I find most contemporary poetic practice notable only for its miserly concern for the difficulties attendant upon the small, the domestic, the momentary--huge acreages felled only to tell us that someone built a fence in their backyard once, and their husband helped them and the bindweed grew up around it and that was symbolic of relationships enduring and such. I'm therefore ensanguined by Burt's new collection (definitive enough, I should think, to silence the shrieks of Robert Penn Warren harpies), which teaches us that bindweed can't "hold candle to chokeweed," that fences tend "to grow thick with unfencing menses," and that husbands are meaningful only inasmuch as they "lung persevering into the guts of Cromwell." As a result, this collection--under Burt's sprightly editorship --provides a needed corrective; Warren takes an uncompromising view of the suffering subject splayed upon the rack of history, and the results are cheerful and life-affirming. This book made me realize that there's a reason for everything; I will recommend it to my co-workers.

bURT AND ARCHER HAVE ASSEMBLED A DISTINGUISHED GROUP OF CONTRIBUTORS ON THE WAY SEXUALITY AND PROPERTY CAME TO BE LINKED IN THE LITERARY PRCTICES OF EARLY MODERN ENGLAND. A HIGHLY INFOMRATIVE COLLECTION OF SURPERBLY WRITTEN ESSAYS.

Here's another excellent book from John, with every statistic you could ever want to know about Jeff Gordon, and arranged in a way that makes it easy to find. Check his record at one track. Check his record for one year. And it's loaded with great pictures of the Rainbow Warrior in action and some great commentary for your reading pleasure. If you know a Jeff Gordon fan, they gotta have this book!!!

THE CONCEPCION; A SPANISH GALLEON SUNK ON THE SILVER SHOALS OFF THE DOMINICAN REPUBLC, FOUND BY BURT WEBER, AND SALVAGED. GOLD, SILVER, WELL WRITTEN, INTERESTING, ONE MAN'S QUEST REALZED, PROBLEMS OVERCOME, GOOD TALE. ALL THE INGREDIENTS.

This is perhaps my favorite volume of poetry. John Burt manages, with a spare, almost Spartan lyricism, to portray crystalline images of great beauty and power. He captures a wide range of emotions with subtlety in such poems as "Ballet Academy" and "From the Diary of Willard Gibbs." He treats philosophical themes adeptly and persuasively in such poems as "Andrew Ramsey at the Somme" and "Learning the Table." And he astounds the reader with the drama and surprises of poems such as "The Plague-Maiden," "The Zeppelin Watchers," and "The Homecoming of Bran." All of these have remained sharp in my mind long after a first reading-- and have inspired me to read them again and again. An evening with a John Burt volume is a rare treat. The state of American poetry would be worth cheering even if this volume were its only instance.

This book is written in installments: first-person narratives by people who know the main character. Most of them are only a few pages long, and few of the narrators repeat. Thus, it's impossible to really sympathize with any of them. The main character himself, gunslinger John Wesley Hardin, is hard to like: we never get into his head, and from the outside he looks like just another gangster. The reader sympathizes briefly when he's wounded and imprisoned, only to be put off when he commits his next act of mindless violence or drunken stupidity. The post-Civil War American West, as presented by the author, whacks the reader over the head with violence, lawlessness, and what I felt were rather gratuitous scenes of sex with prostitutes. I'm all for "gritty" historical fiction, but here it sometimes seemed like the author was just trying to show off. Without emotional content, grit is just an irritant. Having said all that, the book is intelligently written and apparently well researched, and it might be somebody else's cup of tea more than it is mine.

There was nothing like the American West in the history of the world and figures like Hardin exemplify it; deadly, brave, sad and foolish all at once. His death seemed a relief because by 1895 there was no place left for the bravado of a gunslinger who would draw over an insult.

I found the writing format, the telling through other's eyes, less engaging and certainly less tasty than Blake's current style.

This was some book ! Absolutely outstanding in every respect - as a story, in its style, very exciting, excellent dialect, really funny in spots, ..... Chapter by chapter I went from hating the arrogant ... (John Wesley Hardin), to wanting to be a Hardin. If he really was as portrayed in this book (which I doubt), he was mostly the kind of person I respect - leave him alone and he'll buy you drinks all night long and otherwise give you the shirt off his back. Meddle in his business, get in his face, or harm his family and he'll whip you or kill you. Now don't get me wrong. Any reader would try to see where they fit in, in that day and time and I am pretty much left with the sad conclusion that I would have probably been a sorry, boot-licking peddler of some kind . . . . not a Hardin.

What a SUCK-FEST! This is the worst book I've read in a long time. The (unlucky) 13 authors seem only slightly concerned with plot continuity, and the result is like a novel with every third page torn out. Characters come and go, and come back again for no apparent reason, other than to satisfy the authors' self-indulgent egos. In particular, the chapters by Elmore Leonard and Vicki Hendricks were appallingly bad. Hendricks ignores all the preceeding chapters and suddenly changes the eponymous manatee from an aquatic pinhead into some amalgam of Lassie and the Hardy Boys. In a later chapter Carl Hiaasen openly mocks this sudden swerve in character. (Tip: avoid books where one co-author ridicules another co-author's writing) Elmore Leonard contributes a time capsule that might have been hip 25 years ago, with a black character refering to someone as a "cat", and in the very next sentence actually using the phase "shuck and jive". I am very happy I checked this book out of the library, instead of squandering 22.95 on this train wreck of a book

OK, thirteen of Miami's favorite writers are sitting around a campfire (this isn't a joke). Dave Barry kicks off a story involving a couple hit men, a manatee, a 102-year-old woman and a box containing the head of Fidel Castro, and passes it to the writer to the left. The next eleven writers circle the story around the campfire in an attempt to blend this motley cast of characters (and heads) into the literary equivalent of a refreshing Miami Beach smoothee.

Throwing in monkey wrenches, stranger characters and even more heads-in-boxes in the process, they mostly succeed in creating a wholly unbelievable, extremely offbeat and wildly entertaining mystery. Poor Carl Hiassen (of Striptease fame) is challenged with tying up all the loose ends without playing the Demi Moore card, and succeeds in delivering an ending as strange as a manatee is large.

Above all an interesting experiment, Naked Came the Manatee is also an entertaining quick read.

Booger is the answer to the walls talking. Suspend belief and enter the world of a manatee that thinks, feels and reasons like us. He becomes involved in a mystery not as a victim, but as a participant in important events. The concept of a manatee detective aiding the likes of Brit Montero in solving the case of the Castro heads is only exceeded by the writing of this by the many different writers, from Dave Barry to Carl Hiaasen. No mystery should be this much fun