Gandhi found this translation of the Gita to be the best he was able to find. Little more need be said.

The Bhagavadgita is one of the world's true classics of literature. Since it is not part of "western culture" it is often not included in the curriculum of school in the US, much to our loss. This translation is one of the most common, and the Dover edition is incredibly affordale. Being abridged, it is not a text for scholarly studies, but instead provides a great introduction to wisdom from the east... Highly recommended for students and casual readers.

Bhagvad Gita is a Wonderful Poem in Indian Literature (Sanskrit language). But given the fact that this language is no longer spoken (just like Latin), the contents of the great works such as Bhagvad Gita have to be read in translated forms.

Sir Arnold's translation is in poetic form, unlike most translations, which are mainly prose.

It makes for a concise reading, without really missing the the essence.

The Gita is my Manager, and I have personally benefitted immensely in dealing with main daily life sitiuations both in family and work. It has made a profound diference to my decision making ability qand leadership qualities.

I sincerely hope that every ambitious person takes time to read this and beenfit from the relevant parts of the text.

Excellently written and translated. The poetry is wonderful, flowing and easy to read. This book gives a glimpse into emotions of one of the greatest people to walk the Earth without leaving out the details of his life. I think this is the best book Sir Edwin Arnold ever wrote.

I am a soldier in the U.S. Army stationed in Kosovo for 6 months. I bought this book to try and identify any reptiles that I might encounter while serving my tour. I could not have made a better choice. The book covers all of Europe west of the Ural Mountains (including Ireland). It lists all amphibians and reptiles withing that range. The keys are very well written, and the corresponding line drawings are exellent. The book also covers many of the variations that occur withing the European lizards. I would recomend this book for the above reasons, over any book that only covers western Europe/Britain because this book also covers easter Europe, which is becoming more and more open to the west every year. This book could be a very big help to any herpetologist who is planing on travel anywhere in Europe, especially on the identification of the lacertids.

The "Song Celestial" is Sir Edwin Arnold's beautiful rendering of India's most beloved spiritual text, The Bhagavad Gita, and has been kept in print by the press of Yogananda's Self-Realization Fellowship. This is a convenient, pocket-size hardback that is a joy to read from whenever you have a free moment.

"The words of Lord Krishna to Arjuna in the Bhagavad Gita are at once a profound scripture on the science of Yoga (union with God) and a textbook for everyday living. The student is led step by step with Arjuna from the mortal consciousness of spiritual doubt and weakheartedness to divine attunement and inner resolve. The timeless and universal message of the Gita is all-encompassing in its expresssion of truth. The Gita teaches man his rightful duty in life, and how to discharge it with the dispassion that avoids pain and nurtures wisdom and success." --Paramahansa Yogananda (from book jacket)

Regarding the style of translation, Sir Edwin explains in his preface: "The Sanskrit original is written in the Anushtubh meter, which cannot be successfully reproduced for Western ears. I have therefore cast it into our flexible blank verse, changing into lyrical measures where the text itself similarly breaks. For the most part, I believe the sense to be faithfully preserved..."

One definite quibble about the translation is made explicit in Yogananda's autobiography where he notes that virtually *every* translator of The Gita into English mistakes Krishna as instructing his disciples to meditate with the gaze focused on "the tip of the nose." Yogananda points out that the Sanskrit "nasikagam" actually means "source" or "root" of the nose -- a reference to *the point between the eyebrows* - the "spiritual eye". For an esoterically sophisticated appreciation of such subtle (but vital) translation issues, you may want to turn to Yogananda's illumined commentary on the Gita: "God Talks with Arjuna." (ISBN: 0876120303 )

Source: Gandhi an Autobiography - The story of my experiments with truth. Part I, Chapter XX - Acquaintance with Religions. The book struck me as one of priceless worth. The impression has ever since been growing on me with the result that I regard it today as the book par excellence for the knowledge of Truth. It has afforded me invaluable help in moments of gloom. I have read almost all the English translations of it(THE BHAGAVAD GITA), and I regard Sir Edwin Arnold's as the best. He has been faithful to the test, and yet it does not read like a translation.

This book is a masterpiece written by Edwin Arnold, viewed through an "Asian's" perspective. He writes this book with a poetic and beautifully descriptive language portraying the life and times of Buddha, which stimulates your mind's imagination. His ability to capture the views of Asian thought and the story of Buddha's life is wonderful. This is a book to read slowly, and with a relaxed state of mind, to fully enjoy and absorb the impact of Arnold's writing. A great book for anyone who wants to expand their literary boundaries.

It is a narration of the Life and Teachings of Buddha written by divine inspiration by Edwin Arnold. Rev Angarica the founder of Mahabodhi Society was deeply inspired by this book whereafter he took the Buddhist Robes. I have read the book several times and propose to read it many more times. Each reading elevates you some what. Any one who wants the book for free may contact me at

navinkumar@hotmail.com.

