Collection of Finney's Notes, United by a Flimsy Narrative
938580
Did Finney need money at the end of his life? There are the notes for about four or five short stories here, united by a premise that one could somehow prevent WWI. The "Jotta Girl" provides an intriguing possible love interest that could have really set up a conflict with Si's feeling for Julia, but never gets fully explored. Likewise, who are these people in the beginning? I went back looking for clues to where they might fit into the eventual story. Nope. Likewise, Reuben never really develops in this one, either. And we brought Professor Danzinger out of non-existence for a cameo walk-in? C'mon!
I wanted to hand this book to someone who could channel Finney, and turn the contents into several really excellent short stories, which might or might not even have included Simon. Finney's writing is great, but there is no there "there," if you follow. However, be warned that parts of this book are not even Finney's writing, but rather his quoting or rephrasing of material from the time. And frankly, it got rather boring in places, so much that I skipped ahead to where the narrative picked up again. I, too, read original sources from the time (available even in the lower-tech 1990s on microfiche) and don't need Finney's obsession with ocean liners and vaudeville endlessly repeated, when I could find material on my own. I actually think he was trying to pad his word count, by including the irrelevant details of vaudeville acts.
That said, if you're a fan of Finney, and appreciate even his notes, it's worth a read. Just don't have too high expectations.
3457743
Michael Rosen, a British poet and father of five compiled this weird collection of poems and what he considers poems. He states that these selections provide "hundreds of thoughts, dreams, and ideas trapped in words for you to read, say, or sing." Well, he means this literally, as he includes songs by John  Lennon and Paul McCartney, Bob Dylan, and Ewan MacColl (born James Henry Miller) and Peggy Seeger.  Another  poet is British comedian Spike Milligan, whose poem "The Dog Lovers" describes how they are not up to taking their dog out for exercise.  Then when the dog escapes outside and is killed by a car, Milligan tells the dead dog, "Today they will cry for you--/ Tomorrow they will buy another dog." There is also "The Computer's First Christmas Card," which is a list of different word compounds without any meaning, except a connection  (or disconnection) to Christmas. In a similar vein is "The Song of  Snohomish," composed "entirely of baseball players' nicknames." Rosen  includes several of his own underwhelming  poems.

It would be helpful to know the ages this anthology is for. In other reviews teachers have expressed the opinion that this book is not suitable for the classroom, citing several violent poems. This reviewer was startled as well to find Thomas Hardy's "The Dolls," in which a  little girl asks why her mother  dresses the child's  dolls as soldiers, and  the mother does not answer, knowing that her daughter's  father was a soldier and is not the man she calls dad. The catch is that the  children reading the poem learn what the  mother does not tell her child. At least Michael Rosen did not include W. B. Yeats' "The Dolls," which proclaims that the baby about whom the dolls are complaining "was an accident." But he comes close with his inclusion of W. H. Auden's "Roman Wall Blues," in which the Roman soldier declares, "Piso's a Christian, he worships a fish;/There'd be no kissing if he had his wish."

