Movements & Periods Books

The Dharma Bums (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition)

Jack Kerouac

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 14 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

It's OK, but ... 3 out of 5 stars.
2 of 3 people found this review helpful.

I didn't get much out of it. It was a nice diversion from everyday life but I kept looking for the point Kerouac was trying to make and it escaped me. I've been reading a lot of hiker, mostly Appalachian Trail, narratives and thought this would be a nice expansion of the group. I went in with little knowledge and no preconceptions about Kerouac and came away with little appreciation of his work. I'm still going to read On The Road and might revisit this review if the mood strikes me. I suppose the lack of structure is a product of his writing style but I was disappointed in how the story just ended. Again, maybe I was looking for more than he was prepared to reveal. Maybe I'm just too set in my ways. Maybe I did get the point and just don't realize it.

Editorial Review:

The Dharma Bums was published one year after On the Road made Jack Kerouac a celebrity and a spokesperson for the Beat Generation. Sparked by his contagious zest for life, the novel relates the adventures of an ebullient group of Beatnik seekers in a freewheeling exploration of Buddhism and the search for Truth.

On the Road: 50th Anniversary Edition

Jack Kerouac

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 12 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

A 50th anniversary hardcover edition of Kerouac’s classic novel that defined a generation

Few novels have had as profound an impact on American culture as On the Road. Pulsating with the rhythms of 1950s underground America, jazz, sex, illicit drugs, and the mystery and promise of the open road, Kerouac's classic novel of freedom and longing defined what it meant to be "beat" and has inspired generations of writers, musicians, artists, poets, and seekers who cite their discovery of the book as the event that "set them free." Based on Kerouac's adventures with Neal Cassady, On the Road tells the story of two friends whose four cross-country road trips are a quest for meaning and true experience. Written with a mixture of sad-eyed naïveté and wild abandon, and imbued with Kerouac's love of America, his compassion for humanity, and his sense of language as jazz, On the Road is the quintessential American vision of freedom and hope, a book that changed American literature and changed anyone who has ever picked it up. This hardcover edition commemorates the fiftieth anniversary of the first publication of the novel in 1957 and will be a must-have for any literature lover.

Celebrating 50 Years of On the Road

In three weeks in a Manhattan apartment in April 1951, Jack Kerouac wrote his first satisfactory draft of On the Road as a single, 120-foot scroll. On the Road: The Original Scroll prints the text of this remarkable literary artifact in book form.

Why Kerouac Matters: The Lessons of On the Road (They're Not What You Think): John Leland, author of Hip: A History, argues that On the Road still matters not for its youthful rebellion but because it is full of lessons about how to grow up.

From the back cover of On the Road: The Original Scroll: Jack Kerouac displaying one of his later scroll manuscripts, most likely The Dharma Bums

Kerouac's map of his first hitchhiking trip, July-October 1947 (click image to see the full map) Original New York Times review of On the Road (click image to see the full review)

The Meaning of Night: A Confession

Michael Cox

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 79 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

A must read! A+++ 5 out of 5 stars.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful.

I loved the way this story was narrated. The narrator confesses to a murder and the premise of the book is the story that leads you to understand his cold-blooded motive. It is a sizzling murder mystery, but the mystery is not who did it, but instead why he did it. The language is easy to read, but still transports you to Victorian London. Unbelievably suspenseful and intriguing with plenty of twists and characters you will love to hate!! A must read! A+++

Editorial Review:

"Superb.... An engrossing and complicated tale...that touches on every aspect of Victorian society."—Michael Dirda, Washington Post Book World

"After killing the red-haired man, I took myself off to Quinn's for an oyster supper." So begins the "enthralling" (Booklist, starred review) and "ingenious" (Boston Globe) story of Edward Glyver, booklover, scholar, and murderer. A chance discovery convinces Glyver that greatness awaits him. His path to win back what is rightfully his leads him to Evenwood, one of England's most enchanting country houses, and a woman who will become his obsession.

