Idiosyncratic, iconoclastic text is alternately brilliant and frustrating
599425
I am of two minds about Dr. Allan Atlas' iconoclastic text, "Renaissance Music: Music in Western Europe, 1400-1600."  On the one hand, I enjoyed Atlas' personal and eminently readable prose.  He infuses the tome with witty observations, thought-provoking opinions, and offbeat vocabulary.  How many textbooks have you read that use adjectives like "country-bumpkinish" or "huggable"?

On the other hand, I believe that Atlas has boxed himself into a corner with his adamant effort to avoid the "great composers" approach. As a result, his organization becomes idiosyncratic and occasionally haphazard.  Atlas invariably begins focusing on a particular composer while discussing a genre, and then finds himself forced to summarize the composer's life (sometimes as an afterthought). He interrupts the text proper with historical interludes (Intermedios) and chapters on translation, but their presence can be distracting rather than illuminating. Just as he seems ready to make a relevant point or observation, he switches subjects or just stops altogether (the analysis of Dufay's belongings at the time of his death is one example).

This textbook almost requires the purchase of the companion anthology, "Anthology of Renaissance Music (Norton Introduction to Music History)."  Atlas frequently cites works presented in the anthology; without it, the reader may become lost.  When Atlas does present a score in the text rather than the anthology, he usually presents only excerpts (as he does with Josquin's "Nymphes des bois" or Willaert's "Aspro core e selvaggio e cruda voglia").  This can make it difficult to follow the score while listening to the music, unless the reader has impeccable timing.

Finally, Atlas' presentation of instrumental music suffers in comparison to his comprehensive discussion of vocal works.  He almost completely ignores lute music, admitting he discusses it "only in passing" at one point - even though other scholars estimate that lute music accounted for a majority of 16th century instrumental scores.

Despite these considerable complaints, "Renaissance Music: Music in Western Europe" is a worthwhile and much-needed addition to the Renaissance music literature.  An astute professor (like the one I had for a recent course in "Music of the Renaissance") should be able to cherry-pick Atlas' text for the highlights and take advantage of this sporadically brilliant volume.
679946
Virginia Woolf's modernist classic "Mrs. Dalloway" has attracted a substantial body of commentary since its publication in 1925.  The present volume entitled "The Mrs. Dalloway Reader" contains the full text of the novel itself, and a number of Woolf's short stories including "Mrs Dalloway's Party" which amounts to Woolf's first attempt at Chapter one of the novel it subsequently inspired. The selection of articles which completes the volume is something of a literary mixed bag.  While some of the material is from the journals of Woolf herself, and therefore of particular interest and critical merit, other articles and fragments are less directly related to the text.
So, why buy a "reader" in the first place, instead of just the stand-alone novel?  Presumably to have the experience of a landmark work of fiction in its own right, as well as to explore the illuminating thoughts of a variety of minds suitably equipped for the task of intelligent criticism.  A laudable aspiration of course, but in the present instance, one that is hardly likely to be met.
Not even one of Woolf's high-flying literary contemporaries manages to do her novel justice.  E. M. Forster's essay on the early novels of Virginia Woolf may be an attempt to contextualise "Mrs Dalloway" within a proto-Woolfian cadre, but it actually manages to spend much more time on the other novels it discusses than on the actual subject of this volume.  The wandering discussion offered by Daniel Mendelsohn in "Not Afraid of Virginia Woolf" suffers from a sustained lack of focus, struggling as it does to explore the relationships between "The Hours", "Mrs. Dalloway", and "A Room of One's Own".  That it is interspersed with sundry unilluminating literary and cinematic references further disperses its faltering focus.
But there's more!  Michael Cunningham's "First Love" amounts to nothing more than a vacuous and self-indulgent trifle, while Sigrid Nunez, in her ominously titled "On Rereading Mrs. Dalloway" underlines for us the dangers of hyper-critical reflection and over-intellectualisation in the re-reading process.  One truly hopes that she will now fulfil her promise of leaving Woolf's fiction alone and concentrating on her non-fiction.  This may possibly mean that "Mrs Dalloway" could remain safe from at least one self-important literary iconoclast.
Clearly, the ironically named Francine Prose who edited this misguided volume was hard up for publishable material.  Why else would we have to endure Elaine Showalter's tedious "Invigorating Life" which manages - wait for it - not to make a single mention of "Mrs Dalloway", but instead to concern itself entirely with Woolf's "A Room of One's Own"?  Shouldn't that one have made it into the "A Room of One's Own Reader", or did that already contain too many misplaced articles on "Mrs Dalloway"?
In the midst of this mindless morass, there are few gems to justify the publication of a "reader" such as this.  Certainly, Deborah Eisenberg's "On Mrs. Dalloway" is a largely mature and intelligent discussion, though rather too brief to do itself full justice; and Elissa Schappell manages in "That Sort of Woman" to personalise her ideas on the text, though hers is ultimately a self-centred narrative which, for anyone truly interested in Woolf's "Mrs Dalloway", must fail to satisfy.
I am a little surprised that Harcourt would run the risk of damaging their academic credibility with a volume as unsatisfying as this.  A Mrs. Dalloway reader it really aint!  Perhaps it might have been less of an exercise in false advertising, if the publishers had taken a leaf out of the Pythons' book and called it "The Not Exactly a Mrs Dalloway Reader but Something Remotely Approaching It", for what we have here is surely a sheep in Woolf's clothing.
3561050
History books like this one are difficult to rate because, on the one hand they may serve a vital role in the public domain, while on the other hand they suffer from certain technical problems.

