literature Books

bought this series to help my out of control 5 year old to gain some emotional control. We have used all the books in the series and I am amazed the strides that we have made in the last two years since I purchased this series! Yes all kids have various problems but these books cover the real life scenarios that kids might encounter in words that they can understand. I would give this series 10 Stars if it was possible!

Lifesavers for sure!

This book was the first we learned about in this series and it's terrific! Excellent book(s) for children and families dealing with anger-management and strong emotions. It's a great book children can read on their own, have it read to them as well as an excellent book for families to read together. A must have book and must have series!

This has been great for a child with Autism struggling with self esteem issues. The kids like pointing out when the other is "feeding the monster" with their words or actions. It came highly recommended to me and I share the feeling!

My daughter found this book at school and requested it so many times that I finally bought it for her. Basically it introduces cognitive behavior therapy in a friendly way that kids can understand.

It takes all those tangled up thoughts that run through a persons head about how one feels about oneself and calls that "the monster." The monster wants to eat away your self esteem until you are very small and he is very big. He gets fed when you believe the lies that he whispers to you "You're no good" "you're dumb" "she doesn't really like you". So set aside a day and try all day to avoid feeding the monster. if he whispers bad things to you, tell him "STOP" and tell yourself something nice instead. If the monster doesn't get fed, he grows smaller.

I highly recommend this book to kids and adults who feel like they are always doing the wrong thing and feeling really down about themselves.

DON'T FEED THE MONSTER!

I can't get over how incredible this book is! I was excited by the titles and reviews but wasn't sure how it would be received by my kids. They were rivoted by the book (my intonations helped a bit ;) and as soon as we finished we did some great role-playing of what makes the monster grow and shrink. I'm so happy - what a great tool to refer to in our everyday conversations! THANK YOU authors!

An age-appropriate book for my six-year old daughter. The amusing illustrations and little-known facts about the presidents keep her (and me) interested.

Reviewed by Evan Weldon (age 7) for Reader Views (2/09)

"Don't Know Much About the Presidents" by Kenneth C. Davis gives information about all 44 U.S. Presidents, including our new President Barrack Obama. Some of the information is funny. James Madison was about as tall as a pipsqueak. He weighed less than a hundred pounds and was about the size of my eleven-year-old brother. George Washington never had a toothache as president because he had only one real tooth. There was plenty of serious information in the book, too, and there was a timeline of things that happened during each person's presidency.

There are funny drawings and cartoons. George Bush was a World War 2 fighter pilot and survived four plane crashes. There is a funny drawing of a burning plane and George Bush as the pilot saying "Whoops. Again." There was also a very funny drawing of William Howard Taft, our fattest president, stuck in the bathtub! (He was 332 pounds!)

I would recommend "Don't Know Much About the Presidents" by Kenneth C. Davis to people who want to learn more about the presidents and politics. This is a 63-page book with lots of information. It took about two hours to read the book out loud but it only seemed like five minutes because it was so good. You'll keep thinking about this book even after you finish reading it!

This is a great introduction to presidents as others have said, but also to American history. The best thing about it is the time line provided with each president that lets kids know what was going on at the time of that president's term in office. It is fun to hear my kids tell others the silly facts they have learned about the presidents and it's impressive that a book could make this much impact on kids. They are learning and enjoying it! That always gets 5 stars in my book!

I bought my son a couple of these types of books, all were comparable but had some different facts in each book, a fairly easy read and fun for kids and adults alike.

Reviewed by Evan Weldon (age 7) for Reader Views (2/09)

"Don't Know Much About the Presidents" by Kenneth C. Davis gives information about all 44 U.S. Presidents, including our new President Barrack Obama. Some of the information is funny. James Madison was about as tall as a pipsqueak. He weighed less than a hundred pounds and was about the size of my eleven-year-old brother. George Washington never had a toothache as president because he had only one real tooth. There was plenty of serious information in the book, too, and there was a timeline of things that happened during each person's presidency.

There are funny drawings and cartoons. George Bush was a World War 2 fighter pilot and survived four plane crashes. There is a funny drawing of a burning plane and George Bush as the pilot saying "Whoops. Again." There was also a very funny drawing of William Howard Taft, our fattest president, stuck in the bathtub! (He was 332 pounds!)

