Excellent book on an engrossing man.

In the Appendix, the book's dramatic rendition in English of Mallarme's Herodiade is performable as a stage play, just as entertaining and not as lengthy as Wilde's French play Salome.
Performance values include a colorful cosmic exhibition of
special effects (lights) evoking the beginning of the universe
with an incantatory speech by a mature woman (Dawn), an intimate
scene in which the virgin speaks to her confidante of her fearful yet passionate attraction to her father's rival, and the climactic Apollo-like appearance of John the Baptist's radiantly illuminated disembodied head singing as a symbol of masculine love.

This ambitious evolutionary approach to the vertebrate nervous system gives the student all the tools needed to proceed with the advanced (3-volume)works of Crosby, et al (paleo) and Niuwenhuys, et al(neo). The text is well organized and has only a slight amount of redundancy. Would hope the next edition would have improved and possibly colorful figures. This will become the only "one volume" classic of vertebrate comparative neuroanatomy.

While the title of this reference may sound formidable, it is actually suitable for the motivated general reader, and is far clearer than typical neuroanatomy textbooks. Neuroanatomy across the vertebrate lines is considered, with explanations of underlying neuronal and neuroanatomical principles.

Lady Gregory's book is one of the jumping-off points and first fruits of the Irish Renaissance in literature. This translation is one of the classics of modern Irish scholarship. It's fairly readable, especially if you like epic stories, and it does an excellent job of introducing you to mythic Ireland. This is one of Lady Gregory's two finest works, in my opinion.

This book is a translation of many myths, legends, and folk lore of Ireland that make up the Ulster Cycle. The focus of the book is upon Cuchulain, The Hound of Ulster and champion of The Red Branch of Ulster, his life, and his death. A great book for any fan of Celtic myths and legends as well as any lover of fantasy.

"Easter 1916" is one of the finest poems regarding the Dublin insurrection both in its historical account and its encapsulation of raw emotion. Another of my favorites is "The Rose Tree" which relays a conversation between Patrick Pearse and James Connolly, two of the martyred leaders of the Easter Rising. The other poems included are a good cross-section of works from The Wild Swans at Coole (1919) and Michael Robartes and the Dancer (1921)--collections that show the kind of talent Yeats possessed. And there's no arguing with the price; I have found Dover Thrift Editions to be lifesavers in those times when you desperately need to find a poem or short story but don't have $10 or $20 to spend on it. All things considered, this is a fantastic buy.

"'Easter 1916' and Other Poems" is a rich and challenging collection by William Butler Yeats. I read this book as a Dover Thrift Edition. The book includes a 4-page introductory note that discusses the life and career of Yeats (1865-1939), who received the Nobel Prize in Literature. A bibliographic note on the copyright page states that the Dover edition contains Yeats' poems from the volumes "The Wild Swans at Coole" and "Michael Robartes and the Dancer."

Although I found many of these poems obscure and hard to penetrate, I also found many of them haunting and beautiful. And many of the difficult poems opened up to me after additional readings. A mystical thread, as well as an attentiveness to nature, runs throughout this collection.

This book is rich in literary, religious, and mythological allusions. Yeats writes of war, death, grief, aging, love, and beauty. Many of the poems are quite musical--Yeats uses interesting variations in line length, rhyme scheme, poem length, and other effects.

Interestingly, I found the most effective poems in this collection to be those that deal with the relationships and encounters between humans and animals: the majestic "The Wild Swans at Coole," the tender "To a Squirrel at Kyle-Na-Gno," the haunting "On a Political Prisoner," the playful and mystical "The Cat and the Moon," and others.

Of course, there are many additional memorable poems in this collection, such as the deliciously satiric "The Scholars," or "The Second Coming," which has a real prophetic flavor. Overall, a remarkable volume by a significant figure in 20th century literature.

Well, I read a different edition, but I'm sure they contain essentially the same stories. The collection contains many traditional folk stories and several poems from Ireland. The stories are entertaining, and some contain folk wisdom in their morals. Many are told in dialect, with some Irish words left intact. The similarities between these tales and folk tales around the world is striking, though of course characters such as the banshee and leprachaun are distinctly Irish. There is a strong Christian influence in these stories, which makes an interesting blend with the older Druidic elements. I found them entertaining, and they definately are distinctly Irish. Anyone interested in traditional Irish culture, or fairy tales in general will enjoy these stories.

