Romanticizes While It Educates
346560
"Poetry Slam" by Gary Mex Glazner is part-anthology, part-history, part-description of slams, slam poets, and slam poetry. It romanticizes the image and description, but excels as a history. As an anthology, it has much room for improvement, but this could be a result of the limits of performance poetry.

Kerouac's ghost must wonder at how formulaic slam poetry has become. From the aggressive, ideological depth of Ginsberg and Burroughs, we now have the regurgitated flavors of Whitman-wannabes evoked pretentiously in the pop-soliloquys now barraging modern poetry readings. Yet, the slam has introduced thousands of young poets that poetry is worth their time. Glazner demonstrates this inconsistency, but not intentionally as we see the up and down quality of the poetry samples he provides.

An excellent part of the book is the description of poetry slam rules, distinguishing local and national rules, and how this form is meant as an oral art form, not a written one. This is the challenge faced by every slam poetry book: how to present it. Some poems here make the transition, and there a few gems worth a read. Marc Smith, founder of the slam, has "My Father's Coat." An interesting poem called "Ali" by Michael R. Brown. opens with the compelling "Five inches shorter than his fighting height" shows some fine imagery and intriguing approaches to poetry meeting culture.

For a deeper look at Beat literature, see the "Beat Reader," or for poetry only, "Beat Poets" edited by Carmela Ciuraru. "Poetry Slam" is a good start, but these books will provide better examples of the style and quality slam poets esteem to reach.

Anthony Trendl
editor, HungarianBookstore.com
2781132
I purchased this book on the basis of newspaper reviews and the author's considerable reputation as an historian. I expected a readable history of the main currents in politics, society and the economy in Europe over the century covered. The book does not disappoint. But the author over reaches by also trying to cover the major developments in art, music, literature and the frontiers of science. That treatment is too often superficial and not related to the book's main focus. His treatment often comes off as no more than name dropping. Do we need to know that the French Symbolists and Impressionist paintings may have influenced the music of Debussy and Ravel? To show the spread of science, on pages 497 to 498 Evans rattles off a list of scientists and their achievements, but  without drawing connections to their work or the impact on the further advancement of science. For example, the significance of the work of the Curries, Rontgen and Rutherford (mentioned) and Max Planck (not mentioned) ushered in the exploration of the atom, which would dominate the physical sciences in the 20th century. The book is organized into sections and subsections in which Evans explores various themes. Information and facts can come from all directions to prove a generalization. That can sometimes  be interesting, but also disconcerting. In discussing the changing concept of modern time Evans brings in racing tea clippers, the sinking of the Titanic, the depiction of time and motion in early 20th century paintings, experiments in the French cinema and Einstein's theory of special relativity (pages 393-394). The facts don't always integrate and the generalizations don't entirely convince. The narration is aided by 20 special maps and a lovely midsection of glossy color reproductions of art related to historical events. There is a 10 page guide to further reading. The book is directed at the general reader, so there are no scholarly notes. Even with its shortcomings and excesses, that only take up only a small part of the book,  Evans has written a fascinating, readable narrative history of the European century before it plunged into world war.
4926855
I assumed that I knew this book.  I thought I must have read it before.  I have seen the film, a great romantic spectacle starring the shape-shifting Meryl Street and the swash-buckling Robert Redford at his delectable best.  The book is quite different.  It tries to recreate a sense of what it was like to live in Africa at the time all Africa was still a colony.  The romance is between the coffee farmer, Baroness Blixen, and the country and people of the Ngong Hills.

Blixen has been decried for patronizing the native peoples in her employ, but in many ways she was ahead of her time.  She presents some vignettes of real colonial patronizing (e.g. her short essay "The Elite of Bournemouth") with no direct comment but with a world of implicit irony.  Her descriptions of the native people are full of admiration and affection, as well as color and detail which brings them vividly present.  Yes, she compares the children and servants to dogs and elephants and storks.  I don't find this patronizing  our language is full of words and metaphors which compare people to animals  a kittenish flirt, an eagle-eyed matron, a hen-witted gossip and these are the clichs.  Blixens comparisons are not clichs, but help create those vivid, living images.

