( H ) Books

Catch-22

Joseph Heller

Amazon Price: $10.88 List Price: $16.00 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Simon & Schuster Amazon Marketplace: 279 new & used starting at $3.75

Buy at Amazon.com

Browse similar items by category:
Subjects -> Literature & Fiction -> Authors, A-Z -> ( H ) -> Heller, Joseph
Subjects -> Literature & Fiction -> Classics -> General AAS
Subjects -> Literature & Fiction -> Contemporary

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 832 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

There was a time when reading Joseph Heller's classic satire on the murderous insanity of war was nothing less than a rite of passage. Echoes of Yossarian, the wise-ass bombardier who was too smart to die but not smart enough to find a way out of his predicament, could be heard throughout the counterculture. As a result, it's impossible not to consider Catch-22 to be something of a period piece. But 40 years on, the novel's undiminished strength is its looking-glass logic. Again and again, Heller's characters demonstrate that what is commonly held to be good, is bad; what is sensible, is nonsense.

Yossarian says, "You're talking about winning the war, and I am talking about winning the war and keeping alive."
"Exactly," Clevinger snapped smugly. "And which do you think is more important?"
"To whom?" Yossarian shot back. "It doesn't make a damn bit of difference who wins the war to someone who's dead."
"I can't think of another attitude that could be depended upon to give greater comfort to the enemy."
"The enemy," retorted Yossarian with weighted precision, "is anybody who's going to get you killed, no matter which side he's on."
Mirabile dictu, the book holds up post-Reagan, post-Gulf War. It's a good thing, too. As long as there's a military, that engine of lethal authority, Catch-22 will shine as a handbook for smart-alecky pacifists. It's an utterly serious and sad, but damn funny book.

Brave New World

Aldous Huxley

Amazon Price: $11.16 List Price: $13.95 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Harper Perennial Modern Classics Amazon Marketplace: 135 new & used starting at $5.49

Buy at Amazon.com

Browse similar items by category:
Subjects -> Literature & Fiction -> Authors, A-Z -> ( H ) -> Huxley, Aldous
Subjects -> Literature & Fiction -> Classics -> General AAS
Subjects -> Literature & Fiction -> World Literature -> British -> General

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 730 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Open the book and open your eyes (please comment) 5 out of 5 stars.
4 of 4 people found this review helpful.

Brave New World takes place in a utopian London around the year 2540, which started with a good idea, but went way wrong. Humans are produced in large numbers in a high-tech factory without the filth of viviparous reproduction. The babies produced are organized into five castes and are conditioned specifically to do their part in maintaining their society. As the reader progresses farther into the story, they find out what is sacrificed for the stability of the utopian world they occupy, when the reader explores this world through the mind of a man named John, who has not been conditioned to accept this world that suppresses the emotions we value so much today. John comes from a "savage" reservation in New Mexico; where the humans remain that practice our modern day culture. With advances in science allover the world making our lifestyle obsolete, the "savage" lifestyle is repulsive in the eyes of the rest of the brave new world. See how our blind ignorance can lead to catastrophe.

Although an attempt to sum up the novel in only a small amount of words would be in vain, I can offer that this book is a must read for anyone who is capable of thinking beyond ideas provided by way of the text.

This was SUCH a great book. The story Brave New World entertained me more than any other book I have ever read before. It not only was an incredible plot, with amazing creativity, and imagination, but also has shocking conversation that challenge values accepted in our society today, and challenges the minds of all intellectuals willing to relate to the characters, and attempt to draw parallels between Huxley's story, and the story our culture continues to write, as we advance to where Huxley's world began.

To me, a book is worth no more than the thoughts it provokes once I have set it down. By this standard, I am still not done calculating its genius, because I have not yet finished thinking, or talking about themes from the book.

Editorial Review:

"Community, Identity, Stability" is the motto of Aldous Huxley's utopian World State. Here everyone consumes daily grams of soma, to fight depression, babies are born in laboratories, and the most popular form of entertainment is a "Feelie," a movie that stimulates the senses of sight, hearing, and touch. Though there is no violence and everyone is provided for, Bernard Marx feels something is missing and senses his relationship with a young women has the potential to be much more than the confines of their existence allow. Huxley foreshadowed many of the practices and gadgets we take for granted today--let's hope the sterility and absence of individuality he predicted aren't yet to come.

