This was the very first erotic novel that I ever read and I absolutely loved it! It kept me coming back for more, no lie! My only problem is that it had a little too much of a story line. It's my favorite book of Ms. Lloyd's. I highly recommend it. It's a very juicy book. Not at all for the prudish!

This is an easy read and very informative as well. I enjoyed every page of it, it was totally absorbing for me. I couldn't bring myself to put it down and continue it later. For those who are looking for something to turn them on and ways to spice up their sex life, this is a sure recommendation. I was so turned on reading it that my partner and I adapted some of the scenarios and recommendations and acted them out. And each time our sex experience was just exhilarating! I would highly recommend that Amazon publish this same title in the e-book format.

Wow! A co-worker of mine brought this book in for me to read. They knew I was into torn shirt novels. And this is one for the record. For those modest people who just want a romance, this is definately not for you. It is very sexually graphic, but there is a plot and a story line that make you want to read the whole thing, rather than just skipping to the dirty parts. I love reading and how it can transfer you to a world that you'd dare not enter yourself. This book is not for the faint hearted. If you are looking for an exciting book that may even give you a few steamy ideas for your own bedroom, I recommend this one.

HAVIN OUR SAY is an incredible story that show us the extraordinary lives of two black sisters.I particularly saw this story as an example for my life,because of my difficult situation in this country.I can compared it a little bit to the dramatic social struggle of Sadie and Bessie. I really enjoyed The Delany's Story, it has a complex commentary on character, longevity and sisterhood. It has parts of good sense, humor and grace, it's not a tedious book.Mainly I like Sadie's achievements as a professional.It's a good example to practice in my life. In my opinion the author Amy Hill Hearth did a good job, because she was intelligent and could convince The Delany Sisters to tell their fascinating history around the world.

Having Our Say is a remarkable book written by Sadie and Bessie Delany that details their lives over a hundred year period.

Bessie and Sadie grew up in a large family on the campus of Saint Augustine's school in Raleigh, North Carolina during the 90s. They led sheltered lives; Sadie was quiet and well mannered whereas Bessie was very quick to anger and opinionated. They were also very intelligent women who were taught early on to aim high. In a time when most people did not go to school beyond high school, Bessie and Sadie received college degrees. Bessie became the second black woman to practice dentistry in New York.
Sadie became the first black home economics teacher in a New York high school. The Delany sisters spoke their minds, and what they give the reader is a story of pure American history.

This autobiography is filled with stories about racism and how it affected their lives. Sadie and Bessie lived together for over a hundred years. Although the sisters are deceased, their story and words of wisdom live on in the hearts and minds of readers.

I would recommend this book to anyone who is interested in American History. This book is the best history book I've read and the pictures in the book make the story come alive.

Reviewed by Dorothy Cooperwood

I really like this book. It is well-written, moving, inspiring, fascinating, and never boring!!! Over the course of the century in which they lived, the sisters saw a lot of change. They reflct on it very well, each in their own distinct voices: Sadie is quieter and "nicer", while Bessie is much more outspoken. They not only witnessed history, they also contributed to it: Sadie was the first "colored" teacher to teach home-ec in New York high schools, and Bessie was the second "colored" woman to become a dentist in New York. They truly led remarkable lives, and thanks to their family values, different techniques and sheer determination, they succeeded in a white society. This book isn't just for black people or women, but for all AMericans to read and cherish.

