Advances in Chemical Engineering, Volume 25 (Advances in Chemical Engineering)

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Advances in Chemical Engineering, Volume 19 reflects the major impact of chemical engineering on medical practice, with chapters covering polymer systems for controlled release, receptor binding and signaling,and transport phenomena in tumors. Other key topics include oil refining, pollution prevention in engineering design, and atmospheric dynamics.

Advances in Heat Transfer, Volume 25: Volume 25 (Advances in Heat Transfer)

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Advances in Heat Transfer, Volume 25: Volume 25 (Advances in Heat Transfer)

Manufacturer: Academic Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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ASIN: 0120200252

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Advances in Heat Transfer is designed to fill the information gap between regularly scheduled journals and university level textbooks by providing in-depth review articles over a broader scope than is allowablein either journals or texts.

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Accessible, concise, and self-contained, this book offers an outstanding introduction to three related subjects: differential geometry, differential topology, and dynamical systems. Topics of special interest addressed in the book include Brouwer's fixed point theorem, Morse Theory, and the geodesic flow. Smooth manifolds, Riemannian metrics, affine connections, the curvature tensor, differential forms, and integration on manifolds provide the foundation for many applications in dynamical systems and mechanics. The authors also discuss the Gauss-Bonnet theorem and its implications in non-Euclidean geometry models. The differential topology aspect of the book centers on classical, transversality theory, Sard's theorem, intersection theory, and fixed-point theorems. The construction of the de Rham cohomology builds further arguments for the strong connection between the differential structure and the topological structure. It also furnishes some of the tools necessary for a complete understanding of the Morse theory. These discussions are followed by an introduction to the theory of hyperbolic systems, with emphasis on the quintessential role of the geodesic flow. The integration of geometric theory, topological theory, and concrete applications to dynamical systems set this book apart. With clean, clear prose and effective examples, the authors' intuitive approach creates a treatment that is comprehensible to relative beginners, yet rigorous enough for those with more background and experience in the field.

Customer Reviews:

Excellent book.......2006-06-29

It was a great pleasure to read the book Differential Geometry and Topology With a View to Dynamical Systems by Keith Burns and Marian Gidea. The topic of manifolds and its development, typically considered as very abstract and difficult, becomes for the reader of this outstanding book tangible and familiar. This joyful aspect of the book was achieved by the authors by setting the advanced material of differential geometry and topology as if on a mobile bridge or a crossroad that associates a(n) (primarily) unfamiliar abstract part of the text with elementary math theories. The latter pedagogical approach was mostly carried out through carefully prepared examples, in which, for essentially abstract structures and mathematical topics, well known familiar elementary settings serve as obvious motivations, which make the transition to a higher level of an abstraction smooth. Nevertheless, the scope of the main topic in this book, differential geometry and topology, is pretty far advanced. Besides the basic theory, centered around analytical properties of manifolds (mostly endowed with additional, in particular Riemannian, structures and vector or tensor fields defined on them) and their applications, it also provides a good introductory approach to some deeper topics of differential topology such as Fixed Points theory, Morse theory, and hyperbolic systems throughout the rest of the book.
The main stream of the applications that always follow or motivate the theoretical context is dynamical systems. Excellent examples reveal the close ties of this beautiful mathematical theory with common problems in theoretical physics, classical and fluid mechanics, field theory, and, most importantly, the theory of general relativity.
The book by Burns and Gidea is also be strongly recommended for those readers who wish to enhance their mathematical tools to make possible a deeper insight into these fascinating physical theories.

Jerzy K. Filus

A very good book.......2005-12-17

A very clear and very entertaining book for a course on differential geometry and topology (with a view to dynamical systems).

First let me remark that talking about content, the book is very good. Each of the 9 chapters of the book offers intuitive insight while developing the main text and it does so without lacking in rigor. The first 6 chapters (which deal with manifolds, vector fields and dynamical systems, Riemannian metrics, Riemannian connections and geodesics, curvature and tensors and differential forms) make up an introduction to dynamical systems and Morse theory (the subject of chapter 8). Chapter 7 is devoted to fixed points and intersection numbers. The last chapter is an introduction to hyperbolic systems.

