This is the first complete translation into English of Berlioz's second collection of musical articles, originally published in 1859. The work is a uniquely Berliozian combination of light-hearted journalism and serious musical comment and analysis. Hector Berlioz's Les Grotesques de la musique is the only one of his books that has never been translated into English in its entirety. It is by far the funniest of all his works, and consists of a number of short anecdotes, witticisms, open letters, and comments on the absurdities of concert life. Alastair Bruce's fluid translation brings to life this important composer and bon vivant. He does a wonderful job of conveying all the puns, jokes, and invective of Berlioz's prose as well as the nuances of his stories. He even imitates a Tahitian accent in the translation, as Berlioz does in the original. The notes will give the reader insight into the innuendos and in-jokes that fill the pages. This translation will take its place among other translations of Berlioz's prose writings, bringing to the reader more lively examples of a still misunderstood composer caught up in the musical life of mid-nineteenth century Paris. Alastair Bruce is a London-based management consultant and former treasurer of the Berlioz Society. Hugh Macdonald is General Editor of New Berlioz Edition.

The ends of a topological space are the directions in which it becomes noncompact by tending to infinity. The tame ends of manifolds are particularly interesting, both for their own sake, and for their use in the classification of high-dimensional compact manifolds. The book is devoted to the related theory and practice of ends, dealing with manifolds and CW complexes in topology and chain complexes in algebra. The first part develops a homotopy model of the behavior at infinity of a noncompact space. The second part studies tame ends in topology. The authors show tame ends to have a uniform structure, with a periodic shift map. They use approximate fibrations to prove that tame manifold ends are the infinite cyclic covers of compact manifolds. The third part translates these topological considerations into an appropriate algebraic context, relating tameness to homological properties and algebraic K- and L-theory. This book will appeal to researchers in topology and geometry.

The ends of a topological space are the directions in which it becomes noncompact by tending to infinity. The tame ends of manifolds are particularly interesting, both for their own sake, and for their use in the classification of high-dimensional compact manifolds. The book is devoted to the related theory and practice of ends, dealing with manifolds and CW complexes in topology and chain complexes in algebra. The first part develops a homotopy model of the behavior at infinity of a noncompact space. The second part studies tame ends in topology. The authors show tame ends to have a uniform structure, with a periodic shift map. They use approximate fibrations to prove that tame manifold ends are the infinite cyclic covers of compact manifolds. The third part translates these topological considerations into an appropriate algebraic context, relating tameness to homological properties and algebraic K- and L-theory. This book will appeal to researchers in topology and geometry.