literature

Out of This Furnace is an engaging story of the struggle of steel mill workers in the early 20th century. Reading this book felt like going back into time and being able to meet my great-grandparents and see what they went through to establish a better life for me and my family. Highly recommend this book.

I normally read history and non-fiction type books. But this reading was simply outstanding. It was a gift from my parents to help me understand what my ancestors struggled through. I highly recommend it for anyone willing to entrust their emotions to a book. An excellent tale of human struggle and triumph.

I read this book in a college class and found my own family history flying off the pages. My grandfather was a steel mill worker (before the fall) and my grandmother was a maid for a wealthy family (and named her son after their child). They wore the stories told in this book on their faces, Thomas Bell told the story that their faces were too proud to tell. My last name is Michals now, not Mihal. My father is a doctor, not a steel worker. My grandmother and grandfather are both deceased, but they got their children "OUT OF THIS FURNACE"

My daughter loves anything by Lauren Mills. Her illustrations are fabulous, and her stories are full of lessons about loving and accepting people who are different from you. This one is about how a community comes together to help a little girl, and your child is sure to love it too!

One of the most touching and beautiful stories I have ever read! A little girl loses the father she so deeply loves, but never forgets the important lessons he taught her or the love he had for her. Her dream is to go to school, but her family can't buy her a coat. Finally, kind friends of her mama help make her a coat out of quilt pieces. Her excitement at wearing her new coat to school and sharing it with her new friends quickly changes to sadness when she is taunted by her playmates. But she remembers her father's lessons and his love and helps her friends come to see how special her coat is--to ALL of them! This story is part of the reading series I teach from and when I read it for the first time last year, my class was staring at me in amazement as I sobbed my way through the end! I had to get a copy for myself and my little girl!

I must confess, I was not prepared to read my 5 year old a book on death...and I was a little shocked to find out during my first time reading it to her (I guess I should have pre-read it). Even so, I loved it, and so did she! This story deals with the sorrow of death and the humiliation of poverty in a real and positive way, without being sentimental. It is beautiful to see a child come up with a loving solution to her problems.

This is one of the most beautiful books I've read.
Happy, stimulating, exciting, amusing, delightful, stormy and sexy. A great love story full of flavors, smells and rhythm.

This is the story of Emanueil Razinas (AKA Lewis) the surprising and unexpected man, that near him "all of us are such of midgets.... doesn't get even to his ankles..."

This is also the story of group of friends, and all the women and the wives, Athens and Greece. Four decades on yachts decks, in brothels, in the army, in the street, taverns, cafes, sheds, magnificence houses, and anywhere else.

The story is told in a fluent, open and trustworthy way, both satirical and sad.
You can't escape the noticeable painful feeling of the open wound of Greece that try to awaken from the civil war nightmare and the revolution in every page.

It is about all of us... Make sure you start reading on a week-end because you won't be able to put it down without finishing! Mourselas' genius is unbelievable.

The book takes you to the journey of your life...

I rated this book a four simply because I do not think it will last the wear and tear of a growing child. My son, who is now 14 months, loves it and desires deeply to explore each of the pop-ups, which would mean an end to their lives! I do however, have a problem with the number 10 as it is hard for my son to see it among all the children.

My son has loved these since he was about 8 mo, and now he is a pre-schooler. Well, as with all pop-ups, I always supervise, but this series has fairly simple engineering, so an over enthusisastic tug or rip is fairly easy to cellotape. Our four books have lots of tape, but they still work after three years of frequent use. The pop-ups and presentation are so appealing, you will never regret this purchase. An absolute classic for your childs library.

Chuck Murphy's creative way to stimulate and educate a child. The book consists of 10 colorful pop-ups which encourage children to ask questions about the things they are seeing in the pop-ups as well as to count.
Our two young boys, ages 2 and 4, take these books everywhere with them. During long automobile voyages or flights each book keeps the child's mind entertained for at least 30 minutes but not more than 1 hour and 20 minutes during any given trip.
We have already purchased the above book three times since it has sustained a lot of wear and tear from the mountains to the beaches. Chuck Murphy's books are tops with our kids.

When I read my first of Kawabata's palm of the hand stories I can't admit that I was hooked, but I was definately intrigued. On the edition I own there is an entire story on the back cover, and after reading it I could pull NO MEANING from it what so ever. I thought, like one of the other reviewers put it, that the story was pointless. I have come to learn a harsh lession however. If there is one thing that Kawabata's works are not it is pointless. Every part of every word is overflowing with meaning. The truly pitiful part about his work is that to someone ignorant of Japan and Japanese culture it is sometimes hard to grasp what the meaning is. The simple enjoyment I received from reading the stories helped to inspire me to learn more about the country. I am by no means saying that you can't realish every word of this collection without knowing Japan, but I am saying to attempt to fully UNDERSTAND some of them it is truely a desireable asset.