As Gilmore writes (p. 1) in Gender and Jim Crow, "since historians enter a story at its end, they sometimes forget that what is past to them was future to their subjects." And with regard to black optimism, potential and opportunities during Reconstruction, African American "subjects" looked forward to a future of encouraging possibilities, as African American males had real political power and influence within the Republican and populist parties, which courted their votes. These men and women believed that race as a social classification would decline in importance in favor of class. Yet just as the hopes of Agrarian radicals were thwarted by the harsh the realities of the two-party system, so too were the dreams of Reconstruction-era blacks crushed by the resurgence of white supremacy and the systematic attempts by whites to disenfranchise the Negro. Gilmore presents this tale of high hopes and shattered dreams in her first chapter, "Place and Possibility."
Gilmore's story is one of perseverance among the increasingly subjugated blacks of North Carolina after Reconstruction ended, in particular, the struggle of middle class black women to maintain power, dignity and to some degree control over their lives and communities. By the 1890s, the ugly image of white supremacy showed its face, as white men fought a successful battle to disenfranchise black men through the instrument of fear, that is to say, fear for the safety of white women from the ravenous clutches of Negro rapists. As Gilmore details, this sexually based contrivance branded black men as beasts and drove them from the political realm. Articulate black women, she argues, stepped in to this cultural and political vacuum to coordinate with whites (especially white women and Northern reformers) to get social services and to work for "racial uplift," especially through church and voluntary associations such as the Women's Christian Temperance Union. Gilmore notes that these types of activities were not as exposed to white restrictions or ire as overt political action, and thus helped to assure some success by these middle-class black females. It seems that black women could travel within certain community and political circles that were no longer open to their male counterparts.
Gender and Jim Crow is an innovative look at post-Reconstruction race relations, in that the chief actors in Gilmore's tale are women. It nicely dovetails with Kantrowitz's Ben Tillman and the Reconstruction of White Supremacy, in that we see similar examples of the creation of Jim Crow and the use of sexual fears to bolster notions of white supremacy as well as white political solidarity. While Kantrowitz shows that Ben Tillman was representative of many of white Southerners of his day, I am unconvinced that Gilmore's subjects are as representative. Her geographic realm is limited to one state of the Upper South, North Carolina; did black women carve out a similar role for themselves in the Deep South as well? Additionally, her cast of characters is quite small, and perhaps we are drawn to these women and their story because of its very exceptionalsim and not its typicality. Nevertheless, Gilmore's new and nuance perspective is groundbreaking and valuable in that we see the era of Jim Crow from a viewpoint previously unexplored.

I was assigned this book as part of my social relations class, and, given its title and description (as well as the other readings I've done in other similar classes), I wasn't expecting much in the way of entertainment. While I wouldn't call this a page turner by any means, it certainly had its moments. Gilmore does a very good job of weaving stories in with facts to keep the reader going.

Most importantly, however, I learned about the existence of a Southern African American middle class pre-1900s that I never knew existed. Gilmore does an exceptional job of reminding the modern reader that these African Americans were working without the benefit of history. They did not know that Jim Crow would become so pervasive in the early 1900s; they thought they were well on the road to equality.

Gilmore breaks new ground on many fronts that will interest social historians of race and political historians. She uncovers the myriad arenas in which black women and white women pursued "politics" outside the formal arenas of electoral institutions. She also reveals the surprising coalitions formed across racial lines and the mindset of an upper-South State on the eve of disenfranchisement. Gilmore's writing flows smoothly, as other reviewers have noted, but at times becomes overwrought and sentimentalized in a way that makes it sometimes tedious and sometimes aggravating to stay with the text. She's become captured a bit by her characters and sources. But this is a small criticism in the context of an overwise pathbreaking study that's well worth the read.

I read this book in the original German edition and thus don't know how well the English edition conveys this example of a very 'German' post-war destiny. Ika was a "Besatzungskind" - a very negative and subjective term for a child born to a German mother and a (most commonly) G.I. father from the "occupation forces". Her story is just one of a whole babyboomer generation of both white,and mixed-race children, and what a sad story it is, particulary of those little "Black Germans"! Ika's coerced removal from her mother and placement into a Christian institution was a common occurance for 'illegitimate' children of any description. The mothers of Black children were seen as nothing more than whores who were not fit to raise the children they should not have had in the first place. The racially motivated mental and physical abuse that Ika endured makes for painful reading - particularly since the abuse was carried out (as it often is)in the name of Christ and for her salvation. That Ika managed to grow up into the strong, beautiful person she is today is a testimony to her strength of character and indomitable spirit. I was so happy for her that she did manage to find her father and come to terms with her struggle over identity. With the growth in recent years of Afro-German organisations I hope that many more stories like Ika's will be published. They will give voice to that previously invisible 'Stolen Generation' who now, in middle-age are finally given a change to come to terms with their unique history and identity.
Postscript: As a white contemporary of Ika's I had many class/playmates who were black, with family backgrounds similar to hers. Certainly the Catholic institution (Jugenddorf Klinge in Seckach/Baden) were I spent some years, was not guilty of evil such as experienced by Ika. For a long time now I have wondered about the subsequent fates of my special friend Monika and the other girls I knew.

This is the only book that ever made me shed a tear. All I can say is "READ IT!" It's a truly inspiring story.