I thoroughly enjoyed this collection. I purchased it as one of a number of books for a friend. This edition has an attractive cover and a solid construction, important for a volume that will be kept and re-read many times.

Yeats is listed as editor of this volume but I feel that probably underplays his importance. The stories are not his invention, but it seems his writing throughout. The stories are well chosen to cover a large part of Irish myth and are well written. This volume and "Mythologies" show Yeats abiding love for the Celtic heritage that surrounded him.

I always enjoy Yeat's writing, from his poetry all the wy to his essays. This volume shows that he can have a masterful touch for myths.

The only shortcoming is that to the modern reader the language may sometimes appear slightly archaic or stilted, though this is rare and somehow seems to fit for a collection of legends.

This is a wonderful volume. The love of Yeats for Maud Gonne is one of the defining characteristics of his life and the passion he felt for her powered some of his strongest poems. Reading these letters you get a marvellous feel for the strength of the woman and her respect and love for the poet, despite turning down many marriage proposals.

Maud Gonne was much more than the woman beloved of Yeats, she was also a political activist, a woman convinced of the need for Irish nationalism and prepared to work for the benefit of the Irish people. This comes through in her letters to Yeats through her mention of meetings and rallies.

I can almost forgive her destruction of almost all the letters she received from Yeats, which explains the one sided nature of this volume, almost all the letters are from Gonne to Yeats with only a few from him to her.

This volume is a superb addition to the library of anyone who enjoys Yeats. It is also gives a remarkable understanding of Maud Gonne, a major element in the Irish history of the early 20th century. It loses a star because of the shortage of Yeats letters.

First off, let me tell you I love reading letters so this book has definite appeal to me. And of course, Yeats was Yeats and Gonne, as you may or may not know, was a famous feminist in Ireland. That the relationship continued for so many years despite her contunual refusals to marry him says olumes about the personalities of these two people.
If you're interested in what made Yeats tick or how a feminist conducted herself without major media support, read this book.

This book was the first one to explore Kennedy's role as Commander-In-Chief of the armed forces. It also described how foreign events such as the Bay of Pigs invasion, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the conflict in Vietnam were viewed by the Kremlin and the Pentagon. The book also talks about Kennedy's frequent disagreements with the Joint Chiefs of Staff on military issues and how these problems were handled and resolved. I think that this book is very interesting and worth reading.

Being so close to Pres. Kennedy, Pierre Salinger is well qualified to share his knowledge and experiences during his tenure as Press Secretary. I also found the photos very interesting and inviting; I enjoyed reading this book very much; enlightening to learn of JFK's harrowing experiences during WW2 and the suffering he experienced during that time. He certainly was a hero in the true sense of the word. It's sad that these years of his life were not more highlighted, rather than focusing on all his personal escapades. He truly, in my opinion, was a great President; it's tragic he wasn't with us longer. Thank you, Pierre, for a great job!

Though I have the greatest admiration for Ellman, I must say that this critical biography of Yeats has a few too many blindspots, is too vague and shapeless in its outline of Yeats' life, to satisfy entirely. Roy Foster's two-volume account is ultimately preferable because far more complete.

Ellmann was only 30 when he published this in 1948, less than 10 years after Yeats's death; he was the first biographer to see Yeats's papers in their chaotic entirety. What an astounding job! You'd think this would read like a warm-up for his later magisterial biographies of Joyce and Wilde, but "The Man and the Masks" holds its own against those works, giving a sensitive, economical portrait of an unusually fractured poet.

