Chambers Books

At the youthful age of only 29, Tchaikovsky managed to make one of the most profound pieces of his career and most heard piece in our culture today. "Romeo and Juliet" is a magnificent piece that captures the passion and tragic fate of Shakespeare's most famous work. The love theme in Romeo and Juliet portrays Romeo and Juliet's love better than any other, even Prokoffiev's famous version adapted for a play. "Capriccio Italien", less dark and heavy as the latter piece, is a pleasant contrast, complete with Italian-influenced songs and harmony. Dover's wonderful release of the full scores to these two well-known pieces gives people the chance to study and further appreciate these masterpieces. The complexity of these works can no greater be expressed than by looking through this book alone. It is a great source of knowledge for anyone interested in music theory and a treasure trove of experience for anybody interested in orchestration. This book deserves to be in any classical enthusiast's bookshelf.

This is an easy-to-read set of score of two of Peter Tchaikovsky's most celebrated orchestral works. As to Capriccio Italien, Tchaikovsky began composing this upon the inspiration he got when he was staying in Florence, Italy. It is a bunch of published Italian folk-tunes and popular tunes that caught his ears during his stay in Italy. He began composing in Rome in 1880 and finished it after he returned to Russia. Romeo and Juliet is one of the pieces that initially made Tchaikovsky internationally famous, composed during September and November 1869. Both Romeo and Juliet and Capriccio Italien reflect Tchaikovsky's talent in producing of uniquely convincing melodies and excellence in orchestration. And this score is a fine companion for those wishing to pursue a detailed study of Tchaikovsky's masterpieces.

Among Rimsky-Korsakow's most beloved works, this orchestral poem depicting select tales from Scheherazade and 1001 Nights.

The score is very durable and will lie flat nicely on a desk or music stand. The print is very large and easy to read, despite it's smaller size -- Dover opted for 8.5 x 11 in lieu of their more standard 9 x 12. The low price is a great attraction to the starving music student.

You'll love this colorful score for the Rimsky-Korsakov's lush orchestration and romantic writing (the score itself has many colorful pictures on it). This is a must for the music student, professional, or advid listener, alike.

This Dover publication is a very cost-effective way to get accustomed with this masterpiece by Rimsky-Korsakov. Scheherazade tells the story of 1001 nights, Rimsky shines his light over a number of this tales. The score is clear, well-readible, but lacks commentary and is not an outstanding reproduction.

Who'd have thought some guy from Oklahoma would write this pithy discussion of business in Vietnam? Few books exist on this topic but Mr. Chambers has written the kind of honest, straightforward business book we need more of.

This is a well written and informative guide. It is much better written, and much more insightful, than most books of its kind. It is very useful for any person thinking of doing business in Vietnam...in fact, I would call it "essential".

For a Dover score, this is standard. You get what you pay for--it's a reprint, which means the quality is only as good as the original was. For a student like me, it works very well as a study score. If you want to be picky, it is a pain to have to remember which line is which instrument (and what key the instruments are in, e.g. Trumpet in F in #1) since the instruments are only given on the first page of each movement (with a few exceptions throughout the score).

These two symphonies are the greatest of a modern composer. They are deep, emotional, and very melodic.

The only quibble I have with this reproduction (and it might be a personal preference) is that I like having all the instrumental abbreviations (i.e., which instruments are meant to be assigned to which staff) explicitely placed alongside each system for those staffs which are used (even if it's most or all of the players that are called-for overall that have to play on a given system). Without those being in place, it can be difficult to be certain - for example - where is the 3rd flautist supposed to be playing the fife (piccolo) instead?

Otherwise, more than well worth having - especially at such a price!

The full score of Rachmaninoff's most popular symphony is a wonderful bargain at Dover's price. (The competing version by Boosey & Hawkes is more than twice as expensive, and hard to find outside of music stores, unlike the popular Dover series.) A problem: a production error resulted in the reprinting of the music on page 73 on page 78; the solution, photocopy page 110 (whose 8 bars are identical to the missing page) and paste it over page 78. Dover has been alerted by me about this error, but apparently errant copies are still in circulation. Also, be alerted that many recordings of this symphony make significant cuts in the music, especially in the outer movements, so be alert if you are using this to follow a recording!

The full score for CSS's organ symphony is very well arranged, easy to read, and is of good quality. It is really a steal at that price and is good enough for review or study. I used it to transcribe the piece to another instrument. For an orchestra you would need to have the piece-wise score for each instrument which obviously costs much more, but this is a good alternative for simpler applications, is great for a conductor or for transcribing, and is perfect for the casual reader. Very durable too.