The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Volume E: The Victorian Age

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Editorial Review:

Read by millions of students over seven editions, The Norton Anthology of English Literature remains the most trusted undergraduate survey of English literature available and one of the most successful college texts ever published. Firmly grounded by the hallmark strengths of all Norton Anthologies—thorough and helpful introductory matter, judicious annotation, complete texts wherever possible—The Norton Anthology of English Literature has been revitalized in this Eighth Edition through the collaboration between six new editors and six seasoned ones. Under the direction of Stephen Greenblatt, General Editor, the editors have reconsidered all aspects of the anthology to make it an even better teaching tool.

Martial's Epigrams: A Selection

Garry Wills

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Editorial Review:

Bawdy and biting epigrams, freshly translated, ready for enjoyment.

One of literature’s greatest satirists, Martial earned his livelihood by excoriating the follies and vices of his time, and set a pattern that satirists have admired and imitated across the ages. Born in Spain, Marcus Valerius Martialis (c. 40–102 CE), known in English as Martial, went to Rome as a young man to win fame and fortune. At the height of his career he published a book of scathing social commentary every year--1,500 poems in all, of which Wills translates about a third.

This exquisite translation from acclaimed author Garry Wills does not sacrifice the cleverly constructed effects of Martial’s short and shapely thrusts. Martial’s Epigrams make addictive reading and a perfect--if naughty--gift.

Backwards & Forwards: A Technical Manual for Reading Plays

David Ball

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 15 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

This guide to playreading for students and practitioners of both theater and literature complements, rather then contradicts or repeats, traditional methods of literary analysis of scripts.

Ball developed his method during his work as Literary Director at the Guthrie Theater, building his guide on the crafts playwrights of every period and style use to make their plays stageworthy. The text is full of tools for students and practitioners to use as they investigate plot, character, theme, exposition, imagery, motivation/obstacle/conflict, theatricality, and the other crucial parts of the superstructure of a play. He includes guides for discovering what the playwright considers the play’s most important elements, thus permitting interpretation based on the foundation of the play rather than its details.

Using Hamlet as illustration, Ball assures a familiar base for illustrating script-reading techniques as well as examples of the kinds of misinterpretation readers can fall prey to by ignoring the craft of the playwright. Of immense utility to those who want to put plays on the stage (actors, directors, designers, production specialists) Backwards and Forwards is also a fine playwriting manual because the structures it describes are the primary tools of the playwright.

Four Texts on Socrates: Plato's Euthyphro, Apology, and Crito and Aristophanes' Clouds

Thomas G. West, Grace Starry West

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Total reviews: 6 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

Widely adopted for classroom use, this book offers translations of four major works of ancient Greek literature which treat the life and thought of Socrates, focusing particularly on his trial and defense (the platonic dialogues Euthyphro, Apology of Socrates, and Crito) and on the charges against Socrates (Aristophanes' comedy Clouds). This is the only collection of the three Platonic dialogues that also includes Clouds, a work that is fundamental for understanding the thought of Socrates in relation to the Athenian political community and to Greek poetry.

Thomas G. West's introduction provides an overview of the principal themes and arguments of the four works. There are extensive explanatory notes to the translations. For this new edition, Thomas West has revised the introduction and updated the annotated bibliography, which includes the best of the secondary literature on Socrates and on the texts included in this book.

In their translations, the Wests capture successfully the simplicity and vigor of straightforward Greek diction. They strive for as high a degree of accuracy as possible, subordinating concerns for elegance and smoothness to the goal of producing the most faithful and most reliable English versions of these texts.

The Magic Mountain

Thomas Mann

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Total reviews: 85 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Al Gore, Yassar Arafat, and Magic Mountain... 1 out of 5 stars.
7 of 18 people found this review helpful.

...What are three reasons why the Nobel Prize is utterly meaningless Alex!


Holy crud, I just finished reading Magic Mountain about 5 minutes ago and want to get this review out while I still have the taste in my mouth. There's some great 1-star reviews for this book that I doubt I'll ever be able to top...but I'll try anyways.

What the book lacks in character development, ideas, and psychological analysis it more than makes up for in utter pointlessness. A more unfeeling, disinterested, atomized novel you will not find. Mann writes like a man detached from the world; he's incapable of giving a cohesive structure to multiple ideas and moving them in a single direction. In a word, it's a novel without purpose, more or less a collection of seemingly random, meaningless events that occur over a seven year period within a sanatarium high in the German Alps.