Civil War on the Western Border, 1854-1865, was first published in 1955. I picked up my copy at the John Brown State Park in Osawatomie, Kansas and began reading it on the flight home from Kansas City to Arizona later that afternoon. Despite my deep and abiding interest in the subject matter, it took me just over two years to make it all the way through this book. Although the drama of the stories that Monaghan has to tell here is vast and thoroughly compelling, the density of the text can make it a rough read. A big part of the problem is the enormous cast of characters Monaghan must deal with. All too often individuals come and go in this long text and it's almost impossible for the novice to be able to remember exactly whom is being referred to. Frequently characterization is sacrificed to plot and we never have a very clear or reliable understanding of who these historical figures were as living and breathing human beings. One case in point is the very frustrating one of James Henry Lane. Although it's fairly clear that Monaghan is no fan of Lane, I got to the very end of the book without ever having formed a solid opinion of what Lane's character was like, or what really motivated the man.

Another serious problem with this book is its uneven use of anchoring dates. Monaghan's story necessarily moves back and forth in space and also in time, and often it becomes difficult to know when certain events are occurring in temporal relationship to other storylines. By the time a date is finally mentioned after six or seven pages, it's too late to go back in one's mind and reconstruct a mental timeline. Even more frustrating than that is Monaghan's forfeiture of standard footnotes, instead only appending an admittedly rather colossal section of references at the end which only refer to page numbers in the text. One is never certain of exactly which point being made within a certain page of the text refers to any given source. Consequently, a mirror funhouse bedevils anyone interested in tracking down primary or underlying sources. This is all the maddening because the notes section is so huge: Monaghan obviously did an enormous amount of research to create this book; unfortunately, his system of notated sources effectively blocks the reader from verifying, or expanding upon, any of that research.

Nevertheless, given the immensity of Monaghan's tale, I've yet to find a book that covers this material any better. Monaghan does serve as an important repository for all these stories in the popular domain. Anyone interested in the events transpiring in eastern Kansas and all of Missouri and northern Arkansas in the period in question should give this book a try.
4143884
With its labyrinthine backdrop and its claustrophobic atmosphere, "The Castle" is, above all, a novel about frustration: irritation at ignorance, exasperation with complacency, and above all, annoyance with bureaucracy.