This enjoyable and highly instructive book contains a large number of examples and exercises. It is an incredible help to those trying to learn dynamical systems (and not only). It teaches all the differential geometry and topology notions that somebody needs in the study of dynamical systems.
The authors, without making use of a pedantic formalism, emphasize the connection of important ideas via examples. It completely enhanced my knowledge on the subject and took me to a higher level of understanding.

Amazon.com

What is Dhalgren? Dhalgren is one of the greatest novels of 20th-century American literature. Dhalgren is one of the all-time bestselling science fiction novels. Dhalgren may be read with equal validity as SF, magic realism, or metafiction. Dhalgren is controversial, challenging, and scandalous. Dhalgren is a brilliant novel about sex, gender, race, class, art, and identity.

A mysterious disaster has stricken the midwestern American city of Bellona, and its aftereffects are disturbing: a city block burns down and is intact a week later; clouds cover the sky for weeks, then part to reveal two moons; a week passes for one person when only a day passes for another. The catastrophe is confined to Bellona, and most of the inhabitants have fled. But others are drawn to the devastated city, among them the Kid, a white/American Indian man who can't remember his own name. The Kid is emblematic of those who live in the new Bellona, who are the young, the poor, the mad, the violent, the outcast--the marginalized.

Dhalgren is many things, but instantly accessible isn't one of them. While most of this big, ambitious, deeply detailed novel is beautifully pellucid, the opening pages will be difficult for some: the novel starts with the second half of an incomplete sentence, in the viewpoint of a man who doesn't know who he is. If you find the early pages rough going, push on; the story soon becomes clear and fascinating. But--fair warning--the central nature of the disaster, of its strange devastations and disruptions, remains a puzzle for many readers, sometimes after several readings.

Spoiler warning: If you want to figure out the secret of the novel as you read Dhalgren, then stop reading this review right now! If you want to know the secret before you start, this is what the novel is about: the experience of existence inside a novel. Time passes differently for different characters. A river changes location. Stairs change their number. The Kid looks in a mirror and sees not himself, but someone who looks an awful lot like Samuel R. Delany. Central images include mirrors, lenses, and prisms, devices that focus, reflect--and distort. The Kid fills a notebook with a journal that may be Dhalgren, and is uncertain if he has written much, or any, of it. The characters don't know they're in a novel, but they know something is wrong. Dhalgren explores the relationship between characters and author (or, perhaps, characters, "author," and author).

The final chapter can be even tougher going than the opening pages, with its viewpoint change and its stretches of braided narrative--and the novel ends with the beginning of an unfinished sentence. But the last chapter becomes clear as you persevere; and when you get to that unfinished closing line, turn to the first line of the novel to finish the sentence and close the narrative circle. --Cynthia Ward

Book Description

In Dhalgren, perhaps one of the most profound and bestselling science fiction novels of all time, Samuel R. Delany has produced a novel "to stand with the best American fiction of the 1970s" (Jonathan Lethem).

Bellona is a city at the dead center of the United States. Something has happened there…. The population has fled. Madmen and criminals wander the streets. Strange portents appear in the cloud-covered sky. And into this disaster zone comes a young man–poet, lover, and adventurer–known only as the Kid. Tackling questions of race, gender, and sexuality, Dhalgren is a literary marvel and groundbreaking work of American magical realism.

Customer Reviews:

So many ways to see it..........2007-09-18

Here is a multiple-choice test; pick as many as you like. "Dhalgren" is:

1) An embalmed relic of the mindset of the 1960s.

2) A demonstration of how to populate a satisfying novel with "marginal people" normally excluded from popular culture -- blacks and latinos; females; the uneducated and mentally ill.

3) A puerile fantasy of sex and asocial escapism.

