I am a senior enrolled in the AP European history class at my school. This year the class switched to a new textbook, which happened to be The Western Heritage. We were all excited that the new textbook had large, colorful pictures and not just pages of lengthy text. As the year progressed, my classmates and I noticed how poor the book was. Many of the key concepts were explained in a way that was complicated and unenlightening. The book greatly confused many students on significant practices of the Catholic church during the Middle Ages. The chapters are quite inconsistent. Some chapters are written fairly well, while others are cluttered and downright terrible. Each chapter is quite lengthy and is often hard to read or sleep-inducing. The organization of ideas is poorly done. Chronological events are separated by material that is either unrelated to any previous events, or do not occur until decades later. Recently, I read the chapter on the rise of fascist empires in Italy and Germany. Some major terminology that we all know was mysteriously missing -- I could not find the word "Autobahn" anywhere in the endless sea of words, but maybe the publisher suddenly ran out of ink and just couldn't print the word on the page. Alas...
So, in conclusion, I suggest you steer clear of this textbook unless you are stimulated by lots of colorful pictures and enjoy reading books that are more suitable for gathering dust.

I am a freshman in high school, and this is my textbook in my AP European History class.

The events depicted are often out of order, making it harder to understand the timeline. The writing seems inconsistent, sometimes short and understandable but often is long-winded and unclear. The authors of this book assume you have some knowledge of both of the geography in Europe and at least some knowledge of Europe's history already. In most of my fellow students' case, they assume wrong. If you do not already have some experience in studying Europe, then I would recommend searching for a different book.

I am a junior in an AP European History class. My class uses two textbooks, one of which is Kagan's Western Heritage. The Kagan textbook is by far my favorite of the two textbooks to read. It is very interesting and thoroughly covers all the topics of European history, many of which are skipped in my other textbook. I am even considering buying the book so I can read the chapters my class skipped and keep it on hand as a reference. The order of the chapters is not at all difficult to follow as long as the reader has a basic knowledge of European History or looks at the timelines at the beginning of each section. I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in Europe.

David Mamet is certainly an excellent story-teller and an accomplished writer. No one can take that away from him.

But this story - which in Mamet's mind is intended to combat bigotry and racism toward Jews - actually enhances bigotry and racism toward other groups that are being marginalized in current American society.

Mamet gives us a story where an innocent Jewish man is mistakenly convicted of rape and suffers a harrowing fate at the hands of a lynch mob. Mamet tells us that this happened because of anti-Semitism. Fair enough.

Mamet's character then goes on to deliver a two-fisted verbal assualt on Christians of the "evangelical" variety ("they say they've been saved. Saved from what?"), who he portrays as evil, stupid, and lazy. (They bask in "inherited glory," although they've contributed nothing to society, "invented no vaccines," as Mamet puts it.)

First of all, there is no evidence that the historical killers in this case were "evangelical Christians." It's a big stretch to say that just because a murder occurred in the south, that it was committed by Bible-thumping Southern Baptists.

Second, "evangelical Christians" comprise about 7 to 10 percent of the current American population (a number that is consistently revealed in polls by Gallup, Barna, Smith, etc.). That's about the same as the number of Jews and Muslims in America combined. They are consistently villified as "right-wingers" who want to take over the government, impose a theocracy, and kill homosexuals - none of which is true. (The typical evangelical is a moderate Republican of the John McCain variety.) Aside from the rather sympathetic portrayal of Ned Flanders on the Simpsons, the entire media establishment is arrayed against this one segment of our population. The lies and stereotypes directed against these people are as pernicious and hateful as those directed against the Jews in Nazi Germany. (The Jews, too, were out to take over society, according to the Third Reich.) Mamet's hateful scree against people "who say they've been saved" is just fuel for the fire. It takes a feeble-minded coward to throw himself wholeheartedly into society's accepted mode of bigotry, and well, Mamet lives up.