I cant characterize Blixen as a racist even by our current strict standards.  She acknowledges, admires, and understands the differences between the Masai, the Swahili, and the Kiyukyu peoples who form part of her landscape, and tries to accommodate each of them, just as a well-intentioned modern Unitarian Universalist might do her best to accommodate the different needs of a Jew, a Muslim, a Hindu, and a Vegan who were expected to attend a dinner she is hosting. Is this racism, or practicality?

Modern African writers such as Adichie and Teju Cole describe the social dislocation of todays Africa, where modern Western technology clashes with tribal and societal custom.  Blixen suggests that it would have been better if Westerners had brought Africans along little by little;  that by the time she encountered them they could enjoy the humor of Aristophanes, but even if they caught up 30 cultural years of Western culture  for every calendar year, it would take them a long time to understand Western cultural ideas, such as their infatuation with autos instead of cows.

She wasn't so wrong.
2225468
"A Week in the Life of Corinth" is partly fiction and partly nonfiction. It read like a documentary show that's primarily made up of fictional reenactments to illustrate the points. The purpose was to educate readers (in an entertaining way) about the social and cultural background to Paul's letters to Corinth so that we can better understand them.

The book contained some nice black-and-white pictures of ruins, diagrams of houses, and archaeological artifacts that illustrated information in the non-fiction sidebars or events in the story. A lot of educational material was worked into the story, but additional information was provided in "sidebars" (which could take up whole pages) that were placed within the story.

The story followed a week in the life of a freed slave, who is caught in some political power-plays, and of Paul, who is facing a trial described in the Bible. The story had plenty of conflict and educational value, but it's a fairly short story and the relationships were only shallowly developed.

I thought that the author did a good job with the educational points that he brought out. The focus was mainly on Roman aspects (rather than Jewish) since the focus was on Corinth. Overall, I'd recommend this book to people who aren't very familiar with cultural background information and who aren't interested in pure nonfiction books on the topic.
748729
This is a book about many things, but it is not about Kate Middleton the human being and her path to individual fulfilment. Rather it is about KM the media object and her path to financial and semiotic hegemony. It is not about her individuation but rather about her capitalised education. It is not just about social and economic power, but about psycho-power and bio-power, about the production of desire and subjectivity in a capitalist society, and about the economic and semiotic war to control subjectivity and to reorganize our very drives so as to serve only capital and to desire according to its models. For David Cole our global post-industrial capitalist society is not the society of the spectacle but semiocapitalism, where the economic struggle for control of the market is relayed, intensified, and completed by the semiotic struggle for control of subjectivities. The royal family is not some medieval atavism artificially maintained as spectacle by the media for a world that has left such things far behind. The royal family is a formidable financial and semiotic assemblage of elements from diverse historical epochs, converging on a new iteration of the power to control financial fluxes and to define our desire not just for the consumption of the spectacle of the royal family and of its associated products but also for the sort of capitalised education writ large that KM benefited from and that we can experience at our own level and on our own scale as we live out, or try to live out, our own success story. It is a book about education, that educates us into immanence even while it lays bare the capitalised education that edifies such semi-transcendent models as KM. Kate Middleton media object is neither an instance of purely transcendent royalty (unattainable and so incapable of mobilising our desire), nor an example of purely immanent caring for one's life and one's loved ones (attainable by quite other means than frenetic capitalisable consumption). The book is also a reply to the claim that the age of immanent materialism as exemplified in Deleuze and Guattari's works is dead, and that academic commentary is the best that we can hope for from that direction. Cole does not comment Deleuze and Guattari, he uses them, as he uses Laruelle and Berardi, Agamben and Zizek, Marazzi and Lazzarato, but also William Burroughs and Philip Jos Farmer, and many other writers and thinkers in the mobilisation of his own immanent education for the task of understanding the KM-effect in all its multi-layered amplitude. This is a very rewarding read, and can only make us more thoughtful about the motivations that guide our lives.
239807
A modern gem, Sethu's Lucid Romantic Ballad lays the foundation for the artist's journey towards what the author calls "lucid romance."  The Ballad is part lyric essay, part film study, that part of your dissertation you found yourself inordinately proud of, part journal entry, and a heaping dose of those essential moments of clarity found only in really good literature.  This book does not espouse the muddled romanticism of your 10th grade Shakespeare lesson, but instead provides an innovative glimpse into the pitfalls facing those of artistic (or abstracted) temperaments which, like Hesse's Steppenwolf, seem perpetually besieged by the brutish whims of contemporary existence.  The work does not simply ruminate on the dangers assailing the soul, however, instead unfolding into a deeply personal journey from the mires of abstract frustration to many a lucid, irreverent, and undeniably beatific psychological vista.

