Wang Books

For beginning Go players there is a dearth of material on what exactly it takes to increase one's skill. It is all very well to talk about 'whole board' play, but it takes considerable experience to lift one's eyes above the dust of battle long enough to see that there is action all over the board and that everything is related. It only slowly dawns on the player that more points may be made by playing elsewhere than can be gained by flogging a local group to death.

Even after one knows that this is true, even after one has studied some basic opening strategies, it is often difficult to for a player to understand how he or she can arrive at the middle game already badly behind. The 'Power Builder' series is intended to remedy this situation by studying overall opening strategy and then following through to other aspects of the complex game of Go. In each case, Wang Runan goes that little bit deeper that is intended to drive a player past the intermediate skill level.

This is the first volume released of three volumes, a translation of the first 13 lessons of a set of 34. I find it remarkable that they were originally based on a Chinese television program presented by Wang RuNan. It says something for the overall popularity of Go in the Orient that a course as advanced as this would appear as popular media. Here in the U.S. it would be hard to find a program on Chess, let alone a less popular game like Go.

James Dee has done an excellent job of translating the classroom style of the program into a text with a similar feel. I find the discussion exceptionally clear, even though the subject matter is not always straightforward. It is enjoyable, enlightening reading that, applied carefully, will work positive changes in your playing style. This is a book I expect to read many times, and I hope that the following volumes appear in short order.

This was my first C book and I think it is still one of the best books around. The book can be tailored for different needs, from an introductory course in C, to a more advanced one that covers concepts like data encapsulation, Unix system facilities and multiprogramming.

It is NOT a dummy's book, and requires some sophistication from the user, although no previous knowledge. On the other hand, it is well-written, concise (you won't need to read through 20 pages of irrelevant stuff for the author finally converge on the relevant concept), correct and complete.

I highly recommend it.

At first, I found this book to be difficult reading. However, after a very serious attempt to discover the Author's intent, I truely began to cheerish the information presented in this book. One day I plan to contact Mr. Bowen, and maybe study with him for a time.

Rick Geary does it again with his graphic biography of an American icon, J. Edgar Hoover, director of the FBI. He uses his trademark illustrative style to chart the course of Hoover's life from birth to death, and all points in between. Hoover is now a controversial figure thanks to some scandalous, yet unproven rumors (mostly about his personal life), but Geary treats his subject matter fairly, and portrays Hoover in an unbiased fashion. This is a new venture from Geary's excellent "Treasury of Victorian Crime" series, and it does not disappoint. Anyone looking for a concise, yet thoroughly enjoyable biography of Hoover need look no further.

this 1967 pocket-sized paperback from Hill & Wang is a relic of the time, now long past, when commercial publishers found it profitable and worthwhile to print affordable editions of works by great novelists, playwrights, poets and other literary figures. This edition of Anouilh's plays is Volume Three of the collected plays. Can you imagine today collected works of authors released by the major publishing houses in cheap paperbacks? This volume contains the following plays: Medea, The Orchestra, Thieves' Carnival, Catch as Catch Can, Traveler without Luggage, Episode in the Life of an Author, and Cécile or The School for Fathers.

Four short plays, seductive and fickle water nymphs with the visage of Audrey Hepburn, love that can animate sculpted statues, madwomen and the ghosts of those who've loved them... a universal celebration and recognition of small sacrifices and gestures hidden within grand tales of mythic proportions. Keep this book close for the rest of your eventful life.

Charles Wiltse's the Jeffersonian Tradition in American Democracy is a very good account of the intellectual background and philosophy of Thomas Jefferson. Wiltse starts out with the intellectual background for Enlightenment thought in Great Britian and France. It is shown how the philosophy of republicanism and libertarian thought progressed from the mid 17th century to the time of Jefferson.

Next Jefferson's intellectual background is explored. Locke, Bacon, Newton, Sidney, and Lord Kames are shown to be the main influences on our greatest founder. It then moves to Jefferson's progressive philosophy of liberty and republican thought. Public education, religious freedom, the abolition of slavery, ending primogenture and entail, and a republican constitution consume the mind of Jefferson.

Wiltse also goes into Jefferson's philosophy for "ward republics",a form of grass roots democracy. He details Jefferson's passion for ward republics to be the "salvation of the republic" as he called it. The main thing that makes this work so good id that it lacks the anti-intellectual postmodern "deconstruction" of Jefferson. No political correctness or extreme "presentism" viewpoint. A really good book for a Jeffersonian education.