I would recommend "Don't Know Much About the Presidents" by Kenneth C. Davis to people who want to learn more about the presidents and politics. This is a 63-page book with lots of information. It took about two hours to read the book out loud but it only seemed like five minutes because it was so good. You'll keep thinking about this book even after you finish reading it!

It's a bit hard to pin this novel down. The voice of the narrator has a distinctly cynical edge, as if the story were being related by some hard-boiled noir detective of 1930s vintage. The portrait of Naples, on the other hand, seems to stem from mythological times, as if Virgil were once again recounting--with only slight changes in the details--Aeneas's descent into the underworld. Then again, there are elements of magical realism, as if the author were one of the Latin American masters of that style. And there are timeless religious themes--the individual's longing for spirituality and the supreme importance of compassion toward one's fellow creatures--which suggest that the author is actually one of the Church Fathers from the third or fourth century.

In any event, we're definitely not in Bridgeport anymore. Rather, we're in a somewhat surreal world in which there seems to be danger around every corner and one cannot be certain whom to trust, but also one in which miracles are possible and the unsettling turmoil of daily events will inevitably lead to greater self-knowledge. The dominant note, in fact, seems to be sympathy for the "infinitely gentle, infinitely suffering thing" that represents most of humanity.

The intricate pastiche of diverse elements that makes up Earthquake I.D. will not appeal to everyone, but there's no question that this is a richly human story, masterfully told.

I'm overwhelmed by this novel. It's about history, religion, travel, philosophy, phychiatry, biology--you name it and it's there. It's about a truly wise mother and father and their 5 children on a mission to do "God's work" in earthquake ravaged Naples, Italy. Domini knows Naples like the back of his hand, and he knows about traditional family and the workings on the inside. He knows about graft and people in high places trying to climb higher. I asked Domini if he is a Christian because only a Christian could have written about the inner workings of the Holy Spirit. Love this bookfor being politically incorrect and not apologizing about it. Janice Daugharty

John Domini is an extremely talented writer and all his skills are on display in Earthquake I.D. This is a suspenseful story full of mystery, believable characters, and wonderful images. The action begins in the opening pages when an American family arrives in Naples to help earthquake victims, and on their first day in the city are robbed by muggers on a motorcycle: "An elbow caught her, and as the cycle roared away the pain flared in her mind's eye in the shape of one attacker's kite-like blue bandanna--the lone bit of evidence the family would have for weeks to come." There are great moments like this on every page and the plot continues to thicken as we learn more about a colorful cast of characters, many of whom turn out not to be who they seem to be when we first meet them. Lots of well-timed surprises. This is the perfect novel to take on vacation.

EARTHQUAKE I. D. joins a not-so-lengthy list of great novels about Americans in Italy: these, a middle-class family led by an Italian American wife and mother, heroically adrift in her marriage and in a city she's had foisted upon her. Domini deftly fleshes out not only the emotional life of her family and its middle child, the "miracolino," but also contemporary Naples itself, a city of refugees, hucksters, facilitators and half-samaritans. The lives of all Domini's characters play themselves out in colorful threads of plot, which snake through the novel like medieval alleys and catacombs, and which Domini masterfully brings together in a series of climactic scenes that brought great joy to this middle-class American reader.

One John Domini novel equals about three semesters of creative writing. Accordingly, his latest book, "Earthquake I. D.," qualifiies him for a doctorate.
The book is about an earthquake, except that it isn't. It's about an accident that should have killed, a marriage that did die, and how a family teetering on oblivion manages to survive an earthly upheaval.
No ex-newspaperman should be allowed to review such a novel as "Earthquake I. D." News writers summarize in the first paragraph, then fill in the details until they run out of room, maybe 21 inches.
Domini, however, tints his narrative with subtlety, sympathy and shock; the reader has to pay attention.
That done, "Earthquake I.D." leaves the reader with a remarkable sense of fulfillment.

Walt Shotwell, retired Des Moines Register reporter/columnist

We have read this for years to our daughter. Great book for any celiac child!

This book was great. It made my son feel special and helped him be more comfortable at preschool snack time. (I think it was hepful for the teachers, too.) It's the one MUST buy Celiac book. The rest I'd get at the library.

