european

As we all know, Therese Martin carries the burden of the late 19th century bourgeois French idiom. Having said that, if one is willing to look beyond that, these are wonderful poems. What courage this young woman had! I find particularly moving her poem, "the unpetaled rose." What unflinching courage she models for us.

"The Poetry of Saint Therese of Lisieux" is the English translation of the critical edition of Therese's poetry. For the first time it makes available in English all Therese's poems, her least known writings. Some ("Living on Love," "Why I Love You, O Mary," "The Unpetalled Rose") are major works; some, occasional writings. Fr. Kinney's intimate and delicate understanding of Therese has blossomed into a remarkably clear, faithful, and lyrical translation. Therese reveals herself completely in the poems, which have an atmosphere of unguarded tenderness, of a child at play in the universe, searching all creation for images sufficient to tell her love for the Creator. While expressing freely the atmosphere of freshness, innocence, and playful abandon that surrounds Therese's poems, Fr. Kinney also gives the reader access to the graphic and stark images which spoke to Therese. The notes to these 54 poems enrich our understanding of Therese and of her relationships with the sisters and brothers for whom many of them were written. In this book Therese is as completely available to the reader as she was to those with whom she lived, to whom she tried to be "an open book."

You know how Time Life comes out with those informercials selling CD collections - claiming that if you tried to buy all the different albums for the songs that they have all in one set, you would spend hundreds of dollars?

Well, it's kind of the same deal with art books. I will wait YEARS if necessary to buy the right book of XYZ artist - and my search ended with the Portable Magritte. It is not a particularly LARGE book, but if you are looking for a favorite work, you are more likely to find it here than in other books!

Good book.. All pictures of all Magritte's works. good coffee table book.

I very much enjoyed this book and feel that it is a valuable addition to any art lover's or historian's bookshelf.

This beautifully produced and elegantly written book taught me an enormous amount about a subject about which I knew little. While it is very intellegent and erudite, the author takes pains to make her fascinating subject matter accessible to non-academic readers as well.

It is a wonderful investment and you should put it on the top of your gift-buying list for any friends, male or female, who are interested in art, in women's history, France, or just generally improving their knowledge. Every page is packed with a wealth of information, but the reading is exciting and stimulating and not weighted with pedantic language.

The well-chosen portraits are illuminated by the text. This is one of the best book investments I have ever made. MOST HIGHLY RECOMMENDED to all readers.

Ports of the World is both a beautiful coffee table book and a well-written history of prints and print-making during the age of exploration and empire building. As European nations extended their influence over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, increasingly wealthy consumers longed for images of the places and peoples that were gathering attention in the press, either as new discoveries or as centers of conflict. Artists and print-sellers were happy to oblige. Many of the drawings that were printed for the popular market are preserved in the collection of the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, England. The Oxford-educated author, Cindy McCreery, has used that collection to produce this magnificent book.

Organized geographically, the book first examines British and European ports and then turns its attention further afield: African, Asian, American, and Australian ports are all considered and their images reproduced. As the world underwent dramatic changes, the ports that served the world also changed. For example, McCreery includes a plate of a thriving New York City from the mid-nineteenth century, as well as an earlier image of Montreal during the Seven Years War. Cities and ports famous for what they later became are not the only images considered. Progress, Pennsylvania, never achieved the hopes of its developers who printed a view of the town's location in an ill-fated attempt to attract buyers who never came. McCreery also questions the accuracy of the way native peoples were presented in these maritime prints and speculates as to the reasons for both the inaccuracies and the representations that seem closer to what the truth might have been. All of these prints and the questions the author raises about them make for engaging reading and provide some insight into the historical world which produced them.

Travelers of both the armchair and more adventurous varieties, naval buffs, and anglophiles would all relish and enjoy this book. With well over 100 plates, many of them in color, this book is lavishly illustrated and would make an excellent gift for either art lovers and historians.

Dr Cindy McCreery has presented us with a truly beautiful book about the development of selected ports around the world. "Ports of the World" is produced to a very high standard and includes a large number of high-quality color and black-and-white reproductions of prints. Dr McCreery uses these prints - housed at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, London - to develop an historical narrative that makes "Ports of the World" a refreshing alternative to other books of this type. There is a distinctly British flavour to this book that is certainly not out of place given Britain's status as an ancient seafaring nation. The style of writing is easily understandable for a non-historian (myself included). However, useful references are included for the true historian who wishes to delve more deeply into the subject area.

"Ports of the World" is an excellent buy and will appeal to people interested in seafaring in general, maritime history or historical prints of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. I feel certain that anyone who receives this book will read it from cover to cover - what better recommendation could a book have?

This volume draws together some of the most remarkable paintings and sketches done by the Pre-Raphaelites during the mid-1800's. This movement, which focused on the appreciation of beauty through artistic interpretation of legend and literature, produced some of the most stunning works of art to date.

What I like about this book in particular, is that unlike many books, it does not neglect the work of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, brother of the poet Christina Rossetti. In my opinion, Dante (whose painting "Proserpine" appears on the cover of this book, is the heart and soul of the "Pre-Raphaelite Vision" and is too often left out. Do yourself a favor and buy this book.

"Some were painted almost obsessively, and with the passing of time have come to represent an ideal beauty"

This tiny book is filled with works by Dante Gabriel Rosetti, Arthur Hughes, Frederick Sandys, Edward Burne-Jones, William Holden Hunt, Albert Joseph Moore, and Eveyln De Morgan. In its pages you will find all the romantic, now 'posterized' images of this remarkable group of painters.

