The language in this book is translated very well and is easy to read. I looked everywhere for a book that described daily life in Ancient Rome without going into the girty details of war and politics. This book accomplished all that. I highly recommend "The Roman Empire".

Everyone has read "Romeo and Juliet", the classic love story by William Shakespeare, and most have seen the movie "West Side Story," probably noticing some similarities- two groups against each other with lovers in the middle, and a tragic ending. But with these two plays together, you will discover almost every scene from West Side Story parallels one from R&J. The text of R&J also has notes to help the reader understand some of the difficult Shakespearean language. I am a freshman in high school and this book really helped me with an essay.

As it came to pass (once upon a time) there was a scientific revolution. then from the woodwork crept gremlin Romantic poets in a sturm and drang amid which German philosophy grappled with science's broken world view. Schopenhauer, in the midst of this commotion, is seen as both an instance and exemplar, and a man armed with a transcending insight, inherited via Kant, yet with Fichtean echoes. This work very nicely recounts the fascinating subplot of the interaction of Schopenhauer and Goethe, with his theory of colors to which Schopenhauer contributed, but which did not detain him long, as he went on to complete his great opus. Schopenhauer's attempt to refocus on the A edition of Kant's Critique of Reason is the starting point for a critique of the Schopenhauer's distinct 'metaphysical' idealism of the will, bringing him closer to Berkeley, perhaps. Very interesting work
I was always wondering about Schopenhauer and Darwinism. I noted the critical comment cited of Schopenhauer on the earlier Lamarck (the real founder of evolutionary theory)in the generation of the early developmentalists (of which the philosopher was aware), and the 'obvious' sudden realization that the Darwin debate is foundering over the 'noumenal' aspect of the 'will', that is, the missing component indirectly visible as evolutionary directionality (of which Lamarck was still aware, before the Darwinists constructed their own 'metaphysical naturalism'). So much for Darwin. (Darwinists will grumble in vain, so much for Schopenhauer).
Excellent book, if you can afford it.

Good and rare book! Essential if you need to know the conception of the world in the Middle Ages. "Travellers Tales", Prester John legend, Cristian pilgrimates and Arab travelers and merchants could be understood as consequence of the ancient concepts fall and how cosmogonies took its place.

This is a brilliant encapsulation of the rage of the artist. He has a contempt for mankind, society, it's progress, and yet can't escape society. He can be a "..." as artists where called back then, refuse to live a middle class existence, live a life of drunken debauchery, and yet that is just another societal role.
His imagery is powerful, his language self-deprecating and insanely sincere. It draws you in with its suffering.
At the end he finds his life as an artist, his passion, empty. It all ended with the gunshot to the hand that ended his affair with Verlaine. In short, he equates his artistry and homosexual affairs with hell, and a return to society redemption. This explains how he became a materialist later on in his life, a trader, even considering trading slaves.
It is a sad fate for someone who had such a poetic gift.
I still enjoy reading A Season In Hell, even after having read it many times. Ultimately, the work is flawed; it has a little too much affected insanity, angst, the sign of an adolescent work, but it is also full of pure poetry and promise.

These are the brilliant and mystical hallucinations of the original "enfant terrible" and his visionary raptures about poetry, innocence and guilt. Verbal deliriums suffused with pain and hatred, remorse and desperation, but also with a parodic, pathetic and fatalistic megalomania. The "mystical rage" transformed into pyromaniac wording. Poems in prose, of very high quality, which reflect the fury of the love-hate relationship of Rimbaud with life and Universe.

In the collection of prose poems and verse fragments that make up the short book A Season in Hell, begun in April 1873 in an outbuilding at Rimbaud's family farm at the village of Roche and completed by the end of August, he looks back in despair over his life as a poet. In one of the fragments, titled "Ravings number two" he talks about "the history of one of my follies. I invented the colors of the vowels!" he claims, and goes on: "I flattered myself that I had created a poetic language accessible...to all the senses...I expressed the inexpressible. I defined vertigos...I ended up regarding my mental disorder as sacred."