Ellmann stresses Yeats's life-long effort to forge his thoughts into a unified system in the teeth of inbred skepticism, shyness and vacillation. He draws a discreet curtain over the sexual parts of Yeats's life but compensates with a keen understanding of the courage it took for this diffident, ill-read & dreamy man to make himself by fits and starts into a modern poet. My favorite parts of the book were the sections where Ellmann compares earlier drafts of the poems to the printed versions, showing just how hard-won Yeats's genius was. He tempers a critical eye towards Yeats's excesses--the wild mysticism, the Fascist sympathies, the arrogant public demeanor--with an understanding of Yeats's deep need for masks. According to Ellmann, Yeats's theories and systems weren't dogmas so much as postures he assumed to fulfill his own desire for a certainty of belief he never quite attained. Ellmann shows how that drive shaped the poems and ultimately rescued them from the deadness certitude would have brought. A classic study and an excellent starting-point for further reading on Yeats's life and work.

THE definitive, open, and engaging study of the man T.S.Eliot declared the greatest poet of his age. Richard Ellman is no longer with us, but this is a monument of Yeats biography and criticism, the book which all subsequent biographers try to rewrite. The text itself, written as it was amidst a flurry of uncollected papers in the forties and with the co-operation of W.B.'s widow George, is understandably reticent about some elements of the poet's private life, notably his early lovers and extra-marital affairs; but the introduction printed with this new edition fills in many of the blanks, and gives the reasoning for Ellman's assertion that Yeats's affair with Maud Gonne was indeed finally consummated, confirming a suspicion hitherto based only on ambiguous references in letters and the poem 'A Man Young and Old'. Most of all, however, it is Ellman's sensitive and insightful treatment of Yeats's at once shy and self-possessed nature that impresses; the writer will never have a more accurate critic, and the man never a more sincere and biting appraisal of his contradictions. This is the place to start if you are interested in Yeats: you may not find the book or the man that you were expecting, an easy dreamy life of lost women and lake isles, but the portrait is truer, and the artistic genius more clearly delineated than in any other book on the subject, and there have been many. Ellman went on to write the definitive lives of James Joyce and Oscar Wilde; that his first essay in literary biography stands comparison with these is its own testament.

Cymbeline was a British king in Roman times ( Augustus Caesar's time).
Devices used in the Play:
1) a woman plays a man/ boy role ( several of his plays : As You Like it,
Twelfth Night))
2) a deception by a villain to lie the virtue of a Lady ( Much Ado about
Nothing)
3) Princes kidnapped and brought up as common men ( I don't know if he
uses this in other plays)
4) poison that causes a coma ( Romeo and Juliet)
5) a Prince who is a vile fool ( used in his historical plays)
6) a Queen who is a plotter and evil ( Macbeth)
7) a Prince who kills another Prince and it redeemed by his hidden
identity
8) a Prince sentenced to hang by mistake
9) a King who condemns his daughter wrongly ( King Lear)
One wonders how much of this is historical fact and how much pure fiction.
With all this scheming in the plot , it should be a very successful
play.
It is a total flop!
What it comes out is seeming unreal and contrived.
You get that happy ending feel that is so much in his comedies
but it has a very false feeling to it.
That's probably why Cymbeline isn't performed much.
If he hadn't gone for all these at once it might have worked, but the
result is that you see the playwright as ....
If anyone wants to take the air out of a Shakespeare pedant,
this is the play to do it with! He makes Shaw and Eugene O'neil l
look good. He even make Rogers and Hammerstein and Gilbert and
Sullivan look better, ha, ha...
This play is not Shakespeare's finest hour!

"Cymbeline" is my favourite Shakespeare play. It's also probably his loopiest. It has three plots, managing to drag in a banishment, a murder, a wicked queen, a moment of almost sheer pornography, a full-on battle between the Romans and the British, a spunky heroine, her jealous but not-really-all-that-bad husband, some fantastic poetry and Jupiter himself descending out of heaven on an eagle to tell the husband to pull his finger out and get looking for his wife. Finally, just when your head is spinning with all the cross-purposes and dangling resolutions, Shakespeare pulls it all together with shameless neatness and everybody lives happily ever after. Except for the wicked queen, and her son, who had his head cut off in Act 4.

