A pleasant read, but clearly an early work
920626
I am a great fan of Simon Mawer's work and rate several of his novels among my all-time favourites. A Jealous God or The Gospel of Judas I find incredibly powerful and well constructed. A Place in Italy suffers a little from falling firmly within the well-trodden genre of "English couple trying to settle in Mediterranean country and confronted with charming but quirky locals and customs". I am sure that the whole exercise was not such a cliche when Mr Mawer wrote it, but times have changed, and living as a resident in small Med villages is no longer the stuff of page turning adventure.
Interesting as it is to read an early work of a very talented author I do not feel that this book does his later work justice.
769017
This book isn't notable so much for being a sequel to H.G. Wells' THE TIME MACHINE as it is for being a very early novel in the subgenre now called "steampunk," a term Jeter originated.  It's worth reading for its place in the history of speculative fiction.

If you only plan to read one of Jeter's two re-releases, I recommend INFERNAL DEVICES, but MORLOCK NIGHTS still has some great scenes, particularly those set in the London sewers.  Otherwise, it's interesting to see how he handles the single female character, and how he incorporates elements from other myths (King Arthur, Atlantis) into the Wellsian story.
517020
I found this entry in the pseudo-Sayers canon to be far more credible than the earlier 'Thrones, Dominations,' but it is still patently not from the magisterial hand of Dorothy Sayers.
The plot is ok. The set up and reprisal of characters is respectable. I even found the Dowager Duchesses' breathless chatter, originally borrowed by Sayers from Dickens's Flora Finching (Little Dorrit), to be more than adequate.
What really marks this book as flattering imitation and not the real thing is also what gives it some value for modern readers--namely its careful research and recreation of early Wartime conditions in the Britain of 1939-40. As the daughter of a 'land girl' who met my American soldier father during the war and emigrated to marry him after demobilization, I found the build up of details about air raid drills, food rationing, evacuees and all the rest to be well imagined as an overlay and change to the pre-war Tallboys of Busman's Honeymoon.
The author is able to throw quotations around and select epigraphs with fair facility. There's little dramatic tension here, with the grand battle for surrender of the heart over and done and the winning won, but as an excursion into what happily ever after might possibly have looked like for the Wimseys it's not bad.
The only things I did absolutely did NOT believe were the horrifying notion of a married Mervyn Bunter and the notion that his lordship might actually utter the phrase "sheep-s--t" in informal conversation.
2404745
Flotsam is the first of Remarque's refugee works (followed by Arch of Triumph and Shadows in Paradise).  The themes he explored in The Three Comrades are here--the ill heroine, the WWI war veteran, etc.  However, here the emphasis is on the absurdities that the nationless must face to survive.  The work is interesting from a literary standpoint in that Remarque's writing is maturing, though he does seem to return to the same characters over and over--here, the Steiner figure is similar to Ravic in the Arch of Triumph, who, is similar to the main characters of Heaven Has No Favorites, Night in Lisbon, Shadows In Paradise and The Black Obelisk.  Be that as it may, it is always a pleasure to read Remarque's world-weary wisdom of the old soldier.
3579194
This small book is one in a large collection of similar books published by Oxford University Press.  The collection covers a wide range of topics, any or all of which should be of interest to any reader seeking to broaden his knowledge and understanding of the world.  I found this one --- the first in that series which I have read --- to be well researched and well written, interesting, and informative.  That's not to say, however, that I agree with everything the author has to say; but he certainly demonstrates the clear need for progressivism, or something much like it, toward the end of the 19th and in the early 20th century.  As a matter of fact: while reading this book, I sensed that if I had lived in those earlier times I, too, would have been a "Progressive." I like to think so.

The author, as he stated early in the book, is an acknowledged Progressive and proud of it; and this book clearly proves it.  In his view, it would seem that everything good that has been done in America has been done by Progressives while, on the contrary, everything done by non-Progressives, particularly "Conservatives" is either to be ignored or to be denigrated.  It must be kept in mind, however, that this book primarily addresses Progressivism from approximately the 1880s up to the early 1920s.  And, for that period of time, I would, for the most part, have to agree with him.  Some things simply had to change, and most of the changes made were definitely for the better.