I find it so sad that so few people have read or reviewed this masterpiece. I'm sorry to say it, but if it was on Christianity or the life of Christ the response would have been very different and this kind of writing would have been equated with the likes of "Paradise Lost." I am not a Buddhist, but I was deeply moved by the power and beauty of "Light of Asia." It follows the life of the Buddha, who was born in Dambadiva, India about 2500 years ago, to the royal family, but left the comforts of his life and all worldly possessions to persue the meaning of life; and gives us a vibrant picture of this great teacher and his teachings, rendered in beautiful verse. An excellent way to find out more about Buddhism.

Written with difficulty and poorly received by critics upon release in 1938, Journeyman directly followed Caldwell's two successful masterpieces, Tobacco Road and God's Little Acre. While less overtly funny than Tobacco Road and less touching than God's Little Acre, Journeyman remains a small, tightly controlled masterpiece well in keeping with its more famous predecessors, and is no more shocking than either.

A stranger arrives in the hot, sleepy, Georgia agricultural community of Rocky Comfort, driving up to Clay Horey's farm in a dying automobile, the sound of grinding gears and a cloud of billowing black smoke announcing his arrival. Clay, as easily molded and manipulated as his name suggests, isn't sure whether he sees a man emerging from the car or not, and briefly believes he's hallucinating. Buzzards are "soaring motionless overhead," and bluejays sweep from the woods in a flurry "as if they've discovered a snake in a tree." For a moment, the natural laws of the physical world have been suspended and oddly skewed. Clay's visitor is preacher Semon Dye (Semon / Die = Life / Death?), an apparently down on his luck wayfarer in dirty black clothing and a face charred brown from the smoke. Through the use of blatant but extremely effective and smartly executed symbolism, Caldwell makes it quite clear what sort of spiritual being Semon Dye is. He tells Clay he "feels horny," and intimidates Clay into action by jabbing at him repeatedly with a pitchfork. Readers will quickly notice that Semon is the prototype of Harry Powell, the preacher played by Robert Mitchum in the 1955 film Night Of The Hunter.

Semon, "about 50" and nothing less than 6 feet 8 inches tall, is also a magnetically sexual predator and personality, using his continuously evident "huge stiff thumb" to stab Clay between the ribs (a metaphorical act of 'sticking it to him,' as he soon will), and attracting women "like flocks of sheep." "He's the potentest thing," says 15 year old child bride Dene more than once, to Clay's chagrin. Semon sets about seducing everyone he meets literally or figuratively, quietly taking over gullible, torpid Clay's farm and life one piece at a time. Even when one male character says he'd "like to blow Semon's brains out," he also admits momentarily that he misses Dye's presence and being "tickled" by both his big stiff thumb and company. One woman, though just violently pistol whipped into unconsciousness by the preacher, nonetheless agrees to travel with him the following week.

But Rocky Comfort is already in a fallen state before Semon arrives. The only local church has been converted into a guano shed; Clay is married to current wife and teenager Dene, but hasn't divorced his previous and fourth wife, Lorene Horey, who appears in town uninvited and who literally acts out her surname by settling happily down to a life of prostitution; Clay's only child, uncontrollable 6 year old Vearl, is living with a syphilis infection he inexplicably contracted in his fourth year; Lorene, one of the stronger personalities in the book, constantly harasses Clay or Susan to take her son Vearl to a doctor for treatment, but doesn't lift a finger to do so herself; and Clay, though he's had a bottle of medicine for the boy for two years, has yet to give Vearl even a spoonful.

In an original, hilarious, and daring scene, Caldwell has Clay, Semon, and neighbor Tom lightly fighting over and becoming addicted to peeping through a "slit" in the back wall of Tom's cowshed at the barbed wire fence and beautiful, lush woodland stretching beyond it. This slit "the ... little slit I ever saw in all my life," Tom calls it presents an opportunity for the characters not only to peer directly into nature's sprawling, all encompassing vulva, but to simultaneously glimpse through it the only pure, untouchable, incorruptible world they'll ever know that which exists forever beyond the 'barbed wire fence' of their own animal state of lust and gross stupidity. Passing a neighborly jug of 'corn,' the three briefly fall into a state of peace and understanding with one another. Even while competing and tricking one another for access to the hole, they spontaneously empathize with each other's need to peer through it again and again. The unfallen, Eden like natural world they see on the other side but which is directly perceivable only through the magic slit is a vision of paradise that briefly unites them. Thus the male gaze meets nature's maw at eye level with happy results for all.

