About two pages into this I realized I'd come across an incredibly sublime, intelligent, and aware narrative voice, that of a 12-yr-old girl in turn-of-the-century London, and from that point on read the rest of the novel in a page-turning fever of amazement, delight, and pleasure. Ostensibly a fictionalized account of Rebecca West's real family, the story follows the lives of the narrator, Rose Aubrey, her twin sister Mary (both of whom are prodigies on the piano), their older sister Cordelia, who apparently stinks at the piano, but doesn't realize it, much to the chagrine of the rest of the family, their thoroughly adored younger brother, Richard, a flautist, and their ragged, brilliant mother who tries to keep the family running while the father, a brilliant essayist and pamphleteer who is completely lacking in all matters of practicality and stability, loses one job after another. A brilliant cast indeed, but it's West's inimitable prose and intelligence and generosity and imagination and wit that brings the trials and tribulations of the Aubrey family to unforgettable life. When you close the book, you feel as if you had just remembered moments from a real family you'd known while growing up but who you lost touch with because your family moved away. Astounding. Please, if you love beautiful things, read this.

Rebecca West's THE FOUNTAIN OVERFLOWS, published in 1956, is one of the last great British modernist novels. Usually overlooked on modernism course syllabi in favor of West's shorter (but not as profound) THE RETURN OF THE SOLDIER, THE FOUNTAIN OVERFLOWS is an exceptionally funny and evocative portrait of a shabby-genteel family of thinkers and artists at the turn of the century in a London suburb. The narrator, Rose Aubrey, and her twin sister Mary are young pianists; like their younger brother, the adored and otherwordly Richard Quin, a flautists, they are encouraged by their nervous and kindly mother, herself an accomplished musician in her youth. (The musical inadequacies of the eldest daughter, Cordelia, form the lonegest running joke in the novel--and eventually its greatest emotional payoff.) They live practically hand-to-mouth given their unending state of destitution wrought upon them by their handsome and mercurial father, who loves his family but cannot provide a stable life for them. Yet despite their poverty the family's life is never shown to be anything less than magical, given the gifts and talents the children's parents for seeing the world always as a wondrous place. This sense of the ordinary transformed into the extraordinary, the book's great theme, is mirrored both in West's gorgeously descriptive prose and in the family's regular encounters with the supernatural: ghosts, telepathy, and poltergeists play important parts in the novel. The novel is episodic, in the way of its comic antecedents, such as Fielding, early Dickens, and Elizabeth Gaskell's CRANFORD. Still, West's sense of a strong narrative to the family's fortunes keeps you in narrative suspense nonetheless: as you read it you cannot wait to see what happens to the family next.

I have been reading, reading, reading for fifty plus years. Oddly I don't dream about books, but this one was an exception. The character Cordelia came to haunt my sleep, lively and unforgettable. A vidid, surprising, unpredictable, eccentric, and thoroughly original work. Seek it out.

I read The Master of Ballantrae quite recently and I think it is an awesome book. James Durie (the Master) is such a wicked man, but seems to charm (most) everybody. He is such a round character. He torments his poor brother Henry Durie and Henry suffers in silence. Only Mr. Mackellar knows of Henry's sufferings. The Master makes the book so colorful. It's full of adventure, romance, sorrow, and revenge. I highly recommend this book, because it was so interesting and kept you wondering what would happen next. I am sure it will capture your attention as it did mine.

I saw the Errol Flynn movie,which I found rather disappointing. I was assuming, however, that the book was a faithful adaptation of the movie. Be forewarned: it is most definitely not! This is not the kind of superficial swashbuckler you might assume. It is a dark and compelling book about the nature of evil and its manifestation in the person of James Durie, the Master of Ballantrae. The Master sets out to destroy everyone and everything he cannot control or manipulate, including (and especially)his own family. Without summarizing the book, I would offer this to anyone interested in a compelling plot, complex characters and just plain good writing. Stevenson is overlooked, and it's a shame, because he is an excellent writer, a writer in the best sense of the word. Read it and enjoy it!

Wild Grows the Heather in Devon is thought provoking, eloquant and superbly written. I have highlighted most of the book. Many of the prayers written, I have taken as my own. Excellent intelligent reading!