And it can be frustrating for readers, too. The book was unfinished; it ends mid-sentence; and the new Harman translation (which is the one I read) attempts to restore the book to its raw, unpunctuated state. Because its themes center on the mindlessness of officialdom and the repetitiveness of red tape, Kafka's portrayal can seem mindless and repetitive. (Nowhere is this more apparent than in the scene where K. visits with Burgel, whose interminable monologue lulls K. to sleep. It worked like a charm on me, too, and I had to reread the chapter.)

Yet the book contains passages both memorable and quotable, characters that are recognizable, and mysteries (however unsolved) that can be fascinating. As a result, it's a book best read in small doses to appreciate both the author's dry (and even slapstick) humor and, even more, the work's satirical bite.

The plot, such as it is, can be summarized in a brief description. Called to work as a land surveyor for village, K. arrives only to discover that the request was a mistake, that none of the officials in the Castle will take responsibility for their mistake or meet with him to discuss it, and that the townsfolk neither know nor care what it is that the officials and their secretaries do. In short, nobody gets into the Castle. Instead, K. is given a job as a janitor in a school, falls in love with a barmaid, and attempts to meet with Klamm, the official who has allegedly been assigned to his "case."

The Castle's functionless bureaucrats cannot be said to impede K.'s quest; they are hardly seen during the course of his stay. K.'s frustration is amplified not by their active interference but rather by their negligence and obfuscation. The result is far worse, since K. can't even identify with whom he should be struggling or how he should proceed. The officials and their secretaries are so busy with their own paperwork and routines that they really don't have time to attend to anything else, least of all concern themselves with problems that have nothing to do with the nothing they themselves do.

"True, they say that all of us belong to the Castle," admits a young village woman named Olga, who sympathizes with K.'s pursuit and who describes how the Castle's insouciance destroyed her own family. "But where in all this do you see the influence of the Castle?" K. responds. "It doesn't seem to have intervened yet. What you have told me up to now is nothing more than the mindless timidity of the people." Not fully comprehending his own revelation, K. identifies that the problem lies not in the Castle; instead it lies without.
742250
The text reads like a dry, doctoral dissertation that makes me thankful I didn't become a college professor. Passages like the following are prevalent throughout the book : "Moving from science to theology to philosophy and the intellectual history of the period, we can see how his photographic productions were explicitly motivated by the categorical imperative of religious faith." After translating this into "His images were based largely on his strong religious beliefs," you can, after some difficulty, get through the extremely burdensome text. The text also goes on multipe tangents trying to explain Victorian England, and the milieu that Frith lived in, but I found it overly burdensome and digressing. I found myself constantly trying to skip ahead of lengthy passages about Darwin's The Origin of Species and other digressing digressions.
The best aspect of the book is the images themselves. They are superbly produced with about as much detail from Frith's gigantic glass plates as I could expect a book to have. Frith was a rich man by the time he took his trips to the Middle East, and, whatever his motivations were, these images are historically important as well as having that Middle Eastern mystery I find fascinating. I wished that Nickel would have placed BOTH pairs of Frith's stereo slides into the book, rather than just one side and I also wish he had more images.
334049
According to Marvin Mudrick, the bulk of the criticism of Jane Austen's work is "a mere mass of cozy family adulation, self-glorification, and nostalgic latter-day enshrinements of the gentle-hearted chronicler of Regency order." As Lionel Trilling mentions, "the admiration [of Jane Austen] seems to stimulate self-congratulation in those who give it, and to carry a reproof of the deficient sensitivity, reasonableness, and even courtesy of those who withhold their praise...But not to like Jane Austen is to put oneself under suspicion of a general personal inadequacy and even - let us face it - of a want of breeding."