Where the author and I part company is in those instances in the book where he makes a quantum leap from his primary period to more recent times wherein he continues this theme.  He doesn't seem to recognize that there is a considerable difference between the pre-1920s needs and the resulting "reforms" and today's conjured-up needs and the so-called "reforms or "changes" which have now been implemented or are proposed.  Neither does he seem to grasp the fact that whereas the much earlier Progressives always claimed that the people knew what was best; today's self-styled Progressives (aka Liberals, fascists, or whatever) proclaim that the people are too stupid to know what is best for them and that "reform" decisions must be made by the Liberal elitists --- i.e. them --- in the people's supposed best-interest.  He also seems to have a tendency to blame all the problems of today's America on Conservatism --- which he narrowly defines for his own purposes --- while in fact the vast majority of today's problems are in fact the result of Liberal leadership and Progressive programs --- e.g., the current state of the nation's economy; the housing bubble; the Federal Reserve, which earlier Progressives created, printing currency like it's going out of style; ObamaCare which was jammed down the throats of the American people; the energy crisis; the balance of payments deficit; activist judges; a Supreme Court which for the most part ignores the Constitution; and on and on.

Nevertheless, if one ignores the author's lapses of judgment and concentrates on the primary subject of his book: it is a great read and one which certainly aids in understanding much of today's political world.  Four stars.
692623
This is an early work of the author written as a requirement for a 1983 college course in Creative Writing. While it does contain a good story about a rarely addressed era of history, it was never edited or professionally published. I would only buy it after reading G.G. Stokes, Jr.'s Colonial Southeast Series. That said, if you like colonial stories, and if you can find one of the only ten or fifteen copies of this work floating around the marketplace, you'll enjoy the book. Compare it to The Road to Bloody Marsh, the rewritten, edited, and professionally published version of this story that came out in August 2009. Warning! You'll see enough similarities between these two works to recognize them as kin folk, but, like twins, they both have their own unique personalities and stories.
<a data-hook="product-link-linked" class="a-link-normal" href="/The-Road-to-Bloody-Marsh/dp/193525412X/ref=cm_cr_arp_d_rvw_txt?ie=UTF8">The Road to Bloody Marsh</a>
3565061
Aldous Huxley was born in England in 1894 and saw his first novel - "Crome Yellow" published in 1921. He is best known for his anti-utopian novel "Brave New World", which was first published in 1932.

"Brave New World" set in the year 632 AF - 632 years after the first Model T Ford has rolled off the production lines. (Henry Ford has, it would seem, become the world's main deity, and the "Sign of the T" is commonplace). The 'civilised world' has become a radically different place - although everyone is, technically, happy it's cost a certain amount of 'free will'. The family unit no longer exists, with children now being created in a laboratory. Since the overwhelming majority of women are 'created' sterile, the entire population's physical and intellectual development can be carefully controlled from conception. This level of control ensure that - with only very few exceptions - people are happy fulfilling their pre-determined role in society. (Members of the 'Epsilon Minus' class are bred for menial labour, while - at the other end of the scale - members of the 'Alpha Plus' class are bred for their intelligence). Promiscuous sex and recreational drug use is encouraged, and only a deviant would consider abstaining from either. Similarly, spending time alone is considered abnormal, while monogamy is practically a perversion. One of the book's key characters is Bernard Marx - an Alpha-Plus, who has some rather dubious tendencies. He's planning on taking a rather unusual trip to a "Savage Reservation" : in these places, the primitives who live there have children and raise families in the time honoured fashion. They also grow old and don't consider cleanliness to be "next to fordliness".