Though I majored in English, I never took a creative writing course while in college. When I started writing fiction a few years ago, I knew that I couldn't enter an MFA program because I'm a full-time attorney with a family to feed and a mortgage to pay. So, I decided that I should read as much fiction as possible to help teach myself the craft of writing. One of the books I purchased was the then-new 1998 Prize Stories: The O'Henry Awards. I couldn't have made a better choice! In this one volume, I read Lorrie Moore's heartbreaking "People Like That Are the Only People Here," Steven Millhauser's chilling "The Knife Thrower," Alice Munro's evocative "The Children Stay," among many other wonderful and powerful fiction from The New Yorker, Zoetrope: All-Story, Ploughshares, Harper's, and others. Larry Dark, the series editor, and the prize jury, Andrea Barrett, Mary Gaitskill and Rick Moody, did a wonderful job pulling together the best short fiction of that year. This collection not only gave me great joy as a reader, but also wonderful lessons in the art and craft of fiction writing.

Excellent collection of cutting-edge short fiction. If you want to see the extreme edges of today's scene and what, hopefully, is the future of short fiction, buy this collection every year. Extremely compelling work, wide variety of styles, and not the same old names.

As an avid reader of the O.Henry series, I felt that it was in a bit of a rut until this new editor, Larry Dark came along. Last year and especially this year, the O. Henry has become exciting and cutting edge, and Dark must be given all the credit. C'est magnefique Monseiur Dark!!

Something happened on the way from childhood -- from wanting only, like Peter Rice, "to be good," or wanting to be free, or loved, or loving, or safe, or rich, or wanted-- to the widow's funeral. Like the best stories do, this one happens in the hearts and minds of its readers, borne there by the exactness of vision, the precision of craft, the sense of the messenger ever-grappling with the message. Andrea Barrett's essay is a bonus, a sensitive and intelligent reader-response that concludes with the proper advice: "The novel is itself, wholly itself; there is no way to comprehend it except to read it."

Paula Fox is an old-fashioned writer, that is, she choses every word with care; she creates characters that live on in the reader's mind, etched in the acid of recognition. Her characters are never cliched,because Fox writes them true. Their actions and emotions are not predictable because Fox writes them true. In an age of supersized novels of mall-like sameness, Paula Fox is unique. Her work can not be franchised.

Grace Hoffmeir starts telling her story in 1989, as she bicycles around Beijing with her Eurasian child in the aftermath of the massacre at Tiananmen Square. In a first, brief flashback we learn how she came to be there three years earlier, the uncomfortable companion of her husband. Dr. Walter Hoffmeir is an ecology researcher, old and uptight before his time. Dr. Yu, a Chinese ecologist, befriends her and stays with her through a week of pneumonia. But the book begins with Grace gathering the notes of her own research on the ecological damage of acid rain to save her work from the soldiers savaging the campus.

The first third of Andrea Barrett's Middle Kingdom sets Grace's story in the history of our time, in events we watched on CNN from around the world. Then Barrett, one of the most creative authors in the U.S. today, takes us through the decades of her protagonist's life, recalled in the delirium of her pneumonia. From her hippie marriage to a psychotic artist to her grad student days under Professor H we track her career as a second rate loser. Then, as his wife and lab assistant, she gains pounds for every bit of self-esteem she gives up. I would have been tempted to abandon her pathetic story had Andrea Barrett not already shown me Grace's strength in the opening pages of the novel. In the final third of Middle Kingdom the story returns to China, with Grace telling her husband she will remain in Beijing to work with Dr. Yu.

An aspect of Barrett's genius as an author is this capacity to bring us into the lives of characters we normally would walk away from. From her first novel, Lucid Dreams, she has enabled us to inhabit awkward and ungainly lives (perhaps not too unlike our own) with deep respect. She captures us with the quality of her words, page to page, and the quality of her compassion for her characters.

