Paris

This is a light coffee table book that provides a kind of greatest hits list of the collection. A collection that is so big no one single book would really do it justice. Overall I think this book does a fine job at its purpose, which is to provide you a little history and meaning on some selected works. This book is almost akin to a travel memento picture book. The book for me reminds me to always stop by the Museum when I am in Paris

My favourites among the lightweight crime novels of Simon Brett that feature actor cum sleuth Charles Parris are those set against a background of the live theatre and What Bloody Man Is That falls into this category.
Parris is engagaed to appear in provincial repertory theatre in a production of MacBeth-not,alas for him ,in either the title role or a significant supporting part ,but in a variety of small roles.It is a production for which the omens are not good.The title role is in the hands of an actor whose recent career has been in a television sitcom,and who has forgotten many of the disciplines of the classical theatre;his Lady MacBeth is a promising young actress used to the more leisurely and academic approach of the subsidised theatre and who is aghast at the short rehearsal time and text cutting inherent in the commercial world.Add to this a cast member who is a predatory old roue who turns up dead and there is every reason to believe that Shakespeares play will live up to its reputation an "unlucky"
The mystery is not deep but the brisk pace and jaunty writing keeps things lively and diverting,and there are some wry observations about the way the young generation of schoolkids have to be dragged along to see the Bard,and the unenthusiastic response of the MTV audience to the classics.Brett is especially good on the cameraderie between actors who operate below the level of stardom.
One for those who like their mysteries breezy and light and especially if they are devotees of the thespic arts.

Diane Johnson's novel Le Mariage presents the reader with a fun cast of characters, focusing on Americans in Paris and their French connections. The French Anne-Sophie and the American Clara Holly, the female halves of the two couples who are at the center of the book, are the most interesting characters. Anne-Sophie's bewilderment about, and fascination with, American customs and Americans is well done, especially in the trip to Oregon near the end of the novel. Adding a Parisian-in-America aspect puts a new twist on the themes Johnson explored in her previous novel Le Divorce.

Clara Holly, an actress from Oregon now living outside Paris, has more depth than Anne-Sophie and presents another side of the American-French story. The reader watches her struggle with her feelings about living in France, her relationship with her mother, and her responsibilities as a wife, both to her husband and to herself.

The emotional intricacies of the characters and the culture clashes that result when the Americans and the French interact are the best part of the novel. Although the French phrases Johnson scatters around seem more jarring than authentic, she does a very good job of showing how members of the two different cultures react to the same events. These reactions are funny and sometimes illuminating.

The plot of the novel, however, is convoluted and, especially when dealing with the Oregon millennialists, a little bit out there. By the end of the novel, the main plot lines have come together, but it doesn't really matter. At that point, the characters have already become more interesting than the plot. There are some loose ends that never get tied, though, and some issues are never resolved. Still, the novel is fun, and definitely worth reading for anyone with an interest in seeing French culture through American eyes and vice versa.

This author can Write with a capital W. I will say that I enjoyed "Le Divorce" by the same author even more, but this book was also very good. If you are looking for something to read that is set in France, this is just the ticket. If you also enjoyed "Le Divorce" then you will appreciate the threads of commonality between these two books; antiques, the nuances of culture and behavior between Americans and the French, etc. You get a little bit of everything, romance, travel and mystery.

Following "Le Divorce," a National Book Awardfinalist, Diane Johnson's latest novel, "Le Mariage," isanother comedy of manners set in the expatriate American community inParis. Johnson, who divides her time between Paris and San Francisco, casts an insightful eye over the cultural differences, wholesale assumptions and misperceptions of national character embraced by the French and the Americans who live among them.

The story centers around the upcoming nuptials of American freelance journalist Tim Nolinger and his stylish French fiancée, Anne-Sophie. A horse-oriented antiques dealer, Anne-Sophie's bourgeois ambitions puzzle her famous novelist mother, Estelle, who cultivates a bohemian public persona while harboring highly practical concerns over Tim's ability to provide for her daughter...

The novel's framework, with its increasingly zany and convoluted but believable plot lines, offers a solid scaffold for the dynamics of relationship that feed Johnson's witty observations on marriage, infidelity, morality, bureaucracy and cultural chauvinism. Her humor is dry and tart, but, for the most part, sunny. And her characters are delightful. A sophisticated treat.

