This is the first book in the Texas Empires series and it's off to a good start. I liked Cal and Ellie and the way the author set up their relationship. Cal is a loner and a hardened man, thanks to his late father, but you can see and feel his love for his mother when he arrives for her funeral. His love/hate relationship with his father determines his solitary adult life, making him wary of letting anyone into his heart. Then comes Ellie. She is out to avenge her father's death, a father she's never met, at the hands of Cal and his uncles (whom she believes are guilty)and get back the land Cal's uncles won in a card game. She hires two matronly ex-prostitutes to pose as her aunts to accompany her to Texas, where they are supposed to charm Cal's uncles into giving them the land, but all does not work out as planned. Someone else is out to destroy them and take their land, at all costs. I like the way the author made Ellie strong, yet believably vulnerable at the same time. Despite her diminuitive size, she was a match for the tall, blue-eyed Cal, who never developed any feelings, save lust, for a woman. As the story moves along at a fast pace, the snappy, sometimes steamy repartee between the two flows just as well. Cal discovers that he has more than lustful intentions towards Ellie, but he's afraid to commit, while Ellie discovers the passionate side to her nature, but is too proud to settle for being his mistress. The other conflict is the land; they both want it, and Ellie's "aunts" and Cal's uncles come up with a plan. I like the way the author also forced Cal (via Ellie) to realize that family WAS what he needed, by introducing his younger brother, Cord. It was a riveting story and I look forward to reading the second book featuring Cord.

This book will open your eyes, to the secrets and inhabitants of the Hollow Earth. Derro, dwarves, UFOs, just who is down there? Evidence is given. A must for collectors of occult or just plain odd books. Very ahrd to get a hold of, if you find one keep it!

This book contains four very good essays -- one on the works of Evelyn Waugh, one on George Orwell, one on Aldous Huxley and a final one on the common threads running through the works of all three authors. The essay on Evelyn Waugh's works is particularly good. It points out alot of symbolism and motifs which I had missed (but which now seem obvious). This essay focuses primarily upon Waugh's use of architecture as a symbol of social values. However, it only covers Waugh's first four novels (Decline & Fall, Vile Bodies, Black Mischief and Handful of Dust). Similarly, the essay on Huxley only discusses his first two novels(Crome Yellow and Antic Hay) and Brave New World. Both authors continued to write brilliant satire throughout their lives (Huxley's After Many a Summer Dies the Swan comes to mind as an example). I wish the Greenblatt had expanded his study to include a representative cross-section of Waugh's and Huxley's works.

When Sarah's father shipped her off to Constantinople to marry a stranger, the lively beauty thought her life was over. But Sarah's adventures were just beginning. First her ship was captured by pirates and Sarah was sold to the Sultan's harem. Then she managed a daring escape-straight into the strong arms of American adventurer Jake Price, whose seaworthy boat was docked in the right place at the right time. But as they set sail for Jake's secret, uncharted island, and Sarah felt her handsome rescuer's eyes roaming over her scantily clad body, she wondered if she had escaped the life of a concubine only to become a captive of her own wanton desires. Jake took in the veil, the snug bodice, the bare midriff, the silken trousers-and the blond hair. The fact that she was obviously one of the Sultan's cast-offs didn't bother him. Jake lived on the fine edge of danger and adventure and had little patience for virgins. He'd taken time out to rescue this gorgeous damsel in distress, and he'd exact payment in his own fashion-tormenting her night after night with his skilled caresses, his exploring kisses, and his complete mastery over her every sensation.

Although this book is old and out of print it landed in my hands in Queensland. I must say that I really recommend this to anyone who dreams of living on a island, especially as these days it just would'nt be possible to take a loan out to buy such a thing. Unless you are one of the lucky few! So if you come across this book give it a go you may be pleasntly surprised.

This collection of essays is a must-read for any woman in need of a bit of a lift. Stories from the heart...this book is an upbeat conversation with your closest girlfriend who thinks you are strong and can conquer any adversity.