Third, evangelicals are hardly stupid people who bask in "inherited glory" from the Pilgrim days. Evangelical accomplishments are many - from revolutionizing the field of linguistics (Kenneth Pike) and Philosophy (Alvin Plantiga), to improving the lives of millions of Latin Americans after the abysmal failure of Roman Catholicism to confront oppression and injustice, to helping freedom of religion and freedom of speech spread throughout the globe, Evangelicals have contributed much to modern society. Of course, they haven't contributed much to the Entertainment industry, and perhaps that's the only industry Mamet cares about.

In The Old Religion, historical figure Leo Frank, a Jewish factory owner in the old American South falsely accused of rape and murder, then imprisoned and eventually lynched by an organised mob, is turned by Mamet into a religious philosopher, an all but obssessive turner over of truths and half truths, propositions and the voices within voices of a disputatious mind from a disputatious people. But the heart of it is still the same: "To be a man," the Rabbi said, was to behave as a man in that situation where there were neither the trappings nor the rewards of manhood: scorned, reviled, abandoned, humiliated, powerless, terrified, mocked. "Now be a man..." the Rabbi said."

And in The Edge, a movie by Mamet, the millionaire played by Anthony Hopkins is an obssessive learner and compiler of facts, a man detached from his emotions, who through the forces of a melodrama plot, (a plane goes down stranding him in the wilderness with his wife's lover, the fashion photographer Alec Baldwin who wants him dead) is forced to confront himself and, stripped to his essentials, survive. In a sense, The Edge is the opposite story to The Old Religion in that the former has as its central motif a canoe paddle on whose two sides a rabbit and a ravenous beast, I cannot quite recall what, co-exist. Why is the rabbit not afraid? "Because he knows he's smarter then the.." Fox, I believe the beast is. It is significant that the line, among the best in the film, is not quite memorable enough to hold the mind. And the central, memorable sequence of the film is millionaire and adulterous rival being forced to collaborate in killing a bear. That bear was more memorable than the characters or the dialogue. In The Old Religion the opposite moral is operative, Frank is in no useable way smarter than his employee Jim, who uses the white Southern mob's unwillingness to believe in the intelligence of a "nigro" to fool them and gets away with murder, dooming the outsider Jew. You cannot be smarter than the fox and disruptive nature, chaos; the forces of darkness cannot be conquered - you must only stand and face them as you may, that is the true heart of Mamet's reveries.

The trouble is that this does not always amount to a compelling fulcrum, in and of itself, it must accompany colour or is bland, a blank stare in the face of onrushing doom - Mamet's stoic glance in the face of the cancer look.

In The Old Religion, Frank's habits of dissecting, homelitically commenting on and generally discoursing throughout and over every event of his downward course lend the book the air of a series of absent minded sermons, underpinned with occasional colourful clues as to motive, projection through space and narrative to fate, the taste of life. As Mamet points out somewhere in his book of actors' sermons "True or False"- intentions are not interesting, a person's qualities are not interesting, only actions are interesting. Hence the only memorable thing about the Rabbi, a key figure of the last third of the book, is the way he lights a match, his way with a cigarette. This is actual character. Mamet doesn't give either Frank or the Rabbi or any of the other characters quite enough internal colour, a personal smell or feeling, to make them anything - an actor could not successfully play them without addition and a reader cannot happily create them in the mind's eye because aside from the endless discourses- as Mamet's Frank asks himself at one point "what part of reason is not simply the recoil of fear?" - there is nothing much going on. The only thing which defines Frank's response in the face of the onrushing catastrophe is his reversion to the "Old Religion" of Judaism away from the "Old Religion" of the South, of America, of the belief in progress. This is not really, in itself, much that you can play. As Mamet the actor would put it: What's the objective? And it cannot really be said that Mamet the novelist has given the actor or reader much in the way of lines on a page to sustain the illusion of character.

At the novel's early parts, before chaos unfolds, one feels a little like the inhabitant of a Aharon Appelfeld novel, where bitter laughter and irony is beneath every casual detail of the lives of comfortable Jews on the lip on an abyss. And Mamet's skill is always wordily present - for probably two thirds of the novel he manages to keep you reading, keep you turning the pages, despite very little meat between his odd moments of concrete detail. This is no small skill. But his aesthetic position about acting is disproved in his own work, in this particular book. Not enough blood in these characters to sustain the book.