Above all else, The Ballad endeavors to serve as an earnest, artistic coming of age by which readers might discover and delight in shared experience.  The book, along with the many songs, films, and texts that it jovially calls to mind, acts as a lighthouse, beckoning ships to safe havens of laughter, mutual chagrin, and to profound personal insight.  If the late David Wallace believed fiction was a means to combat loneliness, The Ballad seeks to combine such assuagement with the generously proffered romantic dallies of its author as a means to systematically demonstrate the lucid individual's dominance over the flawed society of its birth.
1083788
While I have yet to finish my recently purchased copy I can say that to some extent, much of this is the same ol' Zizek mentioning Hegel at the top of the page and moving on to "The Break Up" with Jennifer Aniston and whats-his-face at the bottom (hooray pop and highbrow culture mixing, how superficially 'postmodern', etc.). But of course that is part of the tongue that is in the cheek while reading Zizek that is pleasurable, only here his overall argument remains compelling and insistent (as opposed to somewhat vague and sporadic in "The Parallax View") as he attempts to summon a spirit virile enough to advocate universal emancipation once again (i.e. "Think Globally, Act Globally).

While the book could take its time to weave its way through the halls of academia and other popular channels, I feel confident this tome caps a comforting wave of other newly-translated texts and memes entering Anglo-American discourse (namely, that of revolutionary terror and the actual pursuit of leftist power) from the likes of Verso, the ripples thereof to be seen in coming decades in a (one hopes) tidal wave of social action.
1971379
Full disclosure: I wrote the book.  Am posting this review simply to document its success in an upper-division college literature class, which success was... well, a four out of five.  The opening and longest essays on proverbs in Ancient Greece and Rome assumes (pace Ruth Finnegan) that oral-traditional cultures do indeed have a distinctive value system.  Using the proverbs as a window into the Homeric world is a better (i.e., more vibrant and interesting) preparation for the ILIAD than merely lecturing from the scholarship of Parry and Lord, Ong, Luria, et al.  The Roman proverbs, drawn largely from Plautus and Terence, tend to support the conclusion that the oral remnants of society grow more cynical and survivalist as the tribe breaks aparta distinction that few scholars have ever considered, but that once again feeds well into a literary survey covering several centuries.
The second essay, on Irish proverbs, wasn't read in our class, but it somewhat picks up on the notion that residual oral culture lingering into a more stratified society acquires a somewhat beleaguered feel.  Yet to designate such atavistic cultural pockets as Marxist in outlook requires ignoring their very clannish and superstitious (often almost anti-materialist) values.  The third piece continues in Ireland and offers a translated traditional tale set down with embellishment by An Seabhac a hundred years ago.  It graphically illustrates how a highly literate intelligence trying to recreate the oral ambiance may in fact overdo the effort when introducing certain stylistic exaggerations.  Again, scholars have paid virtually no attention to this phenomenon, which is very observable in many Irish texts of the sixteenth century.
I found that the best students took well to the use of proverbs to usher in the experience of Homers world.  The weaker undergraduates, however (who were a majority), struggled to grasp just what was being undertaken.  These are the ones who insist upon seeing in Euripides Medea nothing but an abused wife with post-partum depression, or something of the sort... completely and glibly ignoring the mythic backdrop.  I really don't know what to do with themhad thought this book might help, but cannot confirm that it did.  And since scholars are now egging on precisely such egocentric readings, I wonder if anything can resist the downward trend.
523846
This language-learning memoir follows a familiar pattern. Chapters arranged around a linguistic expression are used to take the reader into the mentality of the native attitudes towards expression and mores, while the diligent foreigner slowly figures out meaning from babble and begins to be able to communicate with real people as classroom lessons and tapes give way to actual encounters on the street and in the market.

