Some more good stuff from Mr. Mowat
930297
Farley is one of my favorites and was glad to be reminded that he wrote some great things besides Never Cry Wolf.
1085988
I really liked this compilation. You may be able to find all of it for free, but at three bucks, it is hard to beat, and much less effort. If your time is worth anything to you, it is money well spent, and the formatting is all very good. My only complaint is that I wish the table of contents went to each individual story in the short stories, and not just the short story compilations. But it works very well, and it is great to rind out about Holmes from the novels themselves. It is rather different from the rather sanitized character that I grew up with in some lessor portrayals of Holmes.
2990188
I like this book but it is not quite as good as others in a consistently excellent series. The book presents a lot of information, but I wish there had been a little more natural history in a couple of places. The chapter on dams could be more helpful, but instead it's mostly what people have thought about beavers, more or less as a trope. Illustrations are excellent throughout, and the writing is excellent. Four stars rather than five for what I think to be slightly lacking content in natural history.

That said, this is a good book. After presenting the beaver's evolutionary history and biology (and differentiating between the American and Eurasian beaver), the author has structured the book on four themes, a chapter for each: musk, fur, beaver architecture and what might be called the beaver as ecologist. These are presented mostly as how humans have used the animal, without being as judgmental as some authors are about commodification--perhaps because beavers are resilient and are making a comeback in many areas.

The chapter on musk concerns the glands near the anus used by beavers to mark territory (it has other uses). Termed castoreum, the substance has been used as a medicinal, and as an ingredient in perfumes (and still is). The substance is widely used, says Poliquin, as a flavor substitute for vanilla in baked goods. Likely there are some vegan baked goods that are a tad  less vegan than consumers think. This is one reason that beavers were wiped out in most of their historic range (western and northern Europe to Iran and Iraq, east to China), the medicinal use.

Chapter 3 on fur is perhaps the best in the book. Beaver fur has a unique undercoat that makes excellent felt for hats once hugely popular. The hats kept their shape for a long time and were waterproof. The hats were expensive, and the processing involved mercury, so the Mad Hatter is not just an amusing figure, but call it the beaver's revenge. Those hats in paintings of wealthy burghers by the Dutch Masters are beaver hats. The trade in beaver skins was, as readers would know, extremely important in the settlement of North America, with profound impact on the native peoples and the ecosystem.

Chapter 4 looks at beaver architecture, dams and all, not so much from the standpoint of natural history but from the view of beaver as trope, of hard worker in a classless society, as encapsulated in the later phrase "eager beaver". Animals as symbols were important in the literature of the 1700s in particular, although the use of animals in heraldry and as symbols goes back many centuries. This is the weakest chapter of the book.

Chapter 5 discusses the beaver as ecosystem manager, a 21st century trope perhaps as much symbol as anything the beaver symbolized centuries ago. This chapter has some fascinating information. North America now has 15 to 25 million beavers, which I would think must be the highest number since the beaver trade began in the 1600s. Beavers were somehow transported to Patagonia, where they are seen as an invasive pest species, and a program to eliminate them--unusually, cooperation between Chile and Argentina--is under way. The American beaver has been transplanted to Europe in an attempt to restore beaver populations, but the American species is more aggressive and is replacing the native species. And, each year a beaver eats about a metric ton of wood, equal to about 215 trees, and if you think of 15 to 25 million beavers in North America each consuming 215 trees the species mush be having a major impact on habitat, apparently under the radar.
747517
Another good read for the amateur genealogist, as well as the true who dunnit junkie. Looking forward to more from Mr Molyneux.
2494303
Be warned, it's a set of short stories and most aren't written by Martin. That being said, he makes some phenomenal author selections here. While the hardcover it shows I purchased was a gift for my uncle, I have a Kindle copy from a while ago and have used the stories included to discover authors I hadn't previously read. There are some really good ones in here: Abercrombie, Lynch, and Rothfuss were new to me when I opened Rogues, and I've since read everything of theirs I can find. Martin's variety of tastes show in here too.. (see his writing about the 'spinner rack'), and it's pleasant to find diverse genres in one anthology, even if some wouldn't be my typical selections. This and Warriors are worth picking up!
491483
Charles and his gang have another great book here.  There will be another updated Moab book out soon though.
2806394
Great stuff as almost always from Mart.  A bit wistful, considering it's about losing Kingsley.  Many memorable passages with respect to the young and bratty novelist.  One bit in particular about Amis and friends surprising the great Robert Graves in Spain and, on acid, asking him to turn a cloud into a dinosaur or make a volcano explode.  Easy to picture his immemorial friendship with the equally amazing Hitch.  If you like Amis, you'll like this.  It's a nice companion to the early (i.e. GOOD) novels.  Boy are the later ones stiff stuff.
2338002
The enthusiasm and praises for Ben Fountain's collection is well-founded and well-deserved, so I won't repeat them here. But for those readers who may be interested in a different kind of review, I would like to add here that my only criticism with this collection is on the ideological/political level.