I love David Mamet's plays (recently, I laughed my way through the movie adaptation of State and Main), but this novel was disappointing. The event itself (described on the book jacket) is much more interesting than a fragmented interior monlogue by a less-than-fascinating protagonist. The idea invoked The Stranger, but unlike Camus who does a brilliant job, Mamet is much less brilliant. This read more like a literary experiment in a writing workshop than a polished piece by Mamet. If you want to read the master of this genre, stick to Camus.

One gets the same feeling finishing Frank Capra's autobiography The Name Above the Title as one does finishing a Capra film: thrilled with the zigs and zags of life and optimistic about one's own future.

But following up The Name Above The Title with Catastrophe of Success is akin to washing down Thanksgiving dinner with a rotten-egg-and-sour-grape smoothie. McBride has tainted a seven year odyssey of painstakingly documented research (175 interviews! weeks with Capra's personal papers! archive searches! FOIA releases! federal declassifications!) with an animosity uncommon in academics, at once vilifying Capra and his father while portraying those who loved and associated with Capra as selfless victims of Capra's insecurities, inner torments, and anticommunist political convictions.

In reading McBride, one senses that behind it all, there exists an even better story than the one McBride has scratched out from the voluminous source material. Why did McBride seek to so vehemently deconstruct what he called "the Capra myth," and soil the dignity of Capra's image by using such tactics as only quoting those interview passages in which his subject used expletives, or subjectively interpreting Capra's blinks and nods in a This Is Your Life episode as queasy squirming in the face of some underlying "irony"?

Was it because Capra declined to direct a made-for-TV sequel to It's A Wonderful Life, one which McBride hints he may have been involved in on page 644 of the paperback edition? Did Capra at one point step on McBride's toes as had done with so many insufferable fools?

McBride's perseverant scholarship is self-evident, yet his shamefully slanted execution degrades the whole presentation, making the book unreadable except to Capra enemies and eternal sourpusses. Readers are advised to reserve a second helping of "legend" for after the egg-and-grape "truth" sauce.

This was a disappointment. I don't like everything that Capra made ("Platinum Blonde" and "You Can't Take It With You" do nothing for me)but this book proved too much to take. It reads like a legal brief against Capra by a prosecuting attorney. Every action Capra undertakes is wrong. Every success Capra enjoys is really the work of someone else.

Shortly after reading "Catastrophe of Success," I read "Christmas in July" by Diane Jacobs, a biography of Preston Sturges. It was the difference between night and day. Jacobs seemed to enjoy her subject, and while she noted Sturges' personal failings, she didn't dwell on them or harp on them. Instead she focused on the films and why they worked (or didn't). If only McBride had done the same.

This book is an unholy surprise for any Capra film lover picking it up and expecting to read a warm-hearted tome about the greatest director of 1930s Hollywood. The author hates Capra, and to be fair he makes his case really well. It is sort of like Frank Capra is a china shop and the author goes into him with a baseball bat and vast damage on his mind. Nothing is left unbroken, not even Capra's reputation as a maker of great movies. Much of the credit for those masterpieces is shifted to Robert Riskin. This doesn't even come close to the hit that Capra the man takes, especially with the revelation he named names to federal Commie seekers. Guys like that never get off easy these days. But the most fascinating aspect of the book is how Frank Capra -- the All-American movie maker -- was hounded to prove his patriotism. And nothing worked. No wonder Capra was left so exasperated and bitter. The only good thing is he didn't have to read this book.

