I've kept copies of this book around for years just to pass out to friends. I've even taught this book in an English class. This slim little book is laugh-out-loud funny in places, heartbreaking in others. A simple description of the plot would not do this book justice. "Jujitsu for Christ" is about race relations, martial arts, comic books, super heroes, human heroes, born-again baptists, left-out losers, and the need we all have to connect with others and be included. The language of the book is sheer Southern poetry, flowing like sweet cherry wine from one word to the next, without ever being over-wrought or artificial. Displaying his mastery of language and cadence, Butler commits to paper in two pages of rhythmic, run-on sentences the most spot-on accurate description of summer in the deep South that's ever been written and goes on to pull off an astonishing narrative "trick" halfway through the book that impacts the novel's entire point of view. This is a beautiful book worth reading again and again. That it's out of print is a sad commentary on the state of publishing in America. Find it. Read it. Treasure it.

Jack Butler, son of a preacher man, should be a national treasure. The man who brought us "Living in Little Rock With Miss Little Rock" and "Dreamer" first brought us this treasure of growing up in the south.

Complex race relations, uncertain zealotry, budding sexuality all mix well in this stew. Go to your local library (they probably have a copy) and give it a read. I finally found a good used copy and treasure it.

I can't believe it's out of print, either. This novel is one of the finest examples of contemporary American fiction of the past 20 years.

Jack Butler is one of the most original and gifted writers of his generation. A poet at heart, a novelist by the complexity of his material, Butler challenges readers to propel their intellect into the twenty-first century. While his story line dazzles with intrigue, he flips the reader to the underbelly of ideas. Dreamer is not about dreaming or dream research, and it is certainly not about CIA operatives who will become the insidious Big Brother of the next century. Dreamer is about the construct of the brain: how you connect past and present, fear and desire, de je vu and death. Publishers Weekly may have reviewed Dreamer as a good mystery novel, but it could have easily been reviewed under psychology, philosophy, theology, or even as a Cosmopolitan summer read for white sands romance. It is wonderfully rich for its language, particularly the dream sequences that will spiral you into the world of your own dreams, which you'll find yourself interpreting under Jody's m! entorship.

Review of Jack Butler's DREAMERS

For me, the most deeply pleasurable novels are possessed of what I call drag and draw.

In a novel with draw, plot tangles and untangles, character blossoms and booms, and we are compelled to turn the pages, to read on. John Grisham succeeds again and again at draw.

If, however, a novelist has drag, we find ourselves, as we advance through her book, dragged back to the preceding pages periodically to check the density of the weave and admire the texture of the sentences. As far as I can tell, John Grisham has no drag. Does anyone ever return to a sentence of his for the sheer pleasure of reading it again?

Some writers have drag and draw. Charles Dickens is a master of the double art. Jack Butler is such another. Butler's fourth novel, DREAMERS, is richly embued with both qualities. What will become of Jody Nightwood as she advances farther and farther into her study of dreams and her romance with the mysteriou! s John Shade? If you are impressed by the way Stephen King uses dreams to inform action in the waking world of THE STAND, read DREAMERS. Jack Butler'll show you something really scary. Here there be spooky matters both governmental and vampiric. Read on. But know that DREAMERS will frequently drag you back with the sheer gorgeosity and yumyumyum of its sentences. Here's one: "And now the caravan crept even more slowly over one-lane wooden bridges under which ran the thready, superluminous clarity of the Holy Ghost broken on the world's dark rocks and between summer homes set back in pockets of the world's last green, sweet private prospects that somehow wore the look of coming abandon, as if they knew they were soon to be shut down and soon to lose the spirits that had given them habitation and soon to be forgotten in drifting snow." There's lots more where that came from. If you're looking for a flow with which to go, DREAMERS is a fine current! in which to swim. But be on the ready for rip tides.

No! rman Mailer once complained of Truman Capote that he wrote the most beautiful sentences in America but had nothing to say. Jack Butler writes some of the most beautiful sentences in America these days. And he has tons to say.

