered without getting vulgar.
I really appreciated the author's knowledge about music and the classical music world and system.

The book makes you feel like you're living the life closely with the great man and gets you intellectually, musically, emotionally involved. You experience with him every success and failure Bernstein went through.
His talents were beyond human in some way, yet he was a man just like you and me. Sometimes his talents were greater than he as a man, and as a result the world occasionally saw him fall apart. The book is honest about his failures and misbehaviours without being accusatory. It makes you want to forgive the man for the wrongs he'd done. The burden he was carrying as genius was more than an ordinary man could bear.

The book also covers the Jewish culture, politics, world events, how Bernstein and his genius contributed to the world and American history, etc. in relations to his achievements.
There are enough interviews with his friends and family, reviews on Bernstein's works, letters etc. but the author uses his own narratives to tell us about the man, which is, I think, why this book is more solid and readable. Only, I wish there were more photographs. But oh well, you can't ask for everything.

Great, inspiring book. I might read it again.

If you are interested in Bernstein, this is the biography to read. It neither raises him up too high nor tears him apart. Much of it deals with Bernstein's inner turmoil and how that impacted his relationships. Bernstein's humanity comes through very strongly. An enjoyable read, good pictures too.

This bio skillfully covers Bernstein's background, his philosophy, his methods of viewing and performing music. Bernstein was a man of conflict, always wishing to compose (indeed, he wanted to be remembered not as a conductor, primarily, but as a composer) but knew he had to remain with conducting in order to earn his living. And Bernstein was a splendid composer .. I personally think his Candide and West Side Story are masterpieces without peer, and his orchestral works are incredibly daring and far sighted for their time. Bernstein, though a genius, was all too human. He struggled endlessly with his sexuality, yet remained entirely devoted to his wife and children. Burton thoroughly explores Bernstein's many friendships with those in the music world, the most touching being his involvements with Copland and Mitropoulous. Both recognized Bernstein's genius, and were also painfully aware of his inner conflicts and fragile ego, and strove to uplift and encourage him so that he might make his true mark in the arts. The photos in this book are splendid, and Burton's writing is crisp and engaging. You will come away from this book with a renewed respect and enthusiasm for Bernstein the man and the musician.

I guess this is a really technical look at the composer's life without much backstage drama, because in leafing through the index, there's no mention of Carol Lawrence, Chita Rivera or Larry Kert, the famous cast members of the original production of "West Side Story." A short chapter is devoted to the musical, but without comments either from or on its legendary cast? Bizarre.

Call me shallow, but I don't want to read something that dry.

I agree along with many that this is the definitive Bernstein biography. I have read it on and off for over a year now, and have gone back to particular sections not only to refresh my memory but to re-read Burton's fluid writing. An inspirational book about an all-around genius and the whirlwind tour of a life he lived. The book motivated me to delve into Berstein's life even further (quite costly y'know... with all the recordings, Norton Lectures, Young People's Concerts, various other video performances, writings, etc.)

This book is full of information. It is, however, missing some key formulas needed to do some of the problems (there is a formula about energy density in blackbodies that I needed to get from another text). Additionally, the math becomes almost impossible to understand without a very good base in calculus.

This book is excellent, everything is explained precisely and without fuss. I had to suffer through the dumbed down overly verbose book by Eiseberg and Resnick for my modern physics course. I think this book would give any student an excellent start in physics.

This modern physics book is excellent for those who have some background in the material that is covered. For those of us who are being introduced to the topic, it isn't the best text. The book whizzes through the basics of many topics and dives right into some of the more difficult material. That isn't true for every topic, but it is true for some of the hardest chapters. The math that is "explained" in this book is not explained; I learned all of the necessary math in lecture. It is easy to tell the writers know their material; they just can't express it very well to others in an introductory text. The book gets clearer in the middle, but discontinues that trend shortly. Also, the text contains numerous errors--our class just keeps finding more.

I would recommend at least getting an additional, simpler text if this is your assigned text. I used Paul Tipler's text, "Modern Physics" and Serway's Modern Text (a continuation of the intro to physics texts). These were of sufficient level and clarity. Out of the three, I thought Serway nosed ahead of Tipler with Bernstein, etc. in last.

One last thing, the binding is terrible. Several of the people in my class (including me) had books that were falling apart.

Overall, this book is great for a second semester of modern physics. However, it doesn't stand alone very well for first-timers in the field. For those of you interested, THIS BOOK IS NOT GOOD FOR SELF-STUDY.

