I am reading this two volume work for the third time. Arthur Inman was the scion of two prominant Atlanta families and grew up with a degree of affluence most of us can only imagine. At an early age, perhaps 22, he dropped out of college and became an invalid. Part of his disability was that he could not stand bright lights and so spent much time in a darkened room. Arthus was addicted to doctors and spent a fortune being treated by them. He never worked and his parents supported him to the end. Arthus started to write his diary to amuse himself. Later he began to pay people to come and read to him and talk to him. He was especially fond of women and liked to fondle them in the dark. Arthur married his wife, Evelyn, when she was about 23. Evelyn is the heroine of the story. The diary itself is huge, 155 volumes and 14 million words. It is a fascinating read. Arthur had strong opinions on many subjects. For instance, he believed in slavary (with himself as a master) and thought black inherently inferior to whites. The story ends in 1963 when Arthus kills himself. I am reading this book for the third time because it's a great read. Arthur grows on you and I have come to see him as a friend. I think you will too. Enjoy.

You won't be forgotting this one anytime soon. I'd like to see the full version released one day, that is, the 65 volumes, which are apparently stored at Harvard. As it is, this is one of the greatest reading experiences you will ever have. Arthur Inman is a worthy competitor of Hannibal Lecter.

When this two volumne set was first published, it was sold in shrink-wrap plastic and did not allow potential readers to get any sense of it's content. It was an expensive gamble that I wasn't prepared to take. But I always remembered a fascinating review in the NY Times, and some years later I bought a used (although evidently un-read) copy in a second-hand book store. For the next two months I became immersed in the bizarre world of Arthur Inman, unable to put the book down for more than a few hours at a time. Through a lifetime of reading, I have never encountered such a unique document. Arthur, the Monster; Arthur, the Bigot, Arthur, the Insufferable Egoist; Arthur, the would-be chronicler of the American Century; Arthur, the Hypochondriac Extrodinaire, Arthur, the Listener, paying strangers to share their lives in the annoymous dark; Arthur, the bedridden Sex Experimenter... etc., etc. Doggerel Poet, Psychological Tyrant, Racist, hateful Historian, Rich Cry-Baby, Cruel Deviant: Arthur is the Great American Armchair Monster of Boston...But there is so much more. Very much more to this quirkiest ghoul of enormous literary ambition. Daniel Aaron is a brilliant editor, whose great gift to American letters must be this singularly unique reading experience. In the end you come to love Arthur, and to admire his strange, beautiful, insane creation. Almost impossible to describe, this book is so full of decades of American life that you can lose yourself in its novelistic, labyrinthian, and always human stories.

An undying tale.. legend... song... Wonderful poetry, the language is simply astounding! I have read the russian translation by Bounin, which was as remarkable as the original.

A book for generations. Mine was published 1898 and given me by my mother whose father(b.1875) gave it to her. It goes to the heart of the Indian race, a people susceptible to mythology and magic as their last great hope. Read it with an open mind, imagination, and for its beauty.

"The Song of Hiawatha" is the best book I have ever been exposed to. Every time I hear the wonderful rhyme of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, I begin to think of what this land was like before the Europeans conquered it. It is a wonderful tale of peace between nations and a great book to read to children.

The first time I saw this book was when it was told in sign language to a group of deaf children. The narrator was so demonstrative the whole room was in stitches. Then the children acted out the story in sign and it was hilarious. It has become the favorite book of both my 2-year-old and 8-year-old grandchildren. The story of Aaron and his hair is so funny. I have not read a better child's book in my 40 years of reading them...and I have read many.

I actually haven't read this particular book, but having grown up on Robert Munsch, I can say that he is one of the most brilliant storytellers for children of our time. I can vividly remember the plots and choral repitititions (or as the other review calls them " uninventively repetitive text") from books that I haven't looked at in 10 years. If you have a pre-schooler or teach little kids, this seireis of books is an absolute must. "hey mud puddle!!!"

Studies of Buddhism in China continue to flourish, and this is an excellent collection of essays that showcase the strengths of a historically-informed understanding of this religious tradition. Hawaii continues to lead the field in its publication of high-quality monographs and essay-collections on Buddhism. Some of the essays in the collection are stronger than others, though on the whole, this is a quite readable scholarly work. Shinohara's essay is especially good.

Wali Dad is my all-time favorite of Aaron's books for children (and they are all a close race!). The comic book style and quality of the illustrations are a pure delight, and the story telling is true and compelling. Do not miss the joy of reading this book to yourself and to any children you know.

I love this book/trilogy. It's probably my favorite book I've read so far. I would recommend this book to people whom in the past were put off by older literature. This book, although set in the early 20th century, seems fresh and alive. You may have difficulty at first with some of the more experimental sections, like "The Camera Eye", but I wouldn't let that discourage myself from recommending this book. Those sections tend to be rather on the short side anyway. I wish Dos Passos was more thought of today than he is, because he's an excellent writer. I often couldn't believe how many pages I had read in a session, as I got lost in the book completely. Read this book!