"Cymbeline" is, then, completely nuts, but it manages also to be very moving. Quentin Tarantino once described his method as "placing genre characters in real-life situations" - Shakespeare pulls off the far more rewarding trick of placing realistic characters in genre situations. Kicking off with one of the most brazen bits of expository dialogue he ever created, not even bothering to give the two lords who have to explain the back story an ounce of personality, Shakespeare quickly recovers full control and races through his long, complex and deeply implausible narrative at a headlong pace. The play is outrageously theatrical, and yet intensely observed. Imogen's reaction on reading her husband's false accusation of her infidelity is a riveting mixture of hurt and anger; she goes through as much tragedy as a Juliet, yet is less inclined to buckle and snap under the pressure. When she wakes up next to a headless body that she believes to be her husband, her aria of grief is one of the finest WS ever wrote. No less impressive is her plucky determination to get on with her life, rather than follow her hubby into the grave.

Posthumus, the hubby in question, is made of less attractive stuff, but when he comes to believe that Imogen is dead, as he ordered (this play is full of people getting things wrong and suffering for it), he rejects his earlier jealousy and starts to redeem himself a tad. There's a vicious misogyny near the heart of this play, as Shakespeare biographer Park Honan observed, kept in balance by a hatred of violence against women. The oafish prince Cloten, who lusts after Imogen, is a truly repellent piece of work, without even the intelligence of Iago or the horrified panic of Macbeth; his plan to kill Posthumus and rape Imogen before her husband's body is just about as squalid and vindictive as we expect of this louse, and when a long-lost son of the king (don't even _ask_) lops Cloten's head off, there are cheers all round.

Shakespeare sends himself up all through "Cymbeline". I wonder if the almost ludicrously informative opening exposition scene isn't a bit of a gag on his part, but when a tired and angry Posthumus breaks into rhyming couplets, then catches himself and observes "You have put me into rhyme", we know that Shakespeare is having us on a little. Likewise, the final scene, when all is resolved, goes totally over the top in its piling-on "But-what-of-such-and-such?" and "My-Lord-I-forgot-to-mention" moments.

Yet the moments of terror and pity are deep enough to make the jokiness feel truly earned. When Imogen is laid to rest and her adoptive brothers recite "Fear no more the heat o' the sun" over her body, it's as affecting as any moment in the canon. That she isn't actually dead, we don't find out until a few moments later, but it's still a great moment.

Playful, confusing, enigmatic, funny and shot through with a frightening darkness, this is another top job by the Stratford boy. Well done.

A combination of "Romeo and Juliet," "Much Ado About Nothing," "As You Like It," and "King Lear?" Well somehow, Shakespeare made it work. Like "Romeo and Juliet" we have a protagonist (Imogen) who falls under her father's rages because she will not marry who he wants her to. Like "Much Ado About Nothing," we have a villain (Iachimo) who tries to convince a man (Posthumus) that the woman he loves is full of infidelity. Like "As You Like It," we have exiled people who praise life in the wilderness and a woman who disguises herself as a man to search for her family in the wilderness. Like "King Lear," we have a king who's rages and miscaculated judgement lead to disastorous consequences. What else is there? Only beautiful language, multiple plots, an evil queen who tries to undermind the king, an action filled war, suspense, a dream with visions of Pagan gods, and a beautiful scene of reconciliation at the end. While this is certainly one of Shakespeare's longer plays, it is well worth the time.

Please do not read this book. The writing is atrocious and full of grammatical errors. The author claims to kill all kinds of protected marine animals some like endangered sea turtles just out of spite. The wife character is so annoying that I almost could not finish the book just because I found her so annoying. Worst of all this is book is so unbelievable that it is certainly a work of fiction and the author claims that this is a real life survival story. For the love of all that is good in this world, do not waste your time reading this book.

...sea survivals books i have ever read!! On my first read-through (i re-read about once a year), i think i finished the entire book in 3-4 hours. The detail & narrative style make you feel like you are actually taking part in Bill & Simonne's daily survival & heart stopping situations. The boats, sharks & dolphin dangers are riveting; even the part about the drug boat. the finale is wonderful, the spirituality very uplifting. William Davis's comments are laughable: yes, Simmonne is annoying...but as a person who has spent time at sea on a sailboat, i know this is all non-fiction. Mr. Davis would soon follow suit with regard to the sea turtles, sharks & sea birds if in a similar scenario.

I heard Bill Butler speak at a school about his adventure and decided to order his book. I read the book in about 3 hours without putting it down. It was great!