The Triumphs and Troubles of Theodore Swann

Book Description

It was an era when the game was played for the love of it, and a fledgling NBA struggled for mainstream attention. Bob Cousy was at the heart of basketball's emergence as premier entertainment, a dynamo whose talent and ingenuity dazzled fans and players. The MVP of the 1957 season and veteran of six NBA championships with the Boston Celtics, his trademark behind-the-back dribble and no-look pass gave us basketball as no one had seen it before -- a one-man revolution that set the stage for Wilt Chamberlain, Elgin Baylor, Bill Russell, and others. Here is the fascinating, in-depth story of Cousy's life -- his tenement childhood, his drives and motivations, his little-known personal life, and his record-breaking career -- set against one of the most exciting generations in sports history.

Customer Reviews:

Completely unaffected.......2006-08-29

It may be that you've got to be at least 50 years old to appreciate this book fully. Why? Because Cousy reflects on a game that doesn't exist anymore. It was a time when people did not take three steps to the basket, when palming the ball was a turnover, and when good sportsmanship was the standard. It was also a time, and this is what is so hard to believe, when a guy like Cousy, who came along just in time to save the financially failing NBA, worried each and every year about making the team. It was a time when a hard nosed Red Auerbach, who didn't even want Cousy because he thought him a showoff, coupled Cousy's playmaking with Russell's defense to make a team, the only team in fact, that dominated its sport as the Yankees did in baseball. Cousy was Auerbach's first big hitter, and despite his success as a player, coach and university president, Cousy remains humble, reflective, and self effacing. Cousy is a we guy, not an I guy. Refreshing.

A GREAT BOOK.......2006-07-24

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

A solid biography.......2005-09-01

Reynolds tells a wonderful story about an interesting person. Initially, the story was supposed to be about the pioneering era of basketball, but he decided since Cousy was such a focal point on this era and professional basketball's climb to greatness, that he would write about Cousy himself. Cousy, a private man, agreed through mutual acquaintances to go along and provided information and interviews.

The story starts with Cousy's young life during the depression in a New York ghetto, and his life in a dysfunctional home. He used basketball as a means of acceptance and eventually as a means to greatness. Ironically, he was cut by his high school team in his freshman and sophomore seasons, which drove him and spurred on his killer instinct. When he made the team, he went on to become the captain of the all-city team.

Then, Reynolds describes how Cousy picked Holy Cross for his college education, and how, contrary to the myth, he did not "lead" Holy Cross to the NCAA Championship his first year. He goes through his spats with his first head coach in college "Doggie Julian", and his great respect for his successor, "Buster" Sheary. He also covers how Cousy wound up on a Boston Celtics team that didn't want him and how legendary Celtics coach Red Auerbach took jabs in the press at Cousy, so that he would know who was in charge, despite the press' love of Cousy.

He goes through the hard years of success without championships and then the great championship run that came after the Celtics drafted Bill Russell. He also covers Cousy's business ventures off of the court and his life after basketball.

What sets this book apart from a simple factoid book of the 1950s was how Reynolds digs past the surface to show how Cousy's upbringing created an irrational fear of failure and an unhealthy competitive streak that Cousy had to learn to deal with throughout his life. Depsite his success, Cousy was in many ways a tortured soul, feeling like he had to do all he could to provide for his family, yet regretting the time he spent away from home and the sleepwalking and nervousness he felt as he went through his career, trying to satisfy his competitive urges.

Why 4 stars? I rate basketball books agaisnt each other. 5 stars is the top 1/5 of books. This is a very good book, and 4 stars is a high compliment.

An Early Superstar From the NBA's Beginnings.......2005-06-25

You can be either a casual or even a non-fan of professional basketball and still enjoy Bill Reynolds's book on Bob Cousy. He will take you back to a time in the late 1940's and early 1950's when professional basketball was merely a filler sport between football and baseball. I feel the book is really two stories told in one book, the life of Bob Cousy and the role he played in professional basketball's beginnings and also the birth of the struggling NBA when they played in minor league cities such as Syracuse, New York, and Fort Wayne, Indiana. It is also the story of early NBA superstars from other teams such as George Mikan of the Minneapolis Lakers, Bob Pettit of the St. Louis Hawks, and Oscar Robertson of the Cincinnati Royals. Cousy also tells of his childhood insecurities while growing up in New York City, his decision to attend Holy Cross College in Worcester, Massachusetts, after playing only one and one half years of high school basketball, and how he became a Boston Celtic when coach Arnold "Red" Auerbach preferred to have two other players which were chosen in a dispersal draft. The Celtics weren't able to become the NBA champs until they added Bill Russell, a big man to play center. How the Celtics managed to draft Russell with the third pick is an interesting story in itself. NBA fan or not! Boston Celtic fan or not! You will enjoy this book.