Aiming for the readership that missed out on one of the century's great literary classics, LIVING IN LITTLE ROCK WITH MISS LITTLE ROCK, versatile Jack Butler (fictioneer par excellence, poet, master chef) craftily puts together a page-turner that explores fascinating ideas about the meaning and purpose of dreams while spinning a spy thriller that defies description. If somebody came even close to unlocking the secret of dreams -- as Dr. Jody Nightwood does -- wouldn't the American government itself be out to stalk her? This gripping exploration of dreams and the fascinating group of people -- heroes, heroines, villains -- who are caught in that dreamworld kept me awake and dreamless for the nights it took me to finish it. And when I was finally able to dream again, I dreamt my way into the novel! Even readers who don't care for spy-versus-spy shenanigans will be tantalized by Butler's delicious descriptions of food, sex, and scenery. The menus of this book are mouth-watering, the scenes of lovemaking are original and charged with eroticism, and the travelogue of Santa Fe and its environs will make every reader want to pack up and move there at once. If you can't do that, pack up and move into this novel for a few nights, and see what happens to your dreams.

This book takes the six guitar strings that travel the length of your torso. Then it alternately plays on the fretboard of your intellect, strums your heart, and grabs your whammy bar.

Buy a copy for yourself. Then buy one for everyone you know who doesn't believe in the transformative powers of fiction; everyone you know who believes the novel is dead; and anyone who needs to have the focus of their worldview adjusted to sharpen the magic and blur the ordinary.

The other reviews on this page are well-put, but this novel is much more than regional work or a humorous look at the early 80s. What's it about? Everything. Mysticism, sex, and death. And it's hilarious. Because things are funny in direct proportion to their gravity. I can never teach a class on the American Novel again without somehow dealing with this book, and the sooner it's back in print, the better.

LLR (to use the author's own shorthand) is a book to be reread. It bursts with linguistic and literary trickery: a Finnegan's Wake for this generation. It swoops between characters and narrative devices with virtuousity, and leaves memory trails long after you have finished. Make no mistake, this is a difficult book to read. However since when does difficulty have anything to do with artistic merit, and this is a work of art. It evokes a now distant past of unforgotten history, though we may not wish to recall some of it. The Morrisons' are upwardly mobile, enlightened liberals (a dirty word now) who are targetted by all manner of evils. You should discover the plot yourself and in doing so discover perhaps the most talented of current writers: a Burgess like love of language; A Joycean eye for invention. Each character is complete, believable, and has their own voice: Lianne's stilted thought process; Laugh's self awareness; even the dog. Embedded in this murderous plot are sacred homilies: "...he could have touched if touch was touch was all...", touching personlities and a sense of conteporaneity. This is perhaps the great American novel, something which none of the great American novellists has yet produced. And it took a poet to do it.

Jack is a good man. He has a light, conversational writing style (but it's obvious that he writes for guys - so it might not suit everyone), and he is the impersonation of the "improvisational cook". His love for life, family, food, and for cooking with traditional tools, especially his iron skillet, is refreshing.

I didn't learn much by reading the book, and the recipes were rather useless for me (a strict vegetarian), but it has been nevertheless an enjoyable read (or rather browse) for an afternoon.

The author is a poet and novelist, but he's also a dedicated improvisational cook. He swears by his black iron skillet, taking the position that anything that can be cooked in a skillet, should be -- spaghetti, bisquits, chicken pot pie, blackberry cobbler -- anything. The essays in this collection are sort of bite-size, most of them revolving around a particular culinary topic. And most of those relate to his Southern upbringing in Mississippi, East Texas, Louisiana, and Arkansas -- though he's now in Santa Fe and mutton gets into the act late in the book. Butler's style tends somewhat to the cutesy, but what he has to say about families and meal times and growing up the son of a Baptist preacher is generally worth listening to. And his commentary on the how and why of cooking are always interesting.

