The sonnet is one of the more difficult-to-write forms of poetry, with very strict rules on rhyming and lines, and that makes Shakespeare's collection of sonnets all the more impressive. Shakespeare sprinkled his various plays with poetry and songs, but there is something of a different flavor to these works.

Titleless, identified only by numbers, these poems have vivid metaphors and imagery ("let not winter's ragged hand deface," "gold candles fix'd in heaven's air"). The tone of the poetry varies from one sonnet to the next; sometimes it focuses on old age, to love that "looks upon tempests and is not shaken," and simple expressions that can't really be interpreted any other way. Some of it is pretty well-known ("Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?/Thou art more lovely and more temperate") but most of them you won't have seen before.

Even if you're not normally a fan of poetry, the delicate touch of Shakespeare's words is worth checking into. Fantastic.

This edition of the sonnets is one of the most important and the description on Amazon is misleading - It is actually both volumes 24 and 25 bound together so you get the complete set It's hard to find this book so it is a great find in this version

Shakespeare's amazing Sonnets are compiled here in this wonderful volume, a great addition to anyone's bookshelf. If you love Shakespeare, then this is a must-have book.

I would prefer to have my questions answered concerning this book. I have read this book thoroughly many times; what I wonder is what makes this book "collectible" and worth [price] rather than [price], as no description is given other than "paperback". Thank you.

I purchased this book in order to better understand what the violin was all about to better understand why the violin was so important to my friend.

This is a wonderful book for those interested in learning about the history of the making of the violin. I myself am a violinist, and can appreciate everything there is to know about the violin. I highly recommend this book to anybody who loves the violin.

The Mystery of the Stolen Diamonds

That is the title that I think this book should be because there is another mystery going on at the same time that eventually involves the Three Investigators with the mystery of the moaning cave. The plot is trying to see how or what is making the cave moan only at night and not in the morning. I really liked this book because it kept me reading, even when I wasn't supposed to be reading the book.

The tenth (10th) installment in the "Three Investigators" series finds the boy sleuths travelling to a ranch to try to solve the mystery of 'Moaning Valley'. They uncover clues leading back to an 18th century bandit, and object of local folk legend named 'El Diablo'. The legend says El Diablo used the cave in Moaning Valley as his hideout, and disappeared into the cave 80 years ago... But suddenly there are stories that he's returned! The cave gives off an errie moan that terrifies anyone who hears it. The boys do a bit of scuba diving, and see an odd creature in the water on the western bank of the mountain where El Diablo's cave is located. The conclusion is both satisfying, and fun as they tie up all loose ends, and help the authorities solve a mystery at the same time. I re-read this story to my 6 year old son last month - still one of my favorites in the series.

For more than 20 years, I relied on Schickel for guidance when determining which films to see; also, for gaining a better understanding of the films I had seen. In this volume, he provides interviews with eight great directors: Hitchcock, Capra, Minimill, Cukor, Hawks, Wellman, Vidor, and Walsh. In recent weeks, I have also read Robert J. Emery's two The Directors (Take One and Take Two) and Bogdanovich's Who the Devil Made It which also offer interviews and conversations with various great directors. Don't worry about duplications; that is, what Cukor, Hawks, Hitchcock, Walsh, and Wellman have to say. Bogdanovich, Emery, and Schickel have different questions to ask, different nuances of film making to explore, and approach the directors from quite different perspectives. The responses they obtain from the same directors differ. For that reason, I strongly urge fellow film buffs to purchase all of these volumes. The order in which they are read is unimportant.

