Book Description
In less than a year, Neil Peart lost both his 19-year-old daughter, Selena, and his wife, Jackie. Faced with overwhelming sadness and isolated from the world in his home on the lake, Peart was left without direction. This memoir tells of the sense of loss and directionlessness that led him on a 55,000-mile journey by motorcycle across much of North America, down through Mexico to Belize, and back again. He had needed to get away, but had not really needed a destination. His travel adventures chronicle his personal odyssey and include stories of reuniting with friends and family, grieving, thinking, and reminiscing as he rode until he encountered the miracle that allowed him to find peace.
Customer Reviews:
All of us get lost in the darkness..........2007-09-26
The greatest lesson Neil left me from Ghost Rider is to cultivate a mutual bond and solid friendship with my yet-to-be born children that's as precious as what Neil and Jackie shared with Selena.
What touched me the most was Selena's second memorial. Neil's pure, haunted poetry conveys the pain and loneliness more poignantly than anywhere in his memoir.
His `Show, Don't Tell' passages of him looking at concert halls in the distance are equally riveting. We witness Neil's renewed hope, growth, compassion, and understanding on `The Healing Road'--two steps forward, one back--despite the sickening unfairness of what happens to him. The lyrics to the Rush song "Everyday Glory" come to mind. Just getting out of bed is "One Little Victory".
Unfortunately, the end does get tedious, simply because Neil's thoughts and feelings are conveyed via his letters to Brutus. Employing present tense action and dialogue would redeem it.
By default of the low number of pages of salvation in the last chapter, the ending comes off a little trite. After witnessing him suffering for so long, one longs to see him truly happy for at least 20 pages! For those that have never fallen in true soulmate love, the "Speed of Love" as it happens with Carrie (lucky woman!) may seem unreal.
But that's our dear, shy Neil. Alas, we're not going to get a detailed description of her wedding gown. I hope that they have lots of babies, so the hole left in his heart may close a bit.
I'm not sure what editorial help Neil received at publication, but input from a neutral outsider may have helped to tighten up what obviously is a wrenching memoir to write and edit objectively.
I'm shocked at the lack of compassion expressed in the opinions of certain reviewers here.
Grievers often experience feelings of resentment and jealousy toward others, it is easy--and normal--for them to in the healing process. So yes, he was mean-spirited, bitter, and angry, but he recognized that in hindsight. One reviewer admitted to skipping pages, so it's not surprising that he/she missed this. "All of us get lost in the darkness."
I truly hope that the insensitive critics of this book, and of Neil's emotions/feelings/progress, never find themselves in his situation. However, if they do, I hope that they find healing in a second read of Ghost Rider, and seek a positive way to distract themselves from crippling loss and loneliness.
Sharing a story like this is an act of charity, because individuals challenged with life after the death of family may turn to it for solace. It's already helped another widowed Amazon reviewer. Yet some think greed is Neil's sole motivation for writing.
"GET OVER IT!" Is that their attitude towards people that hurt? One blog from a Rush fan I recently visited had a picture of the World Trade Center in flames, with `GET OVER IT' emblazoned across them on this year's anniversary of the attacks. How can they say that? How can they dismiss everyone that lost loved ones, businesses, real estate, dreams? As a New Yorker--and a human being--I'm appalled.
put down the pen and pick up the drumsticks.......2007-09-24
It seems to me Neil is trying to hard to be like the sagely authors of the books he reads. It's worth reading if you're a lifelong RUSH fan like me I guess. Just very boring at times. You're a gifted musician, just not a very gifted author.
Excellent.......2007-09-24
55000 miles of trying to heal. What is one to do when you live your whole life with a belief of if you do good, you in turn receive good. Then a car wreck and a incurable disease makes you think otherwise. After being a hermit for a few months you know you have to get moving. Before you go far though you have to be told that you thought the bad was over, but it's not. You're best friend will be staying in the friendly confines of a 6 by 9 for awhile. Book made me almost feel as if I was right there traveling with Neil. Have recommended it to a brother and will definitely reread again and again. Have ordered all 4 of his books and have finished Ghost Rider and R30. Now am on Traveling Music and cant wait to get on to The Masked Rider. Enjoy, your humble reviewer.
one star??? come on........2007-09-10
I just need to clarify something for the potention readers of this book. All the previous reviews have been fairly spot on, but the reviewer who gave it one star is clearly off. It IS a dry, literal account of his meanderings for much of the book, and at first I was dismayed because I, too, was looking for something about dealing with grief and there didn't seem to be much substance on that. However, it occurred to me halfway through that perhaps this is how he deals with it: Traveling, denial, smoking, drinking, sarcasm, jealousy. It got him through, so who are we to judge? At least he's honest about his prejudices, which is more than I can say for most of us.