Although there are a few moments of brutal honesty, such as Eva Brann's comment that, "No symbols, metaphors, mere patterns, or levels of abstraction are to be found in them...But nothing is ever there for mere form's sake or to suggest or stand for something else - which is why the novels so repel literary criticism." The remainder of the essays can largely be summarized by a single sentence from this very book. E. M. Forster states, "I am a Jane Austenite, and therefore slightly imbecile about Jane Austen."

The worship of Miss Jane set aside, along with the preposterous claims by the various essayists herein, there are a number of nauseating problems in this book. For example, the title itself is completely misleading. While there are supposedly 33 great authors in this book (or 34, if you believe the Cataloging information), really there are 9 great authors here (Eudora Welty, E.M. Forster, W. Somerset Maugham, Martin Amis, Kingsley Amis, A.S. Byatt, C.S. Lewis, Virginia Woolf, and Jay McInerney), a few Jane Austen scholars (Lionel Trilling (twice!) and Brian Southam), an atrocious editor (Susannah Carson), and twenty essayists whom I have never heard of. Perhaps the most awful of these is the essay by Amy Heckerling. This essay doesn't even have anything to do with READING Jane Austen at all. Rather, it is a four-and-a-half page story about how difficult it is to convert a Jane Austen book into a movie. Swell.

As far as the editing goes, it deserves its own special paragraph. The editor, conscious of the other entries to this book, does not see fit to...I don't know...EDIT them. Instead, she preserves them INTACT, so that we can read the same story about Jane Austen's family three times, the list of her six books nineteen times, the story about her working on two inches of ivory so that much labor produces little effort seven times, three descriptions of how her failure to address the events and occurrences of her times are really not failures, etc. This is not to mention the fact that the editor, who apparently counts herself in this number of "great authors", reiterates much of this same information, AGAIN. A clear example of the awful editing that pervades this entire collection.

If you can tolerate the bad editing, the repetitiveness, and the generally adulatory and unflinchingly praising essays which, astonishingly go so far as to numerate the "perfections of Jane Austen, then you may find a gem here or there. Not many, and certainly not worth sorting through this for many. In all honesty, only the essay be Brian Southam seemed like a proper piece of literary analysis, here, and you can probably read that in ten minutes in the local library. Save yourself some time, and go buy something better.

Harkius
3535216
The book could have easily been titled, "Why I hate contemporary praise and worship."

There are just enough points he gets right, that you end up nodding your head in agreement. But then he starts making statements that are much less... well, truthful! Anoil is under the impression that there are certain things that are universally beautiful (i.e., sunsets, mountains, etc), and therefore music that honors God must ALSO be universally beautiful. This is great in theory, but it's just not so.

See, sunsets are not perfect. They are unique and astonishing BECAUSE of imperfection. Changes and variations in clouds and other atmospheric components are what help to form them into huge abstract paintings. And there's the issue of the abstract. It's so imperfect! Mountains are almost universally beautiful, but in reality, they are enormous scars on the perfect earth God created. Is that real beauty? People who are obsessed with order might find sunsets and mountains alarming in their persistent disorganization.

And music is also very much NOT universally heard. Chinese classical music is deemed the epitome of beauty to it's own culture. The structure of western hymns and classical music is often irritating to many non-western ears. Beethoven and Stravinsky were both endowed with scalding reviews of their music, yet both are given as examples in this book of appropriate music.

And then there's that. We are being told that music must be this and that, but then the author provides a highly questionable list of what he considers to be "appropriate" classical pieces. In this collection there is Pagan mythology, witchcraft, and debauchery. I got my second undergraduate degree in classical vocal performance. I'm well aware of the LACK of holiness in much of this music.

He also speaks again repetition, but lists Messiah as a desirable piece of music. While I agree that it's a stunning piece of music and a good example of a form of worship music, the Hallelujah Chorus is nothing BUT repetition. And what about John's vision of the song that we will be singing for eternity? Repetition is actually linguistically implied in scriptural references to meditation on the Word of God. Repetition is HOW we meditate. Looking at something many different ways. And sometimes Hymns keep us from doing just that.