My daughter loves this book! She's 5 years old. She was very excited about bringing this book to share with her pre-k class. It has really helped the kids in her class to understand and be supportive of her severe gluten-allergy.

I recently bought this book for my 33 month old daughter, who has CD, and she loves it. I think she likes to see that there is someone who eats like her. I would recommend the book. I also bought one for her daycare, so that they could read it to the other kids, and maybe help them understand a little.

I am a preschool teacher and have a student with Celiac in my class as well as 3 other students with food allergies. I read this book and all of my students loved it! They have asked to hear it again and again. My gluten-free student actually had tears in his eyes the first time I read it and hugged me afterwards. All 15 of my students are aware of their classmates food allergies and this has been a springboard for discussion of all aspects of restricted eating. I highly reccomend this book for classroom use.

My daughter was given this book for her fifth birthday a few months ago. She adores it! There is so much detail - visual, textural, information about the era of each house. It's a lot of fun for both my daughter and her father and me - something we enjoy doing with her, and something she can enjoy on her own. We like the "I Spy"-type questions for each era, as well. Fun book!

I collect pop-up books, and my sister bought this one for me recently as a thank-you gift. It is utterly adorable. The story follows the adventures of the dollhouse's residents, each pop-up set in a different time period, and included are descriptions of the clothing, customs and events of that period.

Not only does it contain beautiful pop-up pages, it contains a few removable notes in envelopes that remind me of the beautiful Griffin and Sabine books by Nick Bantock (which started out as a trilogy, but eventually extended to six books). If you are interested in that series--they are not pop-up books, but a story told through a correspondence that you remove from the book to read--you may find it here on Amazon. The first three are available as a set at this link:The Griffin & Sabine Trilogy Boxed Set: Griffin & Sabine/Sabine's Notebook/The Golden Mean The three books which follow this first set are also available as a boxed set at this link: The Morning Star 3-Volume Boxed Set

One of the other delightful things that this book has in it is a sort of "I Spy" game. One such puzzle contains this clue: "Hattie is in the kitchen making jam tarts. Who stole one?" On the opposite page you can see a set of windows of the dollhouse, and you look into each window to search for the missing tart. On each side of the text on the clue page are exact replicas of a few of the objects in the house for which you search.

As with many pop-up books, this book would probably not be appropriate for most very young children. The target audience for the text seems to be for a child that is reading at least at a third-grade level (possibly even higher), partly because the descriptions go into some detail. (That is not a complaint, mind. It is one of the book's attractions, as the descriptions are very interesting.) The construction of the book would also seem to make it appropriate for an older child, as the pop-ups are in paper that is of the usual cardstock weight used in most pop-up books, which can be torn if roughly handled. In addition, the I Spy puzzles involve looking through the windows of the house, and for a young child this would probably prove frustrating.

A grand book for anyone adult/or older child that enjoys doll houses, fairies, etc. Well done, well illustrated, informational and fun.

I received this book as a gift from my Mother and even though I'm 36 I absolutely love it. I has a nice story and it's full of interesting information. Even though it's for reading ages 4-8 you're never too old for this book. I'm buying it for each of my nieces and some of my friends. I want to get entire series. There's an Enchanted Dollhouse Theatre that's not available on Amazon.com so I will probably order it from Amazon.co.uk.

This is a beautifully detailed pop-up with lots of interesting facts and pictures. It would make a great gift for a daughter or granddaughter who loved dolls and dollhouses. The details are amazing.

The breadth and scope of this book is staggering. It's an exhaustive tome on pretty much all the genre fiction of the Victorian age, and not limited to the UK fiction of the period either. It's a must read for fans of steampunk, Victorian science fiction, the pulps... But what it really is is an unbelievable gift to writers - the story concepts stuffed into every page of this tome are unbelievable. There is years and years of amazing inspiration here. The book is sold out, but track down a copy however you can.

Where is this book? Why is it sold out? Is it being reissued? Does anyone know?