I bought this book for the first class in modern physics that I took. Till then I had only read books by Serway and Hayt for mechanics and electromagnetics. Comparably this book is not as well explained as Serway, but also not as difficult to understand as Hayt. However, It is a very good book for people who are just getting introduced to the concepts of Modern Physics. I think that the book gives a good base to readers who would like to further study modern physics. It is clearly and precisely explained and helps the reader see the physical world in a new perspective, different from what is understood by studying mechanics and electromagnetics. The book is divided into 4 parts: Relativity, Quantum mechanics, Applications and Frontiers. Each part does a fair role of presenting a good explanation supported by easy to understand diagrams, graphs and equations. Each physical concept is accompanied by a historical background and mathematical equations to back it up. The final sections talk about some applications of these concepts, such as lasers and semiconductors, which would be useful to engineering students as myself. I think that the book would be a good choice for someone who is beginning to learn modern physics.

I am a college professor who has used this book for two years in a sophomore-level course on modern physics. In my opinion it is substantially better than competing textbooks currently available. It is written in a clear and engaging fashion, the illustrations are good, and the examples are well chosen. The mathematical level is appropriate for sophomore physics, engineering, or other physical science majors. The homework problems are also well designed and a good resource.

I do have a couple of quibbles. Thermodynamics are not introduced until Chapter 12, which makes the discussion of the black body spectrum in chapter 4 highly abbreviated and hard to follow--I actually had my class jump ahead to the first part of chapter 12 and then go back to chapter 4, hardly an ideal approach. Also, the Instructor's Solutions Manual is almost completely useless--carelessly produced and riddled with errors.

I have had to use this book and taken the class of one of the professors who wrote it. For the first few chapters the book is ok. It quickly goes downhill from there. Gives the feeling that they started out with a lot of enthusiasm for writing it but then got bored and just tried to get it done without any real thought on how to educate a reader.

Talk about credibility...Jim Gray, who won the 1998 Turing Award for his work in database and TP, is quoted on the back cover saying "This is a great book. This is the book I wish I had written."

First I need to explain my background: I only knew a little about databases and SQL in general, but I knew the topic was rather complex and very broad. Since I wanted to understand how transactions are implemented I decided to find a book on them and stumbled upon this book; I am glad I did.

Do I now understand how transactions are implemented? Not 100%, but certainly a great deal more so than before I read this books' chapters on transactions. Indeed, I am far more equiped to work with transactions because this book helped me understand what is going on "under the hood". While it wasn't "code level" details, it certainly satisfied this novices' thirst for a general understanding of transaction implementation plus it piqued my curiousity to go on and learn more about transactions as written by the likes of Gray.

Further, I have been given a nice introduction to Database Theory and the topic of Entity Relationships - an entire study of how best to design our data, which before hand I was completely unaware of!

Two chapters seemed rather difficult and one of the authors was kind enough to suggest I study Susanna Epp's fine "Discrete Mathematics with Applications" before heading back into foray of DB theory.

So, all and all, I found this book a delight and well worth working through.

Database and Transaction Processing by Philip M. Lewis, et al. is written as a multi-purpose textbook and practical reference guide for software engineers. One can use this book both as an undergraduate introductory course in database theory and design, as an advanced graduate-level course in databases, or as a graduate level course in transaction processing.

Being outside of the academia, but still needing a foundational theoretical (but not necessarily formal or overly detailed) reference, I was impressed on the ability of the authors to present concise and useful practical facts. Some other textbooks suffer from overwrought attention to topics in database normalization, correctness proves, and such - this one gives a lot of practical advise in optimization, distributed databases and issues of concurrency control and transaction processing. Chapters are organized in a self-contained fashion, so with a bit of background in databases, reader can just read a chapter in isolation if she is interested in a topic.

In summary, a very useful book.

Now in a new revised edition, Flight of the Stork: What Children Think (And When) About Sex And Family Building is a straightforward guide especially for parents, but also valuable to educators and child psychologists, about what children understand about human reproduction at which ages, the stages of cognitive awareness young people pass through concerning the subject, and how parents can best educate young people about it. The revised edition specifically deals with topics pertaining to twenty-first century advances in assisted reproductive technology, donor insemination, and surrogacy. Above all, Flight Of The Stork emphasizes good parenting skills: listening to children, understanding one's own issues, and the importance of honesty and empathy. Flight of the Stork is very highly recommended reading, especially for parents who find themselves flustered explaining the birds and the bees.

The book is labelled as What Children Think (and When) about Sex and Family Building. I expected it to be more like a humour book with kids answers to questions about what sex is and where babies come from. Sort of like Kids Say the Darndest Things about Sex. I was wrong.

It does have antedotes from children about these subjects but the purpose of the book is not to make us laugh but to teach us what children at different levels think, how much they can understand, what they really want to know and how to talk to them.

Although it wasn't what I thought it was, I found it interesting. I have read other books on how to talk to your kids about sex but this takes a different route. It divides children into different levels of understanding and shows you to how help them reach the next level. It explains how sometimes when a child asks a question, they really only want a simple answer, not details. It suggests you should sometimes ask your child what THEY think the answer is so you can see where they are getting mixed up. It also proved that while most parents think they're children understand the birds and the bees, most have a few things off, some have it all wrong.