This is the true American Epic.

Dos Passos wrote this trilogy almost as a documentary. It is a history lesson, with newspaper articles, biographical sketches, beautiful train of thought prose poems, and, in the midst of it all, fictional but brutally realistic characters who each experience the times through a unique set of eyes.

Since I have read this book it has become one of my favorites, and there are few titles with more meaning to me than _U.S.A_.

Dos Passos' trilogy is important reading for anyone intersted in American History. In particular, Dos Passos chronicles the history of the labor movement in the US and the revolt of working class worldwide.

It is intersting to note that at the time that this book was written, Dos Passos was a frevent socialist/communist. By the time of his death, he had renounced the communist idealogies for a more conservatine viewpoint.

Although, the fictional prose is simplistic and the dialogue somewhat cliched, a powerful story is told. The world is seen through the eyes of several ordinary citizens, all with different backgrounds and from different classes. The characters lives interwave through important world events such as labor unrest, Mexican revolution, World War 1, and the Russian Revolution.

Interwoven throughout the fiction are snippets that attempt to educate the reader. The 'Camera Eye' passages are newspaper headlines and attempt to capture the mood of the day. There are sections of Dos Passos's own thoughts of the day, some of them written as Dos Passos as a child might have seen them. My favorite sections were the short autobiographies of important citizens- among them Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, Eugene Debs, Woodrow Wilsoon, and Emma Goldberg.

If you are lookiong for a passionate or suspenseful fictional story, this is not the book for you. But if you are intersted in history, especially American History, this book is excellent in capturing the mood of first third of the 20th century.

Henry James, The Aspern Papers (Laurel, 1888)

One of James' shortest novels, and one of his least-known, The Aspern Papers is a (supposedly based on a true) story about a young biographer of famed poet Jeffrey Aspern (based, depending on to whom you talk, on either Browning or Keats) who contrives to get his hands on the love letters Aspern wrote to a mistress by presenting himself at the now-ancient mistress' Italian villa and passing himself off as a wealthy traveller and author looking for lodging. The mistress lives with her spinster niece, whose age is never given (one assumes mid-forties, a few years older than the narrator), and the two are impoverished. Things go as planned until the narrator finds himself starting to like the niece a bit more than he bargained for.

The novel runs a bit over a hundred pages, which makes it an excellent introduction to James' extremely dry wit; it's much lighter-weight than the ponderous tomes he's known for. The prose here has an agility which is absent from works such as The Bostonians or The Wings of the Dove, but still manages to convey emotion quite well with only a few words and a gesture. The novel's last pages are a triumph of minimal writing, and probably deserve closer scrutiny than the works of James' that are normally assinged in English classes around the globe.

Oddly, the one major failing of this novel is that James abandons the minimalism every once in a while, and his characters go overboard with hysterical crying and the like so common to Victorian literature. In a book that's otherwise so controlled, these episodes-- never longer than a few sentences-- seem absurd more than anything; perfectly composed people suddenly collapse into tears as if shot with pepper spray, and then within the space of a paragraph are back to their cool, collected selves once again. These intrusions are minimal, and while they detract from the scenes in which they're placed, the novel overall is still a worthy one. If you've been turned off by James through exposure to one of those million-page drawing room comedies, you may want to give him another try with this. *** 1/2

"The Aspern papers" is a surprisingly short, sexy and suspenseful novel. It will completely change your opinion of Henry James; he shows himself to be an master of suspense and well played out drama instead of the ambiguous pussyfooting plodder that most people think him to be. There is a definite touch of evil in this novella. It takes place in a stuffy interior world dominated by an old sinister woman in a green shade. The narrator's intentions are quite amoral and evil. The narration is deftly created through sure touches of insecurity and self pity. The trick of the unreliable narrator is used to great effect. And at no point does it seem anything other than a seamless and effective method of narration.

Such is his facility with the essentials of theatre - concentrated narrative action; lengthy, dramatic scenes of dialogue; vivid characterisation; pointed use of interior space, exits and entrances, and the revealing image - you wonder why James failed as a playwright.

Of course, there is a defining element of James' art that is impossible in the theatre - narration. The nameless narrator of 'The Aspern Papers' is one of the greatest monsters in James' teeming gallery of inglorious masculinity - the editor of a revered American literary poet, who tries to wheedle important documents from a celebrated lover, the now-decrepit Juliana, by installing himself as a lodger, and flattering her aging spinster niece. Like most James heroes, who treat life like a selfish game, he has no idea what emotional havoc he is wreaking on the woman.