Robinson Crusoe is one of the first English novels. Written by Daniel DeFoe in the early 18th century during the rise of economic theory, this book chronicles the struggle of an economic hero shipwrecked on an island. He takes advantage of people, always looking to make money or increase economic value. Although Crusoe has religious experiences and gets preachy at times (DeFoe was of Puritan stock at a time when Puritanism was a significant force), Crusoe is a practical man. He does not let morals get in the way of carving out a prosperous life -- there are scenes where the main character is no role model. The novel is episodic, with Crusoe hopping from one scene to another. The narration isn't smooth. However, the "flaws" when compared to later writings may be forgiven because Robinson Crusoe is an early novel. Writers had not worked out the fine points of the genre. DeFoe is an important early English novelist who cobbled together economic theory, religious opinion, travel writing, and borrowed material from a contemporary shipwreck victim to create a work of fiction. Robinson Crusoe is often mislabelled as a childrens book. Perhaps in a watered down abridgement, it is a good children's book. The original, complete, unabridged work is a literary classic that should be read by any student of English literature.

Robinson Crusoe is the perfect treat for the wilderness lover. The novel takes the reader on a journey through many hardships that the main character encounters in order to display just how trying nature can be. Almost every new day, Crusoe must find and develop a new survival tactic in order to stay alive. There are several reasons why one should engulf in reading this book.
Robinson Crusoe displays strength and incredible will to survive. This can be very inspiring to someone who does not have a lot of confidence in themselves. Crusoe has faith in himself and God, believing that he will be guided in the right direction. God plays a large role in his everyday life. Crusoe never was a religious man before he was stranded on the island, but he believed God had allowed him to be the sole survivor of the shipwreck for a reason and he owed it to God to be the best man that he could be.
Another reason to read this book is that it shows that one can do whatever they put their mind to. Crusoe worked long and hard to create things that will facilitate his survival and make things more convenient for himself. He creates a protective shelter, makes his own tools, baskets, and pots, and even grows and raises his own food.
This book will also get many people to realize just how good their lives actually are. Many, not all, of us have lives that are not threatened by wondering how we will get our next meal or if someone or something is out to hunt us down, but Crusoe must face these dilemmas and find ways to secure himself. The wonderful thing about this novel is that it shows how difficult these tasks can be, yet Crusoe does not give up and he pursues his goals until they are accomplished.
This novel can instigate someone to try something new that perhaps thay were uneasy about doing before. Robinson is faced with so many new surroundings at once, yet deals with them so well. If he would have panicked, he eventually would have starved to death. Instead, Crusoe thinks logically and pursues what is needed to survive.
Robinson Crusoe is an amazing adventure novel that explores the life of a very strong-willed man. The main character tells his own story and it is as if he is speaking directly to the reader, which makes it seem even more like reality. Daniel Defoe has written a great novel.

My daughter and I have been reading (and re-reading!) the DK Classics (of which "Robinson Crusoe" is part of) for several years, since she was 5. These books are very colorful, with lots of illustrations and photos of genuine artifacts, maps, and people from the era in which the story is set. Side panel text gives background information about the author, pictures and story. These "additions" (which do not detract from, but only enhance the story) help the young reader (and the adult too!) put the story into context. It is like getting both a classic and a pictorial history book rolled into one! The text is easy to read. My daughter is now 9, and reading the books on her own. Not only has she developed an appreciation for classic literature, but for history as well. These are great books for parents to read with their children. I highly recommend them!

This book is terribly misleading. One expects to find mostly recipes, with some background information on each recipe. Instead, one finds 95% information, and very few recipes. I am returning this book. When I want a limited encyclopedia, I'll buy one. I thought I was buying a cookbook. Only some of the dishes even have pictures; many don't. If all you want is limited information with little intention of cooking, then this is your book. Otherwise, don't bother.

I find this book very useful as a guide book. We go out for Dim Sum a lot as a family and it's great to know what to order now. Also, I've made two of the easier recipes for entertaining and am pleased that they're not as hard as people would have you believe. Some Dim Sum are very tricky and labor intensive, I'm told, but this book only included the simpler ones. I made shrimp rolls and the stuffed eggplants and both are addictive!

