I'm not much for political movies and thrillers, but I was pleasantly surprised to find this old classic still packs a considerable punch. Based on the life of Huey Long, it chronicles the rise to power of an obscure but ambitious backwoods Louisiana lawyer, Willie Stark, who initially seems to stand for honesty and reform in contrast to the entrenched and corrupt political machine he is fighting, which is determined to defeat him at all costs, rightly perceiving an honest man as a threat to everything they stand for.

Stark triumphs, however, and we watch as he himself takes on the trappings of official power, which he takes to like a duck to water. Stark builds new schools and colleges, hospitals for the poor, improves the roads, and seems to be everything the common man could hope for in a champion and leader. But there is a darker side to Stark, as he himself ultimately becomes assimilated by the corrupt machine he sought to topple and reform, and evidence surfaces that he has not only tolerated and even fostered corruption himself but was possibly involved in the murder of an innocent man who dared to challenge his authority. In the end, we see Stark using the same means and ends to further his power and to hold it at all costs that his enemies used against him at the very beginning of his career.

The movie raises the question as to whether Stark was really any different from the corrupt cronies he replaced, and the schools and hospitals he built just monuments to his ego and arrogance, or whether he was a good man who ultimately went bad in his quest and thirst for power. The question is left open for the viewer to decide, as Stark's career comes to a sudden and tragic end during a campaign where he's fighting for his political survival after he's finally implicated in the murder of the innocent man.

Broderick Crawford, John Ireland, and Mercedes McCambridge are really superb in their roles, and the movie is shot in dark, film noir style, which helps create an appropriately dark, conspiratorial mood and ambience. Overall, still a great movie and as I said, one that still packs a considerable punch and continues to be relevant today in its message about the dangers of demogogues and the abuse of raw, unchecked, political power.

I have few associations to Ukrainian language and culture, except that, oddly enough, I had the opportunity to eat in a Ukrainian restaurant in the Canadian town of Jaspar once, in the Canadian Rockies. The food was quite good (I had the Ukrainian potato dumplings, a traditional dish) and I'd be happy to eat there again if I ever return for a visit.

I note the two very negative reviews of this book by the two previous reviewers, citing many phonetic mistakes and even some grammatical ones, such as the author stating that Ukrainian has six cases, like Russian, whereas it actually has seven, which is the vocative case. I'm not as knowledgeable as these two people, so I defer to them here, but I would point out that technically Latin has the vocative case also, but it's hardly ever used. If you look in Latin texts, you'll only see the six cases mentioned.

Appropos of the grammar, I would have liked to verify if the verbal system has directive and non-directive verbs also, like Russian, but there's no mention of this, but that's perhaps a minor technical point.

Since this is the only book on the language I've ever seen, I picked it up to see what it was like, having had some previous background in Russian. Had it not been for the problems cited, this might have been a decent book. It's divided into 15 chapters of useful phrases in practical and dynamic situations, using the now very familiar and successful Berlitz strategy, pioneered by the great Maximilian Berlitz back in the late 19th century as an alternative to the traditional rote memorization of languages. So there are chapters on Transportation, Shopping, Food and Drink, At the Restaurant, etc. There is a 5-page section on essential phrases, and a phonetic and pronunciation guide. Finally, there is a 3000 word mini-dictionary in the back.

The book uses phonetic equivalents to aid in pronunciation, and the book is quite readable being in the large, trade paperback size with a good-size font. The book also includes the Cyrillic alphabet and a transliteration for the words. At just over 200 pages it would be a lot of information for the price, since it's only 12 dollars, had it not been for the problems cited by the two previous reviewers. Despite those, I give it a slightly better rating at 2 stars for being the only book I've ever seen on the subject, which will still be useful to you if you keep in mind the corrections in the two earlier reviews. And the price is a consideration too since Hippocrene's books are usually cheaper than the competition.

In that sense, I guess you get what you pay for. The quality of Hippocrene's books can be uneven, it's true, but they're also capable of putting out very good language books for a realtively modest price, so they can offer a lot of value for the money, such as their concise of grammar of Spanish, which I thought excellent. You just have to pick and choose a little bit. And sometimes, as in this book, they're often just about the only books available on the subject in a typical bookstore, without access to a university library with an extensive language and linguistics section, such as their Beginner's Assyrian and Beginner's Armenian books.

