General Books - Page 5

T.H. White's The Once and Future King (Arthurian Studies)

Elisabeth Brewer

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 326 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

The Once and Future King defies classification. Is it for children, or for adults? Is it fantasy or a psychological novel? In its great range, it encompasses poetry and farce, comedy and tragedy -and sudden flights of schoolboy humour. White's `footnote to Malory' (his own phrase) resulted in the last major retelling of the story based on Malory's Morte Darthur, and Elisabeth Brewer explores the literary context of White's finest work as well as considering his aims and achievement in writing it. White's story of Arthur begins with his `enfances', set in an imaginary medieval England, but it is far removed from the conventional historical novel. White was writing in wartime England, a country increasingly absorbed by a need to find an antidote to war. Through the medium of the Arthurian story he found his own voice, his unique contribution to keeping alive the flame of civilisation. Malory's chivalric virtues are rejected in favour of White's own twentieth-century values; the love affair of Lancelot and Guenever is interpreted in terms of modern psychology. The books which eventually made up The Once and Future Kingof 1958 appeared in distinctly different editions. In discussing these,Elisabeth Brewer looks at some of the ways in which White drew on his own personal experience at a deep psychological level, while also incorporating into his story material inspired by his antiquarian pursuits and by his years as a schoolmaster. She completes her study with an account of White's use of historical material, and the relationship of The Once and Future King to the Morte Darthur. ELISABETH BREWER lectured in English at Homerton College, Cambridge. She is the author of books and articles on Chaucer and the Arthurian legends.

Moby-Dick (Everyman's Library)

Herman Melville

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 327 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

a challenge to read and understand; requires some pondering... 5 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

hard book but all the more rewarding. the narration in itself is part of the melvilles point. moby dick reads as a organized history and methodology of the whaling industry and is often times drawn out and dull. but this narrations illustrates the point of mans obsession of understanding the universe. ishmael is by no means a definite resource on whaling as is shown by his constant interjections of myth and exaggeration. ishmaels narrations goes on to illustrate man's nature to intertwine emotion with reality, thus proving the futility of understanding the world.
the obsessive pursuit of something larger than what men can understand in their finite knowledge is accumulated as the arrogance of ahab. ahab shows us that we are emotional beings who cast aside all rationality for ones personal gratification. it is an allegory of mans futile pursuit of understanding and commanding the world, ultimately, ahab shows us that man cannot escape his arrogance/ignorance. Moby-Dick or, The Whale (Penguin Classics)

Editorial Review:

(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed)

"As a revelation of human destiny it is too deep even for sorrow", was how D.H. Lawrence characterized MOBY-DICK. Published in the same five-year span as The Scarlet Letter, Walden, and Leaves of Grass, this great adventure of the sea and the life of the soul is the ultimate achievement of that stunning period in American letters.

The Best American Essays 2008 (The Best American Series)

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

Editorial Review:

Here you will find the finest essays "judiciously selected from countless publications" (Chicago Tribune), ranging from The New Yorker and Harper's to Swink and Pinch. In his introduction to this year's edition, Adam Gopnik finds that great essays have "text and inner text, personal story and larger point, the thing you're supposed to be paying attention to and some other thing you're really interested in."

David Sedaris's quirky, hilarious account of a childhood spent yearning for a home where history was properly respected is also a poignant rumination on surviving the passage of time. In "The Ecstasy of Influence," Jonathan Lethem ponders the intriguing phenomenon of cryptomnesia: a person believes herself to be creating something new but is really recalling similar, previously encountered work. Ariel Levy writes in "The Lesbian Bride's Handbook" of her efforts to plan a party that accurately reflects her lifestyle (which she notes is "not black-tie!") as she confronts head-on what it means to be married. And Lauren Slater is off to "Tripp Lake," recounting the one summer she spent at camp — a summer of color wars, horseback riding, and the "wild sadness" that settled in her when she was away from home.

In the end, Gopnik believes that the only real ambition of an essayist is to be a master of our common life. This latest installment of The Best American Essays is full of writing that reveals, in Gopnik's words, "the breath of things as they are."

The Wit and Wisdom of Mark Twain: A Book of Quotations (Dover Thrift Editions)

Mark Twain

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 13 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

The Wit and Wisdom of Mark Twain 4 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

Great for a coffee table book. It is full of the character of Mark Twain.