What differentiates Schickel from Bogdanovich and Emery is the fact that, for many years, he wrote film reviews for Time magazine and thus had an immense audience with which to share his opinions about more than a thousand films. Also, he is the author of more than 20 books about film making which include biographies of Marlon Brando, Cary Brando, and James Cagney. Over the years, he has earned and richly deserves his reputation as one of the most thoughtful and knowledgeable of film authorities. In this volume, he interacts with eight of the greatest film directors. At no time does he seem intimidated by them nor does he ever disrupt the flow of information exchanged with self-serving observations. He guides each director into subject areas which are probably of great interest to most film buffs but he also allows each director to ramble, digress, etc. when reminiscing or when sharing specific opinions about films and actors with whom they were associated. Sure, there is some delicious gossip. And yes, some insights not otherwise available. However, for the most part, Schickel sets up various subjects and then allows each director (many of them a personal friend) to proceed wherever he may wish, at whatever pace he may prefer. His brilliant orchestration of responses ensures their scope and depth. That is to say, he did not merely turn on the recorder and then let each of the eight take it from there. On his reader's behalf, Schickel remains actively involved, indeed engaged in the exchange of information but at no time is intrusive. Within its genre, this is indeed a "classic."

This film critic's survey of eight of Hollywood's finest directors and their works uses the interview process to explore the work of American filmmakers over the last decades. Hitchcock, Capra, Cuckor and others share their achievements in a revealing set of interviews covering special challenges and observations.

This is one of the most useful books for an ultrasound library in the day by day practice of Radiology. It has usable charts & graphs & measurements. Above all, it is completely practical to use.
This started our group on the pathway of all the "Requisites" series, with a common trait of easy to use good clinical information in all of them.

Byron Faber MD
Silverdale, Wa

This is an excellant review of U/S for a beginning radiology resident. I would highly recommend it as it is inexpensive (compared to other U/S texts) and has all the majot concepts covered.

This is a really good book, I reccommend you check it out at your local library.

If you liked the CD, then you will love this book. It has some of the best music that I have ever played. I really enjoyed it!

I have owned and read several times the David and Charles publication of this book (as a Pan Books paperback) since it first appeared in 1969.
It is an outstanding work written by a distinguished mechanical engineer very familiar with his subject. In clear language which even the non-technical should understand, the design and workings of the steam locomotive in Britain is made clear. Much of it is applicable in its fundamentals to steam locomotives anywhere in the world. It is definitely not a hagiography of some enthusiasts favorite designs but an objective account of the continued and successful development of the steam locomotive to the much improved state it reached after about 50 year's development in the 20th century. There is a rare but proper examination of compounding, superheat, boilers, cylinders, valve gear, and adhesion and many other relevant subjects. Also of experiments with ultra-high pressure and steam turbines and the author shows how the final designs tended to gell around a certain relatively simple but effective and efficient conformity in both Britain and the USA. Unusually there is a proper emphasis on maintenance and its costs, a subject often neglected.
I thoroughly recommend this book especially to provide the reader with a useful reference for a clesr understanding.
My own copy is now falling apart and I would be glad to find a robust hardcover edition.

Captain Blackman is an American soldier in Vietnam who is seriously wounded. As he drifts in and out of consciousness he hallucinates back in time, as an African-American solider in each of America's wars from 1775 to 1975. John Williams is a superb craftsman whose novel is as engaging as it is original. The blending of fantasy and history is superlative and his message as entertaining as it is compelling. Captain Blackman is authentic, accurate, and detailed in its background details, compelling, appealing, and completely entertaining in its story.

It took me twenty years to finally pull Isaac Bashevis Singer's novel, Shosha, about Jews and the Holocaust from my bookcase and read it. One week later I had finished it and moved on to read Clifford's Blues. Two compelling and distinctive plys coil together to offer up complementary perspectives on the rise of Nazism in Germany. Singer puts a face on pre-World War II European Jews, richly depicting what it meant to be a Jew in western Europe in the years prior to and during the Holocaust. For most modern Americans this is a fairly familiar story.

Williams offers up a tale much less familiar. He introduces us to Clifford Pepperidge, a gay, black, American jazz musician who spends a dozen years incarcerated in Dachau prison, one of the many labeled undesirables who were captured as the Nazis rose to power. While other prisoners suffer the misery of prison barracks and captor abuse, Clifford sits in the comfortable home of a gay Nazi officer and his bovine German wife. There as a servant, Pepperidge allows himself to be used sexually and musically by both husband and wife, the price of survival. In his daily interaction with other prisoners he sees that good men, those with the character and ethics to stand up for their fellows, rarely survive long. It is those who capitulate, who sink down into the muck, who lose their humanity who will endure.