But she also holds our interest through her innovative approach to structure, each book flowing in a unique pattern. Middle Kingdom begins at the end of the story, flashes back through periods of Grace's life (all occurring in the delirium of her illness in Beijing), and then takes us again to the powerful ending. Lucid Stars' four sections trace an extended family's journey from the fifties to the end of the seventies. Each section focuses on a different character, with the chapters as episodes a few years apart. Forms of Water is also a family saga, but with the historic flashbacks occurring in the midst of the dramatic and amusing story of Uncle Brendan's flight from the nursing home.

A final characteristic of particular interest in Middle Kingdom -- and all of Barrett's work -- is her deep fascination with science and her ability to make it integral to her character's lives. Grace may have dropped out of graduate school, tired of living in her husband's shadow, but she is an accomplished researcher and spends her years in China as part of a team studying a lake's damaged ecosystem. Each of the stories in Ship Fever unfolds around the life of a scientist. Linnaeus, for instance, is old and entering Alzheimers but can still recall each researcher he sent into the field to gather specimens. A remarkable and moving story!

This review of one novel by Andrea Barrett is becoming a celebration of her collected works. I've tried to describe why I've given Middle Kingdom a five-star rating, and I've hardly touched upon the high quality of her prose itself. I'm now such a fan that I'd probably even give a high rating to Secret Harmonies, even though it is the one book by her I've not yet read.

No doubt, these finely crafted, interwoven stories will delight many readers, but.... If you're considering this collection because you loved the adventure and danger of Voyage of the Narwhal, reconsider. These stories are as quiet and subtle as Voyage is exciting.

SERVANTS OF THE MAP is a unique collection of short stories by the redoubtable Andrea Barrett. While most of us felt she needed the space and stretched-canvas-epic-form to weave her magic, in this collection of six shortish stories she proves she is as adept at relating her tales woven equally with Apollonian/scientific and Dionysian/sensual facets in tight, capsular fashion. She still manages to create vistas rather than views and lineages rather than one dimensional lifetimes. Now and then I find it necessary to break out of her luxuriously poetic language and take a laudatory appraisal of this women's depth of scientific information. The research for such diverse stories pays off by giving the reader the pleasure of discovery of cartography, botany, medical diseases etc in a flowing, painless entry to the richly detailed minds of her characters. This is nothing short of a wondrous book, on to be revisited often - one story at a time - like a treasured scrapbook travelogue!

Andrea Barrett's Servants of the Map is a wonderful story collection, a collection with tremendous depth and imagination. Barrett's stories are all richly told and engrossing, each giving us their own world. What is remarkable about her stories, and what sets this collection off from most others out today is her focus on the scientific world. This focus adds an additional layer to the stories and makes them somehow richer. The stories involve a 19th century map-maker, a 21st century science professor and early 20th century tuberculosis sufferers. Barrett does not shy away from the scientific nature of her characters and their stories and because of this, these stories have additional layers of meaning. These are terrific stories. Pick them up.

Having read H.G. Wells' classics WAR OF THE WORLDS, THE INVISIBLE MAN, THE FIRST MEN IN THE MOON, THE TIME MACHINE, and THE ISLAND OF DR. MOREAU, I looked forward to reading what is often claimed to be his "best" work. TONO-BUNGAY is completely different than any of his Sci-Fi classics. TONO-BUNGAY is more of a study of class structure and class struggle in England during the late 1800s and early 1900s. The story follows the life of a young man, George, and his Uncle Edward. Edward invents an elixir called TONO-BUNGAY and hires his nephew George to help build the company. As the book goes George and Edward become quite wealthy. Throughout the book George makes numerous comments on his varying places on the social ladder. It seems that no matter how wealthy George becomes, he will never be accepted in certain circles because he is newly rich and not "old money." The story is well written and is generally easy to follow. I would, however, recomm! end the World's Classics edition of this book (published by Oxford U. Press and available from Amazon.Com) because there are some instances in which Wells makes comments about European literature, art, languages, colleges and phrases that may be of little meaning to the average reader, but for the six pages of end notes provided in the World's Classics edition. The World's Classics edition also claims to be the most accurate edition of the story, taking into account all of Wells' revisions of the story, many of which were made after the book was initially published in 1909 (TONO-BUNGAY was revised by Wells and re-released in 1925).