I'm hoping this is the author's first book. From the jacket descriptions and the subject matter I thought this would be a sure winner just to put me in the mood of Paris in the fall. But the writing was so tepid and clumsy, the characters so poorly sketched and the dialogue either so badly written or falsely pretentious that I couldn't even finish half of this book. The sex scenes are basically just snapshots of the author's own perversions and are neither necessary nor believable. To me this book is a complete failure. If you were drawn, like me, to France and the idea of intelligent romance read James Salter or James Baldwin instead. You will be glad that you did.

BTW

4 characters. Luke. Alex. Sahra. Nicole. Living in Paris. In love. Having fun. Having sex. Taking drugs. Uh-huh. What else? Not much.

Reading this book was like eavesdropping on a conversation. At its best, the tale told was amusing, sometimes curious and I read with uncommitted interest. At its worst, it was as insipid as any conversation one might overhear between strangers. And, to me, these characters remained strangers - indistinct, faded strangers - from start to 300-page finish. What specific insights and traits a reader could glean from the characters, Dyer spoon-feeds us through direct narration and heavy-handed depictions instead of subtle guidance and gestures. I couldn't understand why any of these character would consider the others interesting or compelling. Moreover, there did not seem to be any ultimate truth or principle in the novel that was worth pondering over. (The theme of "living out one's destiny no matter the cost" was weak and, at least in the way Dyer developed it, not worth more than a few seconds thought.)

Oddly, the strength of this novel was that it *did* make me feel as if I were eavesdropping. As I read (listened to) their conversations, stories, and jokes, observed their interactions, I was vaguely curious about their lives and relationships with one another in the same remote way I'd be interested in 4 people sitting next to me in a cafe. In other words, from a distance, the interaction between the characters and the outward structure of the relationships seemed real. But, when I tried to become more interested in Luke, Alex, Sahra and Nicole as individuals, I realized that I couldn't. There just wasn't anything there.

I thought this book was very well written. It kept my attention as many don't. All-in-all a very good read.

I read Panama for my high school book club, and frankly found it quite short of my expectations. The writing is very hard to follow sometimes. Zencey goes into these philosophical musings that seem to have very little to do with the subject at hand. Also, the female characters are very poorly drawn. It's hard to see why the main character Henry goes chasing after a woman he only saw twice, and when there also seemed to be little affection or attraction between them. The end is very unsatisfactory - anti climactic in a way. In all, the novel fails to really draw me in, and is not very satisfactorily written. If you are really looking for a good historical mystery, you'd be better off reading something by Ellis Peters or Glen Davis Gold.

Thoroughly exciting historical novel delivering multi-level suspense by the bushelful.

Set in 1880's Paris, Zencey vividly portrays the failings of the political system and the accompanying corruption in the French attempt to build the Panama Canal. Zencey's background as a historian adds to the qult of detail in this novel. I only wish that he will become prolific in his writings

I read this book several months ago and so I don't remember all the details of it. I do remember that it was a very enjoyable read. The plot is very clever and complex, the characters are interesting and well defined, and there is some action and suspense in some parts. The best thing about this book is its atmosphere; you really feel transported to late nineteenth century Paris. I wouldn't say that it was an outstanding novel, but it definately deserves a lot more than the one star some reviewers gave it.

Ms. Paris is not a historian. She admits that primary sources are scarce. She has produced an "explanation" of how the Jews of Germany could have been taken in 500 years after the events decribed and how the "fear of the Other" continues today.

This is a hard read as she skips back and forth and from place to place. She details the pogroms but not the accomplishments of the Jewish community. She virtually ignores the events in the rest of Europe and cannot tell us why Spain was different from France or Italy.

I picked up this book when looking for something on Muslim/Christian relations in 15th century Spain.

Here is a summary of the book's theme: The Catholic church, in general, and the Spanish Catholic church, in particular, have been attempting to eradicate the Jews for the last 1400 years (at least). In the year 712, Muslims brought multi-culturalism to Spain. The resulting golden-age of tolerance was ended by Catholic bigotry, lies and murders. The book retells Spanish history in terms of crimes against the Spanish Jewish people (people who practiced the Jewish faith and those whose Spanish ancestors were Jewish but practiced Catholic Christianity themselves). Particular attention is given to the anti-Jewish riots of 1391 and inquisition, but these events are linked to more contemporary Catholic crimes.