For Whom the Bell Tolls

Ernest Hemingway

Amazon Price: $10.20 List Price: $15.00 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Scribner Amazon Marketplace: 148 new & used starting at $3.88

Buy at Amazon.com

Browse similar items by category:
Subjects -> Literature & Fiction -> Authors, A-Z -> ( H ) -> Hemingway, Ernest -> General
Subjects -> Literature & Fiction -> Authors, A-Z -> ( H ) -> Hemingway, Ernest -> Paperback
Subjects -> Literature & Fiction -> Authors, A-Z -> ( H ) -> Hemingway, Ernest -> General AAS

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 271 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

For Whom the Bell Tolls begins and ends in a pine-scented forest, somewhere in Spain. The year is 1937 and the Spanish Civil War is in full swing. Robert Jordan, a demolitions expert attached to the International Brigades, lies "flat on the brown, pine-needled floor of the forest, his chin on his folded arms, and high overhead the wind blew in the tops of the pine trees." The sylvan setting, however, is at sharp odds with the reason Jordan is there: he has come to blow up a bridge on behalf of the antifascist guerrilla forces. He hopes he'll be able to rely on their local leader, Pablo, to help carry out the mission, but upon meeting him, Jordan has his doubts: "I don't like that sadness, he thought. That sadness is bad. That's the sadness they get before they quit or before they betray. That is the sadness that comes before the sell-out." For Pablo, it seems, has had enough of the war. He has amassed for himself a small herd of horses and wants only to stay quietly in the hills and attract as little attention as possible. Jordan's arrival--and his mission--have seriously alarmed him.

"I am tired of being hunted. Here we are all right. Now if you blow a bridge here, we will be hunted. If they know we are here and hunt for us with planes, they will find us. If they send Moors to hunt us out, they will find us and we must go. I am tired of all this. You hear?" He turned to Robert Jordan. "What right have you, a foreigner, to come to me and tell me what I must do?"

In one short chapter Hemingway lays out the blueprint for what is to come: Jordan's sense of duty versus Pablo's dangerous self-interest and weariness with the war. Complicating matters even more are two members of the guerrilla leader's small band: his "woman" Pilar, and Maria, a young woman whom Pablo rescued from a Republican prison train. Unlike her man, Pilar is still fiercely devoted to the cause and as Pablo's loyalty wanes, she becomes the moral center of the group. Soon Jordan finds himself caught between the two, even as his own resolve is tested by his growing feelings for Maria.

For Whom the Bell Tolls combines two of the author's recurring obsessions: war and personal honor. The pivotal battle scene involving El Sordo's last stand is a showcase for Hemingway's narrative powers, but the quieter, ongoing conflict within Robert Jordan as he struggles to fulfill his mission perhaps at the cost of his own life is a testament to his creator's psychological acuity. By turns brutal and compassionate, it is arguably Hemingway's most mature work and one of the best war novels of the 20th century. --Alix Wilber

Their Eyes Were Watching God

Zora Neale Hurston

Amazon Price: $10.85 List Price: $15.95 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Harper Perennial Modern Classics Amazon Marketplace: 137 new & used starting at $4.99

Buy at Amazon.com

Browse similar items by category:
Subjects -> Literature & Fiction -> Authors, A-Z -> ( H ) -> Hurston, Zora Neale
Subjects -> Literature & Fiction -> Classics -> General AAS
Subjects -> Literature & Fiction -> World Literature -> United States -> African American -> Hurston, Zora Neale

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 407 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

At the height of the Harlem Renaissance during the 1930s, Zora Neale Hurston was the preeminent black woman writer in the United States. She was a sometime-collaborator with Langston Hughes and a fierce rival of Richard Wright. Her stories appeared in major magazines, she consulted on Hollywood screenplays, and she penned four novels, an autobiography, countless essays, and two books on black mythology. Yet by the late 1950s, Hurston was living in obscurity, working as a maid in a Florida hotel. She died in 1960 in a Welfare home, was buried in an unmarked grave, and quickly faded from literary consciousness until 1975 when Alice Walker almost single-handedly revived interest in her work.

Of Hurston's fiction, Their Eyes Were Watching God is arguably the best-known and perhaps the most controversial. The novel follows the fortunes of Janie Crawford, a woman living in the black town of Eaton, Florida. Hurston sets up her characters and her locale in the first chapter, which, along with the last, acts as a framing device for the story of Janie's life. Unlike Wright and Ralph Ellison, Hurston does not write explicitly about black people in the context of a white world--a fact that earned her scathing criticism from the social realists--but she doesn't ignore the impact of black-white relations either:

It was the time for sitting on porches beside the road. It was the time to hear things and talk. These sitters had been tongueless, earless, eyeless conveniences all day long. Mules and other brutes had occupied their skins. But now, the sun and the bossman were gone, so the skins felt powerful and human. They became lords of sounds and lesser things. They passed nations through their mouths. They sat in judgment.