Soon after I began reading Ms Marshall's book I experienced a thrill of recognition. In the brutally honest account of her child and early adulthood in Germany, her stories of recognizing and overcoming her internalized racial self-hatred, I remembered and re-lived some of my own similar experiences growing up as a light-skinned, adopted black child in the black community in Baltimore Maryland.

Ms. Marshall's harsh treatment at the hands of the staff at the home she was sent to as a child sheds light on the brutal and uncaring treatment many children, especially children of color, still experience today. Her writing is both personal and informative (she quotes several government documents of her childhood that "institutionalized" the racist treatment of Afro-Germans) and draws the reader into her story so that one cannot help but become caught up with her as she tells it. I found it difficult to put it down.

That she survived such a childhood and has become both a strong woman and outspoken opponent of racism in Germany, is a testement to her inner power and strength, as well as to the love she received from her mother before she was taken from her at the age of six years old.

Ms. Marshall is still fighting the demons of racism in a country that carries its nationalism in it's breast pocket, as it were. It's not that bad in the US of A...yet.

The book, the Venus Hottentot, by Elizabeth Alexander, is a powerful conflation of what it means to be an african-american woman artist in a space that is dominated by the aestheticized science of the white male patriarchy. Within her writing, Alexander combines beautiful imagery with potent politics. Much of Alexander's poetry involves a renaming. The poems titled with names involve an elaboration of those names into a series of images, a collage of interconnected senses, places and objects. The poet's active role as historian reawakens the components of history, allowing them to shape and be shaped by the poetic encounter. Through the restructuring of names within history, Alexander renames herself. History becomes a menagerie of colors rather than the juxtaposition of black lettering on blank paper, making her poetry a sensual compilation of rhythms, colors and rescripted historical themes.

"All changed, changed utterly: A terrible beauty is born." --W.B. Yeats, "Easter 1916"

"a terrible beau- ty a terrible beauty a terrible beauty a horn" --Elizabeth Alexander, "John Col"

The parallel of Ireland's War for Independence to John Coltrane's jazz at first may strike some readers as a stretch. However, through the pen of Elizabeth Alexander, an African-American poet who manages to discuss at once important issues of race and myriad topics within history, art and music, any connection is elucidated with eloquence and power. In "The Venus Hottentot," Alexander's first book of poems, the subjects range from personal memory to entire cultural memories to human subjects: John Coltrane, Romare Bearden, Claude Monet, a rare black cowboy. In the fourth section of her book, Alexander's essential message is one of unity in difference. "I could go to any city/ and write a poem" she states in "Miami Footnote." And she does, writing out of Boston, Philadelphia, Brooklyn. Her subjects are black, Hispanic, and the eye with which she paints them has its own form of the Monet's xanthopsia in "Monet at Giverny." Colors fade from the black and vivid blue of Bearden's collages into "yellow freesia," "red notes." In "Today's News", she states that "blackness is" is a poem she does not want to write, because "we are not one or ten or ten thousand things." The reader stands looking up and around at the montage, a Diego Rivera mural surrounding one with "walls and walls of scenes of work." The "Painting" is effusive, so why not include the Irish? Out of the clashes of culture, the curious, though ignorant, manipulation of a race in "The Venus Hottentot," a "terrible beauty is born." Alexander sees this beauty in all its colors and musical shadings, none of which alone can describe a situation. Shading her vision with Irish green or Monet's blue, she lives true to the words of "Today's News": "Elizabeth,/ this is your life. Get up and look for color,/ look for color everywhere." Perceptive readers would do well to join Alexander in her search; they just might find something unexpected and lovely.

If you're looking for an energetic, political, feminist poet who calls it like it is - you've got to read this book. It is beautifully provocative, and tightly written - very exciting stuff.

This scholarly and thorough, but highly readable account, details historic and modern (up to the 1980s) instances of the Scottish Highland brand of precognition known as Second Sight. From St. Columba to modern-day Glaswegians, it covers the visions seen by seers that accurately foretold future events. This book should appeal to all lovers of Highland lore and the occult. It is both objective in tone and open-minded regarding its subject and is a refreshing source of information with enough spine-tingling details to keep the reader on the edge of his seat!

Elizabeth Sutherland has done a great service to all of us who hail from Scottish Highland heritage. She has mapped out through exhaustive scholarship the cosmologies, traditions and lore surrounding the ways of the seer in Scottish ways. A compilation of oral traditions and stories, including first hand accounts, of engaged seership in ancient, Culloden-era as well as contemporary Scotland, Ravens and Black Rain is an exquisite introduction to An Da Shealladh (the Two Sights), with plenty of meaty material for seasoned scholars or practitioners to consider. My favorite aspect of the book is, perhaps, Ms. Sutherland's matter of fact way of speaking about the sight as simply an extension of the old Druidic traditions alive and well in the milieu of a contemporary Scotland.