Furthermore, this reviewer claims he never explains why things went sour with "that woman." Yes he did. It was very obvious, or does it take a woman to extrapolate that? (No offense, guys, but you understand.) SHE BLEW HIM OFF. End of story.
Basically, if you have a decent attention span, like traveling the U.S., and are a Rush fan (that helps) you will enjoy this. I was glad to finish it, for sure, but don't let the reviewers sway you. There IS a lot for the reader in this book. (Just not about dealing with grief.)
Ghost Rider.......2007-08-27
I read Ghost Rider by Neal Peart. The First part of the book wasn't to bad, but when it got to the middle of the book it started to get real boring. This book has way to many letters in it that Neal wrote to his friend in jail. He should have called the book, letters to a friend in jail. I enjoyed reading about Neals rides and the different places he went, but I didn't need to read every single letter he wrote to his friend, it made for a very boring book. I'd give it 2 to 2 1/2 stars for the beginning of the book and then 1/2 a star after that. Neal should stick to music, he's much better at that.
Long Way Round was a much better story of 2 motorcyclist who rode from England to New York and took the long way round to do it. That one I'd give 5 stars to.
Book Description
Two current popular country music acts, the Dixie Chicks and Toby Keith, have fired verbal volleys at each other during recent years. While Toby Keith has suggested that all Americans should unite in support of the president in these critical times, the Dixie Chicks have asserted their rights to criticize the current administration and its military pursuits.
The essays in Country Music Goes to War demonstrate that country musicians' engagement with significant political and military issues is not strictly a twenty-first-century phenomenon. In fact, country songs about war are nearly as old as the genre itself, and the first gold record in country music went to the 1942 war song "There's a Star Spangled Banner Waving Somewhere," by Elton Britt.
The contributors to Country Music Goes to War examine the output of country musicians responding to America's large-scale confrontation in recent history: World War II, the Korean War, Vietnam, the cold war, September 11, and both conflicts in the Persian Gulf. They address the ways in which country songs and artists have energized public discourse, captured hearts, and inspired millions of minds.
Customer Reviews:
Great Essays on Country Music.......2005-04-05
I'm not quite sure just what defines country music. In its day the Star Spangled Banner was a "low class" drinking song, and they've been recorded by contrmporary artists. Likewise some of the songs recorded in Northern Ireland or Australia might well be considered country. I guess you don't have to be white and southern to be "country."
In this book there are a series of essays that deal with country music our country's early wars to the war on terror. In fourteen essays, the impact and actions of country music and its performers is analyzed.
I think my favorite is the essay by Randy Rudder on the Dixie Chicks condemming President Bush on a stage in London. After Hollywood went berserk over Fahrenheit 911, why the commotion over the Dixie Chicks. DJ's were refusing to play their songs, there were CD Smashing parties, etc. Well, it's because they were country singers.
If you're a country fan, or if you're a music theoritician, you'll love this book
Book Description
This digital document is an article from Journal of Southern History, published by Thomson Gale on May 1, 2006. The length of the article is 555 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: Country Music Goes to War.(Book review)
Author: Jolie Jenson
Publication:
Journal of Southern History (Magazine/Journal)
Date: May 1, 2006
Publisher: Thomson Gale
Volume: 72
Issue: 2
Page: 506(2)
Article Type: Book review
Distributed by Thomson Gale
Book Description
This is the newly revised and expanded edition of the popular introduction to the design and implementation of geometry algorithms arising in areas such as computer graphics, robotics, and engineering design. The second edition contains material on several new topics, such as randomized algorithms for polygon triangulation, planar point location, 3D convex hull construction, intersection algorithms for ray-segment and ray-triangle, and point-in-polyhedron. A new "Sources" chapter points to supplemental literature for readers needing more information on any topic. A novel aspect is the inclusion of working C code for many of the algorithms, with discussion of practical implementation issues. The self-contained treatment presumes only an elementary knowledge of mathematics, but reaches topics on the frontier of current research, making it a useful reference for practitioners at all levels. The code in this new edition is significantly improved from the first edition, and four new routines are included. Java versions for this new edition are also available. All code is accessible from the book's Web site (http://cs.smith.edu/~orourke/) or by anonymous ftp.
