One of the world's best known living composers, Gyorgy Sandor Ligeti is widely acknowledged as the most influential and admired creative figure of the late twentieth century. His brilliantly conceived and challenging pieces, searingly intense at times and full of humor and irony at others, include the orchestral Apparitions and Atmospheres, piano etudes, the opera Le Grand Macabre, and the unaccompanied choral work Lux aeterna, which Stanly Kubrick actually pirated for the film soundtrack of 2001: A Space Odyssey.

In this book, Richard Steinitz fuses biographical, stylistic, and technical...

MURDER OVER THE BORDER is a mystery set in the context of the Middle East Peace Process. The hero, Yossi Abulafia, is an Israeli policeman on army reserve duty near the Jordanian border. Instead of watching the border, he is taking photographs of antelope when the observation post he is sitting in collapses and he is seriously injured. During the accident, he unwittingly takes a photograph of what appears to be a murder -- on the other side of the border with Jordan. As a result of his accident, he is transferred to a boring desk job. He uses his connections to try and investigate what...