Form-T Books

A great overview of a very powerful and inspiring movment in art. An art era long forgotten, yet one of a kind in its ground breaking reaches. The Dada Seminars begins to touch on these sort of fleating happenings the artists that made them happen and the results of their labors. The book picks at every facet of this movement in a very academic scholarly way. A rather great indeapth read sheading more light on this time past.

This book is about the author's experiences and thoughts as a normal American. It is a great way to use up usless time because the stories are short yet they really make you think of life today, 20 years ago(when it was written)and through recent history. I also think it is a good book to read when your not in the mood for class for this book has little to none.

I'm not sure how firm a basis this book has in the actual reality of Glen Baxter's life, but it's fun and interesting to read. He does his usual combination of pictures and writing, but this time there's an actual story running through the entire book. He talks about his birth, school, neighbors, relatives, vacations, and more. A few of the pictures are in color, in the same style of coloring you can find in _The Further Blurtings of Baxter_. One of my biggest problems with this book, and the reason why I didn't give it a 5, was the way the text and images were handled. Often, the text pertaining to a particular picture would be found on one page and you'd have to turn the page to see the actual picture. This delay between reading the words and seeing the image took away some of the humor. It was also a bit confusing at first, since I kept thinking that the text on the right was referring to the image on the left. That seems logical, but that's not always how this book was set up.

This is a reprint of the 1898 book, The Golfer's Alphabet, a fun and funny book which today's golfers will appreciate just as much as their great-grandfathers did.

So funny--and true---this collection of funny essays about life as a senior kept me laughing from beginning to end. George truly is the Dave Barry of the geriatric set.

Good Basic Instruction to help older people who have never had any art instruction to begin.

This is a book I have found helpful during my seminary study. It has helped me understand the wide variety of forms in the New Testament and how that effects my understanding of parts of scripture

Caminero-Santangelo challenges the long-held feminist belief that historically women have utilized insanity as a means of cultural resistance. The book both analyzes contemporary theory on the issue - including the emphasis French feminists have placed on the linguistic construction of the "feminine" voice and its association with madness - and historical studies on female insanity. Through a close reading of such books as "The Bell Jar," "Girl, Interrupted," and "The Bluest Eye," she asserts that women textually represent insanity as a "loss of voice," rather than a liberatory experience. Further, she demonstrates that historians and theorists have overlooked patients' choices where they conflict with the "madness as feminism" position - particularly in cases where patients view psychiatrists or psychiatric treatment favourably. This book does much to challenge our assumptions about female insanity and perceptions of psychiatric practice. While one might dispute the claim that insane women *cannot* have a voice, Caminero-Santangelo does demonstrate the dangers inherent in the presumption that insanity was a means to personal power.

This is the story of a literary mystery that a professor stumbled across, when editing a collection of the letters of Mary Shelley (author of FRANKENSTEIN, widow of the poet, and daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin). Who were David Lyndsay and Walter Sholto Douglas? Who was Isabella Robinson Douglas? Why the mysterious references to Lord M? The author spent time researching the private family papers of the family of a notable Scottish family, the birth and marriage records of Isabella Robinson Douglas's daughter, the wife of a very prominent Victorian man. And she found - not only a mystery that crosses gender and class lines, but also a mystery that points out how much the information we take for granted from such worthy primary sources as birth and marriage certificates, or entries in the august Dictionary of National Biography, can be false or falsified deliberately. At one level, this book should appeal to academic sleuths with a love of history and a particular fondness for the period 1815-1850 (roughly, crossing the late Regency and early Victorian period); at another level, this should appeal to any serious reader of historical fiction who is interested in women's lives, and who wonders how far the truth may or may not deviate from the fictional variants.

A suggestion: truth is sometimes stranger than fiction, although it is hard for some (mostly male) critics to swallow. Private scandals and peccadilloes (usually of a sexual nature) have been covered over for decades, even centuries. Today, an academic researching on a different subject or an amateur genealogist trying to find out more about his or her ancestor/ancestress may stumble across the long-hidden truth. This book MARY DIANA DODS is not just about an ambitious woman who is fairly ruthless in attempting to better her social standing (and that of her daughter) but the fate of many illegitimate children in the 19th century as well as young widows and unmarried daughters who were dependent on the males in their family for recognition as well as financial support. And now the spoilers follow -

A short summary with spoilers follows (do not read further if you want to solve the mystery along with the author)

Mary Shelley meets a couple Mr and Mrs Walter Sholto Douglas abroad, or does she? It turns out that Walter Sholto Douglas is a woman, and one with an astonishing if unacknowledged paternal pedigree. And his "wife" Isabella Robinson is apparently not his lesbian lover, but a young woman of moderately good family who has fallen into disgrace (a pre-marital pregnancy). To avoid shame and to legitimize her child, she and "Walter Sholto Douglas" (whose name gives a clue to her paternal ancestry) pretend to be man and wife; that is, Douglas, or rather Mary Diana Dods, becomes a man, aided by Shelley and her friends. And then, Isabella Robinson is involved with other men (hardly a surprise), and Douglas/Dods disappears. Isabella recreates herself as the mother-in-law of a Privy Councillor who is fully aware of his wife's shady family circumstances (born illegitimate, born into a marriage that never existed, to a father who was actually a woman). Their deceptions are revealed only when an American academic, puzzling over Mary Shelley's correspondents more than a century later, finds out that firstly two of the missing correspondents are the same, and secondly, that they are a woman. One of her male identities was that of Walter Sholto Douglas. The book should be read and savoured not for this and other revelations (as to how Dods/Douglas and Robinson pulled off their initial deception, or how Isabella Robinson maneuvered her daughter into a suitable marriage), but for the process by which such discoveries are made - hard work, an eye for detail, a memory for names and dates, and a good dose of serendipidity.

The only reason I don't rate this higher is that I wished that firstly, there had been an appendix listing the documentary trail followed by Betty Bennett, and that secondly, there had been a listing of the names and characters (with a summary of their future lives) in the story in a second appendix. Although Bennett discusses the lives of aristocratic bastards in several chapters, and in one chapter in particular where she compares the fate of the widowed Georgiana Carter (nee Dods) and her unmarriageable sister Mary Diana Dods, it would also have been helpful to put this in greater context. For example, how did their father's treatment of them compare with that of other aristocratic fathers? How did their lives compare with that of unmarried or widowed young women, penniless and dependent totally on men? The emphasis in this book was on the process of discovery, and thus these other parts to the story were somewhat neglected in my opinion.

This is still a book that I recommend highly. Rating: 4.5

I loved this book, there was lots of variety between the different story excerpts, many different scenarios and pairings of people, so something for everyone. Some of these short stories are among my favorites, and i've bought the full length versions of 2 of them. Excellent one-handed reading but if you want to get involved with the characters probably better to stay with a full length story.