Customer Reviews:
collates useful computational geometric algorithms.......2006-03-16
If you are perhaps a graphics or robotics programmer, then you will often have need for computing various geometric forms. And the intersections of these forms. Rather than derive algorithms from scratch, you might want to first look here. O'Rourke has collated several useful sets of methods. Germane to two and three dimenions.
Convex hulls are important enough that he devotes 2 chapters to these. While the somewhat related idea of Voronoi diagrams gets its own chapter.
The C code is a nice bonus to some readers. Though if you are experienced enough in another language, you should be able to readily code an algorithm in the book from scratch.
Nice balance of theory with code.......2003-02-03
This book was pleasantly surprising: I had expected to see code presented with minimal motivation or discussion of the underlying ideas -- something of a "Computational Geometry for Dummies" sort of book. That's not the case at all. This is a bona fide textbook on the subject, suitable for an undergraduate course.
It covers all of the the "classical" topics: convex hulls, line segment intersection, polygon triangulation, Voronoi diagrams, motion planning.
The mode of presentation -- supporting a discussion of the theories with implementable code -- is actually a bit refreshing. For comparison: Other books, when discussing the line segment intersection problem (ie: Given a set of line segments, find all of their intersection points) simply assume that computing the intersection of a pair of segments can be done in constant time. This is not an especially difficult problem, but the discussion seems more complete with a brief description of how this might be done. The same can be said about other primitive tests and operations in other algorithms.
Overall, this book can stand alone as an excellent introduction to computational geometry, but a serious student in the subject will want more: perhaps Preparata and Shamos or de Berg et. al.
Very hepful.......2002-05-10
Anyone who is involved in areas such as computer graphics, computational radiology, robot vision, or visualization software should have a copy of this book. The author has done a fine job of introducing the most important algorithms in computational geometry, choosing the C language for their implementation. The choice of C might be somewhat dated now, since C++ is now beginning to dominate computational geometry, but readers who are actually programming these algorithms using C++ can easily extend the ones in the book to C++. Not all of the algorithms in the book are implemented into C, unfortunately, but the clarity of presentation is done well enough to make this implementation a fairly straightforward task. My interest in the book came from a need to design and implement algorithms for polyhedra in VRML and toric varieties in algebraic geometry. This book, along with others, was a great help in that regard. The running time of these algorithms was not really an issue with me, so the detail the author spends on discussing the complexity of the algorithms was not a concern. Readers who need to pay attention to running-time issues will appreciate his discussion of them for the algorithms that are presented.
The ability to visualize objects in an abstract subject like algebraic geometry boils down to, in the case of toric varieties, to a consideration of how to manipulate polytopes geometrically. A major portion of the book, if not all of it, is devoted to the computational geometry of polyhedra. Because it is an introductory book, some more advanced topics, such as Bayesian methods to find similarities between polyhedra, and neural network approaches to classifying polyhedral objects are not treated. Readers who need to do such things will be well-prepared for them after a study of this book. In addition, there are good exercises assigned at the end of each chapter, so the book could be used in the classroom. Some readers will however choose to use it as a reference source, and it would be a good one, for the author gives references to topics that he only touched upon in the book.
Some particular areas that were treated especially well were: 1. The discussion on data structures for surfaces of polyhedra. Although not very general, since he choose to deal with only triangulated polytopes, readers who need to be more general will have a good start in this discussion. 2. The discussion on volume overflow and how to deal with it using robust computation. 3. The discussion, albeit short, of the randomized incremental algorithm. 4. The treatment on the minimum spanning tree and Kruskal's algorithm. Communication network performance optimization is now a major application of this algorithm and others in graph theory, including the author's later discussion of Dijkstra's algorithm.
my rewiew.......2001-09-25
i think that these website is very.it has everything that i need. all of my books are from amazan.
okay content, mediocre presentation.......1999-03-01
This book provides a reasonable introduction to the field of computational geometry, although the notation is sometimes sloppy and the author frequently makes inconsistent assumptions about the reader. For example, on the first page he refers to a circle as a "one-dimensonial set of points," which although valid from a toplogical perspective is a little confusing in an introductory text. As another example, the first exercise refers to "every point in dP," presumably meaning just the corner points (otherwise the problem would be unsolvable). The book also sets up a lot of irrelevant mathematical definitions that generally obfuscate the presentation rather than clarifying it. Although not prohibitive for the ambitious reader, these needless hindrances are at best a little annoying.