In an era where good manuscripts are expensive and somewhat difficult to obtain, Dover has made available the consummate example of organ and symphony in harmony. With easy readablity and the trademark 'lay-flat' binding, Dover allows easy access to all parts of the score with little confusion. A must for all who enjoy listening to this piece as well as those who study scores and instumental relationships.

shows various ways to model production and choice under uncertainty. well written, many examples and graphs. ideal for graduate students who have basic concepts of production and uncertainty.

This book is a must for any graduate program in Economics. The authors show how the state-contingent approach can be extended to production problems breaking the path for a unified duality theory under uncertainty. They also show that agency theory does not need to be inacessible for someone who does not care much about probability theory. Bravo!

Among those who were my college classmates in the 1950s, I wonder how many thought they would live long enough to think that Sam Sheppard was probably innocent, and that Alger Hiss was almost certainly guilty? Not me, I can assure you. As it happens, I lived in Cleveland for a few months in 1954, while the Sheppard fandango was in full flourish. I think I had the uneasy sense then that there was something unseemly about the media (more precisely - Louis Seltzer's Cleveland Press) and its bacchanal. I never doubted - until years later - that the underlying verdict was really wrong.

The Hiss-Chambers conflict is perhaps more complicated. Chambers' charge that Hiss was a Communist agent stood or fell on Chambers' say-so alone. It's true that Chambers, as an influential senior editor at Time Magazine, was in some sense the creature of the publisher Henry Luce, and in any event had plenty of loud advocates from the start. But Luce himself never seems to have known quite what to make of Chambers, and Luce was far from eager to embrace Chambers after Chambers swept himself into the center of the maelstrom. Meanwhile Hiss, with his cool, civilized, aristocratic (except he wasn't, really) demeanor just couldn't be guilty - except, it turns out, seem even on the left (Jerome Frank is a remarkable example) felt uncomfortable with him from the start.

Tanenhaus' biography is a model of detached sympathy. He pretty clearly got himself inside Chambers' skin, but he leaves not the slightest doubt that Chambers was one extremely weird guy, not in any sense the man you would choose to stand as the defender of Western Civilization. Likewise he is at pains to show how Chambers, a conservative ideologue by any measure, remained his own conservative ideologue, never the catspaw of so many who were eager to use him (example: Chambers never had any truck with Joe McCarthy). That may offer a certain solace for all those of my generation who couldn't bear to believe that Hiss was guilty, but have to accept now that Chambers was probably right. My only regret is that this fine biography is out of stock: it's an important story and it would be a shame to see it fall into a crack.

Read this for graduate American history course. There are a few rare instances in American history when a court case grips the passions of its citizens and serves to define people's political or social beliefs based on which side they believed was in the right. The Sacco and Vanzetti case of the 1920's, the Rosenberg espionage trials of the 1950's, and the O. J. Simpson case of the 1990's were to some extent examples of this phenomena. However, the Hiss perjury trials of 1949-50 were the epitome of this phenomenon, and helped to create a divide between liberals and conservatives in American politics that is still evident to this day. During the Cold War era, one could easily identify the political persuasion of a person simply by asking them whether Hiss or Chambers had told the truth. Simply put, the innocence of Alger Hiss was embraced by liberals. If Hiss, a well respected New Deal advocate and important Roosevelt administration member, had actually been an American Communist spying for the Soviets since the 1930's, then a whole mass of conservative accusations would gain legitimacy, and all of FDR's New Deal programs and his foreign policy decisions at the Yalta Conference would become suspect. In addition, Hiss' guilt would call into question security breaches in the Truman administration, which was already being besieged by questions of "Who lost China." It is against this historical backdrop, that Sam Tanenhaus wrote Whittaker Chambers: A Biography; whose purpose was to make the first serious examination of the life and motivations of one of America's most contentious figures in the last half of the twentieth-century, Whittaker Chambers.

Tanenhaus' description of Chambers' early life is an excellent insight into his psychological profile. Born Vivian Jay Chambers on April 1, 1901, (April Fools Day), he came from a middle-class family of meager means. Add to the mix a father who was bisexual and spent much time away from home, a mother who was paranoid, a grandmother who was insane, and his brother Richard who committed suicide, it is no wonder that you have the formula for a man who developed into a tormented soul and was generally estranged from the world and the people around him. In fact, throughout the book, Tanenhaus illuminates his theme, which is to examine Chamber's tormented life at key junctures; such as, when he joined and left the Communist party, when he became a reluctant informer against Alger Hiss and when he distanced himself from the political right near the end of his life. Chambers, who attended Long Island's South Side High School, showed himself to be academically brilliant and an exceptional writer. His parents had big dreams for their son's future. Chambers had dreams too but they did not involve college. Being too young to fight in World War Two, he decided to run away with a friend to see the world. They bummed around and worked their way to New Orleans--a city he fell in love with. "Chambers had discovered life as Hugo described it, a kind of prison, harsh and cruel, but lit from within by tender sentiment and from without by sudden shafts of illumination" (18). After a few months of life on the seedy side and running out of money, he returned home and changed his name to Charles Whittaker but went by Whittaker, and within six months entered Columbia University.