The tale has all the drive and tantalising delay of a crime story - the hero is both detective and criminal, and the suspenseful climax suggests what a great genre writer James could have been. As with Stendhal, just as exciting are the intricate, agonising dialogues between the narrator and the niece, each wildly misunderstanding the other.

But if 'Aspern' is a crime story, than the the criminal is of the order of Freddie Montgomery in Banville's 'The Book of Evidence', a brilliant, charming, frighteningly amoral man, whose check of social scruples is dicarded with shocking ease. His seemingly over-detailed account is full of gaps, self-defence, self-pity, evasion, vagueness, misremembering, disarming honesty and wild misinterpreations of others' characters and motives. He is a man who can't see beyond his own narrow goal, behind whom we always sense an unseen, all-seeing eye.

He is the forerunner to a second modern anti-hero, 'Pale Fire''s Charles Kinbote, another literary editor whose devotion to his subject has become mad and murderous. In a Victorian age full of cant about the ennobling power of art, James asserts, disturbingly, the opposite - repeated exposure to sublime poetry (and the book is full of ironic references to religion and glorious war) has only made the narrator emotinally dead, unable to respond to the humanity of others. This 'portrait' of an aging muse, malevolent and concupiscent is a stark warning to literary idealisers, and a sad study of human decline, but should also be seen as a reflection of the narrator's own desires.

'Aspern' is incidentally THE great Venice story, its watery decay somehow seeping through the narrator's blind egotism.

This is a great collection to browse through for ideas and related forms of names, in case you are looking for a fresher version of a beloved and overly popular name.

However, I came across several errors in meaning (among names that I happen to know a lot about, those from Wales) that, of course, made me wonder whether I could believe in the ones that I *didn't* know about.

Overall, I think that this is a good book and a really nice source for ideas. However, if you're in love with a name because of its meaning, check it out several other sources to confirm (I'd advise this with any baby name book, actually).

The introductory part of the book is thoughtful and helpful, as well. I have only one bone to pick there - he advises people who don't like Jr to use II instead. This is simply not correct usage, and it irritates me beyond belief. Only royal names are assigned this way; mere commoners have to have a Sr and Jr before a III (after which Jr becomes II).

Before becoming a dad (well, I will be one in October), if you paid to me I would have never guessed I'd be reading a book on this topic today, but you see: here I am, browsing through a handful of books off of the shelves looking for ideas. Here's our case: my wife and I wanted to name our baby with a beautiful name (how original, huh?) that is not repeated anywhere near (family and close friends) and that plays well both ways, in English AND Spanish without anyone needing to twist their mouths to pronounce it.

When I read the title of the book I felt dragged into it: Zoe is the name of the baby girl of one of my friends and a name which I've always considered beautiful (heard it in a song by Lenny Kravitz for the first time), yet not too widespread. I had a chance to check out this book and found it to be one of the two best among books of baby names. What I liked most about it was how complete the description for each of the names was. It included the name, current language (where it comes from), ethnicity, meaning, biblical citation (if any), popularity, nicknames, alternative spellings and more. In the end, it doesn't offer 20 or 30 thousand names like most titles, but "only" 15 thousand. When you read it, it feels like the authors did a quality work in putting them together, proof once again that quantity doesn't necessarily imply quality. Also worth considering is "A World of Baby Names".

I found reading through "From Aaron to Zoe" to be refreshing. Finally a baby namer book that makes some sense and allows new parents to know some real background about their child's name.. This is a must for parents and will be a wonderful present.

Benjamin Franklin is regarded as one of the finest minds of colonial America. Franklin explored many interests, allowing him to play many roles during his lifetime (as P.M. Zall states): "inventor, scientist, entrepreneur, political activist, statesman, diplomat, cultural gurr, social revolutionist." However, until his death, Franklin thought of himself as merely a printer and a writer. In his Autobiography, he recounts much of his life, beginning with his genealogy and ending unfinished at a point prior to the Revolutionary War.

Essentially, Ben Franklin's Autobiography contains "unstructured" structure, in which the narrative meanders along different episodes of Franklin's life. The division of the Autobiography into four Parts, solely a modern addition by critics, is not extremely helpful in partitioning the events in the book into easily understandable parts for the reader. What the reader sees are blocks of text occaisionally separated by poetic or witty verses Franklin has included, an obstacle that sometimes allows the experience of reading the Autobiography to be monotonous. The content, and by association, the themes, are somewhat obscured to modern readers by the structure of the book as well as Franklin's language. However, the organization of the book is not completely ineffective for the reason that it lends to the reader's understanding of four different mindsets of Benjamin Franklin, allowing for a more multifaceted understanding of Franklin himself. All four of these mindsets contain similar themes of acheiving the American Dream and becoming a better person with age.