How Basketball Has Changed.......2005-04-23

I started attending Celtics games just after Bob Cousy retired as a player. Naturally, I had seen many of his playoff games on television but the game looks much different in the arena than on the small screen. Having listened to his many road broadcasts over the years, I felt I knew a lot about his philosophy of basketball. For me the potential appeal of this book was to understand how he became the great offensive innovator who helped establish classic Celtics fast break and passing basketball.

I found the answer to my question in Cousy's difficult early years, growing up poor in a family where his parents didn't get along and where coaches assessed by his size rather than the size of his heart. From those hardscrabble beginnings, Cousy developed a fundamental insecurity that meant that winning wasn't a desire, it was the only state of being that was acceptable to his perfectionist self. But that psychological need was balanced by a strong identification with the underdog and the oppressed . . . even if he wasn't always sensitive enough to act on those feelings as often as he could have. I enjoyed that part of the book very much.

But the bulk of the book is really about how professional basketball went from being a minor attraction beneath both the college game and the Harlem Globetrotters into today's massive and profitable business for the players. Having grown up with that transition, I found the book to be a pretty superficial rehash of what I already knew. I didn't enjoy that part of the book very much. But if you are under the age of 25, this material will be new to you, and you will probably find it to be interesting. You will probably rate the book higher than I did as a result.

The book's other weakness is that it is rather like a career highlight video . . . just visiting the high spots of Cousy's life. For someone who wants to know more, you'll have to read another book.

Book Description

This book explores the formative period of British television drama, concentrating on the years 1936-55. It examines the continuities and changes of early television drama, and the impact this had upon the subsequent 'golden age'. In particular, it questions the caricature of early television drama as 'photographed stage plays' and argues that early television pioneers in fact produced a diverse range of innovative drama productions, using a wide range of techniques. It also explores the often competing definitions about the form and aesthetics of early television drama both inside and outside the BBC. Given the absence of an audio-visual record of early television drama, the book uses written archive material in order to reconstruct how early television drama looked, and how it was considered by producers and critics, whilst also offering a critical examination of surviving dramas, such as Rudolph Cartier's Nineteen Eighty-Four.

The Intimate Screen : Early British Television Drama (Oxford Television Studies)

Average customer rating:

The Intimate Screen : Early British Television Drama (Oxford Television Studies)
Jason Jacobs
Manufacturer: Oxford University Press, USA
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000OLFIVQ

Average customer rating:

The Intimate Screen: Early British Television Drama
Jason Jacobs
Manufacturer: Oxford University Press, USA
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000OLIKQQ

Book Description

Sacred Mushrooms and the Law is the only book covering the legal landscape underlying psychedelic mushrooms. All federal and state laws concerning mushrooms are covered, and charts outline potential punishments.

Customer Reviews:

Excellent fun.......2001-02-06

The authors make an excellent work of making parody plots out of famous writers' work (AC Doyle, Jane Austen, Jeffrey Archer, Raymond Chandler and Victor Mollo) and the deals presented are actually educational, and in no way exaggerated hands that would never be dealt in real life.

The book's light-hearted plots are easily read, and the hands tie up with the characters' personalities too.

If the term 'summertime bridge reading' existed, it would apply 100% to this book.