Except for having studied some classical Sanskrit, I don't know much about Indian subcontinnental languages like Urdu and Hindi, except that Urdu is the main language in Pakistan and Hindi is probably the same for India, despite the many more languages spoken there. I'd never seen a book covering both of the languages before, so I checked it out, and this looks to be an excellent little phrasebook and dictionary.

You can learn a lot even from a little book like this, and it turns out Hindi and Urdu are mostly mutually intelligible, although written in different alphabets, Urdu using the Permo-Arabic script and Hindi using the old Devenagari alphabet, or more accurately, syllabary.

The book starts out with a 30-page section giving basic info such as a pronunciation guide and an intro to the grammar. It also includes common phrases, numbers, telling tiem, and so on. Most of the book is taken up by the dictionary and phrasebook, but interspersed throughout there are sidebars that provide extra info. Often these are cultural tips on such things as customs, etiquette, and slang, but occasionally you get some grammar, too.

Finally, there is a reference section in the back with sections on signs and notices, how to read menus and food items, numbers, place names, road signs, public holidays, and many others, in both the Hindi and Urdu. Also, although as I said they're very similar languages, any words or phrases that are only for on Language are indicated by a "U" or "H."

The text uses "keyword referencing" for the dictionary, so if you need to find out how to ask for a hotel room, you just go to the "hotel" section in the dictionary and look for that word, and then you can find the phrase from there.

I also learned some interesting things about the grammar, such as that there are only two genders and two noun cases in Urdu and Hindi, the direct and the oblique. What we call prepositions occur as postpositions, or after the noun, and pronouns lack gender, so there is no "he" or "she." The verb has the same tenses as English and most Indo-European languages, which are strong on time relationships in general (unlike, for example, Arabic and Japanese, which lack a true future tense and are not especially detailed in this regard), and so there are past, present, future, past continuous, past perfect, past imperfect, etc., tenses, as well as the indicative, imperative and subjunctive moods as well.

Given all the features and at 240 pages, it's a lot of information in one little book. And at six and a half dollars, the price is right. The paper is also higher quality than I've seen in other small, inexpensive phrasebooks. All in all, I think this is a great little dictionary/phrasebook book for the price from the Rough Guide.

A very funny little German book that is as much a satire on the language, Germans, and travel in general as a phrasebook. Although only 64 pages, it packs a lot of humor and entertainment into this small package. Some of the phrases are truly funny. To give you a sampling of some of what's in the book, here are a few examples. In the chapter on Clothing I found "Diese Hosen sind einfach ummerfend." (These lederhosen are hilarious!) In the chapter on dealing with policemen, there was "Ich muste sie naturlich von der Strasse rammen." (I had to run him off the road, of course). In the chapter on "Words of Love and Pastry," there was "Ich mochte in Ihren Gugelhopf beissen." (I want to bite your Bundt cake). And in the chapter, "The Wurst of the Wurst," there was "Habe ich erwahnt das ich mich entschlossen Vegetarier su weiden?" (Did I mention that I've decided to become a vegetarian?).

The book is devided into 38 sections of a page or two, each with its own funny phrases. The book is mostly phrases and sentences, but there are a few funny words highlighted too. There is also a humorous two-page "fractured" history and timeline of beer, which has entries like, "1516--The German Purity Law is written ro protect the quality of beer. Anyone caught drinking a Coors is spanked to death by a 300-pound barmaid." Even the chapter and section titles are humorous, such as "Surviving German Romanticism," and "Grimm Tales of the Black Forest."

If you liked this book I can also recommend "Scheisse!: The Real German You Were Never Taught in School," by Gertrude Besserwisser, which covers all the funniest and most outrageous German curses, epithets, slang, and other phrases of dubious parentage and gentility. For example, I learned that saying "BMW" doesn't just mean the name of a car, it also refers to a woman who is not especially well-endowed, since it's from "Brett mit Warzen," or "a board with warts." But a lot of the book wouldn't be repeatable here, so I'll have to leave it at that and urge you to get the book yourself if you're interested.