4) An important work by a masterful writer.

5) A dangerous, morally defective inducement to the spread of AIDS.

6) An absorbing read.

7) Science Fiction.

I would write "true" after all but #7. Dhalgren can't be science fiction because its fundamental situation, the strange condition of the city of Bellona, is not justified by any coherent mechanism. It isn't credible that a whole city could be emptied by disaster (where did the refugees go?); that it would now be in a state in which TV, radio and the telephone don't work; that its skies are filled with strange astronomy and stranger meteorology; that there are no guards or barriers at its limits yet few enter or leave; and so forth.

If Bellona doesn't work as a science-fictional milieu, it does work very well as symbol. It stands for the condition of life in all the wrecked neighborhoods of the world: in the first instance the Bronx and Harlem (Delany has always been a New York writer first); but beyond them, it stands for any hopeless ghetto full of empty buildings with broken windows. Such ghettos _are_ ignored by the surrounding nation -- as Bellona is. Burning up and falling down _is_ their natural condition, and nobody cares or notices -- as in Bellona. Vast incomprehensible events take place outside them (wars, recessions, elections...) and pass on changing nothing -- as in Bellona. Marginal people can, in such places, live pretty much as they please, without reference to law or concensus morality -- as in Bellona.

So Bellona is not acceptable as a setting for SF, but it works as symbol. And a book set in a symbol is a fantasy, by definition.

As for charge #1, in those passages that approximate normal narrative, the book describes the lives of people very much like the people in Delany's memoir, "Heavenly Breakfast" (in which, by the way, there is a vivid paragraph about his sighting of a nameless person who is probably the visual model for The Kid). The people living out in the park are parodies of the Diggers of San Francisco. The "straight" (as in un-hip) Mom who features in one brilliantly tragi-comic chapter is patterned on 60s TV characters. And so on: anyone who was young in the 1960s shares a vocabulary of images and attitudes with Delany -- and anyone who wasn't, won't recognize many features of life in Bellona.

As for #3 and #5 -- I suppose we can't blame Delany for liking to write about sex, nor for writing, in the 1970s, about the carefree sex of the 1960s. It wasn't until the 1990s that AIDS was well-understood. But it was exactly the breezy exchange of bodily fluids so poetically depicted in Dhalgren that gave AIDS its big start in the world. And reading Dhalgren now... well, it would be nice if the author would add a sincere forward about Safe Sex. About the writing itself, he has nothing to apologize for.

Brilliant but mortally flawed.......2007-09-14

This is an almost impossible work to judge. I read the reviews from people that I value highly, such as Umberto Eco, and hesitate to disagree, but I must. I look on this book on several levels: the quality of the writing itself, the premise of the work, and the subject of the work. The details have been exhaustively investigated by others more qualified then me.
First, the quality of the writing is absolutely first rate. No question. No one could fault the author on this point.
Second, the premise of the book. Many people have speculated on it, so I throw in my own: what hapens to humans when both society and science itself desert them at the same time, and neither offers any kind of firm foundation? The answer is a lot closer to William Golding's "Lord of the Flies" then Rousseau's noble savage. There is plenty of savagry here, but very liitle that is noble.
Finally, the subject of the work itself. Here, I find myself looking out through the prism of my own perspective, as well as the authors title for the first chapter. The author is a gay black male. So be it. t Given that, the book is filled with sado-masochistic homo-erotic material. There is is an extensive monolgue by the black character George about how the white female he raped "really wanted it", and how rape is justified when the female "really wants it." While the author has perfect right to write such material, I also have the right to be uninterested and disgusted by it. It rapidly became repetative and intrusive, not to mention downright unpleasant. I realise the author was around 30 years old when he composed it, and it needs to be filtered through that persepective, but sooner or later it becomes just plain boring. I mean, enough is enough already.
So, I read the whole book back in the 70's. Took about four days, and I didn't understand 90% of it. I've tried twice in the past two years years, but just can't get past page 200. It isn't worth the effort. If you want to read a similar work about the end of reality, just as well written, lyric in quality as the Kidd seems to be striving for, I sugggest "The Crystal World", but J G Ballard. Only about 190 pages to boot. Much more thought provoking in addition.
Ultimately an overblown incredibly wordy piece of work leading nowhere.
Consider "Catch-22" if you need something about the same theme.