I love hymns. I also love contemporary worship music. I agree that it should not be flaky and trite. But all kinds can be. I could continue to argue with the author, but doubt anyone will read it anyhow. But it basically comes down to this: he has good points, but he's stacking the evidence to prove his pet position, rather than following the evidence to the truth. Not once did he provide an actual example of a popular worship song that fit the description he gives of popular music. Look at the CCM catalog of most popular songs. These are gorgeous songs that are largely taken directly from scripture. On the other hand, the author would have us trying to teach truths with songs written in a language not used today. This is what Luther fought against. Jesus used the language required in order to reach the people. We should do the same.

I grew up in the Bob Jones kind of legalism. It creates hatred and contention against denominational lines. It's dishonest and unhealthy and is what is driving young people OUT of the church.
3717577
It's really painful for me to read the fawning praise by other Amazon reviewers lionizing this book for its originality.  The entire work could serve as a clich&eacute; for artistic pretentiousness at its worst, an exercise in trivial and transparently post-modern intellectual narcissism.  Often when you hear an artist's work described as `experimental', it's code for `original but not very good.'  This book effectively epitomizes the notion of experimentalism gone awry.  Since there is basically no story, we are left with the writing - unremarkable at best - and the ideas, which basically catalogue frivolous lines of thought in which the narrator marvels at the breaking of his shoelaces two days apart, the evolution from milk delivery to cartons, the pleasures of refilling a stapler, and other nonsense.  In effect, the author thought it would be clever to hit the reader over the head for 150 pages with life's absurdity.  How could this be entertaining?  I wondered too and made the mistake of finding out.

I read another reviewer, doubtless agitated by some reference to the book's vapidity, declare that people focus too much on the big questions, when it is really the minutiae that make the difference in our quality of life.  I disagree.  The reason people differentiate between minutiae and the important is precisely because one is far more relevant to our existence than the other.  Maybe there is some nihilistic wisdom in cultivating a jubilant reaction to menial tasks and minor feats of engineering, giving exaggerated meaning and joy to people whose lives are otherwise ordinary and mediocre in every facet, but it's boring as hell to read about.
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.
3880858
For those who are hostile to religion, this is not a useful review.  My general appraisal of the book is that it is a superb work from a master of Christian apologetics.  This aside, I warn fans of Chesterton that this edition was put together in the most slovenly manner.  Words like "modern" are mistakenly transcribed as "modem."  Random punctuation errors roam freely across the pages, and it becomes clear that someone did not reread before publishing.  This edition needs work and review.
4584635
The wooden, characteristic, language of the "left" is dominant here and it makes this book rather unfriendly to the average reader. Then again, the average reader will not read this book so i guess it's all good in the end.
  However, for those that want to (re)discover situationism as a movemement there are better books out there.
  This is a collection of essays from various figures explaining or criticising -or both- the birth and decline of situationism in the 60s. Many of the contributors assume that the reader already has some knowledge or familiarity with  the topic or is even well acquainted with it so they take it from there making certain parts of the book hard to comprehend.
  But if your patience prevails you will be awarded:
-You will be informed about the main ideas and concepts behind the "S.I's" (Situationists International). Mainly a movement which aimed to be a creative attack against the society of the spectacle and which succeeded for a certain period while finding its own demise mainly due to its eliticism.
-A couple of specific essays, namely, those that deal with music and the arts stand out as extraordinary and very important critiques on music and the arts in general. The part in particular about punk and the Sex Pistols happens to be the sharpest and possibly most original (and dead-on the spot)criticism  i've read anywhere and i have read literally 1000s of articles and tens of books on music because of my profession.
- Other gems (for the uninitiated) include "psychogeography" which involves remapping a city according to the effect a city's buildings, streets, or quarters have on someone.
  All in all not always an easy reading (ok, i'm understating here) but a highly interesting one nevertheless.
  But if you want to know situationism then do not start from here. As i said above there are much more comprehensive sources and books on the subject.
1497551
I would have given this book five stars were it not for the writing style, which I find frequently annoying and often downright ridiculous.  For one thing, it's written both in first person and in present tense.  Are we to assume that Paul Mandriani is walking around with a dictaphone glued to his face, dictating everything that happens as it happens?