Rimbaud draws a picture of his affair with Verlaine in cynical terms, painting Verlaine as a weak and foolish virgin and himself as an "infernal bridegroom," a monster of cruelty. It wasn't far from the truth.

The last chapter of A Season in Hell is titled "Farewell." It has an air of exhaustion and relief about it. "I have tried to invent new flowers, new stars, new flesh, new tongues. I believed I had acquired supernatural powers. Well! I must bury my imagination and my memories. A fine fame as an artist and story-teller swept away! I! I who called myself magus or angel, exempt from all morality, I am given back to the earth, with a task to pursue, and wrinkled reality to embrace. A peasant!" A Season In Hell was finished in August 1873. Rimbaud somehow persuaded his thrifty mother to pay to have the book printed in Belgium. He sent his six author's copies to his friends and to men of letters in Paris. Many people see this manuscript as his farewell to literature. It certainly reads like that, although Enid Starkie believes that it was Rimbaud's farewell to a certain kind of literature--visionary, mystical, growing out of the selfish and hallucinatory lifestyle that had crashed to a halt only a few months before with his shooting and the jailing of Verlaine--and a commitment to something more humble and realistic. "Well, now I shall ask forgiveness for having fed on lies," Rimbaud wrote. He hoped that the French literary world would offer him the forgiveness that he was now prepared to seek, and give his book favorable reviews. He the proceeded to Paris to see how his book had fared.

Favorable reviews? He must have been mad. To those literary men, the dilettantes Rimbaud had mocked and despised a year or two earlier, Rimbaud was the insolent catamite who had destroyed their old friend Verlaine: sponged off him, wrecked his marriage, corrupted his soul and ruined his life, and then, when he had used him up, had turned him in to the police to face hard labour in a Belgian jail.

We have an eyewitness account of Rimbaud on the day when the last door in Paris had been slammed in his face, at the moment when he realized that the literary career he'd embraced so passionately was over. It was the evening of the first of November, 1873, a holiday, and the cafés and restaurants were crowded. The poet Poussin had joined some writer friends at the Café Tabourey. He noticed a young man alone in a corner, staring into space. It was Rimbaud. Poussin went over and offered to buy him a drink. "Rimbaud was pale and even more silent than usual," he later recalled. "His face, indeed his whole bearing, expressed a powerful and fearsome bitterness." For the rest of his life Poussin "retained from that meeting a memory of dread."

When the café closed, Rimbaud--who hadn't spoken to anyone all evening--set out to walk home through the late autumn countryside. It took him about a week. When he got to Charleville he built a bonfire and burned all his manuscripts. He didn't bother to collect the remaining five hundred copies of his book from the printer--they moldered there until they were discovered by a Belgian lawyer in 1901. That should have been the end of it. But Rimbaud couldn't quite let go. The following year in London he carefully copied out his prose poems, gathered together under the title, Illuminations. The year after that he tried to get them published. For the anguished but brilliant Rimbaud, giving up poetry must have been akin to weaning himself from a potent drug.

Sometimes in life you want to go in a circle and "Frommer's Italy's Best-Loved Driving Tours" helps you do just that.

I was going to be in Italy for two weeks, half of which I would be in Venice, floating in gondolas with my girlfriend, eagerly explaining to her why my voice sounds like Dean Martian's when signing "Amore" but the wind and the slap of the gondoliers paddle made me sound different, really. She didn't by it either.

With two weeks in Italy, one by train and the second in an Audi, I used "Frommer's Italy's Best-Loved Driving Tours" to travel through the Alps and Lake District in Northern Italy.

Though not my only guide, it was the "big picture" guide that allowed my preliminary planning.

You can select from twenty-five great itinerary loops that cover Italy from the Italian Alps to the tip of the boot. Each has a map that highlights a half a dozen to dozen places that are unforgettable.

Good maps (although not detailed) and enticing site descriptions kept this book in use throughout my driving tour. Recommended.