Maybe this disjointed style of narrative was somehow meant to be just an avenue through which Mann could pretentiously lecture the reader about the nature of time. Sure! I mean, time is such an easily definable concept that it certainly can be casually woven into what allegedly is an already highly complex storyline - and of course Mann possesed the Astrophysics Ph.D to make any of this time talk relevant, right? Not a chance.

Nothing it seems is able to pry the protagonist Hans Castorp away from his life as a spineless worm. Even the more notable events enjoy just a short twilight before they fizzle out, leaving Hans Castorp the same detached, unthinking, and cowardly individual on DAY 1 as he is in YEAR 7. Is this a true portrait of the character and psychology of a human being? Maybe in this mood equalizer culture of ours it is, which is probably at least part of the reason for the novel's popularity in the Anglo-American world.

Outside of that it's difficult to imagine an individual (or if one did indeed exist why such a wretched existence should be made the focus of a lengthy novel) who - could continuously witness death first-hand, go through a series of near death experiences himself, have intimate relationships with intellectuals (though admittedly the Settembrini-Naphta dialogues are just dramatized pseudo-philosophical ramblings) - without every experiencing any notable change in his psychology or behavior. How would Mann justify this ridiculously unrealistic, unfeeling outlook on the development of what is commonly known as character, spirit, or soul? Assuming we were able to actually locate someone like Hans Castorp would there be any purpose in digging beneath the surface of a man who is so fundamentally disinterested in anything that isn't completely about him?

I think what happened here was that Mann looked at mankind's desire for comfort, then jumped a whole bunch of steps and concluded that the man who simply wants to "stay warm" would be able to easily insulate himself from ideas and withdraw himself from society. That just isn't the case though. I don't deny that modernity can create a sense of detachment and social isolation in many individuals, but these feelings are not at all easily accepted by those same people. Indeed, even the people who personally decide to isolate themselves either do so because of, or cannot do so without severe emotional trauma and despair. Thus, if Hans Castorp is indeed supposed to be representative of this sort of Nietzchean "herd animal" than he is able to live this way with a stunning and completely unrealistic sense of ease.

Finally, what was up with the ending? Out with a whimper indeed! What an incredibly sick view of life this book expresses. Not only was this nearly the most worthless thing I've ever read, but I also have an added sense of shame at having initially given this book to someone as a birthday gift! It's little wonder they never bothered to read it. Run far, far away from this lifeless pseudo-philosophic nonsense.

Worst Novel of the 20th Century.

Editorial Review:

In this dizzyingly rich novel of ideas, Mann uses a sanatorium in the Swiss Alps--a community devoted exclusively to sickness--as a microcosm for Europe, which in the years before 1914 was already exhibiting the first symptoms of its own terminal irrationality. The Magic Mountain is a monumental work of erudition and irony, sexual tension and intellectual ferment, a book that pulses with life in the midst of death.

The Consolation of Philosophy: Revised Edition (Penguin Classics)

Ancius Boethius

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 22 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

truly consoling 5 out of 5 stars.
17 of 20 people found this review helpful.

I don't read a lot of philosophy texts, but I read this one after my father died and was surprised to find it very meaningful and truly consoling.

The Last Classsical Man 5 out of 5 stars.
4 of 4 people found this review helpful.

The Consolation is a philosophical treatise written by Boethius (c. 480-524 A.D.) while awaiting his execution after being imprisoned by the Gothic emperor Theodoric. The first time I heard of Boethius and his most famous composition was, as so often is the case, when I was reading another work. The work in question is A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy O'Toole. The main character of O'Toole's novel, one Ignatius J. Reilly, had based his entire life and worldview around the philosophy of Boethius and his assessment of Fortune. A great work in its own right, A Confederacy of Dunces left a lasting impression in my mind and, when by chance I came across a copy of the Consolation in the used bookstore I jumped at the opportunity to see for myself what Boethius had to say.