This is a study in which the interviewer is from the same background as the subjects. (I forgot the anthropological term for that.) In this study, Higgonbotham asks black women who went to predominantly-White, Northeastern colleges how they got there, how was it, and how did it affect their lives afterward. The book is written in a style that is scholarly but not impenetrable to non-academic readers. But here's the shocker. This book does very little comparing black women to their black male siblings or their white female peers. Most of this book compares the choices and actions of middle-class black women to working-class counterparts. Really, this book was more a labor studies text, than a women's studies or African-American studies one. Further, with the exception of the occasional mention of Patricia Hills Collins, there is no mention of black feminist/womanist thinkers. I wish too that the author didn't make up cheesy names to keep the universities attended hidden. But I enjoyed this book. I think I'm going to give it to my mother as a present. If white women can have Miriam Horn's "Rebels in White Gloves", why can't sisters have an equivalent? Though dated, this book is an excellent edition to books such as Takagi's "The Retreat from Race" and Garrod's "First Person, First Peoples" that look at the lives of people of color in elite universities.

Higgenbotham's book provides a context for and explores the many issues and problems that I faced as a Black woman at a premdominately White University in the late 60's. I learned that my experiences were not unique and personal (as I had assumed), but rather quite typical of my peers. This book reads like my biography, and I can now understand and explain situations that were then inexplicable. I applaud Higgenbotham for her extensive and careful research and recommend this book enthusiastically. This is a history that I lived, and Dr. Higgenbotham has demonstated that it is worthy of scholarly investigation.

This was required reading for my Russian literature class because it is considered a classic. My favorite part of this book is the fact that it gives the reader a glimpse of what life was like for the average nobleman of the day...(in the 1850's) It has some interesting descriptions of Russian family life, the life of the peasantry and how the younger generation interacted with the older generation (hence the title, "Fathers and Sons" although the original Russian is called "Fathers and Children"). One of the main characters, Bazarov, is a self proclaimed nihilist who rejects all forms of authority, causing problems for the older generations (his parents & his friend's parents), but attracting the attention of the people of his (the younger) generation. This book has no real plot...it is merely the story of how one man brings his nihilist ideas into other peoples' lives & it gives accounts of everybody else's reactions to these nihilist ideas. It is an interesting book & a pretty quick read, but it can drag in places...especially if the reader is waiting for something interesting to happen. All in all, I believe this book is worth reading, if just to get a taste of "Old Russia", but if you are looking for an exciting "can't-put-it-down-sitting-on-the-edge-of-your-seat-page-turner", you won't find it in this book.

It's easy to get lost in a sub-plot and believe that this book is about a sociopolitical clash between the old and the new, with the new being a nihilist forerunner of Russian revolution. But the book is extremely weak in the area of political discussion. As a political statement this book would be a dismal failure. Fortunately, the little bit of oversimplified politics that was tossed carelessly into the book is fairly irrelevant to the story.

This book is as good as anything ever produced in Russian literature, in the class of Solzhenitsyn, Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy. It's good because it's emotional.

For me, the main character is one who appears for a very short time and seems to be a minor character - Bazarov's father. His love of his son, and the relationship between Arkady and his father, are what the book is named after, and what it's about. I love the protest that Bazarov's father makes to God.

Two school graduates, Arkady and Bazarov, return home to their families after years away at school. Nihilist Bazarov clashes with Arkady's traditionalist uncle, but don't all generations clash a little over something. That's part of the relationship. Both young men fall in love with local women. I think Arkady and Katia would be great together. She would treat him like a king and lead him by the nose, and he would adore her his whole life and do whatever she told him to do.

In Turgenev's Fathers and Sons, as in most of Chekhov, nothing much really happens. People talk a lot and that's about it. Should be dull, right? But it isn't. The talk, and the characters revealed, reflect the profound changes that were being felt in Russian society at the end of the 19th Century; changes that would set the stage for much of what was to happen in the 20th Century. But more important to a modern reader, the ideas and the real life implication of those ideas are as current and relevant as when Turgenev wrote. Bazarov, the young 'nihilist', sounds just like the typical student rebel of the 60's (or of the Seattle WTO protests just recently). He has the arrogance and the innocence of idealistic youth. He is as believeable, and as moving in his ultimate hurt, as any young person today might be confronted with the limitations of idealism and the fickle tyranny of personal passion.

