Il tempo ha confermato in sovrappiù quanto realistiche fossero le paure di Serge sulle conseguenze della degenerazione totalitaria del bolscevismo in stalinismo. Attraverso il racconto della propria vita, questo grande scrittore ricostruisce le fasi storiche dell'impegno volto a riunire, 'al di sopra di tutte le tendenze, tutti i gruppi socialisti del mondo', proponendo loro come sola regola comune la solidarietà, il rispetto reciproco e la libera discussione: idee che Serge aveva tentato vanamente di mettere in pratica nella Russia dei soviet, nella Spagna del 1936-37, nel Messico del dopoguerra. Occorrerà ancora del tempo perché il messaggio della sua utopia rossa - del suo umanismo rivoluzionario - possa diventare, per la prima volta nella storia, patrimonio di grandi e combattivi movimenti di massa. Fino ad allora finché la parte più consapevole dell'umanità non avrà compreso la vera natura del totalitarismo burocratico - si consiglia fraternamente di apprezzare almeno le qualità storico-letterarie di questa grande opera. Apparato critico di Jean Rière.

1919–1920: St. Petersburg, city of the czars, has fallen to the Revolution. Camped out in the splendid palaces of the former regime, the city's new masters seek to cement their control, even as the counterrevolutionary White Army regroups. Conquered City, Victor Serge's most unrelenting narrative, is structured like a detective story, one in which the new political regime tracks down and eliminates its enemies—the spies, speculators, and traitors hidden among the mass of common people. 

Conquered City is about terror: the Red Terror and the White Terror. But mainly about the Red, the Communists who have dared to pick up the weapons of power—police, guns, jails, spies, treachery—in the doomed gamble that by wielding them righteously, they can put an end to the need for terror, perhaps forever. Conquered City is their tragedy and testament.

Covering fundamentals of mechatronic and electromechanical systems widely used in industrial, transportation, and power systems, this text examines emerging software and hardware, introduces theory, examines the design of high-performance systems, and helps develop problem-solving skills in mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, and electronics. Coverage of MATLAB focuses on solutions of various modeling, simulation, control, and optimization problems. The text can be used for courses in mechatronics, power systems, energy systems, active materials and smart structures, solid-state actuation, structural health monitoring, and applied microcontroller engineering. Additional instructional materials and a solutions manual are also available. New to this edition are updated and extended worked examples and associated MATLAB codes, plus additional problems and exercises, new sections on MATLAB, and new case studies. Giurgiutiu is affiliated with the University of South Carolina. Lyshevski is affiliated with the Rochester Institute of Technology. Annotation ©2009 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

A New York Review Books Original

 

Unforgiving Years is a thrilling and terrifying journey into the disastrous, blazing core of the twentieth century. Victor Serge's final novel, here translated into English for the first time, is at once the most ambitious, bleakest, and most lyrical of this neglected major writer's works.

 

The book is arranged into four sections, like the panels of an immense mural or the movements of a symphony. In the first, D, a lifelong revolutionary who has broken with the Communist Party and expects retribution at any moment, flees through the streets of prewar Paris, haunted by the ghosts of his past and his fears for the future. Part two finds D's friend and fellow revolutionary Daria caught up in the defense of a besieged Leningrad, the horrors and heroism of which Serge brings to terrifying life. The third part is set in Germany. On a dangerous assignment behind the lines, Daria finds herself in a city destroyed by both Allied bombing and Nazism, where the populace now confronts the prospect of total defeat. The novel closes in Mexico, in a remote and prodigiously beautiful part of the New World where D and Daria are reunited, hoping that they may at last have escaped the grim reckonings of their modern era.

 

A visionary novel, a political novel, a novel of adventure, passion, and ideas, of despair and, against all odds, of hope, Unforgiving Years is a rediscovered masterpiece by the author of The Case of Comrade Tulayev.

One cold Moscow night, Comrade Tulayev, a high government official, is shot dead on the street, and the search for the killer begins. In this panoramic vision of the Soviet Great Terror, the investigation leads all over the world, netting a whole series of suspects whose only connection is their innocence—at least of the crime of which they stand accused. But The Case of Comrade Tulayev, unquestionably the finest work of fiction ever written about the Stalinist purges, is not just a story of a totalitarian state. Marked by the deep humanity and generous spirit of its author, the legendary anarchist and exile Victor Serge, it is also a classic twentieth-century tale of risk, adventure, and unexpected nobility to set beside Ernest Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls and André Malraux's Man's Fate.

Over the past two decades, the theory concerning the logical level of database management systems has matured and become an elegant and robust piece of science. Foundations of Databases presents indepth coverage of this theory and surveys several emerging topics. Written by three leading researchers, this advanced text presents a unifying and contemporary perspective on the field. A major effort in writing the book has been to highlight the intuitions behind the theoretical development.