Worth every minute........2007-09-05

This book requires thought. Yes it's long, but it's not wasted space. Almost every moment in this story ties backward and forward to another. It can be read with many intents, and the story will become largely what you want it to be. At least, that's my perception of it. I read this book over 5 days, and I'm going to sit on it for a few months and do it again. I can't wait.

Thank You.......2007-05-10

Timely and a great product. Not a blemish on the cover. Thank you.

Read it, it's not that hard. .......2007-03-02

I'm not sure why Dhalgren has the reputation of being so difficult, impenetrable, complex, and so on. It's long, but a lot of books are long. It's true that there are some things that might be off-putting for some readers. There is a fair amount of sex [a lot of it male-male or MMF]; there are some odd lapses from third-person to first-person perspective; there is some blank verse; there are some shennangians with typesetting, so that some sections have 2 columns of text that say different things. The fact is that all of this stuff together accounts for maybe 5% of the entire book. If you don't like it, you can skip it. You won't miss anything. The remainder can be read simply as a long adventure story about a bunch of people trying to live in a city that has been stricken by some cataclysm, which is never defined but that causes constant changes to the city's geograpy, the heavens, and maybe time itself; or it can be mined for its many references to mythology and social commentary, if that's your thing. This is a great book for anyone who is interested in SF, "urban fantasy," or any other kind of speculative fiction.

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Dhalgren
Samuel R. Delany
Manufacturer: Bantam Books
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Mass Market Paperback
ASIN: 0553117181

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DHALGREN

Manufacturer: Bantam Books
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000GQXJD8

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Tedious Metafiction

DHALGREN
SAMUEL R. DELANY
Manufacturer: Bantam
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: 0553136127

Customer Reviews:

Tedious Metafiction.......2006-03-11

What to make of a novel once called "a vast monument to unreadability"?

First, I confess to not being a Delany fan. I think some of his popular science fiction criticism is worthwhile. He has a great talent for titles, and some of his descriptions have real poetic power. One need to look no farther than the opening page of his _Babel-17_ which heavily inspired the more famous opening to William Gibson's _Neuromancer_. But his fiction leaves me cold, and I find it unmemorable for the most part though this one, the worst I've read, will stick in my brain.

It's not accurate to say _Dhalgren_ is unreadable. Large chunks of it make sense and seem to be following a narrative pattern -- at least until the final "plague journal" segment. Our amnesiac hero, the Kid, wonders into Bellona, a city suffering from a recent and never specified disaster, meets some strange people, has lots of sex, takes up poetry and leading the Scorpions, a quasi-criminal gang. (Someone recently remarked on Bellona's resemblance to post-Katrina New Orleans. It's probably not entirely coincidental given that Delany wrote part of the novel there.)

Nor is it precise to say _Dhalgren_ is incoherent.