I found the details of Spanish history interesting. This period is particularly ugly to our modern sensibility and English speaking historians seem to avoid it. For example, Queen Isabella looks like a good candidate for modern feminist biography. She created one of the first modern states and financed the first European adventures in the Western Hemisphere. Despite this, the Amazon website has only 1 post-1950 biography on her. I suspect her role in establishing the Spanish inquisition seems decidedly un-feminist.

I don't recommend this book. The author naively accepts various first person accounts from the era when they support her case. At one point, she retells the miraculous story of Jewish children having visions of Christian crosses entirely without a modern skepticism. It simply happened. Less sentimental was her naive acceptance of the racist premise that being a 'converso' (Spanish Catholics with a Jewish ancestor) had some sort of biological reality. Somehow, the persecution of these Christians was a crime against the Jewish race because the biological reality of race was more important than the details of faith.

The conventional wisdom on the Spanish Inquisition, (see B. Netanyahu's "The Origins of the Inquisition in Fifteenth-Century Spain") takes the view that the Spanish sovereigns let the 'coversos' be attacked in order to distract the outraged city masses and their leaders from turning against the royal establishment itself. In other words, it was a media campaign to control the 'masses' via propaganda. For example, King Ferdinand himself was a 'converso', but he continually used the inquisition to suppress opposition to his innovations in tax policy.

The 'revisionist' view (see The Spanish Inquisition: A Historical Revision by H.Kamen) suggests the modern understanding of the inquisition is Marxist propaganda of the 20th century. If you can take this perspective for a moment, the fact Paris ignores the 13th century expulsion of Jews from Muslim Spain suggests Paris fits Kamen's critique. For Paris, the only villain is the Catholic Church.

In The End of Days, Erna Paris's quest has taken her into the chronicles and archives of the "astonishing world" of the Moors in Spain - civilized, learned, tolerant - and its dynamic Jewish communities. Of the Holy Reconquest of Spain by Christian armies, of religious fanaticism, wholesale destruction of Jewish and Muslim monuments in an age of grisly plagues and pogroms. Paris is well-served by her material. And she has a powerful message. Our civility as a nation can be measured by our tolerance of minorities. Religious and racial intolerance violently transformed one of the richest pluralistic societies in Europe - Moorish Spain - into a society of savage conformism and fear at the brink of the modern age. That themes of this magnitude for our time arise from a retelling of event from 15th century Spain is a testimony of the powerful and fluent sweep of "The End of Days."

Weather and energy derivatives constitute a 'hot' topic in the derivatives market with new articles, reviews and websites sprouting everywhere. So, this book may seem a timely publication on the topic, given the fact that there are very few publications available on this topic.

However, unless you know nothing about the subject, I do not recommend to buy this book: timeliness seems to be its only quality.

Most articles are descriptive of products and markets and contain little information of interest to risk managers / traders / insurance professionals working in the field. The article on options is a general article on Black Scholes with little or no relevance to energy or weather derivatives.

In brief, it looks as if this book were written for purely commercial purposes. Definitely not worth its high price.

Since my first review, a number of people have asked for more comments on this book. I have therefore written a more detailed review:

This book contains a series of articles covering developments in the areas of Insurance Derivatives, Securitisation and Weather Derivatives. The Weather Derivatives section comprises four articles written by key industry players. It serves as a useful introduction to the weather derivatives market for the newcomer.

The first article provides a broad introduction to weather derivative instruments, contrasting them with weather insurance products. It looks at the weather risk market in terms of the energy chain, from producers through to consumers. The article gives an overview of the most common type of weather derivative presently traded, those based on "degree days". Finally, valuation of weather derivatives is touched on.

The second article presents the current state of the weather derivatives market and summarises the types of deal that have been entered into to date.

The final two articles provide a more in-depth analysis of pricing degree day instruments and cover issues such as: ·Establishing correlations between revenue streams and temperature variables; ·Use of historical data to extrapolate valuations, including a brief look at the appropriate selection of data and 'de-trending' issues; ·Introduction to stochastic temperature modelling; ·Using value at risk techniques in the context of weather derivatives.

Some of the articles in the book are freely available in the public domain, and this may deter potential purchasers interested in weather derivatives from buying the book. In addition, the book would benefit from some advanced articles covering the use of more sophisticated valuation techniques. As it stands, however, this book is a useful introduction for newcomers to this rapidly growing market, with well chosen articles that provide a good basic grounding.

There are only four chapters on weather derivatives themselves and these seem, at a glance, to be mainly re-writes of material that is already available on the internet, e.g. one written by Enron, one by Southern Company Energy Marketing.