I've slightly mixed feelings about "Brave New World". I was a little disappointed - though, with the constant comparisons to "1984", I think my expectations of it were maybe a little off. The elements of the book dealing with indoctrination, conditioning and bio-engineering are certainly relevant to today's world - however, the book just didn't make the impact it could have. Part of the problem, for me, was that the book's focus shifted so often from one character to another - next to Winston Smith, the characters that appeared here were a little flimsy. Similarly, I didn't find Huxley's Brave New World quite inspiring the same depth of feeling as Orwell's Oceania. Nevertheless, it's certainly worth reading, and I can see why it's so highly thought of.
2472240
To me, this book seemed like it had a new author a little over halfway through.  The beginning was an interesting enough, pleasant story about a group of idealistic people trying to create a self-sustaining commune.  The references to the Kid Herd, the Trippers, the Naturists, Ersatz Arcadia and Arcadia, all this stuffing of people and things into little identification boxes got a little old, and some of the metaphors got a little much for me.  Some of the characters seemed stereotypical.  It was a nice enough, three star story, but nothing especially memorable.  Then Bit, a little boy who was raised in the commune, grew up.  The characters had more depth, the story was more interesting, the metaphors rang truer to me, and I fell in love with the story, a five-star book, well worth the reading it took to get to that point.  So split  it down the middle and this one is a good, solid 4-star novel.

Thank you to the publisher for giving me an advance reader's copy for review.
242476
This book is comprised of the two novellas "Somewhere a Band is Playing" and "Leviathan 99", each with its own introduction.  If I could I'd give it 3.5 stars - 4 for Somewhere, 3 for Leviathan.  I think Bradbury recognised Leviathan was not as strong as he'd have liked, from the apologetic note in the introduction.

Somewhere is a quiet little piece which asks some deeper questions than is first apparent.  I enjoyed it, even though you could say not a lot actually happens.  Its an ode to childhood, to being young and growing up and growing old - and perhaps, finally coming to terms with mortality.  Its also a long love letter to Katherine Hepburn, and does not suffer at all from being so.

Leviathan is a sci-fi update of Moby Dick, so I guess you'd call it a long love letter to Herman Melville: but it does suffer from being that.  I understand why Bradbury felt he had to write it - after his work screenwriting on Moby Dick in Ireland, he was captivated - but he also as much as admits in the introduction that he never quite succeeded in having it live up to his vision.  Its a much abridged version of the full Moby Dick story, with a few names changed and the White Whale now a great comet, but I could never shake the feeling that what I was reading was more than a pale imitation of the original - and I haven't read Dick in 20 years.  There are some beautiful notes - its Bradbury, after all - but too few.

If you are only a casual reader of Bradbury, then this is the book you buy when you have read everything else and still want more.  For the more diehard fans, well, I'd still say go and read a lot of other Bradbury first, for all we both know you'll read this in the end anyway.
250821
This is a classic written almost 100 years ago about three generations of an upper middle class English family from around 1880 through the early 1920's. Galsworthy is not sympathetic to this class and makes this clear in a number of tiresome insertions which do nothing for either the plot or the book. However, he is not didactic and the story is compelling in spite of the author's commentary. Apart from being a good read, these volumes should be of interest to students of English social history, early psychology, and of course English Lit majors.  The book has a somewhat satirical tone, excessively so in some places. The plot is somewhat claustrophobic in that the family seems highly insular, even though by the 1880's the British upper middle class was already widely engaged in the British Empire, to say nothing of international trade. In addition, although almost an entire generation of this class was killed in the First World War, the family here had hardly any losses and appears to have been barely touched by the war, except for increased taxes. I would recommend that before starting this saga, readers review Galsworthy's potted biography, say on Wikipedia, and then go on with that in mind.
129545
Not a bad read. Obviously there are some flaws, but it's one of the authors early works and I expect them to only improve. Worthy enough to at least check out the second book
3065673
The first edition of this book - a drab, stapled booklet issued at the author's expense in 1933 - was an attempt by the poet and prose fantasist Clark Ashton Smith to save a few of his favorite tales from oblivion after submission of these tales had resulted in either rejection or requests for alterations the author was not willing (at that time) to make. "The Maze of the Enchanter" and "The Voyage of King Euvoran" are both vastly superior to the disembowelled versions published years later as "The Maze of Maal Dweb" and "The Quest of the Gazolba". Three of my favorite tales by Smith appear in this book - "The Maze of the Enchanter", "A Night in Malneant", and "The Double Shadow". Of these, only one, the heavily-edited "The Maze of Maal Dweb" - still impressive in plot, if less precise in action and almost devoid of atmosphere- appears in Arkham House's fine retrospective collection of Smith's work, A RENDEZVOUS IN AVEROIGNE. "The Devotee of Evil", an exercise in contemporary horror not dissimilar to such minor, early Lovecraft efforts as "From Beyond", disappoints, otherwise the contents are chilling, evocative, mournful, and sardonic by turns, with Smith's muse shaping the prose so cunningly that word, image, action, atmosphere, and speech all work toward the same otherworldly end.