A new world was opened to Chambers at Columbia with which he became enamored. He took English composition with Mark Van Doren, who later in life became a Pulitzer Prize winning poet. Van Doren quickly saw in Chambers a very talented writer and later remarked that he was the best writer among his undergraduate students in the 1920's. Chambers especially enjoyed the friendship of fellow students, mostly Jewish, whom he found brilliant such as Lionel Trilling, Meyer Schapiro, and Mortimer J. Adler to name a few. "It was the ernste Menschen" (serious men) "who shaped Chamber's idea, never altered, of the intellectual life" (22). However, academic bliss was not to be for Chambers. He ran afoul of the school administration for a play that he wrote which was deemed profane, and thus became despondent and quit going to class--eventually dropping out and never finishing his university education. He tried to travel to the Soviet Union to help build a new nation on the advice of Van Doren, but he only made it to Germany before returning home. He took a job at the New York Public Library which fed his autodidactic nature, and he started to consort with many women. It is at this stage in Chambers' life in 1925, that he joined the 16,000 member Communist Party of the United States, (CPUSA). "So much the better. He was used to being outnumbered. He had at last found his church" (46).

Tanenhaus paints a portrait of a man who dove into his new life as a Communist with a religious fervor. Chambers became a much-respected writer for several party newspapers, which brought him to the attention of party apparatchiks in 1932. Chambers also met Esther Shemitz a Socialist, and they married in 1931. It was after his marriage that he accepted an assignment to go underground and actively spy for the Party. He was made the courier of the "Ware cell" in Washington D.C., whose mission was to pass sensitive information from Communist party members who had infiltrated various departments of the U. S. government to Boris Bykov, a Soviet intelligence agent. One of the best-placed spies in the "Ware cell" who provided information to Chambers, then using the alias George Crosley, was Alger Hiss. However, Chambers became so disillusioned by Stalin's purges and his nonaggression pact with Hitler, that in 1938, he quit the party. Fearing for his life and his family's safety, Chambers turned informer and confessed all of his activities to Assistant Secretary of State Adolf Berle, Jr., who forwarded his notes of the meeting to the FBI, which did not follow up on the case until several years later. In addition, an old friend recommended Chambers for a job at Time magazine, which he was elated to have since he was broke. Tanenhaus once again shows that Chambers' literary acumen and zeal for any new project he took on, propelled him to become one of Time's top editors in the 1940's. The magazine's owner Henry Luce said, "Chambers was the best writer Time ever employed" (165). While a writer and editor at Time, Chambers became a most vociferous anti-Communist.

Soon after Stalin reneged on his Yalta Conference promises, a conference that Alger Hiss played a key role in for the State Department, the U. S. government finally moved to ferret out Communist infiltrators in the government. The FBI finally conducted extensive interviews with Chambers. This led to Chambers becoming a government informant in one of America's most dramatic congressional hearings and court cases of the twentieth-century. Tanenhaus' research shows Chambers' denouncement of Alger Hiss was a stinging indictment of the Roosevelt and Truman administrations, since it cast doubt on American liberals' willingness to conduct espionage investigations during the war years. The contrast between Hiss and Chambers could not be starker. Hiss was a Harvard graduate with impeccable looks and a sterling reputation as a government servant. He clerked for Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes. His character references included Justice Felix Frankfurter, and John Foster Dulles, who was to become Secretary of State in the Eisenhower administration. Chambers was an overweight plain looking man who did not dress well, a self-confessed Communist and government informant. Tanenhaus did not write about the relationship between Hiss and Chambers until he wrote about the Hiss perjury case, near the end of the book, which made the book a bit awkward to read. However, Tanenhaus does a good job of retelling the facts of the perjury case and Chambers' testimony to the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), as well as his extensive cooperation and long and friendly relationship with Richard Nixon. One finds that Chambers was much more revealing of his own motivations in his critically acclaimed autobiography Witness, which was written in 1952 after the Hiss perjury trial. It was also disappointing that Tanenhaus did not cover more of Chambers' writings and views about Stalinism and his very prescient views of the Soviet-American confrontation that led to the Cold War. Tanenhaus' research does agree with other historians work. John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr, in their book Early Cold War Spies: The Espionage Trials That Shaped American Politics, written some ten years after this book, proved that their was a preponderance of evidence showing that Hiss was a Communist and did commit espionage against the U. S. government. Hiss was not charged with espionage because the statute of limitations protected him. The first Hiss perjury case ended in a hung jury. The second ended on January 20, 1950 with his conviction on two counts of perjury and a sentence to serve five years in jail--he only served forty-four months. Hiss went to his grave denying the charges against him. Haynes and Klehr wrote that he gained much sympathy with the political left again in the wake of the Watergate scandal claiming, "that a government conspiracy had forged evidence and coerced false testimony against him."

