My teacher at my tutoring school has this book. He said the Allyn & Bacon is his second brain where he stores his important Grammer and Usage techniques. I was interested with what he said; so I bought one myself from Amazon. This was the only reason I bought this book.

However, after I had received this book, I found this to be quite useful for the SAT II writing test. It would be a great reference guide whenever I need help with word usages, paragraph formats, punctuations, critcal thinking techniques, etc.

This book is wonderful. If I can give more than 5 stars, I would.

The Allyn&Bacon Handbook is the most invaluable reference book I have ever come across. Originally purchased for guidance on formal composition, the book has helped me with everything from letter writing to revision. It contains valuable information on just about every writing topic. This book is an excellent companion for anyone taking an English course.

Cost being a factor in determining books to be purchased by students, I strongly recommend this translation by Leonard Bacon (1914). The lines are mainly in iambic heptameter (seven beats per line) with a clear caesura, which facilitates a student's oral reading of the poem. Though the original French used assonance more than end rhyme, Bacon does rhyme his English lines. Compared to the iambic pentameter of the Dorothy L. Sayers translation, Bacon's is a little faster paced, but one senses the hoofbeats of the horses with two more beats per line, which isn't altogether bad for an epic poem about a military massacre. Though a good choice in terms of price, Bacon's translation lacks glosses of archaisms (e.g., the word "eme" is not explained as an archaism of "uncle"). Still, the teacher can supply these as necessary. For [the money], you can't go wrong!

well worth the time. Sure, it gets a little repitious, but you really get a feel of how important knighthood and chivalry were to these people so lang ago.

Not a must-read, but definitely worth the time for leisurely reading, especially if you enjoy history or just heroic epics.

I have had a chance rather vividly to contrast this version with the Glyn Burgess translation, and Harrison is not only more readable, it's better poetry. I use the book in a class of eighth grade boys in New York (who love it), and by mistake a bought a slug of the Burgess translation. Then I had some boys with Harrison, some with Burgess, and the howls from the Burgessites were considerable. Harrison is just a better, livlier, even funnier translation.

The Lusiads places the decadence of the epic genre in its end. The Lusiads bears no power, it is only the song of a feeble hero which is not even by far compared to great characters just like Odysseus. Vasco da Gama is uninteresting, he is in no profound context of living except that of praising Portugal's doings in navegation and conquest. Camoes doesn't matter how many peoples were killed and explored in name of this. The Lusiads is, so, a song of ideological doutrination with less masterpiece characteristics, that means it is not a classic, but a book imposed as part of a certain canon. It is not a good book because its aim is not to make art, but to USE art in order to praise the advancement of the portuguese project of conquering and exploring. The Lusiads placement as a classic is, so, ideologically played to a specific economical and religious aim.

I give this book three stars not because it is a particularly brilliant work of poetry, but because it is a truly remarkable artifact. This book is a monument in Western culture, and, as such, it is worthy of a read. However, those who open this book expecting to find the fanciful, exuberant poetry so typical of the European Renaissance will be sorely disappointed. Though in form - rhyming octaves - de Camoes imitates the giants of vernacular epic poetry - Pulci, Boiardo, and Ariosto in particular - he lacks the poetic dexterity which allowed the aforementioned authors to push the limits of epic poetry, not only in terms of content, but also with regard to style. While one must admit that de Camoes' subject matter is truly revolutionary, his style is pedantic and uninspired. Though the invocation of the muses is a well established topos of epic poetry, rarely in the verses of Virgil or Dante does one get the feeling that the poet is genuinely in need of artistic assistance, for these poets were weaned on the slopes of Parnassus. De Camoes, instead, seems to be earnestly calling out for help. Despite the fact that succor never arrived, nevertheless de Camoes' poem is a quaint little work marking the beginnings of colonialism, the Portuguese penchant for daring navigation, and the subsequent attempt to construct the Portuguese national identity around nautical explorations.

At some point in life we realize why "The Classics" ARE classic. At some point the great literature and words reach out and touch us to the very core of our being, that special spark that is real you. The Lusiads has done that to me.

Being written in a minor tongue and focusing on a minor nation's history, this rhyming wall of words has not had much circulation out side of the lusophonic orbit, which is a shame. This work deserves its proper place behind the Iliad, The Odyssey, the Aeneid, and the Divine Comedy. This English translation enables anglophonics to understand Camoes, the Portuguese Shakespeare.

Unlike the Aeneid, which focuses on one mans journey from Troy to Rome, this story focuses on the Portuguese in the plural as a collective people. It celebrates their special history, using Vasco Da Gama's 1497 voyage to India as the focus of drama.

The only drawback to the book is that you need to read a survey of Portuguese history and geography to savor this book. I lived in Portugal for two years, therefor I understood the allusions and the story. It is not, however, as bad as the Divine Comedy where almost every paragraph is foot-noted, but a perusal of the encyclopedia would help before, during, and after the reading.

Lastly, I have read the Lusiads in Portuguese. Since it is written in poetic form with cantos, and in a second tongue, it was grueling work. I can only compare it to reading Milton or Pope in another language. Poetry by nature is dense writing, and if the reader is also dense, trouble occurs. Therefore, I endorse this English translation to mono- and polyglots alike.

This is a biography of Leonard Bacon (1802-1881) a Congregational minister from Connecticut, a newspaper columnist and social reformer, a moderate opponent of slavery and an advocate of African colonization.

Bacon, like many white Northern clergy of his day, considered African slavery an evil, but advocated gradual, rather than immediate abolition of slavery. For many years he supported the American Colonization Society, which sought to settle freed African-American slaves in Liberia, a privately owned colony in Africa. The ACS saw itself as a humanitarian and missionary endeavor, which would facilitate the gradual abolition of slavery and help to Christianize and civilize Africa in the process. The ACS made the implictly racist assumption that free blacks could never flourish in the predominantly white United States.

Bacon, as an advocate of colonization, was at odds with proslavery southerners, who objected to any interference with slavery. He also clashed with immediate abolitionists, like William Lloyd Garrison, who saw colonization as a cruel scheme to deport free blacks.

Hugh Davis does an excellent job in presenting primary source material in its historical context, weaving an engaging narrative of a figure who was neither a glamorous hero nor a notorious villain in this chapter of American history. This book would be helpful for anyone who wishes to understand a moral stance on slavery that has lately been discredited, but was once the opinion of many northern Americans.

Davis also describes other aspects of Bacon's career and his personal life, including his efforts to organize the national structure of the Congregational Church and his sister, Delia's, infamous attempt to prove that the works of Shakespeare were really written by their ancestor, Sir Francis Bacon, and her consequent descent into insanity.