I have read Katharine Russell Rich's similarly titled "Dreaming in Hindi" (see my review--this book appeared around the same time) and two accounts by Welsh-language learners built on the same motif. It's a sensible one, if not exactly novel. What Fallows provides is less personal and slightly more distant, as she plays up her own language learning with less drama or introspection, focusing more as a reporter from China back to us, learning to speak and read Mandarin.

Fallows writes simply, in efficient prose recalling more a business executive than a florid essayist. She accompanies her husband, journalist James Fallows, and her reports from China echo those he might have written for "The Atlantic" magazine. However, with a doctorate in linguistics, one might assume Ms. Fallows brings to this small work a greater familiarity with language structures and comparative analogies.

Therefore, I was somewhat surprised that she did not do this much. Her accounts focus more on people and how their expressions reveal cultural distinctions. The doubling of a word common in Asian languages, the blunt manner of address, and the imperative tones, she reasons, work better to convey immediacy as intimacy and the lack of a formal distance between speakers than they do rudeness, as a Westerner might assume.

A chapter on how Chinese employs compound structures to combine a root with a nuance begins unexpectedly, with "danger" all around her in Shanghai leading to a consideration of how its derivation from "small heart" convinces Fallows of its relevance. Another chapter begins with "message" and unfolds into an exploration of the writing of characters, given that Chinese has 400 syllables vs. ten times that in English. A final chapter, the most poignant, shares her viewing of small and great acts of kindness after the great quake in 2008.

While I never learned how many characters (as opposed to syllables) exactly are in Chinese, I did come away from this little volume with a greater appreciation of how the language and the culture work together, and why (perhaps) the people resist a further simplification of their ideograms after Mao's imposition. Tonal nuance and subtlety of communication as people write in the air or their palms the characters necessary to clarify meaning in conversation provides a telling example of how the written and the spoken combine as if half-invisibly in ways foreign to those of us growing up with English as the "other" dominant language.
2694614
The Third Chapter looks at the stage of life from ages 50 - 75. The author approaches this stage of life from her perspective as an educational sociologist.  The book's premise is that life's third chapter is one of substantial growth and change.  This change is based on learning.  The author defines learning in this stage of life as not traditional learning, but as a mid-life process of "changing, adapting, exploring, mastery and channeling energies, skills and passions into new domains."

Through my recent work and study in this area, I have come to appreciate the importance the third chapter plays in our lives.  While I recognized its importance, I missed its significance.  According to the author, "The third chapter represents a significant and new developmental period in our culture, one that comes along only once a century."

The basis of the book is forty interviews conducted over a two year period.  These interviews were conducted with both men and women between the ages of 50 and 75 who had made significant life changes during this period.  Many of the interviewee's stories are told in great detail.  Weaved into the book are a number of theoretical frameworks, dominated by the theoretical frameworks developed by developmental psychologist Erik Erickson and cultural anthropologist Mary Catherine Bateson.

While the individual stories bring value and insight to the book, at times I felt they were a distraction.  Personally, I would have preferred seeing less depth in the stories presented and more of the author's interpretation of each story.  Despite this drawback, I felt the book was definitely worth reading.  Approaching this topic from an educational and sociological perspective was a new learning for me.