This book  is a mishmash. The poems are arranged alphabetically by author in each section; the humorous sections of riddles and nonsense verse  succeed better than the sections of limericks, poems, and ballads. Despite the presence of certain classic and well known poems, much of the material ranges from sophomoric to insensitive (given that the audience is children).  The black-and-white illustrations by Alice Englander range from amusing and whimsical to ugly.
1848098
I have to say that I found this book a bit of a disappointment especially having read the author's comment "if you were to purchase just one book on Irish Families, I have written this work for you". In fact if  this the only book you consult on Irish families you will be most upset.  The book makes the mistake of trying to reinvent the wheel by cataloging  families from old data sources. This has already been done, much better, by  several other authors. For the most prominent families, this publication  adds nothing to the existing knowledge base. It's attempt to include rare  names is honorable, but the amount of information provided is scant, at  best. For example, "The family of Mulvey is traditionally linked to  Co. Leitrim and it has remained so in modern times" hardly does  justice to this once great sept. The entries are also inconsistent, for  some the Irish form of the name is included and for others it is not. I  would have expected all of the old Gaelic names to have their Irish form  included. The coats of arms are a real let down, not only are they in  monochrome (colour is the essence of heraldry), but the quality of  reproduction is poor. It would have been better to leave them out  altogether. There are also quite a few errors and omissions (though the  author does admit this at the start). One that stuck me was the list of  Jewish-Irish names which omits the most famous of all, Briscoe. A look at  the entry for Briscoe shows no mention of the family's Jewish heritage,  despite the fact that at least members of the family have had high  political profiles in Dublin. The book claims Flaherty and Laverty as the  same name and while this is true in terms of their root word origin in  Irish, the names are racially quite distinct. In another case the book  fails to link the two names Haughey and Haffey. I found the book too  heavily reliant on "Keating's History", which while excellent, is  far from the only source available. Another off-putting aspect is the fact  that the names are not listed in proper alphabetical order and names  beginning with "B" crop up among the "A's" and so on.  On the plus side, the book does include a lot of information and it is not  expensive as such publications go. In short, this is not a book for  one-name researchers but should be on the shelves of all with a general  interest in Irish names.
4183573
A remarkably poor piece of historiography, this book is chaotically edited, packed with flabby abstractions, and is disappointingly free of original analysis or insight.  My expectations, coming from the generally excellent Oxford History of the British Empire, were sharply disappointed by this book.  Simply not enough can be said about the poor editing; other reviewers give good examples.  Facts and themes barge on in the reader unannounced and unexplained, with the familiar tone of a topic doubtless covered in an earlier, now excised, draft of the text.  Mr. Middlekauff's self-understanding as an author, at least in this work, did not seem to reach far beyond regurgitation of existing scholarship, and the footnotes display a dreary habit of simply cribbing from a single book for 3-6 pages before moving on the next sole source, creating a sort of Frankenstein pastiche.  When the author attempts to move beyond compilation, he trades in vacuous generalities often so devoid of content as to be affirmatively unhelpful, a condition that is immediately apparent when encountering more vigorous scholars covering the same ground.  Mr. Middlekauff is a gifted prose stylist, however, and he writes with humor and frequent grace notes.  Howe's chase of Washington across New Jersey was vividly cast, as was the southern campaign of Cornwallis generally.  On the whole, however, this cannot be recommended, either for the generalist reader (of which I am one) or, a fortiori, I would think, for the serious student of the Revolution.
2378084
I can half heartedly reccomend this with serious caveats.
Problem one.  It is really a one-trick pony.  OK.  You get it.  Holmes vs. various mythos creatures.  This looks great on paper but does not sustain a book.  If you are really interested, however, and since many of the stories are entertaining and a couple actually thought provoking, then buy it and read no more than one story a month, maybe every 6 weeks.  This isn't only because of the limitations of the idea, but also because all but two authors chose (generally successfully) to mimic Doyle's/"Watson's" writing style.
Problem two.  A disproportionate number of stories are based on The Shadow over Innsmouth.  One that isn't, "The Curious Case of Miss Violet Stone," is, as has been pointed out by a previous review, based on The Shadow out of Time.  This is one of the two best stories in the book.  A few stories seem headed off down that sidetrack created by August Derleth where there was a chance in fighting back and winning with Help from Outside.  In HPL doom was eventually inevitable and there was no Help available.
"Death Did Not Become Him" is very tenuously mythos being more related to the story of the Golem and Cabbalistic mysticism with a pretty lane excuse given for the connection.
Most of The Uspeakable Old Ones are named in various chants and so forth, but few put in an appearance.  In the original HPL the power of suggestion hightened the suspense.  Here it is merely disappointing.  Shub-Niggurath has a cameo and I think (based on precious little evidence) that Nyarlathotep has some off-stage schtick.  Most disappointing, Chthlhu Himself is totally AWOL, replaced by innumerable aquatic hybrids.
"The Case of the Antiquaritan's Niece," is vaguely related to "The Dunwich Horror."
The best story is by Neil Gaiman.  More or less connected to At the Mountains of Madness, it also reminded me of the wonderful Kim Newman's Anno Dracula books.
3953141
The endnotes are occasionally interesting but frankly Pullman doesn't add much to these tales.  Like unvarnished wood,  that can be a good thing,  I suppose, but I would've preferred a bit more to distinguish his authorial style.
2714635
Looking, as I was, for the definitive volume on Henry VIII and his wives, Starkey's book was ultimately disappointing in spite of its heft.  To spend two-thirds of the book on Catherine of Aragon and Anne Boleyn, although Starkey clearly found them the most worthy of interest, left the other fours wives' personalities and histories  undeveloped and colorless.  Thanks to Starkey, we now know every possible detail of the Henry/Catherine divorce, both from Catherine's and Anne's perspective. but very little about their relationships with Henry. For example, with all the pages devoted to Anne, why do we not have a clearer understanding of the disintegration of the Boleyn marriage?  How did a woman who was the object of Henry's unbridled passion come to be beheaded a mere three years after marriage?  I, for one, would much rather know more of their personal history.  How can a book on such a fascinating subject be so dry?
2023850
If you can't write, or are too lazy to craft a narrative, get someone else to do it, That's the approach author Jean Stein took in this oral history.  While oral histories can have their charms, this one has far too many voices, many of them obscure or completely unknown other than to the five families featured in West of Eden.  The brief comments made by Jane Fonda and Lauren Bacall are nice surprises, but for the few Fondas and Bacalls, there are many more friends and distant relatives of little interest, and way too many to keep track of.  Ms. Stein has included information about participants in the oral history, but that requires constant reference to the back of the book.