While Franklin's Autobiography has high historic value, its other value is the documented story about the man behind the myth. Much of why I liked reading Franklin's memoirs was due to the subject matter itself. In this book, he is able to provide a picture of success of a man who possessed many admirable qualities, as well as many vices. Interestingly, Franklin's best material is the anecdotal text in Part One. These anecdotes, apparently to Franklin "of no Importance to others," are what lends a human quality to the man whom history has magnified to mythical proportions. I feel that the bulk to the work, with the exception of Part Two, is a rather dry account of Franklin's accomplishments. Had Franklin continued his memoirs as advice for hig son (as originially intended) rather than write for the public, the tone of the work might have been different.

Here, then, is the opinion of a high school student who chose this book to read for school: Through no fault of his own, Franklin has written a work that contains a weak structure and is difficult for modern readers to understand. It is for these two reasons that I would not recommend the Autobiography for light beach reading. However, I would strongly recommend it for historical research. Franklin's accounts of incidents in history provide excellent primary sources. Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography will please those who are avid history buffs and who have the patience to wade through the language of colonial America. Also highly recommended as an enlightening book. Aside from his political achievements, he was a scientist/ inventor, a humanitarian, a founder of the first library, fire station, and university in the American colonies. It's not easy to get through, but once you do, you'll see how amazing Franklin was.

I find the Autobiography a fascinating look into the everyday life of our country's Colonial age! Franklin's narration is clean and descriptive and totally engrossing! The story of his early life and how he came to be a businessman and statesman is well worth 5 stars but also included in this gem is "The Selected Writings" which includes "The Way to Wealth" as well as five more sections (Essays to Do Good, Franklin the Scientist, Franklin and the Revolution, The Family Man, and Something of His Religion) all include various letters and essays and are an entertaining look into Franklin and his view of the world! For an American History buff this is a must book for the collection and for Children... this book is a fantastic way to introduce any Child to History and the REAL Life of one of our beloved Signers of the Declaration of Independence!

In many ways, this is, to someone coming to it for the first time, a very surprising book. For one thing, it is amazingly incomplete. Franklin is, of course, one of the most famous Americans who ever lived, and his accomplishments in a wide array of endeavors are a part of American lore and popular history. A great deal of this lore and many of his accomplishments are missing from this account of his life. He never finished the autobiography, earlier in his life because he was too busy with what he terms public "employments," and later in life because the opium he was taking for kidney stones left him unable to concentrate sufficiently. Had Franklin been able to write about every period of his life and all of his achievements, his AUTOBIOGRAPHY would have been one of the most remarkable documents every produced. It is amazingly compelling in its incomplete state.

As a serious reader, I was delighted in the way that Franklin is obsessed with the reading habits of other people. Over and over in the course of his memoir, he remarks that such and such a person was fond of reading, or owned a large number of books, or was a poet or author. Clearly, it is one of the qualities he most admires in others, and one of the qualities in a person that makes him want to know a person. He finds other readers to be kindred souls.

If one is familiar with the Pragmatists, one finds many pragmatist tendencies in Franklin's thought. He is concerned less with ideals than with ideas that work and are functional. For instance, at one point he implies that while his own beliefs lean more towards the deistical, he sees formal religion as playing an important role in life and society, and he goes out of his way to never criticize the faith of another person. His pragmatism comes out also in list of the virtues, which is one of the more famous and striking parts of his book. As is well known, he compiled a list of 13 virtues, which he felt summed up all the virtues taught by all philosophers and religions. But they are practical, not abstract virtues. He states that he wanted to articulate virtues that possessed simple and not complex ideas. Why? The simpler the idea, the easier to apply. And in formulating his list of virtues, he is more concerned with the manner in which these virtues can be actualized in one's life. Franklin has utterly no interest in abstract morality.

One of Franklin's virtues is humility, and his humility comes out in the form of his book. His narrative is exceedingly informal, not merely in the first part, which was ostensibly addressed to his son, but in the later sections (the autobiography was composed upon four separate occasions). The informal nature of the book displays Franklin's intended humility, and for Franklin, seeming to be so is nearly as important as actually being so. For part of the function of the virtues in an individual is not merely to make that particular person virtuous, but to function as an example to others. This notion of his being an example to other people is one of the major themes in his book. His life, he believes, is an exemplary one. And he believes that by sharing the details of his own life, he can serves as a template for other lives.

One striking aspect of his book is what one could almost call Secular Puritanism. Although Franklin was hardly a prude, he was nonetheless very much a child of the Puritans. This is not displayed merely in his promotion of the virtues, but in his abstaining from excessiveness in eating, drinking, conversation, or whatever. Franklin is intensely concerned with self-governance.

I think anyone not having read this before will be surprised at how readable and enjoyable this is. I think also one can only regret that Franklin was not able to write about the entirety of his life. He was a remarkable man with a remarkable story to tell.