British Books - Page 12

Master and Commander

Patrick O'Brian

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 267 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

Tie-in edition to the major film coming next Spring from Fox. Starring Russell Crowe as Jack Aubrey and Paul Bettany (A Beautiful Mind) as Stephen Maturin. Directed by Peter Weir. Master and Commander is the first of Patrick O'Brian's now famous Aubrey/Maturin novels, regarded by many as the greatest series of historical novels ever written. It establishes the friendship between Captain Jack Aubrey RN and Stephen Maturin, who becomes his secretive ship's surgeon and an intelligence agent. It contains all the action and excitement which could possibly be hoped for in a historical novel, but it also displays the qualities which have put O'Brian far ahead of any of his competitors: his depiction of the detail of life aboard a Nelsonic man-of-war, of weapons, food, conversation and ambience, of the landscape and of the sea. O'Brian's portrayal of each of these is faultless and the sense of period throughout is acute. His power of characterisation is above all masterly. This brilliant historical novel marked the debut of a writer who grew into one of our greatest novelists ever.

Heart of Darkness and The Secret Sharer (Signet Classics)

Joseph Conrad

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 385 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

humidity drips off the end of each line like a light mist in a heavy fog 4 out of 5 stars.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful.

Probably the dampest book I've ever read--humidity drips off the end of each line like a light mist in a heavy fog. More is left unsaid than is written on the page, and this is truly a classic even though there is too much left unsaid for me to rate it at the very top.

Favorite line: As Marlow cautiously pilots the steamboat up the river toward the inland station and its mysterious keeper Kurtz, his manager says "I authorize you to take all the risks." Marlow curtly snaps back "I refuse to take any."

Very, Very Short and Unremarkable 3 out of 5 stars.
0 of 1 people found this review helpful.

Like most people, I was familiar with Heart of Darkness, both as an acclaimed work of literature and as the inspiration for the remarkable movie Apocolypse Now. For some reason, I recently decided to make an attempt at reading it, despite my concern that it was written at a level beyond my capacity to understand.

Upon receipt of the volume from Amazon, I was initially under the impression that I had mistakenly ordered the Cliff's Notes version of the work. I had no idea that the book was essentially a short story, easily readable in 2-3 hours.

Even more surprising, was the ease with which I was able to follow and understand the story, though admittedly written in a slightly dense prose. Perhaps this was due to having seen Apocolypse Now and being familiar with the broad outline of the story and having read other works of history on the Belgian Congo.

In any event, it was a decent story, filled with some beautifully descriptive language and imagery. I must say, however, that I was not bowled over. Steamship Captain pilots a ragged boat up the Congo, accompanied by colonial agents and support staff (cannibals and other natives) in an attempt to relieve a long stranded station agent (Kurtz) who has "gone native" and become the insane source of worship for the local natives. If you've seen Apocolypse Now, you know the story, just replace the Mekong with the Congo.

I go back to my first paragraph in which I related a concern over my ability to understand what is considered a classic work of literature. I fully understood it, but was perhaps not qualified to fully appreciate it.

Editorial Review:

Two of Conrad’s BEST-KNOWN works—in a single volume

In this pair of literary voyages into the inner self, Joseph Conrad has written two of the most chilling, disturbing, and noteworthy pieces of fiction of the twentieth century.

Gerard Manley Hopkins: A Life

Paul Mariani

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 1 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Unrivalled 5 out of 5 stars.
6 of 6 people found this review helpful.

Portrayed in his fullness as poet, spiritualist and Roman Catholic Jesuit amid Victorian England--Hopkins steps out of these pages. You can feel him breathe. This biography cancels out all others.

Editorial Review:

An insightful and inspirational biography of the heroic and spiritual poet.

Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–1889) may well have been the most original and innovative poet writing in the English language during the nineteenth century. Yet his story of personal struggle, doubt, intense introspection, and inward heroism has never been told fully. As a Jesuit priest, Hopkins’s descent into loneliness and despair and his subsequent recovery are a remarkable and inspiring spiritual journey that will speak to many readers, regardless of their faith or philosophies.

