This is a very welcome reader in 'green' cultural studies that includes but goes well beyond 'ecocriticism', as narrowly confined to a subdiscipline of English literature. Its stated aim is 'to stimulate debate about the 'nature' of criticism and to give green studies some much-needed bearings'(Preface).

The readings included are wide ranging, and are organised in three loosely chronological sections: Green Tradition, Green Theory and Green Reading. They have been chosen to help the reader come to terms with the age-old relationship between 'nature' and 'culture', which Jonathan Bate claims in his Foreword to be 'the key intellectual problem of the twentieth century'.

Ecocriticism is better established in the United States than in Britain. This has resulted in two related problems. First, texts on ecocriticism have up to now tended to focus on American literature and theory. Second, North Atlantic ecocriticism has not engaged with (non-English) European thought as thoroughly as it might. The Green Studies Reader goes some way towards remedying these 'faults'. While it is still firmly focussed on Anglo-American literature, (and film), it includes significant readings from key French and German thinkers.

This book is an important, even crucial, read for anyone interested in the ways in which planetary life might at last take 'its rightful place at the centre of that discipline which we might still call, though with appropriate hesitation, the humanities' (Introduction).

I'm a senior application developer for a computer company, but we're doing mostly in Unix environment, no GUI. I just wanted to learn Windows programming (for fun). So after searching for the right book, comparing different books, I've concluded to buy this one.

The reasons why I bought this book:

1. It is NOT about C++.
It's about WINDOWS programming, using Visual C++ IDE. Many other books explain about C++ 50% of it! But I know C++, and I have other C++ books. I want to know Windows programming!

2. Just right font type and size.
Does this really matter? Yes! I checked other books and the text are all cramped and printed in small size font, which gives me a headache and I know I will put the book away pretty soon.

3. This is a VC++ beginner's book.
But it contains enough information to build simple applications.

4. Easy reading, no BS.
Unlike other thick books with 50% on C++, this book doesn't go over the history of C++ and Windows platform, and other BS, and it is really easy reading.

I gave this book 4 stars, because 1. no book is perfect, 2. it doesn't cover internet applicaiton programming, like socket -- well, this book is about Windows GUI programming and little bit about OS specific programming, like OLE, COM, ActiveX., 3. it does not have CD-ROM and you can't download the sample code from any web sites. This is actually good and bad. I have tons of other computer books with CDs, but I never really look at them. If do, I just "look" at the source code and just run it, and that's it. No real learning. With this book, you MUST follow the steps, go to chapter to chapter in sequence. It's very detailed steps, and gradually, the book stops telling you all the detailed steps, but assumes you learned the steps. Which I think it's a great self-teaching approach. However, sometimes I get lost although I thought I learnt all the previous lessons, then I want to get the source code to see how it's done, but no CD/download is avail.

If you know C++, and want to learn Windows Visual C++ programming using MFC, then it is for you. (It only explains about API for one chapter.) The book is not a reference book, well, once you go over the book it could be, but you can't expect to jump into the middle of the book and it shows you how to do things.

And remember, you must be committed to go every chapters to learn. Otherwise, this book (or any books) is useless. Hmmm, I'm still in the middle of the book, and it's quite fun.

I'm an experienced VB 6 and C++ programmer and I was looking for a good introduction for the visual part of C++ for windows programming. This book is really helpful! In the first chapters you begin programming with Visual C++ using MFC (knowing it or don't knowing it) and covers all programming skills you need to begin business programming (databases, ActiveX...) in the style of Visual C++. Also it has a good reference for MFC. For sure this is a beginners tutorial, but if you don't know anything of C++ I recommends you to take up some tutorial first to understand what's going on. I also recommend it for the VB programmers.

Yes, the book was renamed, old version was titled "Using Visual C++", but that's don't really matter with the its contents.

This is the book to buy if you want to learn Visual C++ 6. It explains VC++ in a comprehensive and direct way. No sidelines, no roundabouts. Just good plain learning, well written and worth you time.

Within the first few chapters I was programming intermediate VC++ code using MFC thanks to this books presentation.

Although Jonathan Bate was right on track in "Shakespeare and Ovid"(1993),he lost his way in trying to defend the Stratford man as the author in his latest book. He devotes almost a third of "The Genius of Shakespeare" to an attack on the evidence for Edward de Vere, the 17th earl of Oxford, as the true author of the works of Shakespeare. In doing so, however, he makes eight significant errors of fact and 25 gross misinterpretations. For example, he says that no major actor has ever been attracted to anti-Stratfordianism(67), whereas Gielgud, Jacobi, Rylance,York, Chaplin and the director Tyrone Guthrie are all on record as rejecting the Stratford man as the author. And all but Rylance (so far) have voted for Oxford. One more example: He says that contrary to the Oxfordians letters from the Stratford man do survive and then cites the dedications signed William Shakespeare in editions of "Venus and Adonis" and "Lucrece." (73) These, of course, are not correspondence; and it is well-known that no letters written or received by the Stratford man have ever been found. When Bate becomes better informed about the Shakespeare authorship controversy and takes into account the views of academics ranging from Columbia University (Kristin Linklater) to English professors at Concordia University (site of the 6th annual Edward de Vere Studies Conference next April), he will no doubt see the merit in the evidence for Oxford. Meanwhile, his readers should beware the pot holes, rickety barricades and misguided detours in his ill-fated attempt to steer his readers away from the clearly sign-posted evidentiary route to Oxford's authorship of Shakespeare's works under that pseudonym.