A more pathetic example of one-sided storytelling hasn't beenscripted, yet. I'm no fan of UK, but this guy paints the image ofthem (Rupp especially) as nothing more than racist malcontents. I hope he makes all his money on this book, because he doesn't have the credibility with me to dupe into buying more of his drivel. END

Ironically, "And the Walls Came Tumbling Down: Kentucky, Texas Western, and the Game That Changed American Sports," preserves a stereotypical view of the game that presumably challenged a prevailing stereotype. The controversial figure in this story has always been Adolph Rupp, coach of the Kentucky Wildcats, whose "Rupp's Runts" were the last all-white team to play for the championship in the NCAA mens basketball title game. Fitzpatrick makes Rupp the iconic figure of white racism. Indeed, before the game, Rupp told the press that a team of five black players could not beat a team of five white players. However, certainly Rupp was not alone in that holding that stupid position. While it would not be surprising that Rupp, as a older Southern white man, would be a racist, his attempts to recruit future pros Wes Unseld and Butch Beard would seem to suggest he might have been something short of a card carrying member of the Klan. Yet Rupp is demonized throughout the book, while his players, most notably Pat Riley and Louie Dampier, are forced into the role of apologists. Unfortunately, Rupp's legacy pretty much ended with this game, while Riley and Dampier both got to prove their willingness to play not only against but with blacks in professional basketball.

I had spent years booing Don Haskins and the Miners in the Pit in Albuquerque for years before I found out that UTEP had once been Texas Western and how won the NCAA title in 1966. The final score was 72-65, but as they often say, the game was never really that close. Fitzpatrick does assemble all the stories and quotes needed to give you a sense for what happened and how it was seen as important. The collision course between the two teams, the programs, the two coaches, the two ways of thinking, is crystal clear from start to finish. However, despite its importance, primarily in opening up the SEC to black basketball players and other athletes, this game certainly did not impact on the national championships for the rest of the decade. After all, the argument could be made that the only reason Texas Western won in 1966 was because freshman were not eligible to play and two-time defending national champion U.C.L.A. had the best player in the country, Lew Alcindor, playing on their freshman team. U.C.L.A. would win the next seven NCAA titles and all of John Wooden's 10 title teams were won by integrated teams. I have to believe, that even if Texas Western had lost, that the value of black players would have been lost on the rest of the country.

As interesting as the story about this pivotal game happens to be, the story about the story is equally fascinating. While it was obvious to everyone who watched the game that a team of black players beat a team of white players, the sports media managed to cover the game without dealing with the racial aspects of the encounter. The aftermath of this story abounds with more irony. Kentucky did not recruit a black player until 1969, at which point Don Haskins was having trouble recruiting black players because of a Sports Illustrated story claiming he was exploiting black athletes by bringing them to Texas Western just to win the national championship (I know, think about it a bit and pretend it makes sense). When Rupp coached and lost his final game, it was again an instance of his five white players losing to a team of five black players. Ultimately, the picture of Rupp in this book makes him more of a pathetic figure than anything else. I guess when you have a larger than life figure like that it is impossible to put anything else in perspective because they overwhelm any story in which they are involved. But even though they are tearing down Cole Field House at Maryland, where this game took place, it is certainly a moment in sports history that needs to be recalled from time to time.

This book was very inspirational to me. Before 1966 there was a myth that five African-American couldn't play on the basketball court together without having one white person on the court to keep things in order. This championship game of 1966 with five African-American's starting as well as winning the game busted integration wide open. If minorities as a whole can apply the same techniques to academics that they apply athletics, we as a race will be able to tear down many racial barriers whether we have affirmative action or not. Just look at the blacks that are in big time positions that are not athletes. Kenneth Chenault/CEO American Express, Frankie Raines/CEO of Fannie Mae, etc.

I found this little number at the library, and I suggest that if your even remotely compelled to read this strange bit of fact/fiction/fantasy, you should get a free copy that can be returned also. I find plenty of these accounts plausible and probably just a groupie account of some wonderful events that meant more to her than anyone else. There is nothing wrong with that but it does'nt warrant a book. Perhaps Mike Keneally could offer some insight on this book. He did a great job at picking apart Ben Watson's self-indulgent/ highly laughable "Dialectics of Poodle Play".

Being Frank: My time With Frank Zappa
Expanded From The Original Classic

Since his untimely death from prostate cancer in 1993, the legend of iconoclastic musician Frank Zappa has continued to grow. The decade following his passing has seen the publication of a number of books, both sacred and profane, which examine his life and work, but the best, and only, up-close-and-personal account of the man and his music remains the original: Nigey Lennon's Being Frank: My Time with Frank Zappa. Musician/author Lennon maintained a personal and professional relationship with Zappa during the period which is generally agreed to have been the composer's most creative, and she invests her recollections with considerable musical and emotional insight.