The paintings are interwoven with the beautiful poetry that inspired them and makes it a lovely and tender tribute to any woman. (or a not so shabby guide book for those poor souls out there that just don't know how to be romantic!)

Rossetti is a master of the misty eyed, Sandys finds that little resident saucy side that makes every woman human, and Burne-Jones seems to add an extra element of wisdom to the women that he paints.

These are the paintings that are beloved by so many - never offensive, always relaxing and full of brilliant color. Who could forget Moore's 'Midsummer' with its bright orange fabric against such a gentle sleeper? Or 'Love's Shadow' with that bright red hair? These are the only examples I can think of that use such bright color and still result in such soothing images.

I've yet to find a better collection of these beloved works, and the price and portability of this one can't be beat. Most of these works are from private collections or are in European museums so a lovely book like this makes them accessible to us all.

Most books on the Pre-Raphaelites only touch briefly on the women artists. This book looks at these women, the barriers that made it difficult for them to paint and the tragic lives that some of them had. no Pre-Raphaelite collection is complete without this book.

I am an avid fan of Pre-Raphaelite painting, and was very pleased to find this book. It is very thorough and wonderfully done. It contains more than 230 lush illustrations, many in color. Featured are 20 artists, some of whom I wasn't familiar with before. Very nice!

World War II is on and Chonkin is imprisoned in this sequal to his extraordinary adventures. Chonkin figures less prominently in this sequal. I think, the major character here is the social system itself. Voinovich does not spare anyone or anything: Joseph Stalin, the Soviet military planning, and the prison system--all are criticized. Bumbling bureaucrats continue to bludner like there was no tomorrow. For example, they capture and execute an honest junior officer as a spy, while the real spy continues to work undisturbed. And the bumbling of this sort is pittance in comparison to what has just gone on--the 1937/38 terror. Most outstanding people have been destroyed on no greater basis than wild accusations and Stalin's paranoia. It turns out that the most potent weapon in the war on the cream of society's crop is a simple pencil! Write an accusation on someone who works hard in his field and has his head in the clouds, not paying attention to politics, and that person is soon arrested and executed. Given this absurd atmosphere of repression and the pressure and fear put on the government by war, Chonkin must languish in prison on suspicion of being a descendant of a noble Russian family which is trying to overthrow the government and open the gates to the Germans!

Voinovich's satire is right on target. This book is funny and educational. If you live in a Western democracy you will, at a minimum, reap one important benefit from reading this--you will appreciate even more what you have in your country today. I assigned a number of Russian writers in my Modern Russian Politics class last year, and this is exactly what the impact was. Read Voinovich--his books are humorous and different.

"Pretender to the trone" is the sequel to "The Extraordinary Adventures of Private Iwan Chonkin", and almost as funny (in a grim way)! Those who enjoyed "Iwan Chonkin" should also read this sequel. In the Russian edition I read, they were joined in one volume.

I ran across this book in a political science course that I took this year and I have to say that it was a revelation. I had no idea of just how complex a phenomenon was fascism, not to mention of its cultural dimensions. This anthology gives you the full information set and is very elegantly translated, despite the sometimes windy prose of the materials included. I'd recommend it to anyone who really wants to understand the radical right in depth.

Most anthologies on this subject have been made up of a superficial smattering of articles. Here one gets the real thing: a full-scale corpus of writings from fascism's beginnings to its catastrophic end. The translations are excellent, the selection of texts diversified but coherent.

I like Griffin's anthology as well, but this one gives you far greater depth. I doubt anything will ever take its place, at least in English.

Genet allows you to feel the immediacy of the Palestinian situation with particles from lives,from ill-defined fragments of lives disrupted with no future,he stayed with a family in 1980 a half-day and a whole night where the young son,Hamza a fedayee went off at night to fight. Genet hearing gun fire in the distance inhabited his bed and was brought Turkish coffee and water in the night as a replacement for the young man,by his mother. Genet is a writer/poet,a political thinker,but never a man of politics, a deeply sensitive man,a virtuoso of the sensual image, as the starry-night reflected against the curtain in his room with the small blue table. "Of course it's understood that the words,nights,forests,septet,jubilation desertion and despair are the same words that I have to use to describe the goings on at dawn in the Bois de Boulogne in Paris when the drag queens depart after celebrating their mystery,doing their accounts and smoothing banknotes out of the dew."

Genet was allowed with special permission to visit the massacre site at the camps at Sabra and Chantila,smelling the rotting flesh, "They happened I was affected by them. I talked about them. But while the act of writing came later, after a period of incubation,nevertheless in a moment like that or those when a single cell departs from its usual metabolism and the original link is created of a future,unsuspected cancer,or a piece of lace, so I decided to write this book."

Genet has an intense need for passion of any dimension,scouring the vigours of whatever parts of fragments of the lifeworld's complexity presents itself to him. I once thought of this book as a romantic means of portrayel a betrayel of a political situation,one, the only one that excited Genet.It means something that only encounterings lives in struggle,bent into a repressive state that Genet finds the only life worth encountering,sensing and feeling about. This book was completed in 1986 after suffering from throat cancer, he died on the night of 14-15th of April,1986,while correcting proofs.

This book is absolutely essential to any understanding of the Palestinian situation. It is also the mostimportant work of Genet's entire career.

A fascinating thesis, convincingly argued and painstakingly documented. Ms. Karczewska is to be heartily commended for producing a volume of such scholarly integrity. Her work is a major contribution to the study of medieval literatures, church history, and cultures. Every scholar interested in the French middle ages must read this book!

Here's a book of true depth and scholarship. Ms. Karczewska knows her material inside and out. Finally, someone in the Academy who is not a slave to the latest trend. A must read!