Martini also has the irksome habit of insulting the reader's intelligence by explaining things that are obvious.  For instance, he'll have a character say something, then follow it with an explanation of what the character is talking about and/or what he meant, even though that's already clear from the context.

Then there's the often weird or awkward phrasing, such as "He gives me an expression, the loose translation of which confirms my description of the options available."  A person can "wear" an expression, but he can't "give" it to someone else.

Finally, the descriptions-- especially the metaphors and similes-- are often awkward, weird, off-point, or just plain absurd.  In once scene, when Paul and Lenore are alone, he says something like this (can't be bothered to find the exact quote:  "Her perfume wafts over me like the mustard gas over the doughboys in World War I."  Huh?  Here's a guy enjoying the scent of the perform of a beautiful woman to whom he's strongly attracted, and he compares it to poison gas and men choking and dying?

Martini tries to hard to be "inventive" and "creative," and too often not only misses the mark, but falls flat on his face.
3646802
I share the frustration of Mr. Crawford, another reviewer, in several respects.  On the one hand, the story to be told is important, fascinating, even summoning: how people developed from roving hunter-gatherers to city-dwellers.  On the other hand, the text seems needlessly difficult to follow.  I have read plenty of texts that were difficult because the subject was difficult; but this book is simply poorly written (or translated).  It's beyond "poor"; it's sadistic.  What fiend would visit such prose on the public!  It desperately needs a firm editor (or co-author) who is willing to revise, clarify, even paraphrase in order to reduce long paragraphs of repetitive half-thoughts to a few crisp, informative sentences.
One also hopes that the state of archeological investigation has made progress during the 20 plus years since this book was published.  A generation of scholars has had time to examine the artifacts and their interpretations.
And still, I am willing to jack-hammer my way through.  I am in the middle of my second reading.  But I would like to find a better book.  Is there a more coherent and straightforward telling of the same story out there?
312898
AUDIOBOOK REVIEW: I'm sure there are any number of more pleasurable books of which one could listen to audio versions, but sometimes it's good to buckle down and get acquainted with something that boasts more historical relevance than literary value. This text is a trial, not because of the language, which one becomes accustomed to easily enough, but because it possesses nothing of the pacing or narrative structures that characterize more modern novels. Events happen seemingly at random, people do things for no apparent reason, swords are stuck in stones (more than once!), the holy grail is so ubiquitous that it begs the question of why anyone would bother to go quest for it, and at no point does the author feel obliged to account for anyone's motivations or the inconsistencies of the plot. I doubt I would have the patience to get through this text if I were reading it on paper (although if you are interested, some nice older versions are digitized on googlebooks), but I'm somewhat enjoying the audiobook. For all the deficiencies of the narrative, Derek Jacobi's reading is nothing short of masterful, as one might expect. He gives the writing much more pungency than one might think possible, to the point where it can be almost humorous. His spirited delivery of the line "Nay, nay, my lord Arthur, it is not so; I was never your father nor of your blood, but I wot well ye are of an higher blood than I weened ye were," made me laugh so hard that I rewound and replayed it at least a half dozen times. Such interludes of levity are welcome in a text that can otherwise get quite ponderous, so I'm quite pleased with this production.
4231250
The Plague by Albert Camus is a book for those who like French philosophizing. And not the awesomely accessible enlightenment that Voltaire gives us in Candide, but the pantomimy "por qua" philosophizing that can be found in fake French art house films used as the set up for jokes in popular American comedies. Camus is not afraid to belabor a point.

While I've read in other reviews that the Eden Books version for Kindle is a travesty of typos and mis-punctuation, I cannot fathom how even a copy editing genius could give this dried out gristle of a book any moisture.

