Ian McIntyre, with this elegantly researched and crafted volume, has established himself as a truly exceptional biographer. This was the first work on Burns I have read that presented a compelling portrait of the poet as we know him from his work: a complicated mix of joy and sorrow, deep thought and bawdy humor, loyalty and infidelity, generosity and poverty, arrogance and innocence, British patriot and sentimental Jacobite. McIntyre's incisive and compelling research, copiously documented in notes, completely debunks the equally silly positions of overly sentimental hero-worshipers (mostly Scottish) and effete Burns-trashers (mostly English). McIntyre demonstrates what Burns lovers have known all along: all of Burns' poetry was not good--but when he WAS good, he was one of the truly great poets. The author also wades into many of the great Burns' controversies. He presents the evidence for Burns heavy (if not excessive for the time) use of alcohol, without diminishing Burns' worth as either a man or an artist. His depiction of the "Highland Mary" debate alone is worth the price of the book. This will become THE essential book on Burns, and it is apropriate (and probably essential) that it was written by a Scotsman.

This book really helped me focus on a career plan and it changed the way I relate to working! After reading this book all the pieces fell into place.

It's such a relief to have the Siete Partidas available in this attractive, reasonably priced set. The venerable Robert I. Burns has given it a wonderful general introduction and the index increases its accesibility even more than the very clear translation does. No more ploughing through paragraph after paragraph of Old Spanish, in 19th-century print, to get to the enlightening and even entertaining ideas that so well characterize the 13th century and give sociological background to any kind of medieval research.

Our company library included a copy of Robert Burns' "Making Meetings Happen". This book offers busy professionals everything they should need to improve the meetings they lead and the meetings they attend. Although some of the material is common sense or "you've heard it before", Mr. Burns takes a fresh approach to the topic of meetings and presents it in a very easy to read, concise, entertaining way. Excellent real life examples of meeting situations and how to improve one's approach to handling difficult attendees, hidden agendas, and the inevitable time wasters. Mr. Burns provides many checklists and other practical tools to use for analyzing meetings. I would recommend this book to everyone that attends or conducts meetings.

Much of this volume of some eighty-five folk-lyrics on erotic themes is probably the work of the Scottish poet Robert Burns (1759-1796). It was privately printed c. 1799 under the auspices of the Crochallan Fencibles, an Edinburgh men's club to which Burns had been initiated in 1786 or 1787 by his publisher William Creech, a founder of the group. Some of the texts included are undoubtedly by other hands; but as the Fencibles surreptitiously published this as a tribute to Burns within a few years of his death, it is reasonable to assume that much or most of it is by the poet himself. The Fencibles have usually been viewed merely as a drinking club, fraternal and convivial. But recent research has emphasized their subversive Jacobite and Jacobin sympathies as well. When in Edinburgh, Burns enjoyed composing bawdy songs for the enjoyment of his "brothers" at the Fencibles, who regularly met in Dawnie Douglas's tavern in Anchor Close to sing bawdry together. After 1789, when he moved to Dumfries, Burns continued to compose bawdy songs (often, like "When Princes and Prelates" with a revolutionary subtext), mailing them to cronies like Robert Saughton, also a member of the Fencibles.

This volume contains the (often corrupt) text of some twenty songs that also exist in Burns's handwriting--material usually omitted because of its erotic content from popular editions of Burns, but included in the standard scholarly edition (Kinsley, Clarendon, 1968). At least twelve of these songs are there established as fully the work of the poet, with a further nine identified by Kinsley as collected and transcribed by him as curiosities.

It is the other sixty-five texts that make this rare _Merry Muses_ volume (there are only two known copies of the 1799 edition) an invaluable resource. The Thomas Cooper Library of the University of South Carolina acquired it when the great Burns editor G. Ross Roy, an emeritus professor at USC, donated his large collection of Burnsiana and Scottish literature to the USC library. Most Burns scholars (including Prof. Roy, who contributes a lucid separate pamphlet describing the complex history of the volume) see the non-authenticated texts in _The Merry Muses_ as Scottish folk erotica added by various members of the Fencibles, or perhaps collected by Burns (an avid preserver of folk traditions). But having looked carefully at the contents, I consider all but five or six of the songs to be either the work of Burns himself or pastiches in which Burns revises as frequently as he transcribes. My reason--based on contexts rather than texts, so not authoritative--is the emphasis on mutual consent. In his signed and authenticated songs, RB is notable for this emphasis on consensual sexuality. The erotic song tradition in Scottish folk literature is, by contrast, rife with cautionary tales of rape and incest, but there are only a few such songs in this collection.

The very existence of this book was denied for more than a century by Burns admirers who were embarrassed by its frank sexual content: this denial was easily enough accomplished with only two extant copies of the work, one of them in the private hands of the Earl of Rosebery! But it is time for admirers of the poet to consider the bawdy songs of Burns. They are definitely obscene: some texts use Scottish vernacular obscenities such as "mow," but others make plentiful use of standard English and the f-word. But as the scenarios (typically--there are exceptions) emphasize the mutual joys of adult consensual sex, I think the term pornography is not quite accurate. The imagery is sometimes gross and shocking, but an episode of "Sex in the City" is more spicy. These obscene song-lyrics (the names of the suggested tunes are specified, but no music is printed) are better read as telling artifacts of masculine (masculinist?) culture during the Age of Enlightenment than as embarrassments to Burns's Immortal Memory. The poet lived a short, painful life, enduring the daily symptoms of terminal heart disease from his teens. Love and liberty--sexual as well as political freedom--were the great concerns of his poetry. For Burns, the composition of poetry (and the sharing it with kindred spirits) were his anodynes for poverty, social oppression (Burns is British literature's only great peasant poet), personal unhappiness, and chronic poor health. Like it or not, the bawdy element in Burns is fundamental to understanding his views on language, poetry, and human liberation. There are two modern editions of _Merry Muses_, but the notes in both cases are marred by sexism and poor scholarship. This facsimile is expensive, but all the profits go to the USC library by Prof. Roy's generous agreement. If you're looking for pornography, you'll be disappointed. If you're looking to understand the total Robert Burns in Scottish cultural context--and to gain insight into the inner demons and drive behind his writng--you'll be surprised and enlightened.

I feel puzzled nobody so far has reviewd this excellent text by Novikov (and Fomenko). The view-point is somewhat different from Bredon or May or Spanier, but together with Part 2, they form a good introduction to "geometric" topology.

Robert Burns is the greatest common man poet of all time. I love him!

This book, like the others in this series, is a collection of reviews and essays, here focusing on Robert Burns and his work. From unsolicited reviews of the Kilmarnock edition while Burns was still alive, to brief mentions by great poets, to scholarly essays, it's all here in one volume. Essential material on Burns.

Save yourself the money and buy this book in paperback. This excellent series is well-known, so I needn't mention that they did a great job on Burns.

Robert Scott is a master in taking the finest of details and spinning them into a fascinating and easy to follow storyline. I found the Prologue somewhat off putting but fortunately stayed with it and soon became entranced and horrified at the same time with the telling of the multitude of horrific crimes commited by this demonic duo. I have lived in the areas mentioned in this book and even know some of the officials involved. It was very, very strange to be able to picture most of the places mentioned in the book and to know I had either seen or been to some of the places mentioned. It made the book all that more real for me. I came away from reading it with a new found awareness that is both disturbing and enlightening for me. NO ONE IS SAFE from having this happen to them. It is such a ramdom crime of violence. There are things you can do to reduce your chances of being a victim but Fate plays such a big hand in life, for good or for evil. I will be more vigilant for myself and warn people I care about. This book has made a difference in my life.