While the stories here are careful to avoid, indeed subvert, certain stereotypes and cliches, they also tend to reinforce others, the long history and tradition of western ethnography casting its problematic shadow, threatening to reduce not just the characters and landscapes to hollywood-esque cliches, but also the critical politics addressed here into facile journalism. To be sure, Fountain does resist Manichean, or back and white, moralizing (as one reader below suggests), and certainly, he does not shy away, for instance, from looking critically at his first-world characters' position relative to their third-world counterparts, but ultimately the stories are haunted by what one might call the "heart of darkness" syndrome that still, unfortunately, informs much of western literary, cinematic and journalistic output today.

Having said this, however, my intention is not to deter readers from this book. On the contrary, the stories here are well-written, well-crafted and rare in that there are very few contemporary North American writers who overtly engage with political issues in their short fiction (perhaps a good comparison here might be Ward Just, or even Tom Bissel and Tony D'Souza, though personally, for purely political/ideological reasons, I cannot wholeheartedly recommend the latter two). And as other readers have attested, there is a lot to admire here, a lot to enjoy and gain for those interested in good stories that offer not just engaging situations and plot, likeable characters and voice, but also the political broadstrokes of American involvement abroad. Particularly if you enjoy writers like Charles D'Ambrosio, Scott Snyder, Daniel Alarcon, perhaps David Means, Judy Budnitz, and even TC Boyle, you'll probably enjoy this collection. In fact it is hard to imagine that this collection would completely disppoint. And it is precisely for all of these reasons that I wished that the collection had been even more critically aware.
4872309
Moyo's second book is less successful than her first one, Dead Aid. Where the former was a tightly argued brief on how foreign aid was failing sub-Saharan Africa, her new book is a discursive overview of virtually everything, and on some issues she is simply out of her depth. Still, it is well worth a read by anyone interested in economic issues.
For me, the most valuable part of the book was the section "Not All Bubbles Are Created Equal", where Moyo details just why housing bubbles can be much more devastating to an economy than equity bubbles. Anyone who remembers the bursting of the dot-com bubble in 2000 and the bursting of the American housing bubble in 2005 must have suspected this was so: Moyo explains why.
Moyo gets way out of her depth when she launches a tirade against the adoption of inflation targeting (IT) by central banks as contributing to the Great Contraction of the nought decade. Tony Blair's Chancellor of the Exchequer, Gordon Brown, comes in for special criticism for taking financial regulation out of the hands of the Bank of England, as if this decision were somehow intrinsically related to IT, and not a completely unrelated call. Neither Blair nor Brown had anything to do with the Bank of England adopting IT. This happened under John Major, when Norman Lamont was his Chancellor of the Exchequer, in October 1992, four and a half years before Brown took office. Although the United Kingdom moved to IT just under two years after Canada, it wisely did not follow Canada's lead in its choice of inflation indicator. Canada adopted the CPI All-items, which included mortgage interest costs in its owned accommodation component. The counterpart British indicator was the Retail Price Index (RPI), but for its inflation indicator the UK instead went with the RPIX, i.e. the RPI excluding mortgage interest. This was arguably a better inflation indicator than its Canadian equivalent in 1992, and was unarguably a better inflation indicator from 1995 forward, when the RPI and RPIX incorporated a series for replacement cost of depreciation of owner-occupied dwellings, similar to the one in the Canadian CPI, so that the RPIX was reasonably sensitive to movements in current house prices.
On December 10, 2003, Gordon Brown announced that the Bank of England would be switching immediately to the Harmonized Index of Consumer Prices, to be renamed the Consumer Price Index. While in some respects a superior measure of inflation, the CPI's fatal weakness was that it excluded all homeownership costs except for minor repairs, and so was completely insensitive to the big runup in housing prices then in progress, which ended in a big bust.
Pace Moyo, the US Fed was not an IT central bank in the nought decade so it is grossly unfair to blame the US housing boom and bust on IT. The Fed's preferred inflation indicator was in any case as insensitive to changes in current house prices as its British counterpart, since it measured homeownership costs based on imputed rents.
Neither Australia nor New Zealand went through a housing boom and bust in the nought decade, although they both have IT central banks. This is at least partly due to their wisdom in adopting as inflation indicators consumer price series that take a net purchase approach to owner-occupied housing. This is why the European Central Bank is planning on moving to a similar indicator, likely by 2017 or 2018.