Paul Mariani, an award-winning poet himself and author of a number of biographies of literary figures, brilliantly integrates Hopkins’s spiritual life and his literary life to create a rich and compelling portrait of a man whose work and life continue to speak to readers a century after his death.

Shakespeare and Modern Culture

Marjorie Garber

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 1 Average rating: 2.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

From one of the world’s premier Shakespeare scholars, author of Shakespeare After All (“the indispensable introduction to the indispensable writer”–Newsweek): a magisterial new study whose premise is “that Shakespeare makes modern culture and that modern culture makes Shakespeare.”

Shakespeare has determined many of the ideas that we think of as “naturally” our own and even as “naturally” true–ideas about human character, individuality and selfhood, government, leadership, love and jealousy, men and women, youth and age. Yet many of these ideas, timely as ever, have been reimagined–are indeed often now first encountered–not only in modern fiction, theater, film, and the news but also in the literature of psychology, sociology, political theory, business, medicine, and law.

Marjorie Garber delves into ten plays to explore the interrelationships between Shakespeare and twentieth century and contemporary culture–from James Joyce’s Ulysses to George W. Bush’s reading list. In The Merchant of Venice, she looks at the question of intention; in Hamlet, the matter of character; in King Lear, the dream of sublimity; in Othello, the persistence of difference; and in Macbeth, the necessity of interpretation. She discusses the conundrum of man in The Tempest; the quest for exemplarity in Henry V; the problem of fact in Richard III; the estrangement of self in Coriolanus; and the untimeliness of youth in Romeo and Juliet.

Shakespeare and Modern Culture is a tour de force reimagining of our own mental and emotional landscape as refracted through the prism of protean “Shakespeare.”

Alice Walker's the Color Purple (Bloom's Modern Critical Interpretations)

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 448 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

twisted, horrifying, disgusting, revolting, perverted, vomit-inducing, etc. 1 out of 5 stars.
2 of 20 people found this review helpful.

this is the worst book i've ever read, along with the house on mango street. i had to read this the summer before ninth grade. yes, ninth! i was THIRTEEN and i had to submerge myself in this perverted sick unhealthy (most likely drug-induced) for lack of a better word, BOOK. i was horrified, disgusted, revolted, terrified, and it was NOT a pleasant read. i couldn't even finish it. i stopped after about 100 pages, and akwardly had to tell my mom that i didn't want to finish it. she read it and agrees with me. why this is considered a "CLASSIC" is beyond me. it sounds like alice walker is on crack and wrote down the first twisted, sick, perverted scence she could think of. i would NEVER recommend this book, especially for schools.

Editorial Review:

Celie's development is chronicled through her letters in Alice Walker's novel.

The title, Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, part of Chelsea House Publishers’ Modern Critical Interpretations series, presents the most important 20th-century criticism on Alice Walker’s The Color Purple through extracts of critical essays by well-known literary critics. This collection of criticism also features a short biography on Alice Walker, a chronology of the author’s life, and an introductory essay written by Harold Bloom, Sterling Professor of the Humanities, Yale University.

A Fistful of Charms (The Hollows, Book 4)

Kim Harrison

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 135 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

I'm glad my library stocks this book... 3 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

Before buying a book, I go to the library and borrow it. In this case, with Harrison's series "Dead Witch Walking", "The Good, The Bad and the Undead" and "A Fistful of Charms" (very cute puns on Clint Eastwood films) I'd feel my money would be better spent elsewhere.

I *enjoyed* parts of the books, when there was plot evident, but I did not enjoy the constant emo-ing and angsting. Although the plague that wiped out a huge portion of humanity is mentioned once in a while, usually in tandem with tomatoes, the only effect the plague seems to have had was to bring supernatural creatures and witches and so forth out of the closet. If Harrison was not going to incorporate such a enormous societal change in a realistic way, it should not have been included at all as an explanation for a world with open magicking.