Williams provides us with a fascinating picture of how people react to power and influence, even when it clearly is evil. We see the German burger who blinds himself to the fate of those caught up in the hungry trap of Nazism. The German officer who grasps at every opportunity to accumulate wealth and power. The many who stumbled forward in step with a horror that grows ever larger and more malignant. Where Singer presents a picture of people desperately trying to hold onto their hopes and dreams even in the face of rising oppression, Williams shows us the convolutions that strip away humanity in both victim and oppressor.

The writing is strong, and Williams clearly took the time to do the necesary research to bring his story to life. Richly developed characters hold the reader's interest. It is not a book to be quickly forgotten. Williams holds a mirror up and asks us to look at ourselves and think about how we can be shaped and influenced by people and events. His darkside tale underscores the possibility of our own tumble in inhumanity and evil.

I read this book a year ago and it haunts me still.

John A. Williams has crafted here a story so compelling, so engrossing in its depiction of life lived on a razor's edge, that you loathe putting it down; you may feel chills when you've finished it. It's that disturbing, and that good. CLIFFORD'S BLUES affirms that Williams retains his gifts (fresh as ever in his mid-70s!) and mastery of his craft.

Clifford Pepperidge is triple-crossed: condemned as "decadent" - for being American Negro, jazz musician, and active homosexual (especially impolitic when he's caught in bed with a prominent white man) - and interned "indefinitely" in a German concentration camp by Nazidom as it rises to power in the early 1930s.

This is a historical possibility we'd not thought of. Yet Williams, no stranger to historical fiction (see, for example, his novel CAPTAIN BLACKMAN), footnotes his text with incidences of real life black jazz musicians detained by the Nazis prior to the outbreak of World War II; I'd never heard about this.

John A. Williams has been publishing books, mostly novels, over 40 years. His heroes have tended to be "manly" black men: uncompromising, heterosexual, hard-loving, hard-drinking and cigarette-smoking urbane sophisticates. I've always taken them to be stand-ins for the author himself; perhaps they represent the image of manliness of a day not quite gone by.

Stepping out of his usual bounds and into Clifford's skin, however, Williams exhibits an even greater sense of manhood, an empathetic virility. Clifford may not fathom how he managed to get himself into such a mess, but he doesn't make excuses. He's as resolute about his sexuality as his racial and artistic makeup, though all combine to make him particularly alienated - and vulnerable - as he faces down brutal imprisonment with other Nazi-dictated "undesirables" (Communists, gays, Jehovah's Witnesses, Jews and gypsies) for twelve long years. He lives to see, almost veritably, the walls of his dungeon shake, practical escape, the possible passing on of his testimony - but at what cost?

I can say, with modesty and with pride, that I've read all John A. Williams' published novels. This is, for my money, his most powerful, arguably his greatest book since THE MAN WHO CRIED I AM.

Williams has always been a thinking person's writer and a darn good storyteller. In this extremely well written and deeply felt book he's rendered the poignant story of a character he made me truly care about. Clifford Pepperidge could be the long-feared-lost-or-dead relative whose tattered diary of surviving hell on earth has just been plopped down in your living room. How can you embrace all of what he's been through? What if it were you? The really eerie question is that, given history, or the record of human events, it's apparent that no one has a corner on inhumane depravity - we're each just as likely or capable of being captor or captive when, if, we allow a new holocaust. But when you look in the mirror, do you recognize the humanity within and extending beyond yourself? Will we remember?

If only half of what is published were half as well crafted. By the way, the Kirkus Review at the top says this is Williams's first novel. But this is John A., the author of The Man Who Cried I Am, right? Does Kirkus have him confused with another John Williams?