european

Scott Seregny's well-researched monograph is a must for those seeking information on the intricate and important relationship between Russian teachers and zemstvo officials.

This is the final book in the Holme trilogy, a saga about a Viking thrall and his family. The book starts out with the aftermath of the destruction of the Christian church by Holme. He leads other thralls in an uprising for freedom, which ends in disaster. Once again, Holme is in trouble and must flee again. Holme goes to see the sympathetic king, and becomes his personal blacksmith. Holme's wife Ausi and daughter Tora move onto the king's settlement as well.

The family who originally owned Holme and Ausi is down to its last two surviving members - the old chieftains wife and their son. The old woman still wants vengence, meaning she wants to own Tora and Ausi once more. She's too afraid to want to own Holme again...he's far too dangerous. However, the son Svien has other ideas. He loves Tora and wants her to be his bride of her own free will. Svien works things out with Holme and things go well with Svien and Tora.

The clash between Christians and the worshippers of the old wooden gods comes to a head, and the battle between thralls and freemen continues. This is a very untraditional tale for the genre, written throughout with virtually no dialogue. Fridegard is a first-class storyteller, and infuses beautiful descriptions of wildlife and settings like a true master. The trilogy is a truly brilliant work of artistic literature.

Wonderful! The best, most readable book I have read by Barthes, and the best work I have read on Sade. Full of humor and insight with lots of savory biographical tidbits. The startlingly *natural* juxtaposition of Loyola, Fourier and Sade is cool and casual, not at all forced, and all the more remarkable for that. I read this in one sitting. You should too.

A chronological narrative of how Ford's European rally team set out to win the 1972 East African Safari Rally. It begins with Competitions Manager Stuart Turner getting budget approval from Walter Hayes, and follows the four team Ford Escorts through to victory by Hannu Mikkola and Gunnar Palm. Includes leg-by-leg scoring of the top five runners, and many photos, especially of the Ford team and their Escorts.

Part 2 of the book is a history of the East African Safari, originally called the "Coronation Rally" in honor of the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II in 1953. This part is written by John Davenport, another well known rallyist and rally writer.

If you are reading this, you are either an architect, an aficionado of architecture, or you are fascinated by Gaudi. Sure you already know that Gaudi used hanging weights and strings to design his structures. But did you ever notice that of each set of towers of the transept, two are closer together than the other two? Do you know what a hyperbolic parabaloid is? Have you ever seen computer drawn cross sections of the columns of the nave? Did you know that the column surfaces are made of interfering geometric shapes? Mr. Burry, an architect on the Sagrada Familia staff, describes this, the history behind the construction, and more about this magnificent church-to-be. The book includes sections with detailed photographs and drawings of the nave and the two facades of the transept.

'Grandly conceived and executed' .... 'Magnificent'.... 'Nothing less than masterly' ... critical tributes offered Sartre's Saint Genet that end as mere words. Saint Genet is an unearthly book wrought with the passion of a gospel narrative, explicit and wrenching. It is, finally, an entire act of redemption. The language is apocryphal and never operatic, epic in delivery, even greater than it seems; page upon page of an exceeding pure, and never vulgarly rich, damask brocade! I'll not critique Sartre's thought --it's privilege enough to be presented it!-- but this seminal work is a miraculous construct of human will and unbearable genius that will live forever, a complex and magisterial book ranking among the great achievments of modern literature because of its erudition, humanity, and fierce literary reach. There is not a page that doesn't honor wisdom, nor is there a single idle component. It is indisputably Sartre's crowning achievment as a genius, and as a man. The evocative humanity of two literary giants of the 20th century plays like a dance, the captured aesthetic of which Sartre reveals; everything is taken to the temple of Genet, everything explained, everything mortified, slain and remade. Reading this book is a revealing experience; be willing to be stolen. Theft happens in broad daylight, perpetrators already known.. My favorite chapter is 'Cain,' in which Sartre makes his most profound arguments about Genet as Other, Genet as the living inverse Liturgy, and presents a stupefying image of his subject: 'Everything is possessed, worked, occupied, from the sky to the subsoil...' Intimidating in its greatness.