By "A Fistful of Charms" the only character I give a hoot about is Jenks. He doesn't emo all over the place, although he does take part in one too many deep heart-to-hearts with Rachel Morgan about her love life and psychological state. This book in particular felt like I was eavesdropping in on a massively long and drawn out therapy session instead of following along in a well-structured adventure/mystery puzzle.

The plot, when it bothered to show up between talking head heart-to-hearts, was sort-of cohesive. There was some weaving together of elements from the beginning of the book to later scenes, but, either I wasn't reading closely enough, or I missed the section that introduced a character (by name) and by who he was arriving with in order to have an assisted suicide. I had to figure out he'd been mentioned cryptically a few chapters earlier, but not by name. He was not a character until Rachel had the chance to ooze emo all over HER ethical dilemma. It made her incredibly self-indulgent and unlikable. I almost found myself wishing she'd been killed in the car wreck, also.

Rachel Morgan's own revelation at the end of the book about her psychological nature of needing thrill-seeking to have sex was just...I won't say repulsive, but really, I didn't need to have it spelled out for me. In fact, I didn't like having every deep personal motive of the every major character spelled out for me in dialogue between the characters, as if they were all in Junior or High School trying to figure out their social status and who they could screw and why not or why it could work or not. Does every character own some sort of speshul knowledge about a key character, as if they all have canted telepathy?

Harrison does have a way with writing hooks in her stories. I just wish she'd reign in the emo-talk, the spelling-out of motivations, and hang her stories together a little more securely. Also, make Rachel less of a whiny sex-driven stereotypical witch, please. Sex is healthy; but I don't want to read about characters endlessly whinging about it!

Editorial Review:

The evil night things that prowl Cincinnati despise witch and bounty hunter Rachel Morgan. Her new reputation for the dark arts is turning human and undead heads alike with the intent to possess, bed, and kill her. Now the pack is gathering for the first time in millennia to ravage and to rule. Suddenly, more than Rachel's soul is at stake.

The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Volume 1: The Middle Ages through the Restoration and the Eighteenth Century (Norton Anthology of English Literature)

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 14 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

A legendary bestseller for more than forty years, this is the classic survey to the field from the Middle Ages to the twenty-first century.

With 274 authors, the Eighth Edition deepens its representation of essential works in all genres, ranging from Seamas Heaney's award-winning translation of Beowulf, Milton's Paradise Lost, and More's Utopia to the great poets and prose writers of the nineteenth century—Blake and Austen, Wordsworth and Byron, Tennyson and Barrett Browning—to twentieth-century classics of a truly global English literature—Conrad's Heart of Darkness, Woolf's A Room of One's Own, Achebe's Things Fall Apart, and Friel's Translations, to name but a few. Color plates—over 75 in all—and thematic clusters of brief and historically significant texts bring to life the cultural concerns of each period. Concise glosses and annotations, period introductions, biographical headnotes, timelines, and selected bibliographies help readers understand and enjoy the rich diversity of English literature.

James Joyce's a Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man (Bloom's Modern Critical Interpretations)

James Joyce

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 240 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

terrible, terrible, terrible book 1 out of 5 stars.
2 of 7 people found this review helpful.

I don't know where to start. It's pretty difficult to review a book in which nothing takes place. This book lacks... well, just about everything. It lacks half a sentence of substance. Nothing in the story is connected; I read the book and wondered, "What is this about? What was the story?" Actually, I have a confession to make: I didn't actually read the book in its entirety; I read the first half and was so disgusted by it that I had to read the summaries for the rest of the chapters online. It is that bad.