Nevertheless, the contributors are key players in the market and this book serves as a useful summary of the available literature. I would have liked to see some advanced material, including explanation of more sophisticated pricing models, but that is perhaps best left to a subsequent text.

The book is certainly not cheap, though it is not unreasonably priced - especially when compared to the amount of money companies are throwing away through failing to manage their weather risks...

Third in the Covert-One series, this novel opens with a literal bang. Someone has destroyed with explosives one of the laboratory buildings in the famed Pasteur Institute. Not only is the building leveled, but also in the raging fire that followed, the world's first DNA or molecular computer was destroyed as well as its creator Dr. Emile Chamberland. For Covert-One agent Jon Smith the attack is personal as his good friend Dr. Marty Zellerbach was gravely injured. In addition, because of some very strange events surrounding military communications, there is a possibility the computer was not destroyed and may be in the hands of terrorists.

Soon, Jon Smith arrives in Paris and finds his good friend lying near death in a coma. In fact, Jon Smith arrives just in time to prevent a second murder attempt on his friend's life. At the same time, someone apparently using the new computer manages to bring down the entire United States utility and communication grids. Deaf and blind, the United Sates stands vulnerable to attack and the terrorists seem to be seeing how much havoc they can cause before they launch their final cataclysmic strike. With the fate of the world in the balance as well as his friend's life, Jon begins to follow the complex trail to the terrorists and their secret lair.

While that is the premise of what could have been a very enjoyable book, the execution is fatally flawed. Despite it's Bond style ending, much of this book commits the cardinal sin for any thriller. Boredom. This book is an incredible flat, dull read and quite a disappointment. This book is work to read and becomes a long march through the mud of boredom to reach the closing fifty pages that are mediocre at best.

While for long time readers of the late Robert Ludlum it has always been clear that this series did not stand up to Ludlum standards, the other two novels were at least fairly enjoyable. Both The Hades Factor (Coauthor Gayle Lynds) and The Cassandra Compact (coauthor Philip Shelby) while overwritten at times featured plenty of action and engaged the reader at least somewhat. However, in this novel, the overwriting is extremely prevalent throughout the novel and the read is entirely flat and without emotion. Even in scenes where, for example, terrorists are attacking Marty's hospital room, the sense of emotion or nerve-racking danger prevalent in Ludlum works is nowhere apparent.

The boredom factor is enhanced by the fact that released as a large trade paperback; this novel is 425 pages long. One gets the sense that the authors were paid by the word. Or that Gayle Lynds was unable to correctly follow Robert Ludlum's famous multi hundred plus page outline to properly create the work. The result is a novel that is seriously weaker than the first novel of the series, which she co-authored, and a sign that the series may die without the influence of the legendary master.

The novel is action packed, well written and not to technical. This novel is a delight to read. The best part of the novel has to be the clarity of the vocabulary. I don't need a Phd in molecular science to enjoy this book. Ludlum times this book to the word. He has intense action and miraculous plans. He paces the book like the winding roads in Monaco lots of danger and cliff hangers. I can't say enough about this book it is a reccomended read.

Robert Ludlum's Covert One Novel the Paris Option lives up to the high standards of the Ludlum Legacy. In his third book featuring Operative Colonel Jon Smith (The Hades Effect, The Cassandra Compact); Ludlum keeps readers on their toes with many plot changing twists and turns. In this thriller of a novel the cunning Jon Smith with the help of his old friends MI6 Agent Peter Howell, Computer Genius Marty Zellerbach, and CIA Agent Randi Russell have to stop dangerous terrorist with the powerful DNA Computer before they launch a Nuclear Attack on America. Smith and his friends follow a trail of clues to finally catch up to the terrorist for a surprise ending. This book is highly suspenseful and one of my favorite Ludlum's yet.

When deciding to listen to this book on audio cassette, I paid
more attention to the title (Paris being a place I love) than to the author. I have never actually read anything by this author before, but I know she is in the romance genre, which I do not read. But this has to be the bottom of the barrel even for this genre.

Everyone is gorgeous, a fact that we are told nearly every time a particular character comes onto the scene; everyone is
highly successful; even though Maria had been fat, she lost 38
pounds in 3 months, and kept it off (everyone who has had that experience, please raise your hand!), a feud that broke up the
friendship of the four women seven years previous was mended
after a bitchy screaming match that lasted about 15 minutes and
then they all became great pals again.

