Books about Anonymity from Amazon.com

Some of the greatest works in English literature were first published without their authors' names. Why did so many authors want to be anonymous--and what was it like to read their books without knowing for certain who had written them? In Anonymity, John Mullan gives a fascinating and original history of hidden identity in English literature. From the sixteenth century to today, he explores how the disguises of writers were first used and eventually penetrated, how anonymity teased readers and bamboozled critics--and how, when book reviews were also anonymous, reviewers played tricks of their own in return.

Today we have forgotten that the first readers of Gulliver's Travels and Sense and Sensibility had to guess who their authors might be, and that writers like Sir Walter Scott and Charlotte Brontë went to elaborate lengths to keep secret their authorship of the best-selling books of their times. But, in fact, anonymity is everywhere in English literature. Spenser, Donne, Marvell, Defoe, Swift, Fanny Burney, Austen, Byron, Thackeray, Lewis Carroll, Tennyson, George Eliot, Sylvia Plath, and Doris Lessing--all hid their names. With great lucidity and wit, Anonymity tells the stories of these and many other writers, providing a fast-paced, entertaining, and informative tour through the history of English literature.

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Price: $16.52 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Advances in hardware technology have increased the capability to store and record personal data about consumers and individuals, causing concerns that personal data may be used for a variety of intrusive or malicious purposes.

Privacy-Preserving Data Mining: Models and Algorithms proposes a number of techniques to perform the data mining tasks in a privacy-preserving way. These techniques generally fall into the following categories: data modification techniques, cryptographic methods and protocols for data sharing, statistical techniques for disclosure and inference control, query auditing methods, randomization and perturbation-based techniques.

This edited volume contains surveys by distinguished researchers in the privacy field. Each survey includes the key research content as well as future research directions.

Privacy-Preserving Data Mining: Models and Algorithms is designed for researchers, professors, and advanced-level students in computer science, and is also suitable for industry practitioners.

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Price: $103.20 [Notify me when price goes down.]

When Don Heche died of AIDS in 1983 at the age of 45, one of the earliest casualties of the epidemic, he left behind a family stunned not only by his loss but by the revelation that for years he had led a secret homosexual life. Determined to reexamine the family's self-image in the light of this new awareness, writer Susan Bergman sought out her father's friends and companions and delved back into family history, looking for the telltale fault lines in what had seemed an all-American story. Author Ron Hansen called her wise, passionate, beautifully written book "the finest portrayal of fear and hiddenness in families that I have ever read." .
Price: $8.63 [Notify me when price goes down.]

The Internet and the worldwide web play an increasingly important role in our private and professional activities, for example in accessing information about cultural, political, economical, medical or scientific information. Many people assume that they can access such information privately.

This book addresses the topic of querying information privately in a systematic and comprehensive way, developing practical solutions in the context of database systems. Based on thorough theoretical analyses, the author develops concepts for solutions of real-world settings, in particular for scalable database systems.

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Price: $49.99 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Sometimes things don't exactly work out. Schemes collapse, experiments fail, luck runs out, or times and tastes simply change. It's a cliché that history is written by winners--but it's important to remember that it's usually written about winners, too. Paul Collins changes that, highlighting the failures, the frauds, and the forgotten in Banvard's Folly.

Most of Collins's starts were famous--or infamous--in their own time. For example, William Henry Ireland forged dozens of documents "by Shakespeare," including the play Vortigern, but was found out by his overenthusiastic use of "Ye Olde Sppellingge." (Oddly enough, William's father refused to believe his son was responsible even after William confessed; William was widely held to have been too stupid to have written such impressive forgeries.) Then there's respected scientist René Blondlot, who fooled himself--as well as most of the scientific community--into believing he had discovered a remarkable new form of radiation, which he named N-Rays. In reality, they were only an optical trick of peripheral vision. The book's namesake, John Banvard, amassed a fortune from his celebrated "Three Mile Painting"--a huge panoramic rendering of the Mississippi River--and then lost his fortune in an unsuccessful attempt to compete with master advertiser and showman P.T. Barnum.

Collins describes these and several other "nobodies and once-were-somebodies" in chatty, often tongue-in-cheek prose (in recounting the story of Jean François Sudre and his musical language, Collins notes "obsessive fans who hear already secret messages in music would not do their mental stability any favors by learning Solresol"). He also includes a handy "for further reading" section, should you have the desire to learn more about, for example, Symmes's theory of concentric spheres, grape propagation, or the medical benefits of blue glass. Funny, thought provoking, and sometimes poignant, Banvard's Folly helps to rescue these lost souls from the ash heap of history. Very highly recommended. --Sunny Delaney.
Price: $1.27 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Unnamed characters--such as Lot's wife, Jephthah's daughter, Pharaoh's baker, and the witch of Endor--are ubiquitous in the Hebrew Bible and appear in a wide variety of roles. Adele Reinhartz here seeks to answer two principal questions: first, is there a "poetics of anonymity," and if so, what are its contours? Second, how does anonymity affect the readers' response to and construction of unnamed biblical characters? The author is especially interested in issues related to gender and class, seeking to determine whether anonymity is more prominent among mothers, wives, daughters, and servants than among fathers, husbands, sons and kings and whether the anonymity of female characters functions differently from that of male characters..
Price: $39.99 [Notify me when price goes down.]