Customer Reviews:

A comprehensive resource - but not for the novice.......2006-03-15

Truly Matt Pharr and NVIDIA are at the top of their game, and his "GPU Gems" series is certainly the only one of its kind for graphics professionals that are familiar with GPU's and shading languages already, and want to exploit them for the maximum speed and effect achievable using today's technology. It is not a "how-to" book on shading or GPUs or even advanced graphics. There are equations and code interspersed throughout the book, with bits of wisdom that are very instructive for the initiated. However, if you are a home-grown graphics programmer who knows C, or C++, or Java, and even some assembly language, plus you are familiar with image processing and computer graphics techniques, that will probably not be enough to get you through this book. I would say that this is a five star book for high-level professional graphics programmers who work with GPU specifics and shaders daily, and I would say it is a two or three star book for everyone else.
The one section of the book that is pretty accessible to anyone with knowledge of computer architecture and computer graphics would be section 4 of the book, which is about general purpose computation on GPU's themselves. That section has a series of articles that comprise an excellent tutorial on GPU's, what they are, and what they can do. It is the best material in print I have seen on the subject.
If you want a good introduction into the concept of writing shaders plus practice with an actual shading language, try "OpenGL Shading Language, 2nd Edition" by Rost, assuming you already know OpenGL. For a great on-line resource for modeling and graphics that will get you going in the right direction of knowing what the authors of these articles know, type "Elias Hugo" into Google and check out the first address shown. There is a wealth of on-line articles, complete with math and pseudocode, available there. Then, maybe, you will be ready to sift some knowledge from this "GPU Gems" series.
I notice that the table of contents is not shown by Amazon, so I list the articles here:
PART 1:GEOMETRIC COMPLEXITY
Towards Photorealism in Virtual Botany
Terrain Rendering using GPU-Based Geometry Clipmaps
Inside Geometry Instancing
Segment Buffering
Optimizing Resource Management with Multi-Streaming
Hardware Occlusion Queries Made Useful
Adaptive Tessellation of Subdivision Surfaces with Displacement Mapping
Per-Pixel Displacement Mapping with Distance Functions
PART 2:SHADING, LIGHTING, AND SHADOWS
Deferred Shading in STALKER
Real-Time Computation of Dynamic Irradiance Environment Maps
Approximate Bidirectional Texture Functions
Tile-Based Texture Mapping
Implementing the Mental Images Phenomena Renderer on the GPU
Dynamic Ambient Occlusion and Indirect Lighting
Blueprint Rendering and "Sketchy Drawings"
Accurate Atmospheric Scattering
Efficient Soft-Edged Shadows Using Pixel Shader Branching
Using Vertex Texture Displacement for Realistic Water Rendering
Generic Refraction Simulation
PART 3:HIGH-QUALITY RENDERING
Fast Third-Order Texture Filtering
High Quality Antialiased Rasterization
Fast Prefiltered Lines
Hair Animation and Rendering in the Nalu Demo
Using Lookup Tables to Accelerate Color Transformations
GPU Image Processing in Apple's Motion
Implementing Improved Perlin Noise
Advanced High-Quality Filtering
Mipmap Level Measurement
PART 4:GENERAL PURPOSE COMPUTATION ON GPUS: A PRIMER
Streaming Architectures and Technology Trends
The GeForce 6 Series GPU Architecture
Mapping Computational Concepts to GPUs
GPU Computation Strategies and Tips
Implementing Efficient Parallel Data Structures on GPUs
Flow Control Idioms
GPU Program Optimization
Stream Reduction Operations for GPGPU Applications
PART 5:IMAGE-ORIENTED COMPUTING
Octree Textures on the GPU
High-Quality Global Illumination Rendering Using Rasterization
Global Illumination using Progressive Refinement Radiosity
Computer Vision on the GPU
Deferred Filtering: Rendering from Difficult Data Formats
Conservative Rasterization
PART 6:SIMULATION AND NUMERICAL ALGORITHMS
GPU Computing for Protein Structure Prediction
A GPU Framework for Solving Systems of Linear Equations
Options Pricing on the GPU
Improved GPU Sorting
Flow Simulation with Complex Boundaries
Medical Image Reconstruction with the FFT

Excellent Second Book in the GPU Gems Series.......2005-12-21

This book is the second installment of the GPU Gems book series by NVIDIA. Just like the first book, GPU Gems 2 is a collection of articles by various authors from game development companies, academia, and tool developers on advanced techniques for programming graphics processing units (or GPUs for short). It is aimed at intermediate to advanced graphics developers that are familiar with the most common graphics APIs. The reader should also be proficient in C++. As with the first GPU Gems book, GPU Gems 2 is not for beginners. For professional graphics and game developers, however, it is an excellent collection of interesting techniques, tips, and tricks.