Normally I listen to other people's opinions but I am making it a fact in my mind that this book is the worst book I have ever read. If you disagree, you are wrong. That is how terrible this book was. It was a complete waste of my money. It was required reading for school. I always read the books regardless of whether I like them or not, only reading summaries after finishing to make sure I understood the whole story. This is the first book I have ever relied on reviews to finish. My teacher worhips this book but there is nothing good about it. If anybody can explain to me what this book is about in a way that makes sense, I will give them ten dollars.

So far, everyone in my school has failed to explain it to me. This book is everything Flowers for Algernon tries to be (that's not a good thing).

Editorial Review:

Considered to be cast in a daring rhetorical mode, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is the first novel by James Joyce. Originally published as a series, the novel continually interacts with Irish history and culture.

The title, James Joyce’s A Portrait of Artist As Young Man, part of Chelsea House Publishers’ Modern Critical Interpretations series, presents the most important 20th-century criticism on James Joyce’s A Portrait of Artist As Young Man through extracts of critical essays by well-known literary critics. This collection of criticism also features a short biography on James Joyce, a chronology of the author’s life, and an introductory essay written by Harold Bloom, Sterling Professor of the Humanities, Yale University.

The Story and Its Writer: An Introduction to Short Fiction

Charters

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 13 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Course Book I Actually Want to Keep Reading 5 out of 5 stars.
6 of 7 people found this review helpful.

This compilation of short stories was used for my Intro. to the Short Story college course. Our professor only picked out certain stories but I found myself reading unassigned stories myself. Some of these stories are wonderful. My favorite was "The Widow's Son" by Mary Lavin. Some other noteworthy stories: "Hills Like White Elephants" Hemingway, "Girl" by J. Kincaid. Too many more to list, a course book I am actually keeping so I can finish reading it. Usually I can't wait to close them after the course and not see them anymore! :)

Editorial Review:

During her many years of teaching introduction to fiction courses, Ann Charters developed an acute sense of which stories work most effectively in the classroom. She also discovered that writers, not editors, have the most interesting and useful things to say about the making and the meaning of fiction. Accordingly, her choice of fiction in the first edition of her The Story and Its Writer was as notable for its student appeal as it was for its quality and range. And to complement these stories, she introduced a lasting innovation: an array of the writers' own commentaries on the craft and traditions of the short story. In subsequent editions her sense of what works was confirmed as the book evolved into the most comprehensive, diverse-- and bestselling -- introduction to fiction anthology. Instructors rely on Ann Charters' ability to assemble an authoritative and teachable anthology, and anticipate each edition's selection of new writers and stories.

Dangerous Fortune, A

Ken Follett

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 86 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Entertaining but predictable 3 out of 5 stars.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful.

I checked this out of the library as an audio book, and I would say this is a perfect choice for a road trip. I would not have wasted my time reading, nor would I purchase this book. The characters are unbelievable--the main character is the ethical Hugh who is crossed over and over by his purely evil Aunt Augusta, and yet he never sees it coming and keeps coming back for more. By the end of the book I could barely care about Hugh--there's innocent and then there's obtuse. The plot is pretty predictable at times, the characters are flat & mostly one dimensional, the "coincidences" are as unbelievable as those of any Gothic novel, and much of the story is hard to believe given the time setting.

However, for a long car ride, it was perfect--certainly didn't have to think too much and the story does mostly keep you engaged.

Editorial Review:

In 1866 tragedy strikes at the exclusive Windfield School when a mysterious accident takes the life of a student. Among the student's circle of friends are Hugh Pilaster; Hugh's older cousin Edward, dissolute heir to the Pilaster banking fortune; and Micky Miranda, the handsome son of a brutal South American oligarchy. The death and its aftermath begin the spiraling circle of treachery that will span three decades and entwine many lives.

From the exclusive men's clubs that cater to every dark desire of England's upper classes to the luxurious ballrooms of the manipulators of the world's wealth, Follett conjures up a stunning panorama of intrigue. A Dangerous Fortune brings us characters swept toward a perilous climax where greed, fed by the shocking truth of a young man's death, must be stopped - or the dreams of a nation will die.