When Semon clamorously preaches to the community in the local school house at night, his true nature manifests again not only in his rage but in the sudden appearance of the black flies, June bugs, mud daubers, wasps and biting red ants that swarm into the building. Ostensibly attempting to raise the population spiritually by forcing them to admit and reject their sins and torrid natures, Semon finally reduces the assembly by torchlight to sweating, barely clothed, hysterically orgasmic serpents, slithering on their stomachs, speaking gibberish, and twining themselves around one another and around the desks meant for presumably innocent school children. Only prostitute and sexual sophisticate Lorene "the biggest sinner" in Semon's eyes consciously rejects the preacher's spell, sitting in the back of the room in horrified, disgusted, but unconverted astonishment.

Journeyman appears to be about man's casual indifference to grasping and preventing the pitfalls of cause and effect, and about his inability to learn the lesson of even his most frightful, painful, and harrowing experiences. Its 'religious' theme was taken too literally at the time of its initial publication; today's readers should beware of making the same mistake especially because Semon is only a self appointed and ostensible man of God and remember to keep in mind the book's period context. Caldwell's material here, however, remains timeless, and none of the struggle he had in the writing of the book is apparent. Seamless like the best of his work, Journeyman is a pleasurable page turner, coarse and wise by turns.

A traveling preacher comes to spend the week at a small southern farmer's house. He isn't what he seems to be as all hell breaks loose. The preacher has more vices than a mob boss; including gambling, pimping, and seducing folks's wives. This was one of Caldwell's first books.

Caldwell makes fun of the traveling preacher and people's gullability of them. He also makes fun of the revival meetings in which people go into trances and contortions after having "demons" expelled from them. Racy and certainly funny this book is a quick read, which emphasizes the point that if someone in authority tells you it is okay to do something, it is not always right just because they said so.

Like most of the critical writing that is accruing about McCarthy's work these days, reading these essays invites the observation that academic commentary on great works of literature all too often appears as a perverse sort of alchemy, an attempt to tranform bronze into excrement. While merely vexatious for those familiar with McCarthy's work, these institutionally sanctioned forms of obfuscation, however well-meaning, are a tremendous dis-service to the uninitiated. McCarthy's ambition is biblical, ungodly; thus, his work is robustly defiant -- even scornful -- of contemporary professional exegesis.

This is an excellent update of an important and hard-to-find book. It is scholarly and yet very accessible and helpful to the lay McCarthy fan.

However, be warned the hardback edition for which they are charging 40 BUCKS is a very unattractive book with no dustjacket -- essentially the paperback with a library binding. I am hopeful this can be corrected or the price slashed. Amazon doesn't display the cover for this title because it would be simply a black rectangle -- shades of Spinal Tap.

Edwin Lester Arnold (1875-1939) was for most of this century more famous for his "Phra the Phoenician" than for "Gulliver Jones," published in London in 1905. The stir over "Gulliver Jones" began over thirty years ago when striking similarities between his work and that of Edgar Rice Burroughs' own Mars series of books (begun in 1911) were finally noticed. It is entirely possible that Burroughs had never heard of Arnold or his book. At any rate, Arnold's work stands as a strange, unsung bridge between the Jules Verne/H.G. Wells style of science fiction of his day and the heroic science fantasy to be found in pulp fiction, comic-strips, and movies later in the twentieth century. The book's central figure is Gulliver Jones, a lieutenant in the U.S. Navy. Happening upon a flying carpet in New York City, he is whisked away to Mars, which is inhabited by characters very reminiscient of Well's "The Time Machine." He falls in love with the vapid but lovely Princess Heru just in time to see her handed over to the king of the Hither people (who are Haggard-style Africans thinly disguised as Martians). The rest of the novel involves his haphazard rescue of her via a voyage up an icy river of death and beyond. "Lieutenant Gulliver Jones: His Vacation" is a silly, dated book which is must reading for students of science fiction in this century, and for anyone in search of a good yarn.

Edwin Lester Arnold (1875-1939) was for most of this century more famous for his "Phra the Phoenician" than for "Gulliver Jones," published in London in 1905. The stir over "Gulliver Jones" began over thirty years ago when striking similarities between his work and that of Edgar Rice Burroughs' own Mars series of books (begun in 1911) were finally noticed. It is entirely possible that Burroughs had never heard of Arnold or his book. At any rate, Arnold's work stands as a strange, unsung bridge between the Jules Verne/H.G. Wells style of science fiction of his day and the heroic science fantasy to be found in pulp fiction, comic-strips, and movies later in the twentieth century. The book's central figure is Gulliver Jones, a lieutenant in the U.S. Navy. Happening upon a flying carpet in New York City, he is whisked away to Mars, which is inhabited by characters very reminiscient of Well's "The Time Machine." He falls in love with the vapid but lovely Princess Heru just in time to see her handed over to the king of the Hither people (who are Haggard-style Africans thinly disguised as Martians). The rest of the novel involves his haphazard rescue of her via a voyage up an icy river of death and beyond. "Lieutenant Gulliver Jones: His Vacation" is a silly, dated book which is must reading for students of science fiction in this century, and for anyone in search of a good yarn.