Massachusetts Books

This book was very well written and an extremely good guide for field identification of wetland and wetland type plants. I wish there were a few more color photographs, but the leaf ID drawings are excellent.

Review

The Final Judgment, one of Swedenborg's lesser known works, presents a startling claim: "The Last Judgment began last year--1757--and was completed by the end of that year." This judgment occurred in the spiritual heavens when God saw that the "church" had lost its true identity, which is compassion and charity.

Swedenborg's view of the Last Judgment stresses God's love and mercy and combats the fearful prophecies of fiery destruction and eternal damnation that have characterized this subject for so long. He asserts that biblical prophecies must be read on a symbolic level to understand their true or internal meaning. . . . This short work offers hope for the continuation of life on earth, the triumph of good, and eternal salvation. By understanding the universal application of his visionary insights, readers from other spiritual traditions can appreciate Swedenborg's writings for the truth they convey.

Emanuel Swedenborg, 1688-1772, was a remarkable visionary. A member of the Swedish Parliament, he was known throughout Europe as a scientist, inventor, and prolific writer. He is best known, however, for his extensive theological writings that fill thirty volumes, in which this work is included. Among other subjects, he wrote of the symbolic meaning of the Bible, spiritual symbols in the physical world (correspondences), a life of service and personal responsibility, and heaven and hell.

Contents

* The Destruction of the World is not meant by the Day of the Final Judgment
* The Procreations of the Human Race on the Earths will never Cease
* Heaven and Hell are from the Human Race
* All who have ever been born men from the Beginning of Creation, and are deceased, are either in Heaven or in Hell
* The Final Judgment must be where all are together, thus in the Spiritual World, and not on Earth
* The Final Judgment takes Place when the End of the Church is come, and the End of the Church is when there is no Faith, because there is no Charity
* All Things Predicted in the Apocalypse are at this day fulfilled
* The Final Jugment has been Accomplished
* Babylon and its Destruction
* The Former Heaven and its Abolishment
* The State of the World and of the Church hereafter
* Index

This collection is written by Harvard students, professors and grads, and Harvard types can sure write well. I used The Inexplicable Prayers of Ruby Bridges (from this collection) with students in a teacher training class in Albania and it was a great hit.

This book is an anthology of Rota's papers, all but two with co-authors, and one paper by another author. The title essay, "Finite Operator Calculus" by Rota, Kahaner, and Odlyzko, was published in 1973. It is the founding paper of the modern (as opposed to 19th-century) umbral calculus. It inaugurated Rota's general theory of special polynomial sequences. A later paper, _The_Umbral_Calculus_, by Steven Roman and Gian-Carlo Rota, published in Advances in Mathematics, volume 31, pages 95-188, in 1978, approaches the subject from a different direction and makes it clearer in what sense the theory of polynomial sequences is the same thing as the 19th-century umbral calculus. That older umbral calculus is essentially a notational trick by which subscripts that index sequences are treated as if they were exponents. The paper includes a fairly long list of research problems in combinatorics and probability, perhaps many of which have yet to be addressed. Application to cumulants of compound Poisson processes is barely mentioned in a remark that seemed cryptic to me. He returned to that topic not long before his death in a joint paper with Jianhong Shen, but seemed to be barely beginning to figure out how to think about the problem.

An earlier paper of Ronald Mullin and G.-C. Rota, _Theory_of_Binomial_Enumeration_, anticipates this theory of special polynomial sequences, and, as the title suggests, is concerned with its application to combinatorial enumeration.

Not everyone agrees that the modern umbral calculus can be very fruitful.

This book begins not with the title paper, but with Rota's first paper on combinatorics, _The_Number_of_Partitions_of_a_Set_, published in 1964. It is in that paper that Rota first applied linear functionals on spaces of polynomials to combinatorics. It is remarkable that this paper never explicitly mentions that the number of partitions of a set of size n is the nth moment of a Poisson distribution with expected value 1, since it mentions it _implicitly_ repeatedly. Rota uses a lemma that is formally very similar to the "Robbins lemma" of empirical Bayes methods in statistics, without appearing to be aware of any connection.

This book also contains the only joint paper Rota wrote with Richard Stanley (author of _Enumerative_Combinatorics_), on basic theory of generating functions; Peter Doubilet is also a co-author.

The one paper appearing here in which Rota is not identified as one of the authors is by Curtis Greene, on valuation rings of lattices.

This book successfully recaptures images of the original pilgrims of Plymouth colony celebrating the first Thanksgiving from the first crops the first year they landed in 1620. They celebrated with the Wampanoags Indians. The book mostly consists of these pictures with about a paragraph a page. My family has celebrated thanksgiving every year since I was a baby. In the 1800s, the 5th president Abe Lincoln declared Thanksgiving a national holiday to be held on the fourth Thursday in November. Gather around the turkey and pile on all the fixings.

A must for all who enjoy fishing from the shorelines of Cape Cod. Loved the format with directions and tips. Well done and great buy for the money.

Some of the finest saltwater fishing in the United States has to offer is off the coast of Massachusetts in general, and Cape Cod in particular. John Gribb is a USGC Licensed Charter Captain specializing in light-tackle and saltwater fly-fishing who has compiled a life-time's experience and expertise in Fishing The Massachusetts Coast: A Guide To North Shore, South Shore, And Cape Cod Locations For Boat And Shore Angles. Offering a profusion of insider tips and accessible techniques ranging from chartering boat trips to the technical aspects of saltwater fly-fishing, this "how to" compendium and definitive guide is a "must" for anyone wanting to know where and when to cast their lines in the coastal waters of Massachusetts.

I moved to Florida and really miss stiper fishing in the Boston area. This guide gives you pretty much everything you need to learn about the area. There is a lot of good fishing around if you are willing to be a little adventuresome. Now I sight fish for redfish. Almost as good.

Well organized by area, with local attractions mapped within those areas, accurate times, good descriptions and histories, and times. Also, useful subway map.

Fodor's boston is very helpful. It is organized in a neat way and has detailed descriptions of major tourist sites, museums, and the freedom trail. It comes with a pullout map of downtown. Very useful book. Has info on dining, hotels, sites, and excursions around Boston such as Salem, Quincy, and Cape Cod.