If, like me, you are a student of the third chapter of life, I would recommend you read this book as part of your learning process.
2244781
Very educational for me but heartbreaking at the same time.
4322943
The Stargazer's Sister is educational, in terms of 17th century life and enlightenment astronomy, but that education is couched within a beautiful and tender story about human connections.

At the end of Caroline's life, like at the end of most lives, it was the relationships that mattered the most.

Brown's writing is beautiful and this book made me want to hug people tightly.
3508115
There has been a slow but sure increase in interest in the Medieval period over the last 20 years or so. There are various reasons for it. One of them is the dismantling of the Eurocentric vision of history, which considered the Middle Ages to be an age of stagnancy (hence the name); we feel comfortable revising our views now. Another reason is the anthropological view of history put forward in the last 50 years largely by French structuralist historians, which encourages viewing a period in history on its own merits; naturally, they applied their analyses to the history of their own country first, and particularly to the Medieval period.
Another reason is the increase of interest in alternative spiritual traditions since the 1960's, which aside from promoting interest in areas like Buddhism and Sufism has also encouraged interest in Medieval Christian topics like Celtic Christianity and writers like Meister Eckhart, Walter Hilton and the author of "The Cloud of Unknowing". In the same vein, the Feminist movement has brought mystics like Hildegard of Bingen and Julian of Norwich into prominence, as well as interest in neo-pagan movements, which often have to turn to Medieval sources.
It is not at all surprising that an increase in interest in the history of the Languedoc also occurred. The troubadors and the related tradition of "Amour Courtois", arguably the first system of thought in Western history that accorded something resembling equality to women, was bound to attract interest. The murky and interesting stories of the Templars and the Cathars attract interest in various circles, and the genocide of the Albigensian Crusade is also a lesson in history worth retelling.
It is small wonder that the subject of the language of the troubadors would attract attention sooner or later, which leads us to this book. In fact, this is an excellent treatment of the subject, if accepted in the milieu in which it was originally written.
The fact is, this is a scholarly work, written primarily for advanced students in Medieval studies or Romance linguistics. Although he gives a half-hearted disclaimer in the introduction, it is pretty clear that Professor Paden expects anyone who picks up his book to be familiar with Latin grammar and probably a couple of modern Romance languages as well, and would no doubt be mildly surprised to find that anybody else was interested. As a result, there are various features that would be troublesome to some beginners; there are no vocabulary lists for the lessons, just the glossary at the back of the book.  Notes are only given to the readings when it is assumed you would get stuck; in general, it is assumed that the student will be able to recognize a lot of items and press on. The explanations of the verb forms are for the edification of the student of Romance Linguistics, and belabor a lot of points that more casual readers can actually ignore without any real loss.  To concentrate on them too much would make the subject look much harder than it really is.  The really sad part about this is that Old Occitan is really not a very difficult language - much easier than Old Irish, Old Norse, Old Church Slavonic and even Old English.
This book starts you off reading original texts from the very first lesson, which I found to be exciting, and so far anyway (I haven't finished the book but I'm about halfway through) I find the explanations quite adequate. If you have some familiarity with French or Spanish (or preferably both) you will not find this book too terribly difficult. If by some quirk you are familiar with Catalan you're halfway home already, since Occitan resembles Catalan to a remarkable degree.
I debated over whether the book deserved three stars or four; in the end I opted for four stars because Professor Paden can't be blamed if his book appeals to a larger audience than he thought it would. So be advised. If you don't have the background for the book it can be a chore, but from the scholarly point of view it is an admirable piece of work.
4191262
This is definitely not a chronicle of dead white guys. And for that reason, many folks who don't particularly like history will like this book.  The author himself does not call his work a history but an "essay of interpretation."  And what Professor Ferguson is trying to interpret are the social changes in Europe that slowly gelled into a revolution in art, philosophy, religion and economics that are collectively known as the Renaissance.  His format is one common to the middle of the last century, a format that eschews the recitation of names, dates and battles.  This is a "social history" and perhaps the best one of those I have yet encountered.