One person the citizens of Eaton are inclined to judge is Janie Crawford, who has married three men and been tried for the murder of one of them. Janie feels no compulsion to justify herself to the town, but she does explain herself to her friend, Phoeby, with the implicit understanding that Phoeby can "tell 'em what Ah say if you wants to. Dat's just de same as me 'cause mah tongue is in mah friend's mouf."

Hurston's use of dialect enraged other African American writers such as Wright, who accused her of pandering to white readers by giving them the black stereotypes they expected. Decades later, however, outrage has been replaced by admiration for her depictions of black life, and especially the lives of black women. In Their Eyes Were Watching God Zora Neale Hurston breathes humanity into both her men and women, and allows them to speak in their own voices. --Alix Wilber

The Sun Also Rises

Ernest Hemingway

Amazon Price: $10.20 List Price: $15.00 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Scribner Amazon Marketplace: 99 new & used starting at $4.99

Buy at Amazon.com

Browse similar items by category:
Subjects -> Literature & Fiction -> Authors, A-Z -> ( H ) -> Hemingway, Ernest -> General
Subjects -> Literature & Fiction -> Authors, A-Z -> ( H ) -> Hemingway, Ernest -> Paperback
Subjects -> Literature & Fiction -> Authors, A-Z -> ( H ) -> Hemingway, Ernest -> General AAS

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 479 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

The Sun Also Rises first appeared in 1926, and yet it's as fresh and clean and fine as it ever was, maybe finer. Hemingway's famously plain declarative sentences linger in the mind like poetry: "Brett was damned good-looking. She wore a slipover jersey sweater and a tweed skirt, and her hair was brushed back like a boy's. She started all that." His cast of thirtysomething dissolute expatriates--Brett and her drunken fiancé, Mike Campbell, the unhappy Princeton Jewish boxer Robert Cohn, the sardonic novelist Bill Gorton--are as familiar as the "cool crowd" we all once knew. No wonder this quintessential lost-generation novel has inspired several generations of imitators, in style as well as lifestyle.

Jake Barnes, Hemingway's narrator with a mysterious war wound that has left him sexually incapable, is the heart and soul of the book. Brett, the beautiful, doomed English woman he adores, provides the glamour of natural chic and sexual unattainability. Alcohol and post-World War I anomie fuel the plot: weary of drinking and dancing in Paris cafés, the expatriate gang decamps for the Spanish town of Pamplona for the "wonderful nightmare" of a week-long fiesta. Brett, with fiancé and ex-lover Cohn in tow, breaks hearts all around until she falls, briefly, for the handsome teenage bullfighter Pedro Romero. "My God! he's a lovely boy," she tells Jake. "And how I would love to see him get into those clothes. He must use a shoe-horn." Whereupon the party disbands.

But what's most shocking about the book is its lean, adjective-free style. The Sun Also Rises is Hemingway's masterpiece--one of them, anyway--and no matter how many times you've read it or how you feel about the manners and morals of the characters, you won't be able to resist its spell. This is a classic that really does live up to its reputation. --David Laskin

Blood Noir (Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter, Book 16)

Laurell K. Hamilton

Amazon Price: $16.15 List Price: $25.95 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Berkley Hardcover Amazon Marketplace: 76 new & used starting at $12.20

Buy at Amazon.com

Browse similar items by category:
Subjects -> Literature & Fiction -> Authors, A-Z -> ( H ) -> Hamilton, Laurell K.
Subjects -> Literature & Fiction -> Genre Fiction -> Horror -> Dark Fantasy
Subjects -> Literature & Fiction -> Genre Fiction -> Horror -> United States

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 296 Average rating: 2.5 of 5

The downward spiral continues.. breaking point? 1 out of 5 stars.
11 of 12 people found this review helpful.

I have this to say to LKH, and about Blood Noir and the new direction of the Anita Blake series.

If you're going to write porn, learn to write it well. If you're going to continue calling these "real" novels, you might want to up the plot factor and let the sex become a delicious little treat every few chapters.

BN is too full of poorly written sexual encounters for me to consider it seriously. If you want to turn it into the Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter (if you know what I mean, wink wink) series, by all means, but please, start to use words and phrases besides "breathy" and "just flat does it for me". It's like LKH has been walking the line between eroticism and being too embarrassed to write what she's really "seeing" for many books now, and it's getting old.