MT Fan 4 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

This book of quotations contains many observations dressed with great wit, humor and smarts that perhaps many can relate, but very few can put into words as only Twain can.

Save up! 1 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

Not only is the book small, somewhere between a pack of smokes and a wallet only thinner, it really doesn't capture the wordsmithing Twain was noted for. Damn shame attempt at revenue generation.

Notes from the Rock 5 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

The Wit and Wisdom of Mark Twain is fun to read and see what a master has had to quip about many daily things. It is always fun to see what Twain has to say. Dover makes very afforadble little books so we all can read the classics for less.

Editorial Review:

Invaluable ready reference, brimming with amusing and insightful quotes, includes hundreds of Twain’s most memorable quips and comments on life, love, history, culture, travel and diverse other topics, among them "He is now fast rising from affluence to poverty"; "Get your facts first, and then you can distort them as much as you please"; and "More than one cigar at a time is excessive smoking."

P.S.: Further Thoughts from a Lifetime of Listening

Studs Terkel

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

Editorial Review:

The Pulitzer Prize-winning oral historian and nonagenarian makes a selection of his favorite unpublished writings, broadcasts, and interviews.

Millions of Studs Terkel fans have come to know the prizewinning oral historian through his landmark books—"The Good War", Hard Times, Working, Will the Circle Be Unbroken?, and many others. Few people realize, however, that much of Studs's best work was not collected into these thematic volumes and has, in fact, never been published. P.S. brings together these significant and deeply enjoyable writings for the first time.

The pieces in P.S. reflect Studs's wide-ranging interests and travels, as well as his abiding connection to his hometown, Chicago. Here we have a fascinating conversation with James Baldwin, possibly Studs's finest interview with an author; pieces on the colorful history and culture of Chicago; vivid portraits of Studs's heroes and cohorts (including an insightful and still timely interview with songwriter Yip Harburg, known for his "Brother, Can You Spare a Dime"); and the transcript of Studs's famous broadcast on the Depression, the very moving essence of what was to become Hard Times.

A fitting postscript to a lifetime of listening, P.S. is a truly Terkelesque display of Studs's extraordinary range of talent and the amazing people he found to talk to.

Desert Solitaire

Edward Abbey

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 123 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Must reading 5 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

An early environmentalist even before the term came into use. Ranks up there with Sand County Almanac and Silent Spring. A must read for those who care about the environment. Abbey predicted some of the water problems that now face the southwest.

Editorial Review:

When Desert Solitaire was first published in 1968, it became the focus of a nationwide cult. Rude and sensitive. Thought-provoking and mystical. Angry and loving. Both Abbey and this book are all of these and more. Here, the legendary author of The Monkey Wrench Gang, Abbey's Road and many other critically acclaimed books vividly captures the essence of his life during three seasons as a park ranger in southeastern Utah. This is a rare view of a quest to experience nature in its purest form -- the silence, the struggle, the overwhelming beauty. But this is also the gripping, anguished cry of a man of character who challenges the growing exploitation of the wilderness by oil and mining interests, as well as by the tourist industry.

Abbey's observations and challenges remain as relevant now as the day he wrote them. Today, Desert Solitaire asks if any of our incalculable natural treasures can be saved before the bulldozers strike again.

Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America (America: a Cultural History)

David Hackett Fischer

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

America's Cradle 4 out of 5 stars.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful.