Philip Gura provides an enjoyable, concise biography of this American original -- a brilliant man who understood the need for personal conversion. Edwards rejected a dry orthodoxy that does not produce personal repentence and faith. Gura shows Edwards' consistant stand that people must actively respond to God -- both intellectually and emotionally. Otherwise we remain in our natural state -- unforgiven -- sinners in the hands of the moral law.

This recent collection of short stories by Ping Wang is a revealing glimpse into the tumultuous current state of the Chinese people, although largely from the perspective of those who have immigrated to the USA, and occasionally featuring flashbacks to the strife-torn China of the 1960s.

Most European Americans have rather one-dimensional views of Chinese immigrants, mostly seeing them as meek and polite "model immigrants" without perceiving the reality of these complex people. Ping unwraps them so we see, perhaps for the first time, their humanity, which naturally is not always flattering - there is coarseness, arrogance, duplicity, and xenophobia, but also playful rambunctiousness, sophistication, warmheartedness, a sense of honor, yearning, fears, ambition, a rich tapestry of ancient tales, and much more. Atop this is a whole additional layer because, after thousands of years of a society rooted in tradition and position, Chinese society has recently been picked up and shaken violently, and we see these people adrift, each trying in his or her way to find their bearings, a home, and happiness. Although the syntax in this slender collection of stories is at times a bit rough, this only adds to the immediacy and authenticity of the storytelling, which is wonderful. Highly recommended.

The overriding mechanism of the play is an image, a radiantly English image, of society as a mechanism or consuming beast, it consumes Cordelia as head of state, it destroys Lear as contrary to its purposes. He gives the simple understanding of the situation in the great third act: "If a God had made the world, might would always be right, that would be so wise, we'd be spared so much suffering. But we made the world--out of our smallness and weakness. Our lives are awkward and fragile and we have only one thing to keep us sane: pity, and the man without pity is mad."

He's mad, of course, or call this a moment of lucidity before the end. Within the structure, Bond skillfully handles material from Kafka ("The Great Wall of China") and Frost ("Mending Wall"), tending toward Eliot's "Marina" in Act Two. The writing is sparse, the action is dramatic, until Act Three blooms into Lear's parable, Kafka by way of Charles M. Jones: "A man woke up one morning and found he'd lost his voice. So he went to look for it, and when he came to the wood there was the bird who'd stolen it. It was singing beautifully and the man said `Now I sing so beautifully I shall be rich and famous'. He put the bird in a cage and said, `When I open my mouth wide you must sing'. Then he went to the king and said, `I will sing your majesty's praises'. But when he opened his mouth the bird could only groan and cry because it was in a cage, and the king had the man whipped. The man took the bird home, but his family couldn't stand the bird's groaning and crying and they left him. So in the end the man took the bird back to the wood and let it out of the cage. But the man believed the king had treated him unjustly and he kept saying to himself `The king's a fool' and as the bird still had the man's voice it kept singing this all over the wood and soon the other birds learned it. The next time the king went hunting he was surprised to hear all the birds singing `The king's a fool'. He caught the bird who'd started it and pulled out its feathers, broke its wings and nailed it to a branch as a warning to all the other birds. The forest was silent. And just as the bird had the man's voice the man now had the bird's pain. He ran round silently waving his head and stamping his feet, and he was locked up for the rest of his life in a cage."

Not Solomon in all his glory was arrayed by such a commentator. The Bard in this bleak, warlike world makes himself known by an untoward cruelty or a jest for groundlings, in a line or two. Gunplay replaces the swordfight. The main point of departure is the rapprochement of Cordelia and Lear, who sit as spies on the whole lot in indeterminate time and space.

The Author's Preface argues in Bond's voice the image of the play, and reveals an eye for "the caricatures that pass for strength in our society--the hysterical old maids who become sergeant majors, the disguised peeping Toms who become moralists, the immature social misfits who become judges."

The Royal Court Theatre was able to mount the play in 1972 with a large cast, and Harry Andrews as Lear. The Royal Court is not what it was, Bond is out, and the Guardian headlined a 2000 interview with him (saying the very same things), "Still bolshie after all these years" (the subhead is "Playwright Edward Bond tells Brian Logan why he knows better than Sam Mendes, Trevor Nunn and the rest of theatre's A-list").