The families chronicled here settled in Los Angeles during the first half of the 20th century and include the Dohenys, Warners, Selznicks, Steins and Garlands -- though not Judy Garland, whose unsuitable-for-a-marquee birth name was Frances Gumm.  The family patriarchs were movers and shakers in oil and show business whose lives were surely interesting, but the rambling tedium from those still alive who knew them and their families intimately cast a mostly dim light on what made them interesting.  Take Warner Bros. head Jack Warner, who found out about his wife's affair, according to one oral historian, and fired her actor paramour, who didn't work in show business for decades.  Though that affair was some 70 years ago, the actor's name is not mentioned.  And poor Miss Garland, who suffered horribly with schizophrenia but was not famous or noteworthy in her own right, is given a starring role in the sad but never illuminating section on the Garland family.  These are just two of several missteps in a book on five families that could and should have been fascinating.

If readers want to learn about the cultural and business history of Los Angeles, or even wallow in the lurid and tawdry lives of the super wealthy, they would do well to look elsewhere.
1723612
While the book is a treasury of the small details of frontier life not found elsewhere, its reliance on the perspective of individual, first-person correspondence ignores other archived accounts that may provide a more accurate picture of the events portrayed.

For example, in Chapter 4 Henri Geiger accuses militia Captain Jacob Wetterholt of murdering a Moravian Indian family in a letter to the local magistrate, and author Fox accepts Geiger's version at face value.  A small amount of additional research will find two other, more-detailed accounts of this incident, and (more importantly) its context, from less biased sources reaching entirely different conclusions.  The result is the Fox narrative is extremely distorted, with Jacob Wetterholt confused with his brother Nicholas Wetterholt, the assignment of a theft motive omitted from the two other accounts  entirely, and the omission of more probable villains in the form of Nicholas Wetterholt's lieutenant and an unscrupulous innkeeper.

Hence if Fox got this much wrong about an incident I'm familiar with, how much else is wrong with his accounts of the incidents I'm not?
4880928
When I had the opportunity to grab a collection of essays by a woman with such impressive publishing credentials, I was delighted and fully expected to enjoy every last word of the book. This was an entirely bad presumption on my part. The author's writing style, at least in this volume, seems to rely on the use of excess verbiage in an attempt to demonstrate the superiority of the opinions presented.

I love a large vocabulary and appreciate books, essays, and articles that use large words to great effect. Unfortunately, in this book, the author seems to have sat down with a vocabulary list and a very basic slate of ideas. These ideas were then dressed up by removing more conversational language and inserting weighty synonyms and obtuse similes and metaphors.

Even after getting past the pretentious tone of the essays, the actual content of them is greatly lacking as well. The author makes a habit out of presuming that people, particularly a certain subset of women, who are not like her are somehow faking it. Of course, several caricatures of self-doubting appear in the book to attempt to humanize the writing, but they largely fail because these moments and commentaries feel even more pretentious.

I couldn't recommend this book to anyone. Perhaps if it had attempted to talk TO readers and not AT them, the collection could have veered to two or three stars, but, as it is, this book is not worth the paper it is printed on.
3499306
The book begins with two historical vignettes on ballooning (yes, ballooning) and the rest is an essay on the author's experience grieving the loss of his wife.  Barnes makes token attempts to link these disparate topics -- elements from the ballooning stories reappear as metaphors in the third.  The effect is clunky and amateurish.