"....Being Frank can be viewed as a cautionary tale, a cinema verite' rock-and-roll moral fable, an historically accurate emotional portrait of one of America's most enigmatic modern musicians during an important transitional period in his life when he was free of the emotional/financial baggage of the original Mothers of Invention and could do as he creatively wished...what makes Zappa such a quirky individual and his music so irresistible...is precisely what Nigey has patiently and passionately documented...between the two of our books is a valuable portrait of one of the more intriguing and enigmatic cultural figures of the Twentieth Century, god help us all.
--From the Introduction by David Walley, author of No Commercial Potential: The Saga of Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention

This edition is a reaffirmation of Being Frank's validity as a "must read" book and hell, even a "must re-read" book! Just like Frank's music, the deeper you get into this book, the more you will get out of it.
--From the Foreword by Greg Russo, author of Cosmik Debris: The Collected History and Improvisations of Frank Zappa

"irreplaceable...is the word to describe Being Frank...[Lennon's] memoir is both spiky and musically literate...Lennon's previous books were on Mark Twain and Alfred Jarry, which indicates the kind of cultural perspective required to get a grip on Zappa: something brighter than rock-journo pedantry."
-- Ben Watson, author of Frank Zappa: The Negative Dialectics of Poodle Play

This book is an accurate, funny, and well-observed portrait of one of the most enigmatic figures on the American music scene.
It is most of all a portrait, warts and all, of a human being trying to deal with a human universe, something which Zappa held at a great distance from himself, and despite his protestations to the contrary had difficulty in dealing with. It will and has ticked off many members of Zappa Anonymous who've been fed a steady diet of well... publicity which Zappa in his lifetime encouraged and ironically and inevitably became its victim after his death. I highly recommend this book for those who are interested in historical and sometimes hysterical accuracy. She was there at a crucial time in Zappa's life as a confidant, a lover, and a working member of his band when he was recuperating from a grievious accident which nearly cost him his life. This book is part sociology, part auto-biography and describes her coming of age and the influence that one of America's great enigmatic figures had on her life. She writes well with a great sense of ironic detachment, which is as idiosyncratic as the person whose life for a time she shared.

I ordered this book by mistake, thinking it was the book of the same title by the sociologist Barry Glassner . I don't know who Frank Furedi is, but he sure isn't a writer (though to be fair, this book does come from an academic publisher). It's hard to critique Furedi's argument because his writing is so turgid. I suggest that people interested in fear and panics read instead the work of people like Philip Jenkins, whose work on moral panics is truly pathbreaking, or Glassner, who writes with great style and wit. I am familiar with this literature and did not read anything in Furedi's book that was original or provocative.

I am writing primarily to respond to the Chicago reviewer who found this book less valuable than Barry Glassner's book of the same title and the work of Philip Jenkins. Glassner probably writes better than Furedi, but he's not a better thinker. Glassner's book has received a lot of attention, and it probably deserves it, but it isn't all that profound a work. Furedi, on the other hand, even though he probably pushes his argument too far (i.e., dismisses as fear mongering some things that are probably not), is much richer in his analysis. Jenkins, I must say, I find a bit irritating - at least based on his book on terrorism. While he has obviously done his homework and knows a great deal about the subject, he really doesn't end up saying very much of use.

I was recommended the book by a lecturer at my university as a must read to attempt to gain an understanding of the socio-political climate of our times. The book does not disappoint: Furedi's work is rational, informative, well argued and progressive. It points the direction forward in these "post-modern" times where the victim is celebrated and humankind's achievements have been forgotten. This book is essential reading for anyone who wants to see the truth about many factors in todays society.

I cant speak to this book in its entirety, as I dont usually buy tech books to read them; rather when I encounter an obstacle I thrash thru books until I find something that addresses that obstacle, putting them back on the shelf once the problem is resolved. Thus, to me, the quality of a programming book is how helpful they are in solving obscure problems that usually are hard-to-impossible to find documentation for.