A wonderful book written in a beautiful, personal style. I've avoided visiting Dim Sum Restaurants because of my fear of eating something I don't want to by mistake. This book describes over 50 of the most common dishes so you know what you're popping into your mouth and - if you're a fussy eater like me - what to avoid. On the weekend I took my wife and some friends to a Dim Sum Restaurant and we had a lot of fun and ate some really good food! A bonus is the 20 recipes from top chefs... my wife intends to try a few.

Very insular and without context. I wonder if this is how post-modern lit will seem in 50 years.

This is the first in the 'Sword of Honor' trilogy of novels by Waugh, describing one man's experience in the British military establishment. At the onset of WWII, divorced thirty-something Guy Crouchback anxiously longs to serve his country in its time of need, but can't find a branch of service that wants him. By the end of this book, his training completed, he begins to wonder if his country (represented by its armed forces) really knows what's good for it. This book is a fairly realistic and often rather lighthearted look at the training received by an officer of the Halberdiers during the early days of WWII, before the true terrors and horrors of that conflict had become apparent. This volume contains some fine portraits and vignettes from British army life, after which an officer's death and the questions of responsibility it raises cause Crouchback to doubt the wisdom of his beloved leaders.

Some of the more humorous moments include the incidents involving Apthorpe's port-a-john (not as disgusting as you might fear), Crouchback's attempted reconciliation with his wife, and the ego-driven absurdities that lead to the Brigadier's reconnaissance mission, but the humor is of the dry British
sort, with few of the belly laughs that make books like Catch 22 so unforgettable. Rather more to the point is the mildly biting satire exposing how ill prepared for war Britain really was at the time, particularly in light of the high price Europe paid for that negligence.

While this reviewer certainly enjoyed the book, its target audience is probably not as broad today as it would have been forty years ago. Veterans of the armed forces who are interested in a nostalgic look back at this era will probably get the most out of it, followed by admirers of the gentle art
of British humor, while on the other hand, women looking for romantic adventure will find very little femininity in the book, and Gen-Xers hoping to read another 'Catch 22' or 'MASH', will likely find the story dry and insipid. So don't go into this book looking for a comedy - it stands better as a fictionalized portrayal of a particular time and place in history.

When Waugh wrote this trilogy, between 1951 and 1964, people loved the acerbity of his writing. But
they found Crouchback and his views perverse. In those days, the thought that the Second World War might
have been an error which left the world worse than it found it was almost unthinkable.

There had been frightful blunders such as Singapore, admitted the reader in the National Health spectacles.
But to see it all as a mistake, you would have to be...well, either a fascist or a believer in something perfectly
weird. For instance, a devout member of the old English Roman Catholic aristocracy. Down the narrow
perspective of that particular telescope, through which the welfare of the Vatican mattered more than cutting
Axis communications in the Balkans, things might well look different.

They did to fictional Guy Crouchback.

-The Crouchback tendency (Neal Ascherson, January 7, 2001, The Observer)

Like many of Evelyn Waugh's books, this one--the first in the Sword of Honour trilogy--is at least semi-autobiographical. But, whereas other
life experiences gave him the fodder to savagely satirize such things as adultery/divorce, journalism, Africa, and Hollywood, his treatment of his
checkered military career, probably tempered by a natural patriotism, comes in more for gentle ribbing. So there are plenty of amusing characters
and absurd situations, beginning with the nature of the enlistee, Guy Crouchback, himself:

'We don't want cannon-fodder this time'--from the Services--'we learned our lesson in 1914 when we threw away the pick of the
nation. That's what we've suffered from ever since.

'But I'm not the pick of the nation,' said Guy. 'I'm natural fodder. I've no dependants. I've no special skill in anything. What's more I'm
getting old. I'm ready for immediate consumption. You should take the 35s now and give the young men time to get sons.'

'I'm afraid that's not the official view. I'll put you on our list and see you're notified as soon as anything turns up.'