"Tono-Bungay" is an alleged tonic with dubious medical benefits; and the story is one of the brief fortunes of someone who manages to turn the worthless substance into a formidable fortune - for a while. By the time Wells wrote this novel he had already written books which might or might not be science fiction (witness "The War in the Air") and, all in all, "Ton-Bungay" probably isn't science fiction. But I should mention a substance called "quup" which is introduced towards the end of the book. (I'm not giving anything important away.) "Quup" is the first mention I know of of what we would now call radioactive waste, except that it's naturally occurring, and ... well, perhaps I should be discrete, but I can say that the scenes involving quup have a peculiar flavour which writers would find impossible to capture nowadays.

So you get an excellent double deal with this book: the best of Wells's social fiction of the 1910s, plus a dollop the fresh science fiction he wrote the previous century.

This true accounting about the obsession Charles Francis Hall, a somewhat obscure Cincinatti businessman, had for Arctic exploration and its ultimate personal tragedy is fascinating.

The author Loomis trys to convey the environment of thought that created the appeal the Arctic had for Hall. The sentiment was much more pervasively Christian during the 1860-1870s when Hall made his 3 trips to the north and was able to get farther north than any Westerner had until then. In the Afterword, Loomis describes some of the appeal the vast, unexplored Artic must have had for Westerners. The Artic was both magnificent and terrifying, it was as Byron wrote "All that expands the spirit, yet appals." Loomis explains that the public had an asthetic of the sublime and this went a long way to explain to me the attraction Polar exploration must have had for Hall. But as a modern day mountaineer Fred Beckey said, "Man is not always a welcome visitor in a kingdom he cannot control."

The American explorer Kane, who died at age 36 was so revered by the American public for his exploits, that when his body was brought to New Orleans and then went up the Mississippi to it's ultimate burial location, people lined the river the entire way to bid him farewell. This helps explain the regard the public had for explorers (especially the ones who wrote accessible books).

Hall leads the first two expeditions in search of one of the overriding mysteries of the time, what happened to the members of the British expedition led by Sir John Franklin. The last and fatal voyage was in search of the North Pole. However, because of the funding by the US government of the expedition, the loss of Hall and loss of the ship itself, there was a US Naval inquiry. Because of the quasi-Naval nature of the expedition, there was insufficient discipline on the expedition and the loss of the leader under strange circumstances caused most discipline to evaporate thus dooming the expedition.

Loomis undertook his own mini-expedition 97 years after Hall's death in 1871. He visited Hall's gravesite and performed an autopsy with very interesting results.

The book is well written so that during the narrative when the details might seem tedious, they are not. Exhaustively researched and well presented with essential maps, photographs and a list of the crew on the last voyage.

Read and enjoy.

Chauncey Loomis' Weird and Tragic Shores is indeed all that. It tells the story of businessman and amateur explorer Charles Francis Hall. He goes in search of traces (possibly survivors?) of Sir John Franklin's expedition. The third trip goes wrong and Charles Francis Hall dies and is buried in the North. This book is driven by the personality of Hall and it is quite the personality. He is obsessed, unlucky, amateurish at times, belligerent, and stubborn, but the best word that could be one used to describe him is one that is applied to the Arctic itself, weird. The author captures the personality vividly with contemporary accounts, particulary those of Hall himself. It is an interesting book of a footnote character in the great age of Arcitc exploration, and sometimes through these footnotes in history one can see the truth behind what drives the explorers in its rawest form. An entertaining addition to the annals of history of the North.

As a resident of Barrow, Alaska, the farthest north community in the United States, I share some of the goals and fascinations of Charles Hall, which come out in the book. "The Arctic will get into your blood Earl. You'll be back." That is what one Inupiat Eskimo leader told me back in 1969, during one of my first short visits to Barrow. And I did come back and have lived here full time since the mid 1980s. The Arctic, its extreme environment, and its Native people, can get in one's blood. I feel very fortunate to be able to live here.

When I was in Cincinnati, I talked with a local librarian who said that Charles Hall used to camp outdoors in a local park in a tent in the dead of winter, just to toughen himself up for Arctic exploration.