This is the Dover, 2002 edition of this 1890 classic by E. H. Palmer. Despite being published almost 115 years ago by Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner, and Co., this is still one of the best concise grammars of Arabic I've seen. I only know the basics about Persian and Hindustani, and was most interested in the Arabic part. Except for being written in the same Arabic script (with some minor modifications), those two languages don't have much in common with Arabic, except for many lean words, since Arabic is a Semitic family language, and Persian and Hindustani are Indo-European languages. I did learn, though, that the alphabet for Hindustani is almost the same as for Arabic, except that Hindustani has Arabic letters with up to four dots over them, the maximum in Persian and Arabic being three.

The book is only 100 pages long, but half of it is devoted to the Arabic grammar. It emphasizes the "algebraic" approach to the word root, which I found very helpful, and which the modern introductory grammars of Arabic by Ingle and Awde that I have don't seem to use. For example, using the letters X, Y, and Z to denote the tri-syllabic word pattern, the author gives the basic pattern for a root and then discusses how the variations on the root change the meaning. For example, the simplest verb form in Arabic is the pattern, XaYaZa. An example of a verb that meets that pattern would be the verb for "does," or fa:ala (the ":" denotes one of the glottal-type Arabic sounds). Katala (he killed) and dharaba (he struck) are other examples.

One often reads that the triliteral root patterns are helpful in inferring and gleaning other knowledge about the words, but from my experience, still being a comparative beginner, this is something that doesn't become that helpful until one has reached the intermediate stage of study, although there are exceptions, such as in the pattern for adjectives that I mentioned above. But as the author's approach emphasizes the root patterns and their derivations more than the other books I have, that aspect of the language has become more apparent to me. In general, the author avoids technical grammatical and linguistic terms.

The author includes some nice tables of the verb conjugations, such as the "Table of Derived Forms, " "Table of Forms of the Simple Verb," and a "Table of Broken Plurals." (There is no consistent way to form the plural of nouns in Arabic, so the best way is to just learn it with the word, as with the gender for nouns in French, German, and Spanish). There are also tables for numerals and ordinals.

I only have one complaint about the book, which is that the print is a little faint or spotty occasionally, probably because it was reproduced from camera-ready copy from the original book, but considering the price is only nine dollars, it's a lot of value for the price. I also like the Arabic font better than the ones in several other modern Arabic books, which is somewhat more compact (less distance between consonants and letters), which I found easier to read). And if you actually need the Persian and Hindustani grammars, you really can't beat it. As they say, you can beat the author, but you can't beat his price. :-)

This book gives you the conjugation tables for 201 verbs as it says, but be forewarned, you will already need to be fully conversant with the grammar and Arabic verbs in general to use it. The verbs aren't even given phonetic equivalents in the tables. So this is basically only for the advanced or perhaps intermediate student. For the price, I don't see why some basic information on Arabic verb conjugations, verb patterns and grammar couldn't have been provided, as in the other 501 and 201 verb books from Barron's. The 501 books, for example, often have 20 or 30 pages of material on this, serving at least as a good review for the experienced and a pretty good introduction for the neophyte.

On the pro side, however, the index is organized according to verb categories and conjugational patterns. So if, for example, you need to look up the pattern for verbs with initial, medial, or final hamza, doubly weak verbs, geminate, or quadriliteral verbs, or any of the other verb categories, along with the 10 conjugational patterns themselves, you can find them in the index and then go right to that pattern in the text. The complete verb table and pattern is displayed, so if you need to find out what the imperfect subjunctive or jussive is, it's all there.

If you're going to use this book and aren't at least an intermediate student yet, I can recommend the Arabic Verbs and Essentials of Grammar book by Jane Wightwick and Mahmoud Gaafar, which will help you fill in all the gaps. There are other grammars out there, but if you have some grammatical and linguistic background, the E. H. Parker book, Simplified Grammar of Hindustani, Persian, and Arabic, although now 120 years old and resissued by Dover Press, is still surprisingly good and a great bargain (at eight dollars) for the price.