The book is divided into six parts, each dealing with a different aspect of GPU programming. Compared to the first book, more emphasis is put on the quickly evolving area of general-purpose computation on GPUs (also called GPGPU). In particular, the last three of the six parts of the book are about GPGPU and its applications. The first three parts, however, are about real-time computer graphics.

The first part of the book contains 8 chapters on photo-realistic rendering that mostly deal with how to efficiently render a large number of objects in a scene, which is a necessity for rendering convincing natural effects, such as grass or trees. Two chapters in this part of the book discuss geometry instancing and segment buffering, and another chapter focuses on using occlusion queries to implement coherent hierarchical occlusion culling.
Other interesting topics in this part of the book include adaptive tessellation of surfaces on the GPU, displacement mapping - an extension to the popular parallax mapping used in some current games - that allows to render realistic bumps on a simple quad, and terrain rendering with geometry clipmaps.

Part two of the book consisting of 11 chapters deals with shading and lighting. This part contains highly interesting chapters on deferred shading in the game S.T.A.L.K.E.R., and computing irradiance environment maps on the GPU in real-time. Furthermore, this part of the book has chapters on rendering atmospheric scattering, implementing bidirectional texture functions on the GPU, dynamic ambient occlusion culling, water rendering, and using shadow mapping with percentage-closer filtering to achieve soft shadows.

The third part of the book consists of 9 chapters on high-quality rendering. Most chapters in this part deal with implementing high-quality filtering in fragment shaders. For example, there is an interesting chapter on filtered line rendering and another chapter on cubic texture filtering. Finally, a GPU-only implementation of improved Perlin Noise is also presented in this part of the book.

The chapters in the fourth part of the book represent an introduction to the fantastic field of GPGPU. The 8 chapters of this part first describe the general streaming architecture of GPUs, and then move on to show how to map conventional CPU data structures and algorithms to the GPU. For example, textures can be regarded as the GPU equivalent to CPU data arrays. There is also a chapter on how to implement flow-control idioms on the GPU and a chapter on optimizing GPU programs.

The 6 chapters of part five of the book are on image-oriented computing and describe a number of GPGPU algorithms for performing global illumination computations, for example by using radiosity, on the GPU. There is also a chapter on doing computer vision on the GPU
The final chapter in this part of the book explains how to perform conservative rasterization, which is important for some GPGPU algorithms to achieve accurate results.

The final part of the book has 6 chapters that present GPGPU techniques to perform a variety of simulation and numerical algorithms on the GPU. One chapter shows how to map linear algebra operations onto the GPU and develops a GPU framework to solve systems of linear equations. In other chapters the GPU is used for protein structure prediction, options pricing, flow simulation, and medical image reconstruction. These chapters show good examples of how the GPU can be used for non-graphics-related tasks.

The book contains many illustrations and diagrams that visualize the results of certain techniques or explain the presented algorithms in more detail. All images in the book are in color, which is definitely advantageous for a graphics book. In my opinion, the excellent quality and also the quantity of images and illustrations is one of the strongest points of this book compared to other graphics books.

The book also comes with a CD-ROM with supplemental material, videos, and demo applications to some chapters. Most of the applications include the full source code, which makes it easy to experiment with the techniques presented in the book. Note that most of the applications run on Windows only and many of them require a shader model 3.0 graphics card.

I highly recommend this book to any professional working as graphics or game developer. It is a valuable addition to my library of graphics books and I will come back to a number of articles in the near future. The focus on GPGPU in the second half of the book is a welcome addition and we can expect to see more and more non-graphics-related applications make use of the processing power in today's GPUs.

Pretty pictures.......2005-06-15

This book is targeted at people who have a good solid grasp of either OpenGL or D3D as well as a grounding in programming languages such as C/C++ or Java. While this much is obvious, the book is still painfully difficult to get anything useful out of.
The problem amounts to the fact that there is no cohesion between chapters - each one is written by a different author (and clearly they have not read each other's material) - there is no reference or introduction but worst of all, no common terms.
Example; What D3D calls a "pixel shader", OpenGL call "fragment shader", but there are also "vertex shader", "vertex program", "pixel program" and "fragment program"... some of these are the same thing while others are wildly different, but I found at least 4 references in this book to what I could only make sense of by substituting another term (the correct one). Each author has written their part from their own view point using their own terms.
The code snippets contained rarely have any comments or even descriptions of how they work.
Overall I generally felt like I was either reading someone's thesis or a marketing spiel about a particular aspect of some game.
There are many pretty pictures though.