The work is composed of five books beginning with Boethius struggling to make sense of his imprisonment and pending execution. Confronted with a fate that is seemingly at odds with the virtue and faith with which he has conducted his life, Boethius is about to succumb to the sorrow that is filling his thoughts. Just then he notices the presence of a woman in his cell, the awe-inspiring Philosophy. She bemoans that Boethius, once such an avid student of hers, is now about to abandon all that he had previously gained. Thus begins a journey of reason and contemplation between the two until Boethius in the end finds the consolation that he had almost given up upon. Interspersed between the dialogues of Boethius and Philosophy are a number of poems that range in subject matter and content. More numerous at the beginning of the work, the poems often times serve as transitions between arguments or help to put difficult concepts into a clearer light. Thus a remarkable harmony is reached between prose and poetry that can be appreciated even in an English translation, a rare feat indeed.



It is perhaps significant to understand the time in which Boethius lived a bit better to gain a more accurate reading of his work. Living long after Constantine's conversion to Christianity in the 4th century A.D., it is widely accepted that Boethius was a Christian and believer of the tenants of the Catholic Church (at a time when the Gothic emperor Theodoric, also a Christian but belonging like all Goths to the heretical Arian sect that believed that the father and son were not of one substance). One must find it a bit peculiar than that at no point in Boethius' text is Christianity mentioned in any overt context. To find a believer in his last days before death turning not to theology for comfort, as one might expect, but rather to philosophy has raised many questions about the nature of Boethius' belief. But one only has to look to the title of the work to see that Boethius is choosing philosophy for the subject of his work and could very well indeed have thought theology a better consolation, although one that would be and should be treated in an altogether separate treatise. With this in mind, Boethius draws on the works of the great philosophers and thinkers of antiquity; Homer, Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Seneca, St. Augustine, the Stoics, and the Neo-Platonists. This feat being all the more remarkable because Boethius apparently relied on his own memory to produce the arguments and passages seeing as he had no access to any literary sources while imprisoned.



Boethius has rightly been called the last classical man. Indeed his thoughts and works can be seen as forming a bridge etween the classical world and the Middle Ages. The Consolation influenced countless numbers of theologians throughout the Middle Ages and direct references are to be found in the works of masters such as Dante and Chaucer. His lonely contemplation of good and evil, fate and free will, fortune and the nature of happiness certainly still have an allure to inquisitive minds to this day.

Editorial Review:

Boethius was an eminent public figure under the Gothic emperor Theodoric, and an exceptional Greek scholar. When he became involved in a conspiracy and was imprisoned in Pavia, it was to the Greek philosophers that he turned. "The Consolation" was written in the period leading up to his brutal execution. It is a dialogue of alternating prose and verse between the ailing prisoner and his 'nurse' Philosophy. Her instruction on the nature of fortune and happiness, good and evil, fate and free will, restore his health and bring him to enlightenment. "The Consolation" was extremely popular throughout medieval Europe and his ideas were influential on the thought of Chaucer and Dante.

Touch the Art: Brush Mona Lisa's Hair

Julie Appel, Amy Guglielmo

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 9 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Better concept that realization 2 out of 5 stars.
2 of 4 people found this review helpful.

I ordered these books for my niece and nephew based on online descriptions only. I had hoped for truly interactive books, based on titles like "Brush Mona Lisa's Hair". Imagine, a full head of hair on Mona Lisa, with a little brush attached. Hours of fun for a little girl. Instead, there's a tiny little window in which the hair can be felt, though no chance of brushing it. Same goes for the other titles. Mediocre pop-up books, at best. Great concept, poor execution.

Wonderful for art lovers and their children 5 out of 5 stars.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful.

A lovely book from a lovely series of four--my favorites are this one and "Make Van Gogh's Bed." If you are an art lover and want your child to share your enjoyment, this is a great way to pass on some culture in a fun and low-pressure way. They will recognize the art works just because they have seen them in a book, and you will enjoy reading these books again and again. Wish there were more.

Editorial Review:

The mysterious Mona Lisa could use a little grooming—so go ahead and brush her long black hair! Continue with the Old Masters by touching the large, lacy collar of Frans Hals’ The Laughing Cavalier, petting the horse’s tail in Velazquez’s Prince Baltasar Carlos on Horseback, and arranging the snappy elastic hair in Boticcelli’s The Birth of Venus. Other paintings come from Vermeer, de la Tour, Raphael, and Van Eyck.