Background: I primarily use VB and T-SQL to convert/transform environmental data from over 500 independent sources on a regular or sporadic release cycle into a site-organized perspective which I then convert into attribute-centric XML (each string the totality of a single site and all of its related children) to be stored in a single text field with its site info also stored in other fields as a header, id'd by GUIDs. We collect massive amounts of data in a wide variety of formats which we transform using 3rd party apps, custom apps, and when necessary via a Hand Keying agency for paper datasets. Our data process is many-stepped and complex and involves moving data between different formats and many different SQL Servers at various stages. To expedite this, a co-worker and I have written a collection of automation apps and utilities. However, at 2 different points in the process sombody has to manually DTS data either into SQL (typically from MSAccess which we use a convenient intermediary for analysis and conversion) or from SQL Server to SQL Server. The DTS Wizard makes this easy, but nevertheless manual, and therefore inefficient (and repititious/annoying). Previously we had played around with various methods of using packages, building packages on the fly, and more esoteric methods but due to the sheer diversity of incoming data and inconcistencies in format from data providers, nothing worked better or more easily than just biting the bullet and manually using the DTS Wizard.

Recently, my coworker came across this book and noticed that, while most of it seems pretty uninteresting, Chapter 10 had very simplified code for creating simple DTS packages on the fly. The code & documentation we had found previously seemed to occlude/complicate the matter significantly, to the point that implementation would be too time consuming. However, the code in this book was easily adaptable to our purposes and in conjunction with some of our existing tools could become the basis of an in-line solution, removing the irritating manual DTS Wizard portion of our process.

So, this book gets 3 stars on the basis of solving a single irritating issue thats been a thorn in our side for some time now.

Be warned however, that we had to tape a yellow sticky over one of the writer's portraits; we kept having an unpleasant reaction everytime we looked at the book's cover. When you see it up close yourself, you'll understand what I mean...... ;)

I was discouraged from getting this book for a while because of the other reviews on this page, but when I really needed an additional reference for SQL-DMO, I went ahead for whatever I could get from the book. I have read through the portion of the book (The chapters, not the appendices - they are more for reference).
First, the book is not just a rehash of the SQL SBO, nor of the reference on MSDN. It was my frustration with searching through them, getting explanations that did not always offer enough of an example to really clear up the concept in my mind that led me to seek another book. The chapters in this book do lead the reader through examples, and do solidify the concepts I was looking to have solidified such as the practicalities of the object Heirarchy. Once you have this part firmly in mind, then MSDN, and SQL SBO's endless diagrams and cryptic descriptions begin to make more sense.

As for the examples being in VB, I program in C++ and Perl. I very, very seldom use VB or any of its variants, but it is so simple that there is no problem whatsoever in translating the examples from the VB in the book to the languages I use. The object model is the same regardless of the language, the languages just have a little different notation in accessing the properties and methods. For example:

VBS:

Private dSrv
Private dDb
Set dSrv = CreateObject("SQLDMO.SQLServer")
call AddSurvey("MyCompany", "MySurvey", "MyDbName")
Call dSrv.Connect("(local)", "sa", "changed")
Set dDb = CreateObject("SQLDMO.Database")
dDb.Name = "myDb"
dSrv.Databases.Add(dDb)

'set some db options:
private dbOption
set dbOption = dDb.DBOption
dbOption.SelectIntoBulkCopy = 0
dbOption.TruncateLogOnCheckpoint = 0
dbOption.AutoCreateStat = 0
dbOption.AutoShrink = 1
dbOption.AutoUpdateStat = 0

MsgBox dDb.Script

Is this in Perl:

use Win32;
use Win32::OLE;

my $srv = Win32::OLE->new('SQLDMO.SQLServer');