House of the Sleeping Beauties is one of my favorite anthologies, and I couldn't wait to get my hands on another book from this brilliant author. The stories in Palm of the Hand are full of poetic and philosophical undertones and magical realism. My favorite one is "Bamboo-Leaf Boats," a poignant tale about a woman who grieves the loss of her fiance. The pain the protagonist goes through moved me. The other stories are beautiful as well. I suggest you read this wonderful book...

This was the sixth Kawabata book that I have read. As other reviewers have said before me, this book contains over 100 short stories. When one at first thinks of 100 short stories in one book one yends to think that the book must be massive. This book is 238 pages long. At first I was taken aback by the shortness of the stories. I mean after reading 20 pages I had finished something like 8 stories, but as i continued to read the stories started to have a larger impact on me especially the story "Bamboo-Leaf Boats" This little story was about a young girl whose fiance had not returned from WW II. She had lived her life thinking that she would never married because she was crippled by polio, but a marriage had been arranged with this young man. But he didn't return from the war, so what she saw as a silver lining in a dark cloud turned into more cloud. "The Grasshopper and the Bell Criket" was one of the sweetest stories in the book. It like many other stories in this book is hard to describe, but I found myself with a big smile on my face after i read it. It is just a sweet story about young love.

Read this book I believe you will enjoy it if you are interested in Japanese literature, but for those unuse to Kawabata, I believe you should read Thousand Cranes or Snow Country first.

I love this book and so does my 14-month-old but if she doesn't pull the slider out straight but instead twists it a bit, the pages have a habit of coming apart and the slider slides all the way out. Oops! Very easy to fix (a little glue does the trick), but I've had to glue 2 pages back in in the month we've owned it. It is indeed a favorite book.

I found this book through one of those "So you want to..." lists. After reading the reviews, I decided to add it to my granddaughter's gifts for her first birthday. She LOVES it! The combination of color and the sliding pages engage her fully and she will look at it over and over again. She takes it with her all of the time. I am very picky about children's books (English degree, don't you know:) and I just think this one is GREAT!!

I am soon going to need to purchase another copy of this book. My daughter loved this book from the time she was nine months old because of the "surprise" value of having a matching colored animal pop out of the page for each color. It's fun to read the colors, and then slide out the hidden animal and read the animal name. It also encourages the baby to say the animal name with you--one of her early words was after I said "green" and she whispered "fro(g)". Now that she is 13 months old, it is still her favorite book, but now she slides the pages for herself. The book is sturdy, but I will still probabaly have to buy another copy with this intense use. I am also ordering other books in the series.

This criticism anthology is well put together but is lacking in certain authors. While many of the selections are used give a wide range of a particular author's work, some of the authors used in the work are not fully represented.

Sir Philip Sidney, Giambattista Vico, Alexander Pope, William Wordsworth, Gyorgy Lukacs, Langston Hughes, Laura Mulvey and several others only have one work each in the book. Granted, you can't put all the works these authors have to offer, but some of them are heavy hitters in the criticism world and I find it hard to believe that they are poorly represented in a work such as this. Hopefully, in future editions these authors will better represented.

Being an English major I've had my share of anthologies. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism stands out to me because it offers direct access to the writers and their essays rather than filtered, explained, and dissected discussions of them. It allows for the opportunity to explore what the author had to say in their own voice. Unfortunately that means some selections are more difficult to read than others. The trade-off is knowing that what you are reading is the source of the idea rather than a reflection of it. While I bought this book as a class requirement, reading it (and I am nowhere near done) has offered me new perspectives to not only view literature, but the world in general. That is probably the best thing I can say about this book. The worst? It's not a light read -- literally! Having to tote this brick around campus for a semester was not a pleasant experience regardless of how interesting the essays are.

As I set out to perform the presumptuous task of reviewing what I consider the bible of criticism, I want to make something quite clear: I am reviewing the book not as a literary critic, which I am not, but as a consumer, which I am, since I did pay the hefty price for this massive tome. I am no expert on this subject of Literature, but I would like to become one some day and I thought this a good place to start. I have not quite completed Leviathan (that is the name I gave my Norton Anthology in question here) but I have been reading this in between novels for coming on two years now and I feel I am able to give it the old thumbs up or thumbs down (note: there is no essay in the book covering the critical theory behind thumb pointing). My verdict is thumbs UP, with 5 stars (they don't get into star ratings either). Let it be stated that many of the worlds all-time great minds are represented here and the essays selected are historic and far beyond my reproach. The physical quality of the book is marvelous and the type is flawless; I have found no typos in the 1800 (out of 2500) finely printed pages I have read. The selection headings are invaluable, in-depth analyses of the essays that follow, and they all seem as if written by the same anonymous, deft hand.