This is the best novel that I have read from XXth century Spanish literature. Through a deep emotional and profound language, Esther Tusquets introduces us into the world of this female narrator whose name is not spelled out in the entire novel. At the same time, El mismo mar de todos los veranos explores female subjectivity in an unprecedented way, and it is the first Spanish novel ever to portray lesbianism in its literature. Through this creative language full of metaphors, imagery, symbolism, and stories, the narrator introduces us into her world and into her mind, in fact, throughout the whole novel, it is the mind and experience of this anonymous narrator that the reader explores. El mismo mar de todos los veranos at the same time presents a critical portrayal of marriage, family, and heterosexuality, showing that women's experience is very limited; the narrator has always felt unsatisfied and a deep sense of failure when it comes to the traditional roles that are assigned to women (wife, lover, daughter, mother), leaving her with nothing else but language, words, metaphors, imagery and a deep desire to tell past stories. It is this intimate language that shows how female experience and homosexuality (in this particular case lesbianism) can only exist in isolation, and it is precisely in this state of isolation that past and present will coexist. What personally passionates me about this novel is that it portrays our precarious and insignificant existence as human beings; when we have lost the love of our lives, when all our dreams and expectations have never come true, or when they at least are not what we would have expected them to be or what we believed they should have been, when all the tenderness and love have gone away, we are only left with a deep sensation of sadness and emptiness, and the only things that we have left are language, words, metaphors, symbolism, and the desire to relive and retell a painful past.
An excellent masterpiece to be read by every contemporary reader.

Three elements distinguish Barbara Deimling's outstanding introductory study of Botticelli, one of the High Kings of Western culture:

1. Her account of the artist's work, with detailed analyses of Botticelli's densely allegorical paintings (not just in his world-renowned mythological scenes 'Primavera' and 'Birth of Venus', but his more numerous religious works also); the influence on him of literature, from classical poetry to the Bible and theology to Dante (some of the famous sketches for whose 'Divine Comedy' are included here); and the development of his celebrated style, from the sumptouosness of his mid-period, with its graceful, idealised human figures and concern with architectural perspective, to the austere late works, marking a rejection of Renaissance 'realism', and a return to the stylisation and exagerration of the Gothic period, and a new emotional charge, particularly in some harrowing crucifixion and lamentation scenes.

2. The use of Botticelli as a model for the teaching of art history. Deimling is not content to treat Botticelli as a lone genius who transcended his time, and concentrating solely on his pictures' form and content. By placing Botticelli firmly in the historical realities of 15th century Florence (its economic worldliness giving onto religious hysteria and acopalyptic moods near its end), Deimling shows that every one of his paintings bears the imprint, not only of the period's aesthetic innovations, but of the patrons who commissioned him. Aesthetic choices - such as the use of gold-leaf paint - is decided not by inner imperative, but the desire of a patron to show off his wealth and status, or a merchants' guild to advertise their wares. Colours, motifs, even figures in the paintings, represent the important figures of the day, and the symbolism of their professions and families. The surprise is not that Botticelli was a unique genius, but that he managed to create works inspiring spiritual awe in such a mundane, compromised context.

3. The usual high Taschen quality of plates, admirably reproducing Botticelli's colours, especially the glowing reds that streak his work. Many Botticelli paintings are too big and long to be adequately reproduced, but there is an intelligent use of details to give the reader some idea of his art. If I have one complaint, it is the downplaying of Botticelli's humour and eroticism, but what do you want in 96 pages?

Although the german edition went through subsequent editions and is a staple in that country, this English translation of the second edition enjoyed only a brief life. Yet the only rival in English for those interested in its Indo-European background is T. Burrow's "Sanskrit Language" which is more descriptive than pedagogic.

Of the several translations of Sappho's work into English during the past two decades, Powell's ranks highest in three regards:

His translations bring the immediacy and nuance of Sappho more clearly to the fore.

While not encumbering the text, there is more scholarly supporting material (written so as to be accessible to the lay person as well as useful to the scholar) available in this volume than in any other.

Finally, while the poems that have reached us nearly in-tact are presented in most volumes of Sappho, Powell's book makes available many smaller fragments that have been lost to English-speakers for years in anything but the most inaccessible volumes.

-Nathan