This thing is a brick. Hardbound, weighing in at just over a thousand pages, this book could stop a bullet or cause serious damage if dropped on the toes. And all those pages are crammed full of entries describing Victorian era novels. All of my favorites are here, plus hundreds of books I've never heard of. All nations and genres are represented, not just
Sci Fi and the Brits. Better still, Nevins is not afraid to editorialize. It's shocking, but not altogether untrue, when he claims that The Wizard of Oz "can easily be interpreted as a horror novel" or that Ivanhoe is superior to Sir Walter Scott's other works in that it "is readable." If you like Victorian fiction, but find its offerings uneven, Nevins can be an invaluable guide. My only complaint about this amusing and informative tome is that it's all but useless as an actual reference work. Entries are organized alphabetically by the names of central characters or settings, rather than by title or by author. To find the works of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, you would have to look under Sherlock Holmes or Sir Nigel. There are decent see-also references, but no index. Still, I am mostly content to browse its oddly organized pages, in search of the good stuff. This book represents a serious investment in both money and shelf space, but if you enjoy Victorian era fiction, you can't really afford to be without it.

This was given as a gift. The person who received the book enjoyed it very much. It is a good reference resource for writers and artists.

I love this book. It is very comprehensive and I cannot wait for the release of Mr. Nevins next book on Pulp Heroes. We need more books like this.

It is the first book by Isaac Singer I read and it won't be the last. A wonderful tale about the strengths and weaknesses of the human heart and mind masterfully written.

New York after the Jewish Holocaust in Europe. Herman Broder lives a frantic life between 2 wives, and soon to be three. He writes books for a rabbi. His life is a lie, a big lie to which he's grown used. His mind is a mess, just as his life is. The women around him are products of their survival experiences in Europe during the war, as he is too. Religion is present in every page, almost every line, whether it's mentioned with hate or with hope. Things Jewish are ever present: one gets to learn a lot about Jewish customs and terminology.

The story, however chaotic and improbable, almost ridiculous, doesn't fail to be interesting. The author sure knows how to move on between scenes and keep the pace of the changes in Herman's life. The overall impression is of confusion in all areas of live: sentimental, business, psychological, and of course, religious.

These characters behave so weird after their painful experiences, their loss of loved ones, and their witnessing of so much suffering, that they don't believe in anything anymore, not even in why they keep living. Seems they are bewildered and just make most of what they've got at that very moment: which for Herman is most of the time sex. But that is a temporary refuge from insanity, not permanent. People here are lost, drifters melting into the human masses of New York City.

The book is readable, well told, but the story ain't much fun. Herman just annoys me. And the others aren't very likable either. It's a mess of a book that leaves a sweet-sour taste.

Isaac Bashevis Singer writes a novel of sheer absurdity and yet, page by page, he makes it very believable.

Herman Broder is a Jew who managed to escape the gas chambers of the Nazi Holocaust by living in a hayloft with his mother's servant Yadwiga from Poland for three years. His wife was not so lucky.....she and her children were all killed by the Nazis......at least that is what we (along with Herman) are led to believe early on. Herman manages to make it to the United States where he marries the peasant girl servant Yadwiga out of sheer gratitude for her saving his life, not out of any kind of a love or fondness for her. And while he is married to Yadwiga, he is carrying on an affair with Masha, who also went through her own camp horrors in Russia. Herman identifies more with her, not to mention the fact that an attraction also exists there, both physically and intellectually.

But just when you think the suspension of disbelief Singer creates cannot get any more bizarre, it does, when Tamara, his ex-wife, shows up in New York, after surviving the Nazis. Herman now has two and sometimes three women after him, and still he is unable to commit to any one of them. Singer creates a novel of absurd proportions, and then has the temerity to keep it growing! And the arrant brilliance in it is that it works on the reader to the very end.

Along the way the characters reveal thoughts which make one think more of a philosophical treatise than of a novel, a mark of a great writer and one of the reasons I could not put this book down:

"How peculiar that a panful of brains should be constantly wondering and not able to arrive at any conclusion! They were all silent: God, the stars, the dead. The creatures who did speak revealed nothing."
-Isaac Bashevis Singer, from the book "Enemies, A Love Story"

There are few writers such as Oscar Wilde to whom I can say they are unequivocally brilliant......Singer is certainly one of them.

How does one cope with such a thing? You know? The Holocaust.