Professor Ferguson held the J.B. Smallman Chair in History at the University of Western Ontario.  He died in 1983 but his work is sufficiently enduring to warrant what I think is a republication of his original work from 1960.  From a brief survey of his publications, this appears to be a synthesis of a number of his earlier essays.  Such a book can only result from years of scholarship; it is honed and polished, confident, sophisticated and a great text for an advanced undergraduate course.  But as it is a popular work and not a scholastic one, I frequently asked the question "and just how does he know this."

Professor Ferguson begins with a brief historiography of the Renaissance and describes the evolution of thought about that age since the Enlightenment.  He then traces the origins of the age beginning at the collapse of the Carolingian Empire.  The organization is roughly chronological but it can be a bit hard to follow because the discussion is in terms of centuries and not exact dates.  And there is very little discussion of individuals, rather Professor Ferguson talks in terms of classes, burghers, gilds, the nobility or the clergy and their changing interactions as feudalism gives way to a new social order of increasing prosperity.  Art does not play as important part of this history as it does in others; Professor Ferguson considers it as a natural manifestation of the changing economic conditions and gradual secularization of society.  The chronology follows the geographical progression of the social change first through the Italian city states, to France, Germany, the Netherlands and finally to England.

I was surprised at the extent to which this is really an economic history and with the books sympathy to the development of Capitalism.  Considering that this whole genre of history is an outgrowth of socialist philosophy the dearth of socialist interpretation was a welcomed surprise.  That said this is really not my kind of history.  I am a Jeopardy fan; I want the dates, the names of the dead white guys, the battles they fought and why.  I do not believe you can discount or neglect the role of the individual in history.  Every era has its "Mule," mangler of the zeitgeist.  The Renaissance had many, but for the most part they dissolve into the masses practically unmentioned in this otherwise excellent book.
82453
Make no mistake; this is a textbook, not a novel. As such  it teaches, with insight and a comprehensive exploration of the subject. It is a somewhat slow read, not because of poor writing or archaic language, but because the text is dense with ideas and concepts.

From a very much appreciated explanation of the birth of sociology, especially pertinent to the understanding of the subject matter of this novice reader, to the presentation and dissection of varying contemporary theories of social movements, Piotr Sztompka has composed a compulsory reference book. In his discussion of social movements as forces of change and the subsequent chapter on revolutions, my mind kept wandering to Malcolm Gladwells The Tipping Point, which was released just seven years after the publication of Sztompkas book. While Gladwell was dissecting trends, not revolutions, and for consumption of the lay public, it would be an interesting exercise to overlay the discussions concerning the behaviors of individuals and their influence on groups.

As Sztompka begins his last chapter, Revolutions: the peak of social change, he lists great revolutions of modern history: English (1640), American (1776) and French (1789), Russian (1917), Chinese (1949) and acknowledges the naming by some historians of a rebellious century spanning 1830 1930. Countering that he does credit that among present day sociologists the consensus that we are, in fact currently living in the century of revolution. Should Sztompka update The Sociology of Social Change, I think he would find much evidence of the enormous global impact from the revolution that is us.
3601895
I am a 68-year-old blue-eyed woman who does not just think I am white, I know I am lily-white. I have retired from a long career as a teacher and then as a magazine editor. I have just finished reading Between the World and Me. Well, I say I read this book, but I very carefully skimmed it, and I feel a bit guilty about that even though skimming was a well-considered decision. I skimmed because so much of the book--the portions about the whole experience of mankind--is a polemic, and I resist all polemics, even those by the likes of Michael Moore with whom I totally agree. Not that I don't agree with the history Coates presents, but I already know it. It is tolerable only because this book was written to be educational to Coates' young son who does not know the awful truth. And I realize the young man's very life depends on him knowing it.

But, thankfully, much of this book is not polemic. I was powerfully moved by Coates' own personal story. I happily embraced his accounts of his relationships with his son, wife, parents--especially his father--and all his many relatives and friends, including Malcolm X. How wonderful that magical places like Howard University survive and help young people realize their full potential.