I loved this book when I first read it as a teenager and I enjoyed it even more on subsequent rereadings. It makes the world of 19th century Russia seem strangely familiar and it gives many a current political thread a grounding in meaningful history.

This is the best book that I have ever read on black women,since it compared black women with black women. It's well-organised and very interesting with wonderful pictures. I really appreciated the many photos since it gave me a visual history of these women.

I was visiting with some friends in the South Carolina area when i first saw the author, Kibibi Voloria Mack, (now "Mack-Shelton"), being interviewed on the television show, "Inside Orangeburg". Her vivacious speaking style first caught my attention but after hearing her describe the contents of her book, I knew I had to read it for myself. I am not a history lover nor do I read many nonficition books, but I read "Parlor Ladies" and i must confess that I was pleasingly surprised! It is indeed the best darn book I have enjoyed in a long time!! The book is written in a fashion that makes it easy to follow but I was most impressed with the discourse she writes in that allows even an ordinary, nonscholarly person like myself to to read, understand, and appreciate a good peice of history. This book is a breath of fresh air when it comes to reading American history: it was never dull and is filled with information that I never would have known about southern black women or the black community had i not read this marvelous book. The photos were wonderful!

I first heard of PARLOR LADIES & EBONY DRUDGES when i saw the author, Dr. Kibibi V. Mack-Shelton, on C-SPAN BOOK TV in 1999; her vivacious speaking style and wonderful narration of her book aroused my curiosity. I read this book and must confess that this is the best book I have ever read on the history of southern African American women in the early 1900s. Mack-Shelton does an excellent job of not only comparing the upper classes of black women with their lower class peers, she provides some rather insightful information in her research that further explains the origins of modern day attitudes that some blacks still have in the black community in relations to how they still see light-skinned/straight hair blacks as being on a more superior level than those who are darker-skinned with non-straight hair. Her excellent use of oral history creates a picture of these women's daily life experiences in their own voices, bringing them to life. I am an avid reader of American history and am very impressed with Mack's style of writing. Her account of these women's historical lives is written in a discourse that both the trained, sophistocated scholar or an ordinary lay person (like myself) can follow easily. It's a breath of fresh air to read a history book that is never boring nor needs a dictionary to translate each word. It is a well-organized comparative study that is indeed an easy, interesting read that a person could actually read in a few days, if time permitted. This is a "must" read for everyone interested in American history, Women's history, or African American history must read this important book and add it to your personal library. Keep up the good writing and I can't wait to read your next book!!

It's understandable that a small handful of would-be or wanna be investigative writers would want to throw rocks at this book, SEVERED; because it's a great book that gets you where you live, or as the upfront boys say, grabs you where it hurts! Because John Gilmore has written an emotionally and psychologically troubling book; the most mysterious and bizarre account I have ever read concerning an 'unsolved' murder in Los Angeles. This book must be considered the definitive history on the famous Black Dahlia murder case of 1947. The murder case is still in the news, still in the mainstream press. It also appears that this case is woven into the experience of the author, a major plus for the readers! Born in Los Angeles, Gilmore's father was a policeman with the Los Angeles police department (a wonderful photo of his father is at the front of the book, dressed in the 40's LAPD uniform and standing beside the old black-and-white squad car, like the ones we see in the film noir movies). Author Gilmore is no newcomer to the crime field; I have read his other books, one on Charles Schmid, the killer in Arizona, recently published as COLD-BLOODED, and his book on Charles Manson, THE GARBAGE PEOPLE.

But it appears that this book, SEVERED, is his major work in the true crime field. This book is written with the same sureness that a Zen marksman uses in hitting a target. The reader will most assuredly have nightmares about Elizabeth Short, the young woman this tale concerns itself with as she wages a losing battle with survival. Almost too painful at moments to read, but it keeps getting deeper, and deeper into this girl. Her beauty, it seems, is a curse; she is too young to get ahead in the hard, hard town of Hollywood, and she literally dies trying.