But Mr. Waugh's heart, understandably, doesn't seem to be invested in really letting loose on the British armed services. This combines with the
subject of the story--the painfully slow build-up to war--to render a novel that's somewhat less spirited than many of his others.

However, it does have one feature that more than redeems it and makes it not only one of his most invaluable works, but one of the most important
novels of WWII: its ferocious criticism of the British decision to accept the Soviet Union as an ally, rather than treat her as an enemy just as
dangerous as Nazi Germany. Guy's initial fervor for war comes as a result of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact:

Just seven days earlier he had opened his morning newspaper on the headlines announcing the Russian-German alliance. News that
shook the politicians and young poets of a dozen capital cities brought deep peace to one English heart. [...] He lived too close to Fascism
in Italy to share the opposing enthusiasms of his countrymen. He saw it neither as a calamity nor as a rebirth; as a rough improvisation
merely. He disliked the men who were edging themselves into power around him, but English denunciations sounded fatuous and
dishonest and for the past three years he had given up his English newspapers. The German Nazis he knew to be mad and bad. Their
participation dishonoured the cause of Spain, but the troubles of Bohemia, the year before, left him quite indifferent. When Prague fell,
he knew that war was inevitable. He expected his country to go to war in a panic, for the wrong reasons or for no reason at all, with the
wrong allies, in pitiful weakness. But now, splendidly, everything had become clear. The enemy at last was plain in view, huge and
hateful, all disguise cast off. It was the Modern Age in arms. Whatever the outcome there was a place for him in that battle.

But he despairs when, Hitler having betrayed Stalin, the Soviets are thereupon blithely accepted as comrades:

Russia invaded Poland. Guy found no sympathy among these old soldiers for his own hot indignation.

'My dear fellow, we've quite enough on our hands as it is. We can't go to war with the whole world.'

'Then why go to war at all? If all we want is prosperity, the hardest bargain Hitler made would be preferable to victory. If we are
concerned with justice the Russians are as guilty as the Germans.'

'Justice?' said the old soldiers. 'Justice?'

'Besides,' said Box-Bender when Guy spoke to him of the matter which seemed in no one's mind but his, 'the country would never stand
for it. The socialists have been crying blue murder against the Nazis for five years but they are still pacifists at heart. So far as they have
any feeling of patriotism it's for Russia. You'd have a general strike and the whole country in collapse if you set up to be just.'

'Then what are we fighting for?'

'Oh we had to do that, you know. The socialists always thought we were pro-Hitler. God knows why. It was quite a job keeping neutral
over Spain. [...] It was quite ticklish, I assure you. If we sat tight now there'd be chaos. What we have to do now is to limit and localize
the war, not extend it.'

And so the comic misadventures that Guy undergoes in preparing for war are no longer even in furtherance of an ideal one can be proud of, but are
instead the minmum required of a patriot. Rare indeed is the book--fiction or non--that's this brutally honest about the ultimate futility of WWII
and that frankness makes it special...Grade: (A-)

Evelyn Waugh's THE LOVED ONE is a strange and amusing little book, and as he says himself in a prefatory note entitled "A Warning," it is, "a little nightmare produced by the unaccustomed high living of a brief visit to Hollywood." Dennis Barlow is a one-hit-wonder poet and failed screenwriter forced to take a job selling and effecting pet cremations and funerals at an establishment called the Happier Hunting Ground. Doing so cuts him off form the snobbish Cricket Clubbers of expatriate English society in L.A.--they would much rather pay to send him back to the motherland than have him disgrace them by association.

Waugh also takes several good cuts at the vacuity of American life as exemplified by the heartless film industry and the garish tackiness of the Whispering Glades cemetery (complete with piped in sounds of nature)--a place of rest found enduringly beautiful by Barlow's love interest Aimee Thanatogenos. This mortuary cosmetician's name translates roughly as 'The Loved One, who gives Life to Death. No need for subtlety here as far as Waugh is concerned--this is Tinseltown, after all. More fun names: the virtuoso mortician also in love with Aimee is "Joyboy" and the advice columnist at the local paper who replies to her several entreaties is "Mr. Slump."