As noted in the book, Hall should also be remembered for working closely with the Native peoples of the Canadian Arctic, as he searched for traces of the Franklin expedition. Many other Arctic explorers had only fleeting contact with the local people, if that. And Hall had to hitch-hike on various ships during his early exploration. When he finally got a ship of his own, then he died under mysterious circumstances. That is tragic and a dreadful way to end one's lifetime dream.
So read this book, and enjoy its excellent perspective on the Arctic and its people, and the dreams and determination of one man, who did all he could to learn more about our northern lands.

Just as John Grisham's protagonists are lawyers, the protagonists of Andrea Barrett's Ship Fever are biologists and physicians, most often from the 19th century. Ship Fever is a collection of short stories plus a novella which shares the collection's title. The historical novella Ship Fever is of itself more than worth the price of this book, and the short stories that accompany it are gems to be treasured. Ship Fever is a must read for anyone who wants to understand the terrible tragedy of the Irish during the potato famine, and inadequacies of 19th century medicine in dealing with epidemics aboard crowded and unsanitary ships carry fleeing emmigrants. Many of the characters are historical figures, the research is meticulous, and like all stories in this collection, the reader is totally engaged. I highly recommend this book.

Ship Fever is an extraordinary book. As a scientist, writer, and addicted reader, I have found that any connection with science renders most writers excruciating and/or incomprehensible. Ms. Barrett is a rare exception, able to weave science into her stories with consummate grace, neither turgid nor pedantic. Although not a professional scientist herself, she has a keen understanding of science and of scientists, and of human character in general. Her crystalline prose and thoughtful insight make this book eminently readable and at times, breathtaking.

Andrea Barrett's "Ship Fever and Other stories" is such a rare literary treasure you'd want to take your time tasting and savouring every morsel of delight these vignettes release. Barrett draws upon her expert knowledge of nature, history and the sciences to create a fascinating subtext over which the private lives and heroic struggles of men (and women) of science are interwoven and told. The stories are not all of equal or impeccable quality. "Ship Fever" is the most outstanding, though others like "The Littorol Zone", "Rare Bird" and "The Behaviour of the Hawkweeds" are also truly excellent. Even the mediocre ones like "Soroche" come laden with such a generous dose of human interest you overlook their weaknesses. Barrett may write about scientists, but not as a breed apart. Her characters are multifaceted and always interesting. They live, love and fight just like the rest of us. Through these stories, Barrett expose the hypocrisy and double standards that dog women and scientists in 19th Century society. Sexual politics, the relevance and responsibility of men of science and their contribution to public good are common themes that recur throughout.

In "Ship Fever", Suzanne Rowling is handicapped by her sex but emerges victorious when she overcomes social barriers to nurse the sick at the cost of her own life. Dr Lauchlin Grant discovers true humanity only when he leaves the middle class comfort of his home for Grosse Isle to fight the terrible plague and dies from it, but not before saving Nora Kynd's life. Nora's last act in honour of Lauchlin's memory is one of the most touching moments in "Ship Fever". Contrast these lives with Arthur Adam Rowling's, still writing, reporting and shaping public opinion, seemingly untouched by the death and disease which has devastated his family and reached his doorsteps, or his servants', whose humanity lies dormant till the very end.

Barrett's beautifully judged and precise descriptive prose is strangely evocative, like the lingering fragrance of bouquet from good wine. Reading this book is such a pleasurable experience you don't want it to end. "Ship Fever and Other Stories" is a great literary achievement and truly deserving of the National Book Award. Don't miss it !

If you are on some kind of Healthy plan and are thinking of using this book to help you plan your eating when you are not at home, think again. The last revision of the book was in 1991 and several of the Restarurants and Brands listed no longer exist. Of those that do, watch out. This book includes listings for menu items which no longer exist, or which were changes within the last few years.

Unless this book is updated, this is not a good resource.

I found this book to be very helpful in finding the exchanges for various foods. I wish it would have been a bit smaller in actually dimensions (like a paperback book), but other than that it is extremely helpful.

Perfect for any diabetic who is confused about their diet. Going through the book you realize how much food is actually available to you.