Apart from this amazing portrait of a young woman caught in the L.A. web (thugs, crooks, gangsters), what I found most fascinating was the author's personal link to the case, to the murder (via his father, a cop doing legwork on the case in the late 1940's), his family (the name Short crops up, which brings about an encounter with the actual victim when the author was 11 years of age). These things seem at the root of Gilmore's interest or obsession with the case, the victim, and certainly his years of efforts at closing in on a plausible suspect. He tracks the participants, no doubt followed some to their death beds, hounded police and newsmen alike, and spent decades on an otherwise 'officially' futile investigation. Again and again he returns to the same subject, the strange and haunting personality of the Black Dahlia herself, would-be actress, L.A. fringe girl and drifter during the War and that lost, merry-go-round of post-war Hollywood.

This book is a real life thriller and one you will stick with to the end, despite a few spots that could raise a few nit-picking questions. It is a must read for anyone interested in true crime, police, hard-boiled, dark writing or seeking a real experience: being plunged back into L.A's. past, those swing-shift war yeras of the west coast. But this story seems to hit all coasts, east, west and inbetween as we follow the black Dahlia on her torturous journey.

The photos are shocking, but this is a frightening tale, and told by a strong writer, a new voice echoing some of the old hard-boiled school of pretty gals and gunshoe cops. But reader beware: this tale sneaks up on you, and will shake you up before you know it.

The story of the girl nicknamed the BLACK DAHLIA is one of the most haunting and disturbing books I have ever read. There is no fluff here, no glitter; no so-called 'entertainment'. This is HARD ART. Author John Gilmore, (he wrote another brilliant but hard to swallow book entitled COLD-BLOODED), has created a shocking picture of a shadow-world in postwar Hollywood, and he has done so without compromise. In my opinion, this is what great writing is about: how the readers is hooked in emotionally and psychologically, caught in this undertow the writer creates apart from the text. Reading SEVERED is like listening to dark, strange music. It's easily understandable how this author upsets many, because he aims directly at the chinks in social armor and in some he draws out the uncomfortable aspects of the self. I have read John Gilmore's book on Charles Manson, and Manson is described at being able to "get at fear" in people. Gilmore obviously does the same thing. No wonder he connected so tightly with Charles Manson, and with James Dean, and Janis Jopin, and etc., etc. This is the dark arena. The pictures Gilmore paints with words are like the photographs of Diane Arbus and Joel Peter Witkin (try Gilmore's FETISH BLONDE and LAID BARE. See if I'm right). Murder victim Elizabeth Short, in Gilmore's evocative prose, rises out of the grave and into the readers mind like a dark Madonna; we experience almost everything she is, her pains, her struggle, her sorrow, and we experience her brutal, strange murder almost blow for blow. Some things about this girl no one can apparently ever understand, but Gilmore gives us all we need to know. Guaranteed to give you nightmares. So step right up. Guaranteed to draw you into a dark world where fear and horror cracks the whip. This is much more than reportage. More than true-crime journalism. This is literature with a sign on the door that says ENTER AT YOUR OWN RISK.

SEVERED is by far the only credible text on the infamous Black Dahlia; the first nonfiction, true crime account to have been written on this horrible murder, this book stands light years ahead of anything that has appeared since the publication of John Gilmore's book. Gilmore is, without doubt, still the Prince of Darkness at exploring the shadow-world of our culture. This book is without equal, and others cobbled together on the Black Dahlia subject jumped on the bandwagon, smelling the blood of Elizabeth Short, to cash in on the trail blazed by Gilmore. This work has created an icon in Elizabeth Short, and as they once said about Ernest Hemingway, "now the jackals come to gorge on the feast". I have never read a book that opens the Postwar world of Los Angeles as does SEVERED. Gilmore puts the reader in the smokey cafes, the bars, stinking of booze and sweat; in the night clubs and dingy hotel rooms, and on the electric streetcars that long ago ceased to exist. In reading SEVERED, my senses were opened wide and I was caught up in the shadow-world Gilmore revealed. Then came the murder: a painful experience to read it because the author had made me so vulnerable and drew me right in. He snuck up on me, and then struck me with the full impact. I shudder recalling that moment.

I recommend this book as a masterpiece of true crime literature, and most surely a guide book for all seeking to touch upon those lost yesterdays in the "city of angels," the subject of so many noir movies and dark novels. But the subject in SEVERED is real life, intriguing and frightening. The "Prince of Darkness" takes us through a lost world I shall never forget. I feel as though this strange girl, Elizabeth Short, the notorious Black Dahlia, stepped into my life and I now carry her with me wherever I go. There is something so powerful yet subtle about this book that it simply, as they say, "gets under your skin."