As a former editor, I would like to offer some advice. I have known many editors who never explain their notes to writers and will even say that writers are too self-absorbed to engage in that kind of communication. How ridiculous. But I am also a teacher and I respect writers deeply--after all, I am one.

Therefore I offer a suggestion to Mr Coates: You have a lovely, if flawed, book. Now maybe you could extract from it an article containing only the personal aspects of your story. It may be painful to leave all your polished musings on the whole history of race relations on the writing room floor, but if you were to do so, you would have an absorbing article for sophisticated adults--for the New Yorker perhaps?-- rather than an educational work for teenagers.
1950664
Don't be misled by the word "Romance" in the title of this book -- "Possession" is no bodice-ripper.
An acquaintance of mine, seeing the word on the cover, asked me if the book was about a man with  strong arms carrying someone up a flight of stairs. I told him the book was  "nothing like".
Before mass-market paperbacks appeared ad  nauseum in supermarket carosels, there was an entire literary tradition  known as the "Romantic." Into this literary tradition, A.S. Byatt  has created and inserted two fictitious poets, Randolph Henry Ash and  Christabel LaMotte.
Two present day scholars, Roland Mitchell and Maud  Bailey, uncover documents suggesting that the two poets knew each other.  Eventually drawn together by their individual research, Roland and Maud  trace the movements, uncover the correspondence and piece together the  relationship of Ash and LaMotte. During this time, their own love story  unfolds, offering an intriguing parallel to the love that now exists only  in relics from the past.
A word, if I may, about one of the supporting  characters, Val. Roland is not at first free to pursue a relationship with  Maud, because he is already romantically entangled with Val. For the sake  of the plot, it is obvious that he must, of course, become unentangled.
I have never understood the justification behind making the hero's  original romantic interest abominably loathsome for no other reason than to  manipulate readers/viewers into rejoicing when she is sent packing like the  literal and symbolic baggage she is. This always seemed to me, a very weak  form of plot.
I hope I do not give too much away when I say that I was  very pleased to see that Val is NOT treated in this cavilier way. Instead,  she is given a happiness that she is surprised to find but in fact richly  deserves. Everyone deserves to be happy, and the chance to make someone  else happy, right?
Byatt's book is not just the story of two love  affairs, but the story of a love affair with reading itself. If you have  any doubts, just peruse the following passage, taken from pages 510-512 of  the trade paperback edition:
"It is possible for a writer to make,  or remake at least, for a reader, the primary pleasures of eating, or  drinking, or looking on, or sex. Novels have their obligatory  tour-de-force, the green-flecked gold omllette aux fines herbes, melting  into buttery formlessness and tasting of summer, or the creamy human  haunch, firm and warm, curved back to reveal a hot hollow, a crisping hair  or two, the glimpsed sex. They do not habitually elaborate on the equally  intense pleasure of reading ... Now and then there are readings that make  the hairs on the neck, the non-existant pelt, stand on end and tremble,  when every word burns and shines hard and clear and infinite and exact,  like stones of fire, like points of stars in the dark -- readings when the  knowledge that we shall know the writing differently or better or  satisfactorily, runs ahead of any capacity to say what we know, or how. In  these readings, a sense that the text has appeared to be wholly new, never  before seen, is followed, almost immediately, by the sense that it was  always there, that we the readers, knew it was always there, and have  always known it as it was, though we have now for the first time  recognized, become fully cognizant of, our knowledge."
At once  mystery and romance in both the common and literary senses, Byatt's  multi-faceted epic is full of breathtaking prose like the passage above.  The revelation at the end of the book is not unpredictable, but nonetheless  gives a nice feeling of closure to the relationship of Ash and LaMotte and  is a vivid reminder of how similar these long-dead poets are to the living,  breathing Roland and Maud.
For an engaging read that can be enjoyed on a  variety of levels, I strongly recommend "Possession" by A.S.  Byatt.