This book is perfect if you are planning a driving vacation around Italy (or parts of it) and would like to get away from the touristy centers like Venice, Rome, Florence, etc. It doesn't even cover those major cities, but does provide a wealth of other suggested places to visit, which were relatively quiet and tourist-free, even at the end of August. We just returned from a 6-day visit, and rather than complete any single tour from the book (they're typically 3-4 days each), simply selected sections of the itineraries that fit into our timeframe and location.

2 things to note: this book does NOT provide any listings for places to stay, so you will need another resource (I found several excellent country inns on the Web.) Also, while detailed maps of each tour are included, you will also need a good roadmap or atlas of Italy, esp. if you will be visiting more than one part of the country.

This was the most helpful guide book I used on what to do and see in Italy. The pictures were helpful, and the routes they suggested included wonderful places that I would have overlooked. It doesn't include where to eat/stay, but it's terrific on what to see while you're there.

The only thing good about this book is the cover.

After 30 years experience in the Space Program, NASA, and deep Space probes, I have to say this is one of the more intellectuall accurate, and stimulating stories I have read. I am an Clarke fan, having read 2001 when it first came out in 1968, but the combination of Clarke's vision and Preuss's writing skills makes this Venus Prime Series a set of books you will not be able to put down!

Sparta is the name of a bio-enahnced young woman. She wakes everyday, knowing nothing of the day last past. Then one day Sparta's keen senses trip a deep mechanistic response to escape where she is. Only minutes later she finds herself in a mega-fast mega-powerful attack helicopter; somehow, she knows exactly how to fly it... From then on she will have to assume a new identity - hiding in the open as an elect officer. She knows only that she's looking for her true self - she will solve many other mysteries along the way. This is a fantastic trip and an excellent read! Also, it is difficult to get all six (6) in the series - if you find them (all) BUY THEM AT ONCE! It has taken me three years to collect them all.

This is the first volume of a multi-author endeavor to trace the changes in private attitudes, beliefs, benaviors, and lifestyles from the early Roman Empire to the late twentieth century. The first volume begins with the early Roman Empire and ends with the apogee of the Byzantine Empire. Containing five lenghty essays by different authors (mainly French -- the whole project is a French one) dealing with the early Roman Empire, the late Roman Empire, housing and architecture in Roman Africa, Merovingian Gaul, and tenth and eleventh-century Byzantium.

The project is a fresh and invigorating look at the ways that societies change. There are several excellent illuminations in this book. We are shown that the notion of Roman "sexual liberation" is not well-founded; that Christianity did not change Western views on sex and the body, but that Christianity adopted the views of the poorer (and more numerous) Roman classes; how architecture can reveal much about a society; and that the major change between the late Empire and the early medieval had to do with notions of "private" and "public."

Although the book is interesting and useful, there are some reasons to criticize it. Most of the attention is given to the early Roman Empire, which consumes almost one third of the book. Entirely too much space is given to the chapter on architecture in Roman Africa -- it is significantly longer than the chapter on the late Empire. The chapter entitled "The Early Middle Ages in the West" is really only about Merovingian Gaul, and does not always have the change between the late Empire and early medieval as a focus. The chapter on Byzantium did not seem to fit with the rest of the book. The reason for including Byzantium in this volume rather than the next volume (Middle Ages) was to show Byzantine culture as a continuation of Roman culture. Unfortunately, the piece was not about the early Byzantine, but rather the middle Byzantine era, thus having no connection with the rest of the book. It is also dubious that the book begins with the Roman Empire, not the Roman Republic or classical Greece. Paul Veyne says that this decision was made because Rome was essentially Greek in character, and that a section on Greece and a section on Rome would be repetitive. This is weak reasoning at best, but, given the lenght of the book as it stands now, it may still have been a good decision. Finally, the book is not footnoted or endnoted. There is a lengthy bibliography and a small notes section in the back, but assertions, ideas, and evidence are not clearly referenced. I do not know if this is how French scholarship is done, or if this major chunk of scholarship was left out in the interest of marketing the book to a lay audience. Either way, it is frustrating, and only hurts the academic value of this major project.