(A side note about LKH follows, feel free to skip to the bottom for the rest of my Blood Noir review)
If you'd like your audience to start taking you seriously again, please give us back our strong, independent Anita. And please stop giving her new metaphysical powers every time she gets into a fight (which is happening less and less frequently).

As for sleeping beauty, aka Marmee, that's a WONDERFUL plot waiting to happen.. it could take the series back where it belongs and onto a whole new level.. please write it on par with the first few books, and whatever you do.. please don't have Anita hop into the sack with the zombie/vampire/lycanthrope/ghoul/etc combination I'm sure you'll turn Marmee into.
/rant.

In short, Blood Noir is either a poorly planned and written novel, or a poorly executed porn. Given LKH's penchant for backtracking in just about every previous book, you could certainly skip this one and not miss a thing. My advice? Wait for paperback, or ignore it all together.

(Oh, and to echo a previous review I had written.. when are Anita and the gang going to start dressing like it ISN'T 1987?) How many royal blue shells, or shells of any color, for that matter, does Anita own? Does anyone call stockings "hose" anymore? And we all know the litany of complaints about the way she dresses the men. Yikes.

Editorial Review:

Readers can’t get enough of the #1 New York Times bestselling author.

A favor for Jason, vampire hunter Anita Blake’s werewolf lover, puts her in the center of a fullblown scandal that threatens master-vampire Jean- Claude’s reign—and makes her a pawn in an ancient vampire queen’s new rise to power.

Bite

Laurell K. Hamilton, Charlaine Harris, MaryJanice Davidson, Angela Knight, Vickie Taylor

Amazon Price: $7.99 List Price: $7.99 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Jove Books Amazon Marketplace: 60 new & used starting at $3.62

Buy at Amazon.com

Browse similar items by category:
Subjects -> Literature & Fiction -> Authors, A-Z -> ( H ) -> Hamilton, Laurell K.
Subjects -> Literature & Fiction -> Genre Fiction -> Horror -> Anthologies
Subjects -> Literature & Fiction -> Genre Fiction -> Horror -> General

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 53 Average rating: 3.5 of 5

Book Review 5 out of 5 stars.
2 of 3 people found this review helpful.

GREAT book! I bought this book mainly for the short story by Charlaine Harris, and it was REALLY good. I enjoyed it thoroughly, and would reccomend it to anyone. It was great. I also started the story right after that one, and it seemed good too. Glad I bought this book.

Editorial Review:

A never-before-published Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter story from New York Times bestselling author Laurell K. Hamilton. A brand-new story from New York Times bestselling author Charlaine Harris, featuring the much-loved Sookie Stackhouse.

A hot new novella from USA Today bestselling author MaryJanice Davidson, set in the world of Undead and Unwed's Betsy Taylor, the newly, and reluctantly,crowned Vampire Queen.

Introduced in the collection Hot Blooded, and on the heels of the wildly successful Master of the Night, Angela Knight has created a fascinating universe of Arthurian Lore and erotic vampirsim. And a sexy original story from Vickie Taylor, a new addition to Berkley Sensation.

The Old Man and The Sea

Ernest Hemingway

Amazon Price: $9.60 List Price: $12.00 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Scribner Amazon Marketplace: 337 new & used starting at $0.01

Buy at Amazon.com

Browse similar items by category:
Subjects -> Literature & Fiction -> Authors, A-Z -> ( H ) -> Hemingway, Ernest -> General
Subjects -> Literature & Fiction -> Authors, A-Z -> ( H ) -> Hemingway, Ernest -> Paperback
Subjects -> Literature & Fiction -> Authors, A-Z -> ( H ) -> Hemingway, Ernest -> General AAS

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 684 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

Here, for a change, is a fish tale that actually does honor to the author. In fact The Old Man and the Sea revived Ernest Hemingway's career, which was foundering under the weight of such postwar stinkers as Across the River and into the Trees. It also led directly to his receipt of the Nobel Prize in 1954 (an award Hemingway gladly accepted, despite his earlier observation that "no son of a bitch that ever won the Nobel Prize ever wrote anything worth reading afterwards"). A half century later, it's still easy to see why. This tale of an aged Cuban fisherman going head-to-head (or hand-to-fin) with a magnificent marlin encapsulates Hemingway's favorite motifs of physical and moral challenge. Yet Santiago is too old and infirm to partake of the gun-toting machismo that disfigured much of the author's later work: "The brown blotches of the benevolent skin cancer the sun brings from its reflection on the tropic sea were on his cheeks. The blotches ran well down the sides of his face and his hands had the deep-creased scars from handling heavy fish on the cords." Hemingway's style, too, reverts to those superb snapshots of perception that won him his initial fame:

Just before it was dark, as they passed a great island of Sargasso weed that heaved and swung in the light sea as though the ocean were making love with something under a yellow blanket, his small line was taken by a dolphin. He saw it first when it jumped in the air, true gold in the last of the sun and bending and flapping wildly in the air.