It was the Holocaust that took Herman's parents, wife and two children. He manages to survive by hiding in a hayloft. For three long years, a former servant in his home, Yadwiga, a plain, uneducated but loving Polish woman, keeps him hidden and alive. After the war, we find Yadwiga and Herman married and living in Brooklyn. For other Holocaust survivors, Brooklyn represents opportunity, a sense of re-birth. All around him, new families are being formed out of what is left of old ones. Old customs are being renewed. The old prayers are said. Feasts are held. Traditions prevail. Life goes on. The future is hopeful, but not for Herman. Herman merely exists. He has a job as a ghost-writer for a famous rabbi. Herman is good at writing inspirational messages, messages of hope. But, Herman is not a believer. Not anymore. Not since the Holocaust. To Herman, God is either dead or an enemy. God is out to get him. Herman has a mistress, Masha, a camp survivor. His life is complicated. Then, as it turns out, his first wife who supposedly died in the camps, she's alive. Now Herman has two wives and a mistress. Complicated. They all want a piece of him. Emotionally, he retreats to the hayloft. But, emotionally, Herman is already dead, as dead as he would have been had he been found and sent to the camps, as dead as the rest of them, as dead as his faith in God. In the hayloft, minute by minute, day by dragging day, Herman was exterminated.

In New York

The hotel staff

gave me the chair

that

Isaac B Singer

used to

lean his back against


years before he died




custom made


produced

out of gentle wings of butterflies


that circled his first wife's head


every day and night in Treblinka


before she finally

went

up in smoke




So

I went down at the front desk


A weird occurence

of

that strange and powerful thing

I certainly

wanted to bring to their attention



Of course they say


I. B. Singer

never stayed here

never had a first wife

nor she died in the concentration camp



But what's metter?



My back

feels better


way better



ever since

Wow, what a treat! I purchased this book for my wife (oh, okay, for the two of us) for Valentine's Day. It was perfect!!!

Very sensuous and enjoyable. Some full frontal nudity, but absolutely nothing offensive. All beautiful and erotic.

This is a high-quality, coffee-table type book celebrating heterosexual love and sex. I wish we could find similar movies--people just making wholesome, beautiful love. (We're not all that interested in the XXX variety of pornography that also passes as instructional books/videos for plumbers learning how to "lay pipe," know what I mean?)

Eros is pure class for adults. Buy it and enjoy it with someone special.

I wrote this review in 1998. I will rewrite it here and say, that i have given this book as a gift many times and all the recpients have loved it. In 1998 I wrote the following and when I looked at it today.......I felt the same but even more so.Here it is............."This shimmering collection of nudes,male and female,can be debated to be a perfect gift for your love. Inscribed with your own words and pointing to a page of succulent text and a most erotic body you will surely send the arrow home like Cupid.A woman's breast cast upon with a vine's shadow is not far from the lower torso of what's surely a male dancer, toe pointing on a small wooden ball.A jug of wine , a loaf of bread and this.Review this beautiful book of nudes together by a roaring fire"

What a gorgeous collection! For me, the attraction is in the images. There's generally one B&W photo per two-page spread, beautifully printed at a large size. A lot of the pictures show a single figure, male or female. My favorites, though, show couples embracing. Although wonderfully sensual, all these photos meet the highest standards of good taste. Still, people shy about seeing the whole body might think twice.

Most two-page spreads also include extract from the literature of love. That includes everything from the classical periods of Egypt and China up to Walt Whitman, e e cummings, and Erica Jong. Like the photos, all of the chosen texts avoid vulgarity. Also like the photos, some of the passages evoked more for me than others did.

I can easily imagine a couple enjoying this together, on some night warmed by a fire, a blanket, and each other.

-- wiredweird

The black and white Photos are truly art, and the poetry is well suited to the photos. This is an adult book that stays where I can share it with my friends who enjoy beautiful art and poetry. This erotica is tastefully done and I am sorry that this book is no longer available it makes a great gift for special friends.

These are the most wonderful nude photographs imaginable. They are not as shocking as the Mapplethorpe photographs but they are as artistic and as sensuous as his are. Unfortunately, you have to buy your copy used. That's the way I had to buy mine. I have bought many other nude photography books new but, except for Mapplethorpe's work, none of them are as good as this book. I spent a small fortune on photographer David Hamilton's book new, for example, and I look in Hamilton's book one tenth of the time I look inside this book. This book contains both nude men and women plus couples. You can't go wrong buying this book. Get it while you can as my experience with great out of print books is that the price skyrockets before long.