I have sometimes wondered what I am. I am of course me, but sometimes it seems there is no "we" that quite fits the "me". I am hardly alone in this and there are probably many Americans that feel this way.
Albion's Seed is a grand overview of where America comes from. Where our values and habits were born.
The author traces the history of four intertwining British cultures that he says are the foundation of America. These to put it roughly would be the Yankees, the Phillys, The Southern Gentry, and the Scots-Irish "Rednecks". He gives them all a more or less sympathetic protrayal showing strengths and weaknesses from each culture.
As an Oregonian I am probably more Yankee in blood then anything else. Or at least I would like to think I am a sharp New England son of the cold North Sea though my home state's cultural outlook really seems rather "Philly" by the description of the book. Which is perhaps as well as the "Philly" culture while least congenial to my imagination(though not unattractive even there)is most likely to leave me alone. But in any case I can see elements of all four in my habitual outlook. Some of the customs described I recognize as a relation to the way I was brought up. My Church, for instance, is governed in a New England sort of way with regular "town meetings" of the congregation, to choose deacons and review policy matters. I also recognize the Southern idea that citizenship is a badge of pride(this was corrupted by the way into a justification for slavery; Southerners were not being hypocritical in denying freedom to others-they thought one of the points of freedom was that it was a posession you could brag about), and the glorifying of honor(despite the distastefulness of some aspects of the old honor code). I can also appreciate the famed scots-irish orneryness a little even though I could never manage to live with it. And I very much admire the "Philly" ideal of liberty for all. It is probably an accident of geography but it is wholly fitting that America's first capital was Philadelphia.
Albion's Seed details the customs of the four strands with their complex adaptation to life. It shows how they confronted the day to day challenges and opportunities. It gives description of the reaction of each group to a series of categories of facets of life that the author believes every culture deals with.
It gives some space to the influence of non-british minorities, though that is not it's main concern. The subject of the book is British folkways after all.
Perhaps the main fault is that it is a little to deterministic. That is an easy fault and many fall into the opposite errors of assuming people are monolithic members of a group and assuming them to be atomistic individuals. A better way to describe life is that we are all who we are but our nature and nurture is part of us and we are part of it. And a way to appreciate yourself and others is to appreciate the background people come from. And when I read this book I can appreciate what it means, not only to be an American but to be an Oregonian and a son of New England's kin.

Editorial Review:

This fascinating book is the first volume in a projected cultural history of the United States, from the earliest English settlements to our own time. It is a history of American folkways as they have changed through time, and it argues a thesis about the importance for the United States of having been British in its cultural origins.
While most people in the United States today have no British ancestors, they have assimilated regional cultures which were created by British colonists, even while preserving ethnic identities at the same time. In this sense, nearly all Americans are "Albion's Seed," no matter what their ethnicity may be. The concluding section of this remarkable book explores the ways that regional cultures have continued to dominate national politics from 1789 to 1988, and still help to shape attitudes toward education, government, gender, and violence, on which differences between American regions are greater than between European nations.

101 Great American Poems (Dover Thrift Editions)

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

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 8 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

The American school anthology 5 out of 5 stars.
7 of 7 people found this review helpful.

This is a wonderful collection of American poetry classics. It contains most of the poems that have been taught through the years in American schools as the ' classics ' of American Literature. It does not really touch the American poetry of the past fifty years.
Most of its poems are the shorter poems of great poetic masters , for instance for Wallace Stevens, " Thirteen ways of looking at a blackbird' and the 'Emperor of Ice- Cream' but not the 'Idea of Order at Key West' for Eliot, " Prufrock" but not the "Wasteland " or the "Quartets".
A wonderful collection most highly recommended.

Excllent Read 5 out of 5 stars.
6 of 8 people found this review helpful.

This book is quite wonderful. It includes some of my all time favorite American Poets. I recommend it to anyone who likes poetry.

Also Recommended: Quotes, Poems, and Words That Flow by Kevin Grommersch

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.

As I Lay Dying

William Faulkner

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 191 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Homegoing 5 out of 5 stars.
15 of 15 people found this review helpful.

One of the most important writers of the twentieth century in any country, William Faulkner could tell a rousing tale. Check your collective memory. You're sitting around the campfire and the the storyteller begins.

When it is Faulkner, expect the unexpected. As I Lay Dying. As Dead I Am Carried to My Homeplace. The first sentence: "Jewel and I come up from the field, following the path in single file." When they get to the cottonhouse, Darl, the narrator takes the path around, Jewel goes straight--through one window and out the other. Cash, the oldest son, is making a wood coffin. (This is a very impoverished family in an impoverished South.) Their mother Addie is dying in bed and watching the building of the coffin through an open window. "It will give her confidence and comfort," Darl tells us through his first person thoughts.

If you want a study in dysfunctional families, go no further. Anse, the father, is a n'er-do-well, who is basically indifferent to the needs of those around him. Cash, the oldest, is a mighty fine carpenter, but a little slow on the uptake, while Darl, the only one who understands this family's pathos, is mentally ill. Dewey Dell, the only girl, is not conversant with the facts of life and makes this homegoing pilgrimage with hopes of doing away with the life she is carrying. Poor Vardaman, the youngest, will suffer the most in his total lack of understanding. His mother dies. She is in a coffin. He can hear her talk inside the coffin through the drill holes to give her air (she is decomposing in the hot Mississippi heat). And Jewel, the second youngest, is his name to Addie, the special son for a special reason.

