"Professor Madden's magisterial survey of ancient law going forward is exquisitely written and a real delight for historians of tort law...This quality collection is first-rate torts scholarship which will be of great interest to tort scholars, law students, and graduate students in sociology as well as philosophy." 
Bi-Monthly Review of Law Books

Humorist Barry demonstrates once again that he has reached that plateau of success where he can do no wrong-almost. This second novel represents something of a decline from Big Trouble, his first venture into fiction, which emerged as an incident-crowded mystery topped off with rapid-fire laughs and a dash of satire. This time, the laughs are not much more than titters, and the incidents are only intermittently compelling. In brief, the story is built around events on one of the floating casinos that takes paying customers three miles off the Florida coast each night to gamble. It leads readers into a crazy complexity of money laundering, drug dealing, murder, sex, violence, hijacking, and undercover work. As it is written by Barry, the book probably will meet with a certain amount of popular favor, but a caveat is in order: This is not the Barry of his syndicated columns or his nonfiction books. As he himself puts it, "This book contains some bad words," which he justifies by saying that his "unsavory characters" talk that way. A likely story.

It is impossible to imagine modern mathematics without complex numbers. "Complex Numbers from A to ...Z" introduces the reader to this fascinating subject which, from the time of L. Euler, has become one of the most utilized ideas in mathematics.

The exposition concentrates on key concepts and then elementary results concerning these numbers. The reader learns how complex numbers can be used to solve algebraic equations and to understand the geometric interpretation of complex numbers and the operations involving them.

This book is devoted to various explorations of how linguistics and pragmatics together can shed light on the contrasts between languages in their discourse-cultural settings. It arises from presentations and discussions held at the Fourth International Contrastive Linguistics Conference (ICLC4), which took place in Santiago de Compostela, Galicia, Spain from 20 to 23 September 2005.1 The twelve chapters analyse linguistic phenomena across different languages, taking into account their co-texts as well as the socio-cultural contexts in which they arise. The first two sections consider various questions of information structure, discourse analysis and lexis; each chapter is concerned in some way with the interplay between, on the one hand, grammatical and lexical organization and, on the other, the contexts in which utterances are used and texts emerge. The final chapters of the book consider how new techniques of contrastive linguistics and pragmatics are contributing to the primary field of application for contrastive analysis, language teaching and learning.