Every morning I text or e mail a poem from this book to my girlfriend...

186 pages filled with amazing poetry. This book connected.... to both thought, and pleasure.

I was in the bookstore yesterday and saw this book reprinted with new cover---a sign that it's been doing great in the market! that says a lot about it's content. I got this book over two years ago; from time to time I took it out from the shelf and it always entertains and brings great romantic feelings! I really hope the editor could do more of this kind of book! I have compared this book with other books of love poems---the unique collection of poems from all around the world, modern and ancient, make this book so much more special. The poems seem to use very effective language and words and put together the most sensual pictures with very little words. Very entertaining and enjoyable! BUY THIS BOOK AND CITE ONE A DAY TO YOUR LOVER LIKE I DO! DO IIIIIITTTTTTT!!!!!!!

Poems from Walt Whitman, Rumi, Adrienne Rich, Shakespeare, William Blake and Pablo Neruda are just some of the poets listed in this anthology. Out of my 25+ poetry books, it is the one I reach for first if I am looking for something romantic or erotic. Included is a little notation about each poet listed. It's a wonderful little paperback that has gotten re-read often at my house.

Erotic love is one of the highest forms of contemplation. ~Kenneth Rexroth

The Erotic Spirit is a collection of beautiful poems mingling together in a land of sensual nirvana. The minute you enter the pages of this stunning anthology, you will find you have entered a sacred sanctuary of desire. You may find yourself startled by the mirroring of emotions. When Sappho (6th century BCE) wrote: "Eros seizes and shakes my very soul like the wind on the mountain shaking ancient oaks," did she imagine women in the future knowing exactly what she was talking about?

Sam Hamill has included moments of beauty to blur the distinction between spirituality and sensuality. The two become one in a swirling of seductive soul expressions.

When I think of you,
fireflies in the marsh rise
like the soul's jewels,
lost to eternal longing,
abandoning my body

~Izumi Shikibu (970-1030)

Rarely have I read a "Preface" so profound in content and so enlightening in regards to poetry. The "Notes on the Poets" section is also essential to your enjoyment and I was so pleased Sam Hamill included information on each poet. Suddenly a poem becomes all the more significant when you read about Sappho jumping from a cliff because her love was not returned.

Sam Hamill is a poet and the author of over thirty books of poetry, translations and essays. He shows a deep understanding of erotic love and has included poems of longing, passion, compassion, sexual love, adoration, devotion and ecstasy.

There are poems from Egypt, Greece, China, Japan, Turkey, India, America, England, Thailand, Mexico, Spain, France, Lebanon, Pakistan, Estonia and Costa Rica.

Featured Poets: Sappho, Anakreon, Asklepiados, Praxilla, Rufinus, Marcus Argentarius, Catullus, Philodemos, Ovid, Petronius Arbiter, Tzu Yeh, Agathias Scholoasticus, Cometas Chartularius, Paulus Silentiarius, Li Po, Otomo No Yakamochi, Yuan Chen, Li Ho, Ariwara No Narihira, Li Hsun, Ono No Komachi, Izumi Shikibu, Liu Yung, Samuel Ha-Nagid, Ou-Yang Hsiu, Mahadeviyakka, Jelaluddin Rumi, Francesco Petrarch, Ikkyu Sojun, Kabir, Vidyapati, Mirabai, William Shakespeare, Bihari, Robert Herrick, Anne Bradstreet, Se Praj, Andrew Marvell, John Dryden, Jonathan Swift, William Blake, John Keats, Walt Whitman, Charles Baudelaire, Emily Dickinson, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Antonnio Machado, Yosano Akiko, Anna Akhmatova, Pablo Neruda, Kenneth Rexroth, Hayden Carruth, Denise Levertov, Carolyn Kizer, Robert Creeley, Adrienne Rich, Roberto Sosa, Robert Kelly, Lucille Clifton, Jaan Kaplinski, Sam Hamill, Gioconda Belli, Olga Broumas, Maurya Simon and Dorianne Laux.

Within these pages there are poems by an Indian Princess who became a saint, poems by one of the most influential poets in history and even poems from a woman who is considered to be the first poet in America.

Poems to Adore:

Plum Blossoms - A poem describing longing while lovers are apart. The clouds become love notes as a poet drifts in an orchid boat.