I often had the impression that this book was written primarily
for 1) money, and 2) to show off the knowledge of Ms. Bradford
in all things "cultured" from clothes to art to cuisine to wine.
Unfortunately Ms. Bradford does not believe that her readership
are members of the culturally elite because she finds it necessary to explain to them (for instance) who Gainsborough and Turner are. I guess mentioning that the character was looking at paintings was not a broad enough hint.

I suppose that among some die hard "Dallas" fans there might
be a person or two who could actually love this book, but I
think you would have to dig pretty deep.

What I find particularly sad, or perhaps irritating, is that
Rosenblatt is such a talented narrator. Why does she find it
necessary to take on such drivel?

This book could have been half as long if you take out all the long boring descriptions of everything. BTB gives way too much information about what the room looks like, what the characters are wearing, etc. Using your imagination is one of the great things about reading a book. I should have learned from the last BTB book I read. This one is the last.

Sorry I did not wait to buy this book used. Was not worth the full price I paid.....The main characters were very predictable and kind of boring....You know from the start where this story is going....Too much descriptions of the streets of Paris and houses....The story is about four women who return to Paris 7 years after graduating from Anya Sedgwick's School of Decorative Art....These women were best friends while attending school, but had a terrible fight and left after graduating. each persuing her own life and career without contacting each other all the years since..... They each received an invitation to attend their beloved teacher, Anya's 85th birthday party......They all attended and the rest of the story is spent rekindling old memories and revisiting all their old haunts.....etc. etc...If you want to read this book I suggest you borrow it from your library.

I became immediately suspicious of this book when I noticed that only one of the blurbs on the back cover came from an art historian of this period; the others were from a historian, pop-historian Ken Burns, a museum director, and Kirkus Reviews. And in reading the book, I understand why no other scholars of 19th & 20th century American art reviewed the text. In overwrought prose, alternatively patronizing and celebratory, Cohen-Solal suggests that France is responsible for all that is good in American art. As an author born in Algeria, I would think that she would avoid such a colonialist paradigm. She misses completely that the experience of American artists was one of transatlantic exchange, as they worked to reconcile their European training with their American environment. Cohen-Solal leaves interesting questions--such as why Americans and American artists responded to Impressionism before the French--unanswered. And the text has several factual errors, for example she writes of an American "economic boom" in 1894, when that year marked the first of a 4-year economic depression in America. For those interested in a text on this subject, but one that focuses on exchange instead of a franco-centric bias, I would suggest Wanda Corn's The Great American Thing.

A shallow overview, off-puttingly Euro-centric. In addition, Cohen-Solal, who has little or nothing to offer as an art critic aside from literal descriptions of the content of each work, habitually defaults to the rather off-putting modus of the second-rate cultural critic by habitually tracing influences (X's work shows the influences of W,Y & Z, etc.).

Anyway, here's something from page 258 that in many ways epitomizes for me what's wrong with this book: 'Marchel Duchamp--the "most eccentric and the most inexplicable human being who ever came" to the city which, according to some, had become the "cultural capital of the world"--was on the way to becoming, for many generations, the true father of American art.'

Sorry honey, but anyone inclined to think that Marchel Duchamp -- the expatriated Frenchman who spent precious little time in America doing anything except cadging a living -- is the father of American art has no credibility whatsoever as either a critic or an historian.

I have nearly completed 'Painting American' and have found it to be a fine review of an interesting period. As a student of the American Gilded Age I found that Cohen-Solal's book represented this period well. Yes, there are some inaccuracies (i.e. George Hearst not George Hearn. Cornelius Vanderbilt did not buy Rosa Bonheur paintings, his son William H did) but what made the book interesting to me was her use of seldom accessed European sources written at the turn of the century; newspaper reviews of America and American artists, rare memoirs of the various players, even buisness files of art dealers. This is something unlikely to be found from an American historian writing on the same subject. Does the book have a 'French slant' as the previous reviewer objects to? Well, yes because France absolutely was THE main source of art training and education at that time. There's no way around that. If that bothers the previous reviewer then he better not read any books about the history of American architecture for he would find that nearly all the leading American architects of that period were trained in Paris and therefore most of their creations in this country are Beaux Arts inspired. This includes the New York Met Museum, most of the still standing Gilded Age mansions, the interior decoration of the White House (subcontracted out to a French firm by McKim, Reed and White), etc.