When Faulkner wrote, he discarded all notions of what a writer is expected to do: tell a straightforward narrative. Sit where you are and go back in time to any episode. Plan a summer vacation in your mind. That's the premise Faulkner worked with. The mind is not a straightforward narrator. He depicts that backward and forward movement in his stories. He challenges the reader by never indicating where on the time line he is in telling the story.

In "As I Lay Dying," he goes a step further. He never tells who narrates the story until the reader figures out that the title of the chapter is also the narrator. The first chapter is entitled "Darl." He begins the story in his prescient, omniscient knowing.

Make no mistake. The story of the Bundrens taking Addie back to her homeplace for burial is a comic-tragic one. The person who most deserves punishment for his bad deeds is the one who is most rewarded. Faulkner was no optimist. But he was a chronicler of his times and of a defeated South and of resulting decaying values years after the fact.

If you are new to Faulkner, read this novel first, now that you know the secret to its puzzle in narration. Then imagine sitting around that collective campfire and hearing this story just as Faulkner wrote it. Puzzling on paper, clear in the telling. So Faulknerian!

Editorial Review:

At the heart of this 1930 novel is the Bundren family's bizarre journey to Jefferson to bury Addie, their wife and mother. Faulkner lets each family member--including Addie--and others along the way tell their private responses to Addie's life.

A separate peace

John Knowles

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 770 Average rating: 3.5 of 5

Schoolbook 4 out of 5 stars.
3 of 4 people found this review helpful.

You can see this title on the required summer reading tables in bookstores, and I guess schools have been assigning it for almost fifty years. It is easy to see why. Its characters are all adolescents, engaged in the usual struggle for self-definition, subject to sudden mood-swings between intense affection and crippling self-doubt. And being set in 1942-43, the years following America's entry into the War, it offers a new and valuable perspective on this important period in the nation's history. It is, in short, a teachable text.

But it is a text that requires teaching. For one thing, I am not sure how easily most young people can relate to the hermetic world of a single-sex boarding school, let alone an elite New England prep school (the Dover School of the book is surely modeled after Philips Exeter, which the author attended). Although there is no hint of the homoerotic attractions that were a significant issue at the similar English school I attended a decade later, the book demands some understanding of the emotional impact of a closed world, where one's friends are everything, and every feeling is intensified. The central character, Gene Forrester, though physically no slouch, is primarily a scholar; he is drawn into the magnetic ambience of his roommate Phineas (Finny), a natural athlete for whom no feat is impossible and no scheme too audacious. The plot turns on Gene's inability to discern his own motives, or even to work out whether Finny is his best friend or most jealous rival. A moment of ambiguity early in the novel triggers an event which, though apparently soon laid to rest, will resonate throughout the book, leading to much more serious consequences. A good teacher might profitably discuss questions of truth and perception, motive and blame, on a chapter-by-chapter basis, but Knowles is a subtle and balanced writer who avoids primary colors. The lone reader who does not stop to question the text might well be left with the impression that this is merely an elegant memoir in which little of consequence happens.

The title phrase occurs about two-thirds of the way through the book during an unofficial Winter Carnival that Finny has organized in the snowy fields: "It wasn't the cider that made me surpass myself, it was this liberation we had torn from the gray encroachments of 1943, the escape we had concocted, this afternoon of momentary, illusory, special and separate peace." The peace really is momentary; the very next paragraph introduces the first Devon casualty of the war, not fatal but nearly as devastating. Indeed, the war has been almost imperceptibly in the background for some time, but it now moves to the foreground, as the members of the graduating class move to enlist in one of the services. In the epilogue, Knowles has Gene take the war as a metaphor for the psychological battles fought at school over the past year. I am not certain that this works. But the brief moment when the two worlds, school and war, are temporarily balanced against one another is very poignant indeed.

Editorial Review:

One of a series of top-quality fiction for schools, this is the story of a friendship between two 16-year-old boys in an American boarding school - one a natural athlete and the other a scholar. Their different temperaments cause tensions that lead to tragedy.