A Focus on Hardware Optimization.......2005-06-01

"GPU Gems 2" edited by Matt Pharr (Addison-Wesley, 2005, ISBN 0-321-33559-7) is a collection of forty-eight white papers that detail cutting edge techniques based on today's latest graphical processing units (GPU). The full color hardcover text is 784 pages and includes a CD-ROM with working demos and source for some of the articles presented in the book. The text retails for $59.99.

The book is divided into six parts: geometric complexity, shading, high-quality rendering, general purpose computation on the GPU, image oriented computing, and numerical algorithms. A part has anywhere from five to twelve chapters. Each chapter is written by a different author but the format and style is consistent. The chapters have an introduction, discussion of the problem or technique, conclusion, and references. The material is presented with color illustrations and occasionally some pseudo-code or code fragments. Generally, the material is extremely current and very approachable to read.

As a sequel to its well received predecessor, the text focuses on taking advantage of the computational power and features of today's high-powered GPU boards. The first part of the book, geometric complexity, emphasizes this with chapters dedicated to batch rendering, using multi-streaming, hardware occlusion, and displacement pixel-shaders. Each chapter illustrates how operations traditionally performed on the CPU can be moved into the GPU for efficiency and greater effect.

The subsequent two parts on shading and rendering continue along the same theme: improved performance by using hardware functionality found on the GPU. Each topic considers the performance ramifications and GPU capabilities when discussing the problem domain of a rendering technique and factors it into the final solution. For example, chapter 10 considers irradiance environment maps for fast lighting - but with a twist - using the GPU to do the calculations in real-time. In doing so, the book's real value becomes apparent.

The fourth part on general purpose GPU computation is an interesting addition to the text. The chapters illustrate methods of offloading traditional CPU tasks by exploiting the inherent parallel nature of modern GPU hardware. Since the book features Nvidia hardware, the architecture and performance capabilities largely focused on their products.

In the fifth part of the book, hardware assisted image creation and analysis is considered. By using context clues from the spatial, texture, or lighting data - additional refinements can be made to a scene prior to rasterization. The topics presented in this part are further refinements of the text's main theme (using the GPU fully) and are specific solutions to uncommon problems - or approaches to rasterization. None the less as GPUs continue to evolve, the topics presented in this section will undoubtedly become more common.

Finally, the sixth part of the book provides several non-traditional graphics examples to illustrate calculating data on the GPU: solving linear equations, options pricing, and numerical simulation - just to name a few. As using the raw floating point power of modern GPU is a growing trend - these sections were quite interesting and well done.

The included CD-ROM contains examples to 28 of the 48 articles in the book. In most cases, the example material includes source code as well as pre-compiled binaries to help illustrate the topic presented in the text. In order to run the majority of the samples, Cg must be installed on the host computer. In addition, the CD-ROM provides access to Nvidia's software development kit, Cg toolkit, performance tools, and several helpful reference links to on-line sites.

GPU Gems 2 provides a cutting edge view of the capabilities found in today's video cards. The selected articles illustrate that every part of the rendering process can be enhanced in some fashion by fully using the underlying hardware. As such, this book is essential to anyone working with modern GPUs.

Another magnificent piece of work.......2005-05-12

The original book was awesome. This book is just as fine of a follow on. The full color on every page, the excellent use of images, and the quality editing all add up to a very fine work indeed. If you loved the second one, buy this one. If high-end 3D graphics are your thing and you haven't read these books yet, buy both.

GPU Gems 2: Programming Techniques for High-Performance Graphics and General-Purpose Computation

Average customer rating:

GPU Gems 2: Programming Techniques for High-Performance Graphics and General-Purpose Computation
Matt, Fernando, Randima Pharr
Manufacturer: Addison-Wesley Professional
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000OUB5EG

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