The essay on grief is beautiful and one of the least indulgent accounts of mourning I have ever read.  It would have been even more powerful without the jarring ballooning references.  The grief essay is only 56 pages long - not long enough for a book; I imagine that Barnes included the ballooning stories in order to lengthen the text and have a book to sell.  To do this in the context of mourning a wife, well, shame on Mr. Barnes.
2354767
Imagine a story with, say, 24 or 30 chapters.  Now imagine a book that collects only 8 of those chapters.  But not the first 8, or the middle or the last, but rather a spattering of pieces plucked seemingly at random out of the whole.  This is that book.  Forget the writing herein, which seems decent (if a bit overwrought at times, even for a comic book); and forget the art, which is by and large done well.  Those things just don't matter when most of the story is missing.  And what this collection really does, unfortunately, is show how inconsequential the missing chapters ultimately are.  The editors who collected these particular issues together in this volume are saying that, beyond the missing plot points, all the sound and fury that occurs in the missing pieces matter not at all.  And after reading this pathetic little collection, I must reluctantly agree.
2603360
This work by Andrew Himes--poet, computer pioneer, ex-fundamentalist, and ex-Maoist--combines memoir, biography, family history, and an indictment of southern fundamentalism for its racism.  The book is most valuable for its poignant reminiscences of growing up in a family dominated by Himes' grandfather, evangelist John R. Rice (1895-1980).  Nevertheless, the work is a ramble, moving back and forth in time and making amateurish pronouncements about American history in general and the history of American evangelicalism in particular.  Himes reprints part of a sermon in which his grandfather referred to him as a child not "held accountable as he ought." Whether a few good spankings might have kept Himes from Marxism is unknowable, but it is tempting to believe they might have made him a more disciplined thinker and writer.
1425767
Texts like these are best kept in the religious tract section of the bookstore. The authors did indeed do a good job researching trivial details, which makes the text read like a novel and gives it an air of authority.

As a high school AP American history teacher, I'd like to use this book in my class to show my students an example of the kind of mythologizing that can lead to international misunderstanding and war... but I'm afraid of helping the authors earn their royalties. A cursory examination of the sample pages alone reveals at least 3 historical errors.

The authors unapologetically subscribe to an "American exceptionalist" school of thought. Students should be taught the danger of believing that God is on the side of your coutry, of equating Deuteronomy-era Israel with modern-day America (or any other country). Do we want to teach our children to attack people who don't agree with our beliefs, or do we want them to explore a diversity of opinions and grow up into sympathetic, adults who embrace the values of agape love? (My favorite teachings of the Founding Fathers and Jesus, respectively)

I teach my students to be aware of different approaches to history and to be wary of both historical myth and revisionism - this text might best be described as Christian revisionist history. Most responsible historians learn the flaws of whiggish, Providential models of history early in their careers. These authors, apparently, did not.

For the curious, those 3 errors I noticed are:

-The suggestion that Franklin wavered in his faith, that he had "failed to accept Christ," is unfounded. Franklin was always a profoundly spiritual man, a Freemason, and a self-described deist. As the text's quote later shows (and the Lutheran university he lent his name to), Franklin fully recognized the pragmatic value of the Christian religion.

-To say "[In 1776] the states supported each other totally and without thinking," (p. 17) undermines the fact that there was a great deal of ambivalence about whether to accept the Declaration, and there was a sizable Tory minority (some historians say up to 30% of the colonial population) immediately prior to and during the Revolution.