The true beauty of the Kindle edition though, is how you can see what other readers have chosen to highlight. Highlighters were busy for the first part of the first section, and the last part of the last section, but started to slow down some in between. In fact all of section 3 was devoid of highlights when I read it, leading me to hypothesize that most everybody skipped it. If only I could have followed suit.

I read this book on a dare. My sympathies go out to students and others who may be forced into it. On the bright side, when you're done you'll have one more entry on your resume under "Pretensions."
4967660
This book is an exemplary romantic text, rebellious, reactionary, nave and full of misunderstandings.

Attack on reason
For Hlderlin, reason (the Enlightenment) should be replaced by `spontaneous enthusiasm'. This is not less than asking that the evolution be screwed back: `When I was still a child, knowing nothing of all that is about us, was I not then more than now I am?'
`Man is a beggar when he thinks.' `When these men saw a spark of reason, they turned their backs like thieves.'

Attack on all that limits individual freedom (power, state)
`It is better to become as the bee and build one's house in innocence, than to rule with the masters of the world and howl with them as with wolves, than to dominate people.'
`You accord the state far too much power ... we will take its laws and whip them in the pillory. The state has always been made a hell by man's wanting to make it his heaven.'

Attack on science, industry, wealth accumulation
`Knowledge has corrupted everything.' `Barbarians whom industry and science and even religion made yet more barbarous.' `Men of necessity insensitive to all comely living.'

Illusions
This book is full of ecstatic childish cries about `endless love' (but his love dies), `the magical land of the Greek gods', `the terrifying splendor of Antiquity', `proud Rome' (Hlderlin quotes Plutarch, but the world described in Plutarch's books was indeed `terrifying' for the populations who lived in it), `the Eternal Beauty that is Nature' (but man is part of nature).

Freedom and peace
His highest goods are individual freedom and peace (`the golden age of innocence, the time of peace and freedom'). When one has enough means, one should `flee to some blessed valley to buy a pleasant house'.
Hyperion's trust in mankind is completely shattered when the Greek troops whom he leads against the Turks to give them a nation (also a very romantic goal), 'plundered, murdered, indiscriminately, even our brothers were killed.' Hyperion's reaction: `Be your own consolation'.

This book is a key text for the understanding of the Romantic Movement in Europe. Therefore, it is not to be missed. However, it doesn't attain the high standard of such romantic masterpieces as `Elective Affinities' by Goethe.
3195317
I have mixed feelings about this book in both content and structure. First, there are typographical problems that get worse as the book goes on. Eveything from simple spelling errors and wrong words (like "he" instead of "the") to words repeating in the same sentence ("He entered the He entered the room...") to places where editing is evident because verbs no longer agree, or parts of old sentences have been left behind. I recognize these are editing problems, not necessarily the author's, but it detracts from the reading experience.

The writing itself varies from clever and compelling, to long sections of boring exposition that left me wondering "so what?" At times I found myself wondering how far I could skip without missing anything important. It turns out, pretty far. I wanted to like Prospect, the title character, but he read too much like Edward Scissorhands.

Negatives aside, the premise of the story is very interesting: if a person could preview life on earth before being born, would they still choose to be born? I don't know if it was the author's intention, but the book is a classic study in selfishness. Everyone Prospect encounters is driven entirely by selfishness, even though their purpose is supposed to be helping him. Ultimately, what Prospect learns is how to be selfish, and his final decision is entirely that.

For me, it was easy to hate the "bad guys" because they were so overtly self-serving. But it was hard to like the "good guys" because there was no meaningful self-sacrifice. In the end, I didn't care one bit what happened to anyone because their selfishness made them so unsympathetic. Maybe that was the author's point, we become apathetic towards anything that doesn't meet our needs or expectations.

If a feeling of complete indifference was the author's intent, this is a masterpiece. If not, this book is an epic fail.