Despite these critical comments, I view the book as an excellent effort and an enlightening read. Too often history is about events, not people, and these historians have made a noble attempt to humanize our past.

This book covers about 1,000 years of private life, from the polytheistic era of classical Rome through the acceptance there and then institutionalization of Christianity in the dark ages. It is a dazzling side glance into the cultural evolution of these tumultuous times with some reference to the larger political context.

The distinctions between these cultures are at once subtle and brutal. First, we view the civitas of Rome, that is, the obligation that Roman citizens felt towards their cities, which involved complex community-oriented mores and expensive public displays that were paid for by private means; aristocratic children, brought up with relatively less sense of their individuality than we enjoy, saw their lives and careers as reflections of the glory of their cities. The reader is also treated to the way that slaves and families were treated in great detail.

Then, in the early Christian era, more privatized cultures arose, first with the increased introspection that the christianization of the empire entailed. Next, the barbarian invasions - in which nomadic tribes smashed the urban cultures in whose wealth they had wanted to partake - merely accelerated this trend; they greatly valued their possessions, often war booty that they had to carry with them, and hence had little regard for fixed property and its supporting laws that enabled cities to flourish. Infrastructure and larger communities and political units in this period deteriorated, which severely impacted trade and hence economic welfare. The standard of measure of a life at that time became purely personal wealth and power.

A sub-theme of the book is the influence of monasticism, which created its own closed communities and became the model for family life at the beginning of the gothic era. Monks and the clergy were the holders of standards of conduct and literacy through this little-known period, and exerted immense influence on the mores of the people who lived nearby. In all its detail, this was new to me. Indeed, if it were not for their labors, much of classical learning would have been lost forever. They are also virtually the only source for information about life in Byzantium.

While there is something lost in having so many authors involved in a single volume, the chapters in this book are so long and detailed that they are like self-contained books. Ample illustrations transport the reader to each era, revealing the mystery of what made us who we are in the west over so many centuries. Nonetheless, the chapters are uneven. The chapter on Roman architecture in N. Africa is very boring indeed, and the one on Byzantium is dull as well. But those on pagan and then Christian Rome are superb, as are those on the dark ages.

Finally, this book relies more on written sources than on archaeology, which is a pity in my opinion, as the sources written after pagan Rome are rather formulaic and outright boring in their rhetorical flourishes as you read about them over hundreds of pages. At times, it reads like a compendium of obscure sources, including exhaustive analysis of funery inscriptions, though that is often what academia comes down to. Another odd thing is that there are only two pages of footnotes, which are followed by a rather poor bibliography. While the book is trying to strike a balance between popular and specialized audiences, I would have preferred better info on sources.

In spite of these criticisms, there is no question that this book is an ample and fascinating meal. Recommended.

The back of the book says that the "History of Private Life" series is "written and edited by leading scholars yet intended for any reader who wonders how people lived and behaved in earlier times". In this, the first volume has definitely succeeded. It is divided into five parts: The Roman Empire, Late Antiquity, Private Life and Domestic Architecture in Roman Africa, The Early Middle Ages in the West, and Byzantium in the Tenth and Eleventh Centuries. Each of the five sections is divided into chapters, which are then each divided into portions, each portion with its own heading, for easy identification. So, for example, under "The Roman Empire" is a chapter entitled "Marriage," which is divided into sections headed "Criteria for Marriage," "The Transformation of Marriage," "Marriage as a Duty," "The Harmonious Union," etc.

I thoroughly enjoyed most of the sections, although "The Roman Empire" was a bit too long-more than 200 pages, twice as much as any of the other sections. Often it sounded like the author was repeating himself.

I didn't find "Private Life and Domestic Architecture in Roman Africa" very interesting, probably because the emphasis was on the Domestic Architecture part. Since the section was based mostly on architectural excavations, it had little information on "private life." Most of the section was overviews of the plans of houses and cities in Roman Africa. Since minor details, like furniture arrangements, often do not survive to be discovered by archeological expeditions, there was little information on such minor details.