-If concealing the problem of slavery in metaphors wasn't enough (p. 20), the authors suggest that the Pilgrims of New England had from the start rejected slavery, that the Puritans were somehow critical of the practice. Indeed, much of America's white supremacist past was justified by Puritan ideology. The first colony to legalize slavery (in 1641) was Massachusetts!
4917967
I do not wish to give this book a large dissertation at the moment. Just please take note of the table of contents and expect each of them to be touched upon briefly.  In my earnest opinion you could get the same information by reading the Gods of Eden which is constructed in a similar fashion with different agendism . The chapter on Albert Pike and the Druses were the only new information I could extract out of the first book. The second part was basically useless except for the appendices  which contained creeds and rights of the O.T.O., Which at the present time makes the expense of the book equivocal but fair. I also had a hearty laugh realizing that Mark Dices publisher coined 'The Resistance' took the effort to preserve the book which is a noble effort on thier part, despite the Christian overtones of the book as a whole.

tl; dr worth the money if you can afford $50, are an upstart to the topic and can bite the bullet to read through the narrative of a early 20th century rabblerouser.
2205567
Someone told philosophy is simply a specific genre of European literature; I would tend to agree if permitted to add that to validate itself as "philosophy" the opus has to include references to the previous philosophical works. Otherwise, however similar in vein and content, a book of philosophy it will not be.

According to that definition philosophers are writers doomed to retell stories heard from their predecessors; far is the day when the Allegory of the Cave will drop off that rambling and overburdened philosophical cart (driven by the Buridan donkey, no doubt) and be moved out of readers' sight.

Whether this definition is true or not, Taylor in his book behaves exactly as described, repeating and condensing others' treatises and opinions. They are many in the long history of our civilization, so the author's tactic is to find connecting "narratives": here is the great "Inward Turn", from which premises of Romanticism easily follow, there came "veneration of the ordinary", which brought about the phenomenon of the modern novel.

It is precisely in this that both the greatest weakness of the oevre and its greatest utility lie: the book has collected innumerable praises from the horde of us, intellectual sloths, for in it we immediately spotted the opportunity to use the results of this marvellous compression, with the narratives as aids to jog our lazy memories, without reading the whole philosophical library of Taylor's sources shelf after shelf, and cover to cover.

The weakness of the approach could be in a certain arbitrariness of the found stories and connections. They make what was announced as "history of the central terms on which the modern man appreciates himself" seem too logical and inevitable. Those threads or constantly developing themes, when historical rather than invented, could be simultaneous, interweaving and interplaying - not consecutive and orderly.

In short, they are patterns half discerned and half imposed on history and philosophy by Taylor himself.

The second peculiarity of the book is the Taylor's style.

Once, they say, physisists came to a University bursar to ask for funds. The bursar studied their proposal for a long time, and then complained: "It's always like this with you, physisists. You always ask for huge sums to do your experiments. Mathematicians are so much better! All they use is paper, pencils and erasers." Then he thought a bit and added: "And philosophers are best of all. They do not even need erasers."

Taylor's style is unnecessarily dense and repetitive. I had an impression that he was more engrossed in wording than in laying out logically when writing. Very often, when the thread has been followed through to the very end, one realises, it could have been greatly reduced, and reduced to almost a platitude, I caught myself thinking at times: yes, "the original unity" of religious worldview was shattered and became multiple disciplines in modernity, emergence of protestant churches is habitually used to explain the Western individualism et cetera et cetera et cetera.

The "difficulty" of the book may be in the density of its style, and not always in the subject matter being discussed.

But still...

they say laziness is the King and true source of all Good in the world, so I cannot help but give the deserved 5 stars to this crash "immersion" course in the ideas of Western philosophy (in the guise of a treatise about Good, Ethics and sources of Modernity), nicely condensed and organized in a number of stories to follow for a curious reader but less than dedicated philosopher.

Digesting the Taylor's tome is the easiest way to read one book and then be able to convincingly claim to know many, many more.
3278996
The book is strong in parts and extraordinarily weak in others, especially the long-awaited conclusion. The greatest failing of the novel, however, is Rice's approach to the narration of the case history on the Mayfair  Witches. She contracts one of the worst cases of verbal diarrhea I've ever  encountered and becomes an utter bore. Some parts of the case history are  interesting (e.g., Langtry's account of Stella's death and the letters of  van Abel - although these, too, are remarkably long-winded, given that Abel  often wrote them under pressured conditions, e.g., when he was being  stalked by Lasher). Most of it, however, is completely irrelevant, serving  only - and why Rice felt the need for this God only knows - to distend an  already grossly bloated novel. It never ceases to amaze me how ready  publishers and editors are to overlook the insufferable over-indulgences of  writers who have acquired best-seller status, while reserving nothing but  criticism for those would-be writers who dare approach them with  manuscripts of over 120 000 words. In sum, I would recommend Rice's book  only to those who suffer from acute insomnia.