The ruling metaphor seems to be the peculiar chains of prisms, mirrors, and lens several characters, including the Kid, carry. Just as those optical devices spread light out, reflect it, and focus it, Delany's narrative does that with notions of truth, authority, or consistency. Besides the above mentioned narrative uncertainties, there are elliptic conversations; Kid's possible madness; the oddities of the setting with two moons, irregularly lengthened days, an anomalous sun peering very occasionally through the overcast; the ignoring of Bellona by the outside world. The Kid's journal, basis for our story, is fragmented, out of chronological order, and not even entirely by the Kid. All this serves to scatter any thematic statement other than reality not being knowable, the narrative a metafictional game. Yet, at other times, Delany has brief asides about the nature of our reality: the place of the engineer in society; the idea of a megalithic republic so big its inhabitants seldom leave it as opposed to smaller countries outside of China, the USSR, and America; or the oh-so-seventies notion of essential male-female identicalness. None of these sections has the tone, confidence, or entertainment of a Heinlein lecture at his most hectoring. The question of race is mentioned since most of the remaining inhabitants of Bellona are black. Yet here, and in the section pointing to the threesome of the Kid and his lovers Denny and Lanya as a new type of sexual relationshp, Delany seems to want to bring issues into focus. The same holds true for the relationship of the artist to society since Kid is a celebrity poet. But Delany's vagueness says nothing remarkable about race. Many people admire Kidd's poetry without reading it, and Delany deliberately gives us mixed messages about it. We see none of it, and it may be as bad as one character says. Delany's ambiguities undercut his frequent and annoying equation of artist as outlaw. Scorpion leader Kid may not be all that bad of a criminal, but he also may not be that great of a poet.

So, judged as conventional fiction, this novel is incoherent. But, if Delany's intent is metafictional puzzles, the constuction of a confusing story whose conclusion is a sentence fragment that melds with the novel's opening fragment, than his structure and technique do cohere.

Delany is guilty of one of three things here: incompetently attempting to convey a message beyond tedious metafiction, pulling the literary con of passing off obscurity and bad writing as a puzzle too difficult for the reader to solve but for which a solution exists, or not fitting the pieces of a real puzzle together well enough.

And Delany certainly seems aware of how most will react. A sentence toward the end: "... as one reads along, one becomes more and more suspicious that the author has lost the thread of his argument, that the questions will never be resolved, or more upsetting, that the position of the characters will have so changed by the book's end that the answers to the initial questions will have become trivial".

Read this novel only if you're working your way through one of those lists of recommended science fiction classics. And I suspect this novel will show up on fewer and fewer such lists as time goes on.

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DHALGREN

Manufacturer: Bantam
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: 0552685542

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Dhalgren
Samuel R. Delany
Manufacturer: Bantam
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Mass Market Paperback
ASIN: B000GRHHCG

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Dhalgren
Samuel R. Delany
Manufacturer: Bantam
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Mass Market Paperback
ASIN: 155308554X

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Dhalgren.
Samuel R. DELANY
Manufacturer: Hanover: Wesleyan University Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
ASIN: B000UB6FZI

Dhalgren in New Orleans: a classic science fiction novel comes to life in the big easy.(Dhalgren)(Book Review) : An article from: Reason

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Dhalgren in New Orleans: a classic science fiction novel comes to life in the big easy.(Dhalgren)(Book Review) : An article from: Reason
Bidisha Banerjee
Manufacturer: Reason Foundation
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Digital

General | Philosophy | Nonfiction | Subjects | Books

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Book Description

This digital document is an article from Reason, published by Reason Foundation on December 1, 2005. The length of the article is 917 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: Dhalgren in New Orleans: a classic science fiction novel comes to life in the big easy.(Dhalgren)(Book Review)
Author: Bidisha Banerjee
Publication: Reason (Magazine/Journal)
Date: December 1, 2005
Publisher: Reason Foundation
Volume: 37 Issue: 7 Page: 68(2)

Article Type: Book Review

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Dhalgren. (book reviews): An article from: The Review of Contemporary Fiction

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Dhalgren. (book reviews): An article from: The Review of Contemporary Fiction
David Ian Paddy
Manufacturer: Review of Contemporary Fiction
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Digital

Book Description

This digital document is an article from The Review of Contemporary Fiction, published by Review of Contemporary Fiction on March 22, 1997. The length of the article is 430 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: Dhalgren. (book reviews)
Author: David Ian Paddy
Publication: The Review of Contemporary Fiction (Refereed)
Date: March 22, 1997
Publisher: Review of Contemporary Fiction
Volume: v17 Issue: n1 Page: p181(2)

Article Type: Book Review

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