The other four parts were much more interesting. The book contains a wealth of information on private life: the way people thought, the way they acted, the way they lived. It is extremely readable. I am not a scholar of the period, but I found the book very easy and enjoyable to read. This simpleness in writing means that a lot of scholarly arguments and debates are left out. The whole text is sort of streamlined. Generally this is a good thing, but sometimes it makes one suspicious of some of the author's statements. On page 224, for example, one illustration's caption reads, "Tomb of a physician, 3rd-4th century. He is not, as was once thought, reading a medical treatise but rather his classics..." Looking at the illustration, the scrolls the physician is reading are blank, with no identification on or around them. How could one decide what the man was reading? The author may have had a reason for making this statement, but without the reason given, I found myself thinking, "For heaven's sake, the man could be reading ANYthing." However, if nothing else, this forces the reader to realize how subjective interpretations of history often are. The editors of this book are to be commended for having included enough information that the reader can make their OWN subjective judgements about how to interpret the evidence.

This book's biggest problem, I think, is its length (600+ pages). The large number of illustrations helps, but this is a book that has to be read in bits and pieces. Luckily, the book is divided in such a way that reading it a piece at a time is the easiest way to read it.

This book is one of a number of Professor Challenger adventures of Sir A. C. Doyle. A noted zoologist (Challenger) has come across evidence that there is a plateau in South America that can be reached from deep in the Amazon rain forest in which prehistoric animals still exist. An expedition of four (Challenger, a sceptical zoologist named Summerlee, a noted hunter (Lord John Roxton), and Edward Malone, a journalist) sets out to verify this report. The arguing and interactions between the academics is interesting in that little seems to have changed in the last 87 years! It should be noted that Doyle isolates the plateau so that there is minimal interaction with the rest of the rain forest (thus, the dinosaurs can't escape). But, why couldn't the ptereodactyls spread out? This story was one of the earliest "Lost World" tales and has been made into a film a number of times. Other stories in this sub-genre owe much to Doyle and Challenger.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle created a classic dinosaur adventure story when he wrote The Lost World in 1912. The tale's narrator, Ned Malone is a newspaper reporter who joins an expedition to the wilds of the Amazon to impress his girlfriend. However, he scarcely anticipates the dangers he will confront when the expedition's leader, zoology professor George Challenger takes them to a plateau filled with dinosaurs and ape men.
Doyle's human characters are described much more richly than Michael Crichton's minimally interesting protagonists in Jurassic Park (1990), so the story hinges as much on Challenger's eccentricities as it does on dinosaur attacks or Ned Malone's quest for validation of his masculine bravado. A weakness is the lack of female characters worthy of more than passing note. Ned's fickle and heartless girlfriend makes only brief and displeasing appearances at the beginning and end of the tale. Crichton does no better with females.
Hopp's Dinosaur Wars, published in 2000, does a much better take on genders, giving equal weight to a young male/female pair who brave the dangers of dinosaurs loose in modern-day Montana. It seems that even dinosaur fiction has evolved over the years.

Professor Challenger, a protagonist as unique and eccentric as Sherlock Holmes, "challenges" the London Zoological Society to send a team of impartial judges to verify his claims that dinosaurs live on a plateau in the Brazilian rain forest. Professor Summerlee, a staunch foe of Challenger, accepts the challenge. Lord John Roxton, a soldier and big game hunter, agrees to go along, and Edward Malone, a star rugby player and journalist, goes as their scribe.

The world they find is every bit as captivating as Michael Crichton's Jurassic Park, and the danger is every bit as exhilarating. The characters are more engaging, and the story contains a good deal of humor as the four strong personalities clash a number of times on a number of levels.

There are no velociraptors to menace the adventurers, who have become hopelessly marooned, but a tribe of ape men serves quite well to provide the danger. It is a pleasure to have the English language used so well in describing the adventures of the four.

"The Lost World" is obviously the inspiration for Crichton's "Jurassic Park." Crichton may have modernized the story, but he certainly didn't improve it. Unfortunately, "The Lost World" reflects the ethnic insensitivity and "classism" of the Victorian Era, but if you can overlook that flaw, you will thoroughly enjoy the story.