Wildside Press has not produced the most elegant edition of the book one could imagine. The binding is not sewn, the paper is thin, and half the title - the words "AND OTHER FANTASIES" - appears only inside the book, a detail which may cause some confusion among those not already familiar with Smith's work. Nonetheless, the book appears reasonably durable, the cover art is attractive, the text is laid out stylishly, and random checks for accuracy suggest this is more carefully proofread than are some of this publisher's earlier books. "The Maze of the Enchanter" in all its unexpurgated glory is alone worth the price of this book.
2284190
"The Return of Martin Guerre" is a suprisingly simple book about a court case that occurred in the Sixteenth Century.
The book is composed of a variety of chapters that cover the background of those involved, the land and industry of the time, the actual court case, and even the background of those that wrote about, and later dramaticized the case.
The book itself is very easy to read, and could probably be enjoyed by readers of any age. Unlike a previous reviewer, I did not think that there was too much French in this book, and only one or two lines were left untranslated (very simple ones at that).
One little annoyance I constantly found was the tendancy of the author to assume things. She often claims that if something was done in the sixteenth century, then it was also most certainly done by Bertrande, Arnaud, or Martin. One example that stood out would be the taunts that she claimed Martin suffered as a result of neglecting the marriage bed of his wife (with no actual evidence).
Nonetheless, it is these assumptions that make "The Return of Martin Guerre" interesting to read, because they do teach the reader a little bit about peasant life at the time.
I reccommend this book to all readers. In particular, I feel that a younger reader would enjoy it due to its simplistic, but lyrical writing style, and its carefully woven introduction to the history of sixteenth century France.
984275
James Wood's book is largely an engaging read filled with pleasing sentences and often telling illustration. It deals principally with writerly skills, and those particular uses of them which make in novels for the Beautiful. Among the most important of these is the indirect or ironic narrative style whose virtues Wood demonstrates in detail. The author in similar fashion moves on to treat with equivalent freshness such expected areas as characterization and language. Then, toward the end of the book, he turns to the question of the True in novels, and persuasively argues for what he calls "lifeness." Such concerns of Beauty and Truth are of obvious centrality to both the creative writer and the appreciative reader of novels. So far, I'd argue, so good.

 The book finally and sadly disappoints, however, and it does so owing to the author's inadequate and stale, if still widely fashionable view of what in novels constitutes the third element in Plato's trinity, the Good. About the freshest Wood gets in his noticeably scant treatment of this topic is a twice repeated quotation from George Eliot on how novel reading can expand our sympathies, enlarge our human capacities and horizons. Surely this is true as far as it goes, but Wood implies much more here which he doesn't seem to realize is highly questionable. If I read him rightly, he is praising readers of novels who leave Plato's Cave in order just to become "non-judgmental" multiculturalists, open to all times, places, and persons. And this assumption, held apparently with uncritical dogmatism, is as far as Wood goes in considering the Good.

 Wood's thinking, despite his own early voiced Joycean fear of pedantry, finally itself smells too much of the shop. He values the difficulty of the doing almost to the exclusion of the human worth of the thing done. His enthusiasm, for example, for the artistry in a particularly gross passage from Philip Roth coupled with an ignoring of any deeper moral considerations may stand as the signature of Wood's strengths and weaknesses as a critic. What he omits in bowing before the artistry of any skillful wielder of words is what Flannery O'Connor included when she quipped that for Tolstoy in "Anna Karenina" adultery was a sin whereas for rootless postmodern fiction writers, critics, and readers it is at most "an inconvenience."