This is probably the funniest book you'll ever see on German, and it's the only one I've seen on the subject. Most of the book wouldn't be repeatable here, but I might be able to mention a couple things. "Die Muschi" refers both to "cat" as well as to you know what, just as in English. Equally funny, I recall from my study of Chinese that in Mandarin, the word "mao," pronounced with the tone that falls at first and then rises, has the same dual meaning too. So German, Chinese, and English are all alike in this respect. :-) You might hear the acronym "BMW", but it doesn't refer to the car. It's shorthand for Brett mit Warzen, or "a board with warts," referring to a woman that is not especially well endowed. However, "der Vorbau" means just the opposite. In fact, it translates as "front porch," which carries a connotation of being fairly heavy as well.

The book has 12 chapters with hundreds of off-color and colorful phrases and words, and a glossary. Each chapter has a paragraph of introduction to the subject of the chapter, such as "Curses, Epithets, and Other Cries of Exasperation," or "The Basics," or "Body Language and Other Parts." Finally, there a little quiz in the back to test your new-found knowledge of scatological German linguistics, so to speak. The book is only 112 pages, but there is a lot of information in those 112 pages, and it's worth the price just for the entertainment factor.

I think this is one of the better Hippocrene Beginner's Series books I've seen. It would be suitable for a good introduction to Japanese for most people. It's laid out differently from most of the Hippocrene Beginner's books I've seen. The right-hand margin of the right page has sidebars that elaborate on or add to the text, such as discussing aspects of Japanese culture, or fine points of the grammar. The left-hand margin of the left page has the current chapter's vocabulary list and definitions.

The author makes a very interesting statement, which is that it takes a Japanese speaker 5 to 8 years to achieve fluency in English, but an English speaker only 2 to 3 years for Japanese. I don't know if this is true or not, but one major thing Japanese has going for it is the very regular verbs and other aspects of the grammar. Unlike English, Spanish, French, and other Indo-European languages, which often have hundreds of irregular verbs, Japanese only has two. For example, 22 of the most commmon Spanish verbs are irregular in the present indicative tense, and of those, 18 are irregular in the subjunctive mood and often several other conjugations, making for a great deal of memory work.

The main difficulty for most English speakers will be that some concepts in Japanese will seem strange. For example, Japanese doesn't have adjectives as we know it. They actually belong to the verb rather than the noun grammatically, and are are conjugated to agree with the verb rather than declined to agree with nouns, as in most languages. And even verbs don't exist as we know them. In Japanese, it's most accurate to think of verbs as expressing the "act of doing something," rather than simple action per se, according to another book on Japanese I just read.

The book is also good for discussing basic Japanese sentence patterns, and these are often highlighted and discussed in the text. However, the book doesn't really go into Japanese particles in depth, which are a more advanced and difficult part of the grammar, but I wouldn't expect that in a beginning book. These are small standalone words that serve various functions, such as marking the subject, topic, or modifying the verb, and other things. For that you'll need a more advanced book. There are at least two books out I've seen devoted just to particles. These are: "Dictionary of Japanese Particles," by Sue Kawashima, and the other is "All About Particles," by Naoko Chino. Both of these are excellent and will help you with this important area of the grammar. Another good book is "Japanese Sentence Patterns," which discusses 50 basic patterns and 69 variations, also by Naoko Chino.

But getting back to the present book, there are 25 lessons or chapters. Each lesson has exercises, self-tests, a vocabulary list, and discussions of grammar. The grammatical discussions aren't too technical but cover the necessary points well. The book also includes an index with all the vocabulary words paged to the text, and a discussion of the Hiragana and Katakana phonetic alphabets. Hiragana is taught to schoolchildren when they're first learning to read, and Katagana is used for spelling important foreign words. All in all a very nice introductory book on Japanese.

Exceptionally well researched, documented, illustrated, and well-written reference work on 80 of the world's writing systems. I don't know if they're all here, but they include extinct languages such as Egyptian and Gothic, as well as modern ones that are still alive. Alphabets as diverse as the Cree syllabary and Korean phonetic alphabet are discussed, as well as phonographic and ideographic systems such as Egyptian and Assyrian cuneiform.