$srv->Connect('(local)', 'sa', 'changed');
my $db = Win32::OLE->new('SQLDMO.Database');
$db->{Name} = 'MyDb';
$srv->Databases->Add($db);
my $option = $db->DBOption();
$option->{SelectIntoBulkCopy} = 0;
$option->{TruncateLogOnCheckpoint} = 0;
$option->{AutoCreateStat} = 0;
$option->{AutoShrink} = 1;
$option->{AutoUpdateStat} = 0;

Win32::MsgBox($db->Script());

As anyone can see that takes even a few seconds to look at those two scripts for creating a database, the object model is exactly the same. The scripts are doing exactly the same thing. The only difference is in the language syntax, and there is such a direct correlation even there that it is very easy to translate from the examples in the book into the languages I prefer to use. For C++, chapter 12 is dedicated to setting up and creating projects in C++. From there, it is just using the C++ syntax to access the same object heirarchy.

In my opinion, the book does what it says it does, and was helpful, and clear in developing a better understanding within me of using SQL-DMO, SQL-NS, and DTS in my development.

Steve Howard

I had to write some programs for work that involved getting into the DMO objects of SQL Server, and this book was simply invaluable to me in understanding the objects better and helping me to produce a program that I am really proud of.

I have not checked out the other sections of this book, however the books from this lot (wrox) tend to be very good, with useful, real-life examples and detailed explanations. I also used a similar book from them to learn ASP.

I highly recommend this book.

The author is highly imaginative and tells a lot about her own life in this mish mash. We never learn much about Daisy Bates. the author writes " her body shudders like a dying rabbit and her new husband wakes and stares at his new wife..." But the author is really describing her own childhood dream of an old man with his legs wrapped around her neck!!! Blackburn's "very personal interpretation" of the life of Daisy Bates seems to include Blackburn trying to overcome some of her own childhood traumas and problems with men. If little is known about Daisy Bates' feelings towards her husband, I'd rather have that than a lot of silly conjecture and fantasy. The prose is very good, very flowery and high flown, but it doesn't help tell the story of Daisy Bates. Like other reviewers, I will have to research Daisy, yes even after reading her "biog". It didn't feel balanced at all.

Daisy Bates appears to be delusional at times in recounting her adventures with the Aboriginese but this is still one of the most fascinating reads I've had in a long time! If you were to separate her tales from the fact that she lived on her own among the indigenous peoples of Australia during a time when it was shocking for a woman to do so, there would still be an incredible story of courage and perserverance. This is an account worth reading!

Daisy Bates, a controversial woman who has attained almost mythical status in Australia, was an inveterate liar, constitutionally incapable of seeing herself in the world as it really was. Instead, she created a better world in her own mind and assumed that everyone else recognized her world as real. As Julia Blackburn reconstructs what she believes to have been Daisy's life in Australia's western desert, and her seemingly futile efforts to protect and preserve the aborigines and their culture, she presents a plausible personality with whom the reader can, to a great extent, identify.

Blackburn is successful in making Daisy's dream world seem like an understandable response to the privations and hardships she faced in her early life alone. In Part I, Blackburn describes what Daisy has said about her life, and follows it with what Blackburn has discovered to be the truth as a result of her documented research. In Part II, she allows Daisy, as she understands her, to speak to the reader herself, and we "live" with her in the desert for many years, watching as her original dedication becomes a mission and then a mania, and her insecurity grows into delusion and eventually paranoia. A woman who seems to have accomplished nothing of lasting significance, Daisy might have achieved some of her goals if she had only bent a little. Part III tells of Daisy's life after she leaves the desert.

Blackburn brings Daisy's Australian desert camp to life--the blinding sun, the heat of day and cold of night, the ghostly arrivals and departures of the shy aborigines, the birds and animals who were often Daisy's only company, and the changes wrought by the railroads, settlement, missionaries, and unfeeling governmental bureaucrats. Though she presents Daisy sympathetically, she is not Daisy's apologist, offering no defense, other than Daisy's own personality, for her extreme and solitary viewpoint. Unlike other readers, I found this a very poignant story of a woman who, at the end of a life of the utmost privation and dedication to saving a culture, realizes with sadness that it has all been for naught. Clearly, she never had a clue that most of her failure was her own fault.