Despite being an early work, Pinball shares many elements with Murakami's later novels. It describes itself in the text as "a novel about pinball," but also explores themes of loneliness and companionship, purposelessness, and destiny. As with the other books in the "Trilogy of the Rat" series, three of the characters include the protagonist, a nameless first-person narrator, his friend The Rat, and J, the owner of the bar where they often spend time.

A musical prodigy, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart began playing the piano and composing when he was just three years old. Able to play multiple instruments, among them the piano and violin, Mozart spent much of his youth touring European courts with his family. From the time he was three until his death just thirty-two years later, he produced a huge volume of musical works. Among them the famed operas The Magic Flute, The Marriage of Figaro, and Don Giovanni.

Reading level: Ages 9-12

Colin Wilson tells the story of human violence from Peking Man to the Mafia - taking into account the calculated sadism of the Assyrians, the opportunism of the Greek pirates, the brutality that made Rome the ‘razor king of the Mediterranean’, the mindless destruction of the Vandals, the mass slaughter of Genghis Khan, Tamurlane, Ivan the Terrible, Vlad the Impaler and more. Each age has a unique characteristic pattern of crime. In the past three centuries crime has changed and evolved until the sex killer and the mass murderer have become symbols of all that is worst about our civilization.

This volume compiles contributions by leading economists in VoxEU over the past year that attempt to answer the burning questions. We have grouped these contributions into three sections corresponding to those three critical questions.

The International Olympiad has been held annually since 1959; the U.S. began participating in 1974, when the Sixteenth International Olympiad was held in Erfurt, G.D.R.

In 1974 and 1975, the National Science Foundation funded a three week summer training session with Samuel L. Greitzer of Rutgers University and Murray Klamkin of the University of Alberta as the U.S. teams' coaches. Summer training sessions in 1976, 1977 were funded by grants from the Army Research Office and Office of Naval Research. To date the U.S. teams have consistently placed among the top three national scores: second in 1974(the USSR was first), third in 1975 (behind Hungary and the G.D.R) and 1976 (behind the USSR and Great Britain) and first in 1977.

Members of U.S. team are selected from the 100 top scorers on the Annual High School Examinations (see NML vols. 5, 17, 25) by subsequent competition in the U.S. Mathematical Olympiad.

In this volume the demonstrably effective coach and prime mover in planning the participation of the U.S.A. in the I.M.O., Samuel L. Greitzer, has compiled all the IMO problems from the First through the Nineteenth (1977) IMO and their solutions, some based on the contestants' papers.

The problems ae solvable by methods accessible to secondary school students in most nations, but insight and ingenuity are often required. A chronological examination of the questions throws some light on the changes and trends in secondary school mathematics curricula.