Much of the information in this book relating to the history and development of various writing systems can be found in Encyclopedia Britannica and Encarta articles on various languages and language groups, but the actual writing systems are usually not shown, which is where this book comes in. This book lays them all out under one cover. However, the Britannica articles are especially impressive from the standpoint of the comparative philology and historical linguistics, so you might want to consult those articles too for that information, especially as the Britannica CD is only a fraction of the cost of this book.

In addition to the real languages covered, this book even covers musical notation, body movement, and Tolkien's invented language for Middle Earth. Despite the cost, this is an extraordinary reference work on writing systems that will probably become the definitive work in its field.

This is not an especially good beginner's book; a more appropriate title would be "A Linguist's Beginner's Assyrian," as it presumes too much previous knowledge of grammar and of Semitic family languages. It would not be appropriate as a first learning text for most people, in my opinion. However, for someone who's main interest, like mine, is in comparative linguistics and not in learning the language per se, but who wants to learn the something about the language, about the grammar, and how it works and is structures, this book is fine.

The book's approach is straight out of late 19th century language pedagogy in it's use of rote memorization and the inclusion of lengthy passages to translate. And the style reads like it was actually written many years ago, and republished by Hippocrene. I'd like to know more about this, but the publication page only lists the date of the Hippocrene edition.

On the pro side, the book includes an alphabet and phonetic guide, a 45-page discussion of the grammar, a glossary of about 800 words, and 30 pages of smaller print footnotes discussing various aspects of the Romanized phoneticizations for translations. There is a list of 215 ideograms and a list of 360 phonograms. So despite its problems, I did learn quite a bit about Assyrian from this book. The language is based on the typical tri-consonantal root system for Semitic family languages, like Arabic, Aramaic, Ugaritic, and Hebrew (but not Hittite, which is now known to be of Indo-European origin).

To highlight some of the mains points of the grammar that I learned, nouns in Assyrian have two genders, male and female. Nothing is needed to form the male gender, and the female ending involves simply adding a "u" to the end of the word. There are five noun declensions or cases: nominative, accusative, genitive, dative, and locative, as in classical Arabic. (In current Arabic there is only the nominative, accusative, and dative, and those are no longer used in the modern spoken Arabic).

I couldn't find a precise breakdown of tenses, moods, or aspects, but the author states that the Assyrian verb has imperfect, permansive, imperative, infinitive, and participial forms. In addition, there are causative and reflexive verbs, and strong and weak verbs. The "permansive," which was new to me, is defined as having an intransitive quality, and denotes continuation of state or being. Examples of permansives are "they dwell," or "sapuh," "it is spread," or " sabtu," "they were left," or "purruku," and "it was situated," or "massura." There are four primary, four secondary, and two tertiary verb stems, the 2nd and 3rd being formed from the primary by adding "ta" and "tan."

Weak and strong verbs don't have the same meaning as in the Germanic family languages, where strong verbs form the past tense by an internal vowel change, as in "speak" and "spoke." A weak verb just means that verbs with stem endings in certain letters lose these letters when adding the conjugational endings.

As far as modifiers go, there are adverbs of manner, time, and place, as in English. Adjectives are similar also. There is only one indeclinable relative pronoun which doesn't change for person, gender, or number. Demonstrative pronouns (this, that) are the same as in English and most languages.

So although not an especially good beginner's book, I was still quite entertained by this book, and I was able to use it to gain at least a basic understanding of a language is probably little changed since about 3800 B.C. The author states that Assyrian is quite similar to Akkadian. (I should mention here that Sumerian is quite different, however, and is in fact not a Semitic language according to linguists). Assyrian finally died out 2500 years ago, about the time Pericles was giving his orations in the Greek senate. And after reading this book, I can see why. :-) However, at 12 bucks, the price is relatively inexpensive.

Note: since I first posted this review, I did a web search and found D.G. Lyon's name in the following reference: "D.G. Lyon, Harvard Excavations at Samaria, 1908-10." So Lyon was active in the early part of the last century, and the book probably dates from that period. So Hippocrene is likely reissuing an old book whose original copyright has expired, which accounts for the dated writing style and learning approach.