Although this book isn't specifically about childrearing an "infertility" child, knowing the thought processes that children go through when learing about "where do I come from" is crucial for anyone who is thinking about using assisted reproduction or who is thinking of adopting to understand. The book contains some specific sections on those areas, but don't just skip to them. This book can help you make those very difficult decisions relating to whether you can BE a parent of a child brought to your family by less than traditional methods.

Ok, this is a bit of a heavier, academic-type book, although the writing style is easy enough to read.

Bernstein has interviewed many children about their understanding about sexuality, particularly in terms of pregnancy, birth and family structure. The book is filled with examples of what children say and think, which can be fun to read.

Bernstein separates children's responses into six rough stages of mental development, which turn out to be fairly clearly differentiated. In each stage, she describes and explains how children think, giving examples of what children have said in interviews with her. She then also suggests how to talk to children of each stage, taking into account their understanding and way of thinking at that time.

There are also chapters on adoption and stepfamilies, and generally how to discuss and make sense of the great variety of family structures children encounter, and how children understand them.

It's reasonably fun reading, if you have the concentration to read through it all, and the desire to think about yourself and your situation, and how you may improve your communication and the understanding of the children you encounter.

Bernstein's approach to the transcripts of these recordings is interesting in that he provides running commentary on specific points alongside the transcript. This enables points to be clarified and/or interpreted as the reader peruses the transcript. However, it can be a bit bothersome at times.

He debunks the idea that all of German nuclear research during the war years was for peaceful purposes, but sometimes presses too hard on this point.

The inclusion of some of the transcript in German is particularly useful for those interested in sorting the nuanced differences between the English translation and the German original.

Definitely a great reference work and should be read by anyone interested in the early years of nuclear energy.

Toward the end of World War II, ten German nuclear physicists were captured by American and British forces and sent to Farm Hall, An English country house near Cambridge for six months. While there they were interrogated about Germany's nuclear research. Farm Hall was a comfortable prison, but it was bugged and their every word was secretly monitored by British agents. Now in a revised and updated second edition, Hitler's Uranium Club: The Secret Recordings At Farm Hall is a complete collection of transcripts made from those secret recordings in 1945. Expertly annotated by Jeremy Bernstein and put in context by Bernstein (and with an informative introduction by David Cassidy). This startling and sobering set of documents provide an insight into the thoughts and feelings of these ten scientists as they considered the destruction of the Third Reich, the failure of their beloved "German Physics", and the roles they played in the Nazi war effort. Hitler's Uranium Club is a unique, informative, invaluable, and at times unsettling contribution to World War II studies.

This book consists of expertly annotated transcripts of conversations of German scientists taken at Farm Hall after the end of the WWII in Europe. The book is based on the recently de-classified "Farm Hall Transcripts", a revealing set of informative statements which demonstrates the low level of understanding that the German Scientists had of how to build Atomic Bombs. It is written and annotated by an American physicist, so you get some insights as to Heisenberg's mistakes. The book is a refutation of the book "Heisenberg's War" by Thomas Powers, a revisionist history that claims that Heisenberg, Germany's top scientist, really knew how an Atomic Bomb worked, but withheld this information from his colleagues and the German Government.

Heisenberg remains a mystery. He won a Nobel Prize in Physics in the early 1930s for his "Uncertainty Principle" which deals with Quantum Mechanics. Yet despite his brilliance, he sounds pretty ignorant at Farm Hall. Was he faking? I think not. To paraphrase Watergate: the question still is "What did Werner Heisenberg know and when did he know it? At Farm Hall, when he found out about Hiroshima, his ego deflated like an untied balloon. His comments were made at a vulnerable and candid moment. They reveal a knowledge one would expect from someone you picked at random at a shopping mall.

The Manhattan Project was at least as much engineering as science, and Heisenberg was more of a theologian than a nuts 'n bolts guy.

But hey, don't take my word for it. If you are really interested, I recommend this book along with "Heisenberg's War" so you get both sides. Then read "Alsos" by Samuel Goudschmidt, the scientific leader of the famous Alsos Mission, who along with Col. Boris T. Pash ("The Alsos Mission"), followed the allied armies into France and captured Heisenberg and the others. Goudschmidt was a physicist who offered the earliest (1947) and perhaps the most philosophical postmortem on the German A-bomb "program".

The author tells an interesting story about some of the most known german physicist and their role in the attempt to produce an atomic bomb. Unfortunatelly he does not tell the pure facts, he gives his personal interpretation on each comment made by the germans and tries to make you think that they wanted to produce a bomb at any cost, that one of the most famous physicist, Heisenberg, did not know enough nuclear physics and that everything Heisenberg said, was just to hide his failure. A biassed book.