Flannery O'Connor, by the way, whose own brilliant book of criticism "Mystery and Manners" Wood oddly neglects, shared with Plato and Tolstoy the belief that art was so powerful a force, it could be dangerous, to the artist and to society. On the other hand, PBS a few years ago inadvertently revealed its cruder idea that art in our time had at last been defanged and was instead now happily insipid, the station even going so far as to offer subscribers a self-congratulatory button sporting the phrase "Fear No Art." In his inadequate handling of the "Good" in the art of the novel, James Wood for all his sophistication places himself, I'm afraid, on PBS' side of the court.
1269752
Yalom, a professor of psychiatry at Stanford, has written a decent tale of the encounters between Friedrich Nietzsche (on the brink of authoring _Also Sprach Zarathustra_) and Joseph Breuer, a physician and mentor of Freud, in  late 1882.  Freud and Lou Andreas-Salome have walk-on roles.
Nietzsche  has been going from one physician to another for his migraine headaches and  other physical ailments.  Lou Salome maneuvers him unknowingly toward  Breuer, who effects a proto-psychoanalytic cure through the ruse of having  Nietzsche treat HIM ... although the treatment of the doctor by the patient  becomes something real in the course of the story.
The dialogue is not  entirely convincing.  Yalom obviously knows his Nietzsche as well as his  psychology and medicine, and one can sense him slipping his own clinical  insights into Breuer's ruminations and projections of the future of  "mind healing" (must they always be right on the money?).  Nietzsche and Breuer come across more convincingly in their letters and  notes -- perhaps because we readers are more used to encountering 19th  century luminaries through their written words.
The denouement is a  little too pat.  A stimulating crisis and possible catastrophe seem to  develop, and then are jerked from our hands.  Perhaps Yalom should not have  tried so assiduously to keep his plot within the bounds of historical  possibility and instead played more freely with his characters.  Still, it  is nice to see someone attempt this sort of thing with such substantial and  intimidating historic figures.
3420928
This is an extremely early Barbara Mertz/Barbara Michaels/Elizabeth Peters book. It was written during the time that gothic novels were as prevalent as vampires and werewolves are now and it follows the rules the expectations of the time. There are two male protagonist, leaving the reader to wonder which one is the good guy, two female leads and they are not what they seem either.

I love that the subplot could have been a typical historical romance novel on its own, but is woven into the main story with a nod to the reader that not to underestimate any young woman.

Even thought there are no explosions, no lovely breasts heaving above tight bodices, and if there are rippling muscles, they are only described in the context of the work they are able to do amazingly well, there is a reason that even the earliest efforts by this author is still read and reread.
1840971
SOPHIA is a novel solidly in the sentimental tradition. It first appeared in 1760, not only written by Charlotte Lennox but also serialized in her own monthly magazine - a daring idea that would usher in a whole new publishing methodology.

The story follows the fortunes of a widow and her two daughters after the death of their father, a fine gentleman who squandered his inheritance and left his family destitute.

The widow is beautiful, extravagant and frivolous, and her daughter Harriot is just like her. The younger daughter Sophia is not stunning like her sister, but her intelligence, high principles and subtle elegance are ultimately more attractive. Sir Charles Stanley, the rich but morally lax young gentleman essential to the plot, attempts to seduce Harriot, then changes the object of his desire when he beholds the superior Sophia.

Various misadventures and misunderstandings ensue to challenge virtue and torment lovers.

Charlotte Lennox saw her first novel published when she was twenty. A prot&eacute;g&eacute;e of Samuel Johnson, she achieved fame in an age when male writers were the dominant powers on the literary scene.

Contemporary reviewers praised SOPHIA as "an agreeable love-tale," just the sort of morally improving book young ladies ought to read. But even as a twenty-first-century woman reader, with none of the social restrictions suffered by Sophia, I found myself charmed by the graceful prose style, the engaging story and the characters, all so quaintly reflective of their time and place.

The introduction is a bit dry, but I was fascinated by the notes that followed on female property and education, rank and titles, social status of the clergy, currency values and everyday transportation in mid-eighteenth-century England.