If a younger Hemingway had written this novella, Santiago most likely would have towed the enormous fish back to port and posed for a triumphal photograph--just as the author delighted in doing, circa 1935. Instead his prize gets devoured by a school of sharks. Returning with little more than a skeleton, he takes to his bed and, in the very last line, cements his identification with his creator: "The old man was dreaming about the lions." Perhaps there's some allegory of art and experience floating around in there somewhere--but The Old Man and the Sea was, in any case, the last great catch of Hemingway's career. --James Marcus

The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway: The Finca Vigia Edition

Ernest Hemingway

Amazon Price: $14.96 List Price: $22.00 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Scribner Amazon Marketplace: 77 new & used starting at $8.94

Buy at Amazon.com

Browse similar items by category:
Subjects -> Literature & Fiction -> Authors, A-Z -> ( H ) -> Hemingway, Ernest -> General
Subjects -> Literature & Fiction -> Authors, A-Z -> ( H ) -> Hemingway, Ernest -> Paperback
Subjects -> Literature & Fiction -> Authors, A-Z -> ( H ) -> Hemingway, Ernest -> General AAS

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 44 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Hemingway - What more needs to be said? 5 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

Hemingway is one of the greatest short story masters of all time. Full of deep, thought provoking storylines, Hemingway will always be one of the best.

G 5 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

This collection is godly. This is what I would bring with me to a deserted island. Would probably have more than enough good fishing tips in it to help me survive anyway!

A book in GREAT condition. 5 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

This book was shipped in a great used condition. There is no sign of any writing, highlighting, or damage. I appreciated business with this seller.

Phenomenal 5 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

I saw that someone complained about the soft paperback cover; it is true. If you buy the paperback, it peels and quickly begins to wear. I take great care of my books, but this cover just falls apart anyway. The paper on the inside feels like it's made out of recycled newspaper. But, can you seriously beat this collection? Every short story that the man has ever written? It is still a great purchase.

Editorial Review:

THE ONLY COMPLETE COLLECTION BY THE NOBEL PRIZE-WINNING AUTHOR

In this definitive collection of Ernest Hemingway's short stories, readers will delight in the author's most beloved classics such as "The Snows of Kilimanjaro," "Hills Like White Elephants," and "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place," and will discover seven new tales published for the first time in this collection. For Hemingway fans The Complete Short Stories is an invaluable treasury.

101 Great American Poems (Dover Thrift Editions)

Edgar Allan Poe, Walt Whitman, Robert Frost, Langston Hughes, Emily Dickinson, T S. Eliot, Marianne Moore

Amazon Price: $1.50 List Price: $1.50 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Dover Publications Amazon Marketplace: 171 new & used starting at $0.01

Buy at Amazon.com

Browse similar items by category:
Subjects -> Literature & Fiction -> Authors, A-Z -> ( D ) -> Dickinson, Emily
Subjects -> Literature & Fiction -> Authors, A-Z -> ( E ) -> Eliot, T.S.
Subjects -> Literature & Fiction -> Authors, A-Z -> ( F ) -> Frost, Robert

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 7 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Quite a Bang for Your Buck!.......... 4 out of 5 stars.
23 of 23 people found this review helpful.

............this small book of poetry contains the work of nearly forty of the best known American poets. From Emily Dickinson to Walt Whitman to Edgar Allan Poe to Robert Frost, there are poems in this collection that are sure to appeal to everyone! Also represented in this collection are ten women poets and eight African Americans including Paul Laurence Dunbar, Langston Hughes and Phyllis Wheatley. There's even a poem by Abraham Lincoln that reveals his thoughts about his childhood experiences.

This collection is a simple, inexpensive way to introduce oneself to the wonderful world of American poetry. Each poet is introduced with a short biography followed by his or her most memorable work. Great buy!

Editorial Review:

Rich treasury of verse from the 19th and 20th centuries, selected for popularity and literary quality, includes Poe's "The Raven," Whitman's "I Hear America Singing," as well as poems by Robert Frost, Langston Hughes, Emily Dickinson, T. S. Eliot, Marianne Moore, many other notables.