Although Chambers was vindicated by Hiss's conviction, Tanenhaus showed that Chambers entered into a self-imposed exile on his farm in Maryland. However, for the rest of his life Chambers was visited by a small coterie of friends with whom he enjoyed lengthy discussions about world affairs. "Still convinced he had left the winning side for the losing one, Chambers foretold a global Communist victory. Gloomy as his predictions sounded, he was not devoid of hope" (450). He believed that the primary way the West could defeat Communism was with morality and religion and not militarily. Needing to earn money, Chambers went back to what he did best. He wrote his autobiography Witness, which occupied the top of the New York Times best seller list for several months in 1952, and gave him the financial security he desired. More importantly, Witness was an anti-Communist manifesto that for Chambers described, "a struggle between the force of two irreconcilable faiths--Communism and Christianity." Witness was a powerful exposé of Communist activity in America and changed the life of one future president, Ronald Reagan. Reagan remarked that Witness was his favorite book and pointed to, "Witness as the book that would shape his political outlook." In 1984, President Reagan posthumously awarded Chambers the Presidential Medal of Freedom. The other person of note that Witness made a huge impression on was William F. Buckley, Jr., who befriended Chambers and offered him the position of senior editor of his fledgling conservative magazine National Review. Both men maintained a very friendly relationship up to Chamber's death in 1961. Though Chambers would write articles for the National Review, he turned Buckley's offer down due to his poor health and his growing reluctance of the tactics that the political right was using--especially those of Senator Joseph McCarthy. Near the end of his life, Chambers became friendly with another former Communist and imminent writer, Arthur Koestler. Koestler wrote of Chambers upon receiving news of his death: "I always felt that Whittaker was the most misunderstood person of our time. When he testified he knowingly committed moral suicide to atone for the guilt of our generation. The witness is gone, the testimony will stand."

In all, Sam Tanenhaus did an excellent job using primary and secondary sources, trial transcripts, and personal interviews to write an engaging biography of Whittaker Chambers. In his book, he provides informative notes and a thorough index; all of which helped to provide readers with a better understanding of the political mood in the country at the time of the Hiss-- Chambers case. The book would have been better organized had Tanenhaus placed the Chambers Hiss relationship information in its proper chronology and not moved it from the 1930's into the Hiss trial period of the 1950's. That small criticism aside, Tanenhaus' biography of Chambers is an important scholarly work for anyone wishing to gain a better understanding of CPUSA activities in U. S., the work of HUAC, and especially its star member, Richard Nixon, and the political left/right divide that was at the center of the Cold War era.

As a graduate student in philosophy and history, I recommended this book for anyone interested in American history, foreign policy, Cold War history.

This is a nice edition, but the paper is very smooth making it difficult to turn pages in time.

Besides "William Tell"(1829), this volume also contains the overtures to: "La Gazza Ladra" (The Thieving Magpie, 1817); "La Scala di Seta" (The Silken Ladder, 1812); "Il Signor Bruschino" (Mr. Bruschino or The Accidental Son, 1813); "Semiramide" (1823). From Dover's Bibliographical Note: "This Dover edition, first published in 1994, is a new compilation of five previously uncollected works originally published by Breitkopf & Haertel, n.d. Lists of contents and instruments have been added in the Dover edition, accompanied by information about the source of each work, its librettist(s) and first performance. For the Overture to Il Signor Bruschino, a new editorial note clarifies performance of the col legno passages; for the Overture to Semiramide, a brief note about playing cues replaces a longer explanation in the original score, printed in three languages."

Thsi book is really wonderful to read, it really makes you focus on what should be most important in your life. We were created for a reason and we should be living our life for the purpose we were put on earth for, not just for ourselves. In general be a fun-loving, caring, down to earth, spiritual person, and always smile.

This book was suggested to me by a dear friend and I am so glad I bought it. It is an awesome book. I've enjoyed every page I've read so far. It not only explains what God wants you to do, it helps you believe. I couldn't have asked for a better book to read. It has been a very spiritual journey.

Superb service, fast delivery, and a high quality product. I would strongly recommend this product and this seller to anyone intersted in making a quality online purchase.

Every household should read this book! The earlier the better. Jessica V. Psalidas - Author Everlasting Purity

This book was very useful to me. By the time I had finished the book I was charged with energy and looked at things and issues differently. I recommend you read and one section at a time. I also recommend that you keep a journal and record your thoughts. It will be very helpful to go back and read reference. I highly recommend this for everyone, whether they are young and coming out of high school, college or at any point in your life. It will be very meaningful for you. Jessica V. Psalidas - Author Everlasting Purity