Yuan Chen's Remembering - Passion, daydreams and mountains keeping lovers apart.

Fires Run Through My Body - An anonymous Kwakiutl poem describing love as pain. There is a similar theme in Yuan Chen's Remembering where pain is embraced.

The Erotic Spirit will make you breathless! Some of these poems stir up such deep emotions it is as if the poems burst from the pen in order to experience a union with the page on which they were being written.

100 Stars!

~The Rebecca Review

This book is utterly delightful. It is a very crisp portrayal of a witty, willful woman and a convoluted personal situation that befalls her. Her is someone who not only takes control of her life, but understands and accepts all of her decisions with equanimity.

Mrs. Hawkins is a war widow and a person of huge bulk. She works as a literary agent and editor. One day while in the park, she calls one Hector Bartlett a 'pisseur de copie'. She will not retract that statement. Instead, she proclaims it with relish. What transpires because of this is the heart of the story. It is witty, acerbic and wonderfully well-crafted. It has plots within plots within plots, all skillfully rendered and multi-layered.

Hector is insipid and cruel and, indeed, a 'pisseur doe copie'. His lover, a famous writer, costs Mrs. Hawkins several jobs. He has a personal vendetta against her. She is more than his match - - in fact, he's just a small toadlike annoyance to her. However, he wreaks disaster on others in his attempt to enact his vendetta.

I agree with jt from New Jersey. I picked up "Far Cry" based on its review in the NY Time Book Review in 1986 (front page coverage). If you simply accept Mrs. Hawkins at face value you will fall in love with the setting, the time and Mrs. Hawkins approach to life.

Perhaps the book has a special place in my heart because I read it in a hotel bar overlooking the Arno in Florence while my pregnant wife was resting upstairs. I still reread the book and remember the bar. Funny.

I enjoyed "A Far Cry from Kensington" and recommend it. It's an entertaining story about an overweight young editor who matures in many ways (weight loss, new romance) over the course of the novel and exhibits strength of character in overcoming various tribulations. When she puts down a toadying literary hanger-on, this unpleasant person becomes something like a stalker. A good yarn; the last chapterlet is bang-up. It's one of those novels, which I think are pretty rare, where the last two pages are the best part.

I am a big Muriel Spark fan -- I mourned her passing earlier this year -- and was very interested in a book that is generally accepted as a companion novel to the brilliant "Loitering with Intent", one of my favorites. I was particularly intrigued given the reviews on amazon. So I want to caution prospective readers that there's no way that this is up to Spark's best work. It simply doesn't have the resonance or mysterious allusiveness that some of Spark's other books have. It's kind of a throwaway, in fact. So I think some of the reviewers below are getting carried away and overpraising the novel. Open it with reasonable expectations and you have an entertaining, intriguing tale ahead of you.

This is one of those books that cannot described in a nutshell. If you had to hazard a guess at a description, you'd have to place it firmly in the comedy/ tragedy/ drama/ mystery/ romance section, or simply file it under Spark: Muriel in the Classics section.

Narrated by the once round and central character, Agnes Hawkins (a.k.a. Mrs. Hawkins or Nancy), the story revolves around her experiences as a young widow living in furnished rooms in a semi-detached building in South Kensington. She colorfully describes her neighbors and acquaintances, and gives us tantalizing glimpses into their little secret worlds, in which she is a trustee and confidante.

Despite the mysterious black boxes and the lurking threat of enemies, known and unknown, our heroine manages to keep her head above water, remains a pillar of strength and finds true love among the rubble. Thanks to her diet plan (freely given to the reader as a bonus for purchasing the book), she gains new self-respect, and reinvents herself in a new country, a far cry from her humble beginnings.

A simple classic by an inspired writer.

Amanda Richards

Muriel Spark's A Far Cry From Kensington (1988) is the bookend companion to her 1981 classic, Loitering With Intent. Both novels share a common theme, and like the earlier novel, A Far Cry From Kensington is largely autobiographical and takes place in virtually the same setting and time period: the literary world of early Fifties London. Both are explorations, via reminiscence, of the banality of everyday evil, taking place among the workaday, routine lives of the lower middle class. Less scathing if no less hilarious than many of its predecessors, the relatively unsung A Far Cry From Kensington is the most realistic and humane novel among the twenty-odd Spark has written. It is also exceptional in that it is the single Spark fiction in which a love affair blossoms into a successful relationship of duration.