Trying out a moderate position that lets him have his conservative genius Shakespeare in quotes and so eat it too, Bate has written a lifeless, boring account of Shakespeare. The prose is wooden. The book is so tedious I confess I didn't get through much of it.

Jonathan Bate's THE GENIUS OF SHAKESPEARE takes issue with cultural conservatives and with politically correct radicals to explain how a dramatist of humble orgins became the best known author in history. In what is described as "a new kind of biography", Bate offers a two-part history of Shakespeare's talent and reputation. Instead of the usual life story or play-by-play account, Bate begins part one by discussing the anecdotes that were told about Shakespeare during his life, looking at how his contemporaries saw him. Then he moves on to dissect the sonnets showing the various ways they have been used to provide a biographical key to their author's life. Wielding Occam's razor, Bate attacks the tendency of the "life and works" approach to over-interpret the poems to illuminate the dark corners of the life.

Bate's willingness to admit that much will never be known is refreshing. His suggestion about the Dark Lady's identity is delightfully mischievous: she could have been the wife of John Florio, Italian secretary to the Earl of Southampton. Given the sources, this is as credible as most other interpretations, even though Bate is attempting to convict the poet Samuel Daniel's sister of multiple adultery on circumstantial evidence that would not have persuaded Othello. More daring is Bate's solution to the conclusion of "Master W H", the unknown "begetter" of the sonnets. This, he argues, is just a printer's error for "W S" (William Shakespeare).

When addressing the authorship question, Bate uses knockabout tactics to demolish alternative candidates - from Francis Bacon to sundry lords - but he does so in a more profound question: why should anyone doubt that Shakespeare wrote the plays? As so often, the answer concerns class. Cultural conservatives could not bear the idea that a mere grammer-school boy and butcher's son was as talented as university-trained wits.

In part two, Bate deals with the gradual growth of Shakespeare's reputation after his death. Since the Bard's plays broke the rules of classical decorum, his eighteenth-century admirers were forced to "invent" a new category of "native genius" to account for his talent. Shakespeare's apparent weakness, his lack of a university education, turned out to be his greatest strength. Aided by sundry Romantics, Britain's national poet was defined a "natural" genius.

Other emerging nations also adopted Shakespeare as a cultural icon, but usually in opposition to the classical culture of oppressive rulers. In Germany, for example, the Bard was reinvented as a symbol of anti-Gallic, pro-Teutonic identity. As a large part of Shakespeare's rise to universal deification was his ability to inspire other artists, Bate considers the reworking of his plays by artists such as Hector Berlioz, Giuseppe Verdi and Henry Fuseli.

Although everyone knows that Shakespeare has been used for conservative propaganda, Bate is at his best when he reminds us that the Bard was once also the people's playwright. The use of Shakespeare by Quakers, Chartists and other nonconformists as a counter-tradition - "one nurtured in the dissenting academies in which those excluded from the old universities found an educational community" - powerfully suggests that Shakespeare's genius was rooted in the ability to represent so many different aspects of life that all social groups could find cofirmation of their world-view in his books.

Bate goes further. Rather than being a reactionary Dead White European Male, Shakespeare was also an inspiration to black writers such as George Lamming and Aime Cesaire, who used THE TEMPEST as a critique of colonialism and as "the voice of the recovered black identity". Examples such as these seem to prove Bate's assertion, following Jorge Luis Borges, that Shakespeare can be "everything and nothing".

Perhaps the most polemical passages are those in which Bate revisits the arguments between the conservative "vigilantes", who use the Bard to police educational standards, and the politically correct "new iconoclasts", who use him for their own ideological ends by arguing that Shakespeare was less a genius than a product of historical forces. At its most extreme, this view denies that his works have any meaning: it is we who give meaning to them.

Between the stubborn assertiveness of the conservatives and the absurd reductionism of the radicals, Bate occupies a middle ground - Shakespeare, he insists, became an icon of genius because he was a better playwright than his contempories. His reputation has become universal because his plays really do contain a rich store of images, ambiguities and the juxtaposition of different viewpoints convincingly imagined.

Bate ends his book by arguing that Shakespeare's dramatic techniques - he toned down, for example, the stark motivations of characters he found in his sources - have only been fully appreciated in the twentieth-century. After modern science and philosophy propagated new ideas about relativism, uncertainty and the coexistence of opposites, the way was open for William Empson to lead the appreciation of ambiguity in Shakespeare's work.

THE GENIUS OF SHAKESPEARE is aimed squarely at the general reader. Cultural materialists are sure to be exasperated as conservatives and other Shakespeare specialists may cringe at the boldness of his assertions and the ambition of his scope. Like many popular accounts, this well written book excites and provokes while risking accusations of over simplication. It is manifestly counter-productive, for example, to conclude an engagingly fervent book about the unique irreplaceability of Shakespeare's genius with the claim that had history been a little different Lope de Vega would have done just as well.

Despite such quibbles, Bate succeeds in conveying a powerful image of practical genius. Instead of bardolotry, we get a vivid portrait of a man who "invented the profession of dramatist", a quick-witted outsider who broke all the rules, a creative collaborator who gloried in playing games with what was possible on stage. Not only does THE GENIUS OF SHAKESPEARE say a great deal about the making of a literary reputation, it is also a fascinating account of how plays are lifeless unless they are performed.