The characters don't offer much to redeem themselves, but that's the point, and Waugh doesn't waste any pages getting it across. Whether you have gone through the process of making funeral arrangements or not, THE LOVED ONE will prepare you for the sales pitch of "Before Need Arrangements" and various other details you weren't crazy about knowing but that are dealt with in such a funny, hyperbolized way here by Waugh. "A Warning" recommends that "squeamish [readers] should return their copies to the library or bookstore unread." What a silly thing to do that would be.

From cover to cover, the book is hilarious. Evelyn Waugh's dry wit will really inspire laughter. Waugh's take on L.A. funeral industry is amazingly funny and creative. His use of location, irony, sarcasm, and a line-up of well developed characters, is evidence of his good writing abilities.

Set in Los Angeles, Waugh uses the funniest names for two distinct funeral businesses. First, for the humanly customer is "Whispering Glades". Secondly, he develops a pet cemetary called "Happier Hunting Grounds". In a morbid way, these two names will make you laugh. Waugh ironically and sarcastically uses a serious service, the funeral industry, to make a series of funny events that you wouldn't think happens. In one part, Mr. Joyboy, the funeral director of Whispering Glades, fixes a smile on a corpse in order to show his female cosmotician that he likes her.

If you like dry humor, sarcastic wit, and great characters, The Loved One is a must read. In fact, I give it four stars and recommend it as a best seller. Waugh hilarious style of writing will leave you wanting to read more of his works.

After a brief, apparently unpleasant, stay in Hollywood--he had been commissioned to adapt his novel Brideshead Revisited for the screen--Evelyn Waugh wrote this wonderfully wicked satire of the movie business, the funeral industry, lowbrow Americans and whatever other hapless targets wandered within range of his savage pen. Dennis Barlow is a young British poet, who, having lost his movie job, is temporarily employed at The Happier Hunting Ground, a pet cemetery modeled after the hallowed Whispering Glades, graveyard to the stars. But such a lowly job is anathema to the British expatriate community, as Sir Ambrose Abercrombie informs him:

We limeys have a peculiar position to keep up, you know, Barlow. They may laugh at us a bit--the way we talk and the way we dress; our monocles--they may think us cliquey and stand-offish. but, by God, they respect us. Your five-to-two is a judge of quality. He knows what he's buying and it's only the finest type of Englishman that you meet out here. I often feel like an ambassador, Barlow. It's a responsibility, I can tell you, and in various degrees every Englishman out here shares it. We can't all be at the top of the tree but we are all men of responsibility. You never find an Englishman among the under-dogs--except in England, of course. That's understood out here, thanks to the example we've set. There are jobs that an Englishman just doesn't take.

However, when Barlow's roommate, Sir Francis Hinsley, is abruptly dismissed from his studio job and hangs himself, Abercrombie and his fellow Cricket Club members depend on Barlow to arrange the burial--after all, he knows about how to dispose of animal remains, how much different can it be?

So Barlow heads over to Whispering Glades where he is treated to a hilariously garish tour and sales pitch. He meets and falls in love with one of the cosmeticians there, Aimée Thanatogenos, but must hide the truth about his embarrassing job, particularly since she is also smitten with Mr. Joyboy, the legendary embalmer at Whispering Glades. When she proves unresponsive to his own poetry, Barlow woos her with passages from the great poets, the works of whom she is utterly ignorant.

Naturally, it all goes bung, as Barlow's various frauds are revealed and Aimée kills herself. Barlow extorts some money out of the scandal fearing Joyboy and buries her at the Hunting Grounds, so:

Tomorrow and on every anniversary as long as the Happier Hunting Ground existed a postcard would go to Mr. Joyboy: Your little Aimée is wagging her tail in heaven tonight, thinking of you.

Waugh lays bare a Hollywood where all is pretense and illusion, where human lives--never mind human feelings--are meaningless, where semantic niceties, like calling a corpse a "Loved One" are intended to mask reality. It is brutal, and unfortunately still timely, and quite certainly one of the best novels ever written about the movie industry. It is also just a screaming hoot.

GRADE: A