It seems to me that there are three kinds of cookbooks:

1> The massive, reference-kind. Containing not just recipies, but info on how to buy an avacodo, the difference between a pinch and a dash, seventy five different things you can do with garlic, etc. For me, these books are useful, but they take all of the fun out of cooking. Worse, they don't encourage experimentation

2> The regional or course-specific kind. You know, books just about chocolate or cajun or brunch. Again, nice to have (especially if you're marrying someone Italian and you happen to be Jamacian... or something like that), but a little too specific for every day use.

3> The book that tries to do a good bit of the above, but focuses more on stoking your enthusiasm, your experimentation, and your built in love of food (you know you have one).

Jack's Skillet is fixed squarely in category number three. This slim book offers 50-odd chapters on every course or occasion or meal that you might come across in a year. Family get-togethers, Easter dinners, oysters, miles of chicken dishes, homemade pizza, shortcake, salads, barbeque, soups, blackberry pies, coffee, margaritas, biscuits, camping, meat loaf, cake and even home made crackers ("more convenient than going to the store").

Each chapter reads like an ode to the food and the situation it's being prepared in. The "flavor text" is entertainment in and of itself. When the time comes for the recipies at then end of each chapter, you're already drooling.

The recipies themselves are straightforward. Jack takes you through them in prose, then again in regular recipe form. The recipies avoid the banal of the over-simple and complex ornate-ness of the caterer. This is home cooking.

While there's a fair amount of regional pride from Jack (who's lived in Mississippi, Arkansas and New Mexico), Jack makes a strong effort to avoid limiting his scope and pulls recipies from all over.

Experimentation is encouraged and the reader is given a nice framework to experiment in.

In short, this is a book that encourages cooking. It gives the reader the enthusiasm that one only gets from a well-written cookbook; not just a book with good recipies. Pick it up!

Jack Butler is probably most known for his contempory fiction and (perhaps to a lesser extent) his poetry. This is his first foray into Science Fiction (his later novel "Dreamer" may qualify if the definition is stretched a bit). While the transition could have been a little more graceful, the results are compelling.

For starters, Butler paints the same kind of landscapes that Robert Heinlein does. You won't find a lot of exposition, the action comes at you fast, and the reader has to do some work keeping abreast of the slang of 22nd Century Mars. There's also a slight political undertone. Never pedantic, Our Author prefers to show situations that have resulted from the extremes of human nature and technology.

Hellas is a Martian frontier town, a community living in one of Mars' 30 mile wide craters. The atmosphere being thin, an enormous tent keeps the air pressure at habitable levels. Within this settlement live the kind of folk one expects to see in any Martian Colony of the future: genetically engineered beasts, ranchers, enhanced people, and intelligent robots.

The story (and I don't like giving stuff away), deals mostly with a war for independance from Earth. But focus is kept on our hero--a rancher turned leader of the cecessionists--who is about 400 years old.

The book gets off to a bit of a slow start. Somewhere about a quarter of the way through--somewhere about the time you've figured out how this world works--the story sinks it's talons into you and takes you away. You're helpless.

Nightshade is not without it's flaws, but I really enjoyed this book and would love to see it come back into print. In the meantime, see if you can find a copy somewhere.

I rate this as a mediocre writing effort. To me, the characters were not really well developed and the story, while emotional, was not that interesting. It was worth reading, but I wasn't really sorry to finish it, so I can move on to something better.

If you want to read a better, even great, Vietnam novel, I'd recommend you try Fields of Fire by Webb, or Close Quarters by Heinemann, or Better Times than These by Groom. Fragments pales in comparison to those works.

A breathtaking story bout a group of Soldiers in Vietnam. Fuller made me care about the soldiers and the villiagers that the soldiers wee trying to help.

The majority of the illustrations in this book are in black and white, and those in color are consistently very muddy reproductions. Therefore, if you are tempted to buy this book because you are interested in the looking at Yeats's painting rather than in the extensive biographical and critical text, this book is quite likely to disappoint - and particularly at the price. If you are familar with the catalog that was part of the Centenary Exhibition of his paintings and drawings you will know that they can be reproduced with stunning effect.