Denmark's central bank never went in for IT, following an exchange rate policy with respect to the euro through the nought decade and afterwards, but it suffered a housing boom and bust just the same. Bulgaria suffered the same fate. Montenegro's currency was the euro from the time it gained independence in 2006, even though it was not a member of the EU or the EMU. Although it had no independent monetary policy at all, IT or otherwise, it had a huge housing boom that went bust in 2008, the worst and only housing bubble of any country in the former Yugoslavia in the nought decade. On this issue, Moyo simply doesn't know what she is talking about.
750878
There's good stuff here, despite the fact I was looking for particular insights he's famous for, that this book didn't have.
But it's still a keeper!
2313832
I like this book. I like Jim Knipfel's writing in general. He's quite good, and seems to be a naturally gifted author who's learned the ropes from his years as a columnist. In a strange sort of way, I consider him to be yet another link in the line of writers first described in the 1950s as the Beats. He measures up to many of those great truthsayers, and I always look forward to more work from Mr. Knipfel.
Long may he linger.
432201
I like anything written by John Hogue and follow him on facebook and coast to coast radio.
Not earth shaking, lol, but another good observation from our dear John, no pun intended.
866380
This is a very interesting compilation. Not the usual "Best Of."  On the mostly good side, there are a LOT of cuts here, some of which provide very clean recordings of Harry's late 1930s work that are not found on most of the other "Best Of" type compilations. These less well-known recordings are excellent examples of the jazz that Harry was playing before he (and this is admittedly a point of debate) "went commercial." Those late '30s recordings really swing.  As a previous reviewer put it: "Here's the hot horn man, fresh from the Goodman band..." Personally, I prefer his late '30s work to his more popular recordings and hits from the '40s. That's not to say his '40s work isn't good. I simply think that his late '30s work is a bit more jazz and has a bit more "boogie" in it. But that's a personal opinion and I respect those who feel the 1940s recordings are the best. On this compilation I would particularly note Harry's work on the four boogie woogie tunes recorded with Albert Ammons and Pete Johnson: "Boo Woo," "Woo-Woo," "Home James" and "Jesse." I know Harry has, at times, been accused of being too schmaltzy, but you won't find ANY schmaltz on those cuts. Those are swingin' boogie, pure and simple. And I think that those and some of the other cuts show that Harry James was possibly the most versatile trumpet player to ever pick up a horn. He could play with flat out, ear-piercing jazz power, but he could also quietly back a singer (many of whom said Harry James was the best at that skill). He could play the "schmaltzy" stuff, but he could also boogie with the likes of Albert Ammons. And if you've heard Harry play "Carnival of Venice" you know that he could play classical trumpet, as well. There are plenty of great trumpeters out there, but very few who can cross over and be good at so many different styles of music. There may be better be-bop players, better dixie players, better screamers or better classical players, but none of them can jump from their style to the other styles and be equally good the way Harry James could. My only real complaint with this otherwise very good (and varied) compilation is that the 1950s versions of "James Session," and "Two O'Clock Jump" sound like they're being played through a wet blanket. The same recordings on the Capitol Records "Trumpet Blues" CD (which are themselves taken from Harry's 1950s "In Hi-Fi" albums on Capitol) sound much brighter. I compared the the two CDs back to back and I have no explanation for why this otherwise nicely mastered CD would muffle those tunes. But that's hardly a reason to not buy this excellent compilation. As another reviewer noted, for this price, you can't go wrong. For the amount and quality of the music you get, this is an insanely inexpensive compilation. (And with the money you save buying this CD, you can pick up "Trumpet Blues" and have it all!)
293313
Solid, M.R. James-inspired collection. There are some real gems here, including the title story, "Out of the Water, Out of the Earth", and "The Marsh Warden". Consistently high quality of writing. My only quibble is that many of the stories fall too far into Jamesian pastiche, which gets a little samey after awhile. Don't get me wrong, I like that kind of stuff--it's just that I think Duffy could use a little more of his own authorial voice, because when it comes through it's awesome.
2006623
Having read all of Joe Hill's books up to this point (I haven't attempted Nos4atu yet), I thought I would check out his shorts.  This is a great collection of his works, and almost all of them were great reads.  The only one I skipped over involved a boy turning into a large insect.  Couldn't get into that one.  My favorite was the one about the inflatable boy.  It was really interesting and very sad.  If you are laughing while reading this, check it out and then get back to me.
This is definitely worth checking out.  Most of the stories can be read in about 30 minutes or less, and it shows off Joe Hill's different writing styles.
2349251
I love MWW.  You have to read his stories carefully due to the vernacular in which they are written.  He was a real master of his style of writing.
1138641
This collection of stories all take place during the Perez era and later. Some really good stories. If your WW fan no disappointments you can get right into reading and enjoy.