Secondly, I must criticize the text's scope, in light of the important role computational geometry has played in modern computer graphics. There is no discussion of clipping, culling, occlusion (e.g. BSP, octree, OBB), or even non-polygon primitives -- important topics arguably more useful to the target audience than e.g. convex hulls (to which over 1/4 of the book's pages are devoted).
Regardless, this book (combined with a professor and a course) probably would serve quite well as an undergraduate text. Readers interested in a cookbook of applied graphics algorithms, however, should look elsewhere.
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Polytopes: Abstract, Convex and Computational (NATO Science Series C: (closed))
Manufacturer: Kluwer Academic
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Book Description
The aim of this volume is to reinforce the interaction between the three main branches (abstract, convex and computational) of the theory of polytopes. The articles include contributions from many of the leading experts in the field, and their topics of concern are expositions of recent results and in-depth analyses of the development (past and future) of the subject.
The subject matter of the book ranges from algorithms for assignment and transportation problems to the introduction of a geometric theory of polyhedra which need not be convex.
With polytopes as the main topic of interest, there are articles on realizations, classifications, Eulerian posets, polyhedral subdivisions, generalized stress, the Brunn--Minkowski theory, asymptotic approximations and the computation of volumes and mixed volumes.
For researchers in applied and computational convexity, convex geometry and discrete geometry at the graduate and postgraduate levels.
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Complex Effects in Large Eddy Simulations (Lecture Notes in Computational Science and Engineering)
Manufacturer: Springer
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ASIN: 3540342338 |
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The field of Large Eddy Simulations is reaching a level of maturity that brings this approach to the mainstream of engineering computations, while it opens new opportunities and brings new challenges for further progress. The main objective of this volume is to bring together leading experts from different countries in presenting the state-of-the-art and emerging approaches for treating complex effects in LES. A common theme throughout the volume is the role of LES in the context of multiscale modeling and simulation.
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Applied Computational Geometry. Towards Geometric Engineering: FCRC '96 Workshop, WACG '96, Philadelphia, PA, May 27 - 28, 1996, Selected Papers (Lecture Notes in Computer Science)
Manufacturer: Springer
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ASIN: 354061785X |
Book Description
This anthology is based on the First ACM Workshop on Applied Computational Geometry, WACG '96, held in Philadelphia, PA, USA, in May 1996, as part of the FCRC Conference.Today, CG is in transition and applied computational geometry has established itself as a fertile meeting ground for theorists from core computational geometry and practitioners from the potential application areas to exchange their ideas and identify issues of common interest. The book presents 11 invited contributions and state-of-the-art reports by leading experts together with 12 refereed full papers selected from 32 submissions. It points the way towards geometrical engineering and addresses researchers and professionals sharing an interest in geometric algorithms and techniques and their use in computational sciences and engineering.
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Closed Object Boundaries from Scattered Points (Lecture Notes in Computer Science)
Remco C. Veltkamp
Manufacturer: Springer
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ASIN: 3540588086 |
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This monograph is devoted to computational morphology, particularly to the construction of a two-dimensional or a three-dimensional closed object boundary through a set of points in arbitrary position.By applying techniques from computational geometry and CAGD, new results are developed in four stages of the construction process: (a) the gamma-neighborhood graph for describing the structure of a set of points; (b) an algorithm for constructing a polygonal or polyhedral boundary (based on (a)); (c) the flintstone scheme as a hierarchy for polygonal and polyhedral approximation and localization; (d) and a Bezier-triangle based scheme for the construction of a smooth piecewise cubic boundary.
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Computational Science - ICCS 2002: International Conference, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, April 21-24, 2002. Proceedings, Part I (Lecture Notes in Computer Science)
Manufacturer: Springer
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ASIN: 3540435913 |
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The three-volume set, LNCS 2329, LNCS 2330, and LNCS 2331, constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Second International Conference on Computational Science, ICCS 2002, held in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, in April 2002.The three volumes present more than 350 reviewed contributed and invited papers and span the whole range of computational science, from foundational issues in computer science and mathematics to advanced applications in virtually all application fields making use of computational techniques. These proceedings give a unique account of recent results in the field.
Book Description
This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-proceedings of the 7th China-Japan Conference on Discrete Geometry, Combinatorics and Graph Theory, CJCDGCGT 2005, held in Tianjin, China, as well as in Xi'an, China, in November 2005.
The 30 revised full papers presented were carefully selected during two rounds of reviewing and improvement from over 60 talks at the conference. All current issues in discrete algorithmic geometry, combinatorics and graph theory are addressed.
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Rush - R30 - 30th Anniversary Deluxe Edition