The first order of business in the way of criticism for me is the nature of some of the selections, which are undeniably political with little or no relevance to literary theory. I can understand including Marx for laying the foundation for further essays about Marxist literary theory, but do I really learn about literature from Franz Fanon's essay on how a country can best recover from the end of colonialism? Or what about the irrelevant social criticisms of Theodore Adorno? Perhaps the most pessimistic, depressing, and idiotic things I have ever read. This is the only essayist whom I wish did not make the cut. In one essay he goes so far to offend as to outright assert that human laughter is a sign of moral and intellectual decay, among many other absurdities. Aside from Adorno, the non-relevant essays are very good and worth reading anyway, so I was not too bothered by it, but be forewarned there is a big chunk of political, social and linguistic theory here, much of which has only a tenuous (at best) relationship to what most people consider to be Literature.

My second criticism may perhaps have to do more with my own mistaken expectations and therefore unfair, but I would not be surprised if there are other like-minded consumers out there. I was expecting to learn more about literary history, style, modes, technique, devices, genres, and the like. I was also hoping to read classic criticism of classic works. There is none of that here except obliquely. You will not, for examples, learn anywhere in this book what the Romantic period of literature was all about, or how writers use plot and dialogue to convey meaning. You will not find a lot on the why verse and meter were once dominant modes of literary focus whereas prose is now. And lastly, you will not read a great exposition on Hamlet or Job. I think it would be more appropriate to call this an "Anthology of Theories OF Criticism", or better yet just "Anthology of Literary Theory", not "...Theory AND Criticism." The essays are mostly about the philosophical nature of literature and how to study, interpret, and teach it. My silly notion was that an anthology of both theory and criticism would have examples of the great critical writings, not just the theory behind them.

I don't have much to add to the other reviews, except to note that one of the techniques of the Nova Mob is to provoke conflict by playing back the worst things opposing groups have to say to each other in a positive feedback loop. I started to think about this when tracking the Clinton sex scandal and impeachment on the Web, and have had cause to think of it since....

my god, man! Burroughs is a sheer genius. I read the trilogy as well as Naked lunch and the Wild Boys (also cut-ups) three years agoo. This is the one I remember most. I took awhile to read it, and I tried to compete in an interpretive speech with it, but ended up using a piece from The Ticket that Exploded. Every one of these books fascinates me. I also highly reccomend the Soft machine. This got me hooked. I also read Junky, Place of Dead Roads and Queer last year. I am now currently reading Western Lands!!! The man's resume is endless. His genius continues to influence in many deconstructionists today. Look at Radiohead, Andy Kaufman, David Lynch, all of those abstract thinking break down the cell wall artists. They are of a special breed. and this is a special writer!

I won't be as vivid and descriptive as an eel in hot pursuit over gravy, er, I won't be as evil and malignant as Cortez babies, er, want I....EGAD! Start over...

I won't be as descriptive and detailed (there we go) on this review as on THE Wild Boys. This too is a good book, but my least favorite of my collection. It also seems to be the shortest, and less memorable. Parts of it seem to be more preachy than other releases, opening with Agent Lee talking about how the mass media is controlled by psuedo-punk poseurs addicted to controlling the brainwashed populace. From what I remember, Burroughs seems to make fun of these individuals (who have such elaborate names as Jimmy The Butcher, Jackie Blue Note, etc.) who are portrayed as racist punks fooling everyone with actually being the enemy of true revolutionaries. The plans they hatch up to keep the world controlled are amusing.

Aside from this most coherent of writing, the rest is pure Burroughs insanity...classics include the section "Twilight's Last Gleeming", in which a ship is going down and all hell is breaking loose (the immortal line quoted above is said by the drag-wearing captain of that ship). This may come as a shock, but some of the sections actuall bored me...mainly the more scientific information packed parts like the relationship between parasites and hosts, other easily forgettable things. But look past this, and Burroughs knows what he's talking about.

As before, there are some downright beauties and truths around...this may have been from one of the other books since they all seem to flow together as a whole, but I remember a story about a house shifting over a dsert plain and the tenants trying to socialize with lonely lemurs hanging in a tree. There's a great peice of poetry existing right around there. about angry warriors waitng around with their arrows loking for someone to shoot. It just proves that WSB would've been good at straitforward poetry, possibly better than Allen Ginsburg. He actually tried it with Tom Waits on The Black Rider album, remind myself I gotta get that. Wancha all stripped down, all stripped down....wrong album. Point blank, this book is just as worthy/signifigant/brown propeller on a fasion moon as any of his others. Dig? Flat, baby. Flatfooted and pure goulash on my headset tonight. Burroughs, my man...you know it...you...