The story of the universally respected though immensely overweight Mrs. Hawkins, A Far Cry From Kensington follows two divergent threads in her daily life: the mounting sufferings of a rooming house neighbor who is being anonymously threatened, and the problems that stem from her own continuous encounters with Hector Bartlett, a manipulative sycophant who hopes to use her footholds in the publishing world to advance his nonexistent literary career.

While Loitering With Intent can be read as something of a tactical combat manual, A Far Cry From Kensington is instructive in the art of deduction: caught up in a spiraling series of mysterious and increasingly serious coincidences, Mrs. Hawkins, short of both hard facts and physical evidence, actively unravels the odd events that are taking a toll on both the lives of her friends and her editorial career. Fully realizing she is as prone to misjudgment as anyone, Mrs. Hawkins, utilizing her intelligence, intuition, and instinct, nonetheless proceeds confidently and assertively to pierce the veil of secrecy and quiet conspiracy engulfing her. Spark is at a creative peak as she reveals the subtle turns, nuances, and moment to moment impressions in Mrs. Hawkins' mind as she forms her cautious conclusions.

Unlike Spark's finest novel, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961), in which a significant portion of the mystery of human existence is shown to exist on a partially transcendent level, A Far Cry From Kensington eventually grounds that mystery in the knowable everyday. Though the author was to return to something of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie's vision in Symposium (1990), here she seems to be expressing that at least the mundane truths of human life can be ascertained by diligence of method, applied intelligence, and a fundamental willingness to be believe that some people are unabashedly predatory, unscrupulous, and ethically coarse at best. Another message of the novel is that the weak, the foolish, and the vacuous are among the most potentially dangerous individuals one can become involved with.

Upon its release, a number of critics publicly objected with pointed distaste to some of Mrs. Hawkin's behavior, she who enjoys "a puritanical and moralistic nature; it is my happy element to judge between right and wrong, regardless of what I might actually do." For exhausted with Hector Bartlett's elaborate attempts at manipulation, unhypocritical Mrs. Hawkins calls him a "Pissseur de copie" to his face when she encounters him in a public park, and continues to do so, to the detriment of her publishing career, throughout the novel. "It seemed to me," she says, that he "vomited literary matter, he urinated and sweated, he excreted it." Far from keeping this observation to herself, Mrs. Hawkins loudly shares it with authors, editors, and publishers, and since Hector is protected by best-selling author Emma Loy, finds herself fired from one job after another. But Mrs. Hawkins is without regret: "I can't help it. Sometimes the words just come out and I can't stop it. It feels like preaching the gospel." Thus in this and other passages, A Far Cry From Kensington supports speaking one's perception of truth under certain circumstances, regardless of consequence, even if that truth represents an enormous breach of upper class WASP manners and social decorum.

In Spark's vision as expressed here, building relationships of any kind solely for personal gain, manipulating others through callous, self-interested `networking,' and general toadyism are high crimes, all of which Hector Bartlett is guilty of in the extreme. In fact, Hector is one of Camille Paglia's "court hermaphrodites": "red hair en brosse, brown corduroy trousers, tweed coat with leather patches on the sleeves, a yellow tie and a green shirt: this was gaudy in those days, and Hector Bartlett was always dressed in bright colors. He was tall, with a pronounced stoop of the shoulders, which made him seem older than he was - I imagine at the time, he would be in his mid-thirties. His face was round with a second fat chin. He had a small but full baby-mouth as if forever asking to suck a dummy teat." Though many critics have felt otherwise, no amount condescending liberal piety can excuse Hector's routine aggressive subterfuge, moral mediocrity, and parasitic nature. It's unlikely that Spark chose this character's name randomly: "hectoring" is exactly what this he often does to those he encounters, and `Bartlett' suggests his "pudgy," pear-shaped physique.

Written in the plainest language possible but poetically conceived and executed, A Far Cry From Kensington belongs, with The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, The Girls of Slender Means (1963), The Driver's Seat (1970), The Takeover (1976), and Loitering With Intent, among others, with the very best of Spark's work.