Howard M. Berlin

This sort of filmography was once a staple of both film scholarship and film fandom. With the coming of online resources such as IMDb and Wikipedia, however, these type books have faded from interest. And people have tended to ignore them. That may be a mistake, because IMDb and, especially, Wikipedia are flawed. And The Complete Mr. Moto Film Phile holds up well against both of them.

In the case of Wikipedia, the site is subject to everything from a malicious teenager vandalizing the entries to political ideologues willing to scrub out references to things that offend them and even to organized efforts from certain nations that want to censor history, culture, and the arts and advance their own deceptive propaganda. IMDb, meanwhile, is ever more commercialized, incomplete, and organized more like clickbait to get as many pages viewed as possible. (The same entity that owns IMDb, of course, also owns Goodreads, although the more literary nature of the latter site has seemed to protect it from some of the more mercurial type decisions effecting IMDb, such as the vaporization of IMDb's comment threads without so much as a whimper.)

So, why is The Complete Mr. Moto Film Phile a worthy rival? It tends towards cult fan appeal much more than scholarship but nonetheless makes a more than good effort to track down some of the more obscure participants and influences on the Mr. Moto series of films. It certainly does not come up to the standards of, say, MacFarland Publishing, which at one time had (and maybe still does have) a thriving industry devoted to scholarly reference books, particularly on film and television. But it does gather together in one place all the available material (circa 2005) on Mr. Moto. The biographical sketches are also helpful--although it would have really been nice to see much, much more done on Marquand, Lorre, and Foster, especially on Marquand. If you are writing on the films, it is far easier to work with referencing this book than flipping around online. Too, the author seems to have made a good faith effort to get things right. So, the content appears trustworthy--not something to take for granted with internet based sources.

The faults? The book is repetitive. It contains more than a few typos and editing/proofreading errors. And the film commentaries are next to useless; they simply don't provide anything worth the time they take to read them. Too, while The Complete Mr. Moto Film Phile also contains a bibliography that includes a few scholarly sources, these are few in number. Granted, there simply are few of these specifically addressed to the Mr. Moto series (and there haven't been many additionally, since the book was published in 2005). But that wouldn't stop a more comprehensive effort from reaching out into generalized connections. Narrow focusing on Mr. Moto per se and not those things that could easily connect with it is a major failure. Lastly, the writing is simplistic, forced, and lifeless. There is much that can be done with this subject to make it interesting. The author has the desire but not the ability to pull it off.… (meer)

Questo libro è stato scritto principalmente per semplificare l'approccio alla progettazione e alla sperimentazione dei filtri attivi. Mi risulta che questo sia il primo libro che tratta la progettazione di filtri attivi affiancando una vasta gamma di esperimenti di laboratorio. Per questa ragione il libro è utile agli sperimentatori ed hobbisti che desiderano apprendere in modo autodidattico i concetti basilari o può servire facilmente come testo supplementare per corsi sulla teoria dei filtri o la progettazione di circuiti integrati lineari.… (meer)