Fadeout in classic form.

The book oh, the thinks you can think is about all the things you can think about when you have nothing to do. It is about things that Dr. Seuss has made up things that he has thought of at one time, I think this is a good book because it can help kids think of things or anything they want to be when their older, the book has good easy sentances to read it is really something to think about

Dr. Seuss magically takes readers on an adventure of imagination and thinking. His nonsense words and rhyme scheme keep a reader's interest at any age level.

"Life" magazine published a report in May of 1954 about illiteracy among American school children. One of the key things in this article was that children were not inspired to read because their books were boring, which is to say the world of Dick, Jane and Spot. So it came to pass that Theodore Geisel's publisher sent him and a list of 400 words that had to be cut to 250 (because that was how many words it was believed a first grader could understand before their heads exploded or something), and then write a book. At this point in the history of the world Geisel was best known as the creator of Gerald McBoing-Boing, an animated character for which he won an Oscar. The book, of course, was "The Cat in the Hat," which used 220 of those words, and for the rest of his life Dr. Seuss wrote books that were part of the Beginner Books and Bright and Early Books series, which proudly allowed young kids to proclaim "I Can Read It All By Myself." Consequently, Dr. Seuss was one of the major forces in American literacy in the last half of the 20th century.

But beyond that, Dr. Seuss was the personification of imagination for all those generations of children, and this particular legacy is embodied best in his 1975 book "Oh, the Thinks You Can Think!" Told in the distinctive verse style of Dr. Seuss, this book gets young readers to think about all the things then can think if only they try. The book is filled with the delightful creatures of Dr. Seuss's own fertile imagination, from the Guff and the Snuvs to the Bloogs and the Rink-Rinker-Fink. However, my favorite is the Jibboo: what would you do if you met one? After reading this delightful book beginning readers can either make up their own thinks or they can try out their imagination by thinking of what happens next in these pictures, where strange creatures enjoy beautiful schlopp with a cherry on top or visiting the Vipper of Vipp. There is a reason why virtually every one of the books Dr. Seuss wrote are considered classics and it is due as much to the imagination that he displays on each and every page as it is to his ability to arrange 220 (or more) words in non-boring ways.

Tom Shippey has an intimate knowledge of the mind and creative processes of the late Professor J.R.R. Tolkien, perhaps nearly as intimate a knowledge as Christopher Tolkien himself. The degree of the schism between language and literature professors of his day was most startling, and how that affected the early critics' appraisals of his masterpiece was also not what I had expected. Tom Shippey's knowledge of JRR Tolkien's mind is most revealing and is encyclopedic, and his ability to explain how deeply the master philologist would see legends and myths in the most ordinary of names and words left me thunderstruck. I have read all five of the main Middle Earth volumes several times and have read some of the Lost Tales, but I had not gained any insight from previous volumes saying how Pr. Tolkien created his world. The authors of those books seemed to lack legitimacy. Tom Shippey does not have that problem, and his book demonstrates that he is Pr. Tolkien's bona fide pupil and linguistic heir. Fans of Middle Earth should be thankful for Tom Shippey's insight, an insight that could only be bettered by Christopher Tolkien, or Pr. Tolkien himself.

Shippey's "J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century" places Tolkien in the context of his time. "The Road to Middle-earth" has the more scholastically challenging job of placing Tolkien in the context of his tradition. As that tradition is primarily philological and philosophical, these are his subjects. He tells us what Tolkien meant the words and names in his stories to mean; he tells us how Tolkien used modern language to convey modern and ancient styles and philosophies in contrast; he tells us how the Ring mediates two mutually exclusive concepts of evil; he explains Tolkien's complex narrative strategies; he dresses down critics who misunderstand Tolkien and blame him for not fitting into their concepts of literature; and he does all this with such a blistering display of erudition and general intelligence that the reader sits back amazed.

The book is discursive, and the opening theoretical chapters may seem heavy going, but have patience: they provide necessary context. Shippey has Tolkien's measure in full throughout. He explains what was important to Tolkien, what Tolkien thought he was doing, and - no less vitally - why it is necessary to understand this if one is not to bash Tolkien in annoyance for not accomplishing something totally different.

If you read Shippey, will you necessarily understand Tolkien? No. But if you don't read Shippey, and if you also don't have his insight and knowledge, you will not fully understand Tolkien.

Road To Middle-Earth appears for the first time in paperwork in a revised, expanded edition and is considered one of the foundations in Tolkein research. It studies the literary roots of his fiction, examining the originating myths of his works, and considers some of his lesser-known works as well as his Lord of the Rings and Hobbit titles. Scholars and the general reading public alike will find Road To Middle-Earth an inviting study.