When it comes to telling young children about where they came from, I think this is the best book for it. I liked this book because it answers the question, "where do babies come from?," in a truthful manner. It does not leave anything out when it comes to explaing sex. I liked how it gives kids the idea that children are made from parents making love. It makes it sound beautiful rather than dirty. I also liked how the book explains the biology of how babies grow in the mother, and come out of the mother. When it comes sex, it is important for a child to understand how it works. This book explains sex in a simple way, which makes it easy for a young child to understand. There are good illustrations of how sex happens, as well as pictures of how the baby grows in the mother's womb. Giving illustrations along with the text gives children a better understanding of the whole concept. The illustrations are cartoon like, which gives the entire subject a cute appeal. One day when I have kids, and I have to explain how they are made, I will use this book. I don't want to give them any false information, and this book is very truthful about the subject.

My mother tried teaching me about sex starting at about age four or five--I'm not sure I was ready to hear it at that point, but, as life would have it, a therapist had a copy of Where Did I Come From? on her coffee table when I went to go see her at age six. I was curious about the book, since the pictures were engaging and the topic matter was obviously interesting to me, so she read it to me. It was interesting and fascinating, and funny--the pictures were cartoony enough to be specific but not threatening or gross. I actually recall asking her to read it to me a number of times, and I asked tons of questions. I can't say how I would have responded to having my mom read it to me--a neutral third party was probably the best person, for me, to hear it from, just because my mom tended to get very self-conscious teaching me about sex, and that made me uncomfortable (although, God bless her, she did try!). I really enjoyed the book as a child, and it taught me everything I needed to know to understand what sex and puberty were so that by the time those things happened, I knew not only what was going on, but because it was so easy to ask questions with the book, I knew I could ask more questions of my mom and other adults in my life (doctors, health teachers, etc)(and find more books) when the time came. (I actually can't stress that enough--when it was about time for my friends and I to start menstruating, we actually went to the library (without our parent's knowlege) and took out a book called "Period" to tell us more about it (another great book--I don't know if it's still in print or not-- just the right speed for 10-12 year olds). And that helped a lot too.

If you're looking for a way to ease into talking about sex with your kids, Where Did I Come From? worked very well for me when I was 6 (I did actually know what sex was, since my mom told me about it at 4 or 5, but I ENJOYED learning from this book--I think because this one was down to earth and funny. Humor can help a LOT!) And like some of the other reviewers, learning about sex early did not prompt me to have sex early--I waited until I was 19 and then waitied again until I was 23. And I know that the fact that sex WASN'T a mystery to me had a lot to do with my abstaining from it. Teaching your kids about sex doesn't have to be a horrible experience. This is a fun book, and your kids should be distracted by the silly pictures so they won't be looking at you nervously sweating, wondering what to say. Plus, the book will say it for you anyway. I highly recommend the book.

I bought this for my daughter seventeen years ago. I was determined she would know the facts so wouldn't learn the harmful nonsense that I did as a child, and that taking the mystery out of sex and treating the fact casually was the healthiest way to go about her sex education. The toughest thing about it was that, having treated it as practical information with no hush-hush nonsense, I occasionally had to read it to her as a bedtime story, at her request, I couldn't refuse without making it into a big deal or making it seem naughty and secretive. That was slightly embarassing but I hid it and got over it and eventually she moved on to other books. She did NOT turn out to be promiscuous, as another reviewer suggests would inevitably happen. With the mystery taken away from the subject, she formed a very healthy attitude to sex and was never mislead by the misinformation her peers bandied about due to their lack of knowledge and the heresay. She also grew up feeling that she could easily talk to me about sex and her body, if she ever wanted to, and that it wasn't a taboo subject between us. Too many people grow up making mistakes in their sex lives because they were never given the information that allowed them to make informed wise choices and talking to their parents about it was taboo. This book ensures that ignorance wont be their downfall and knowledge does not automatically lead to experimentation in the way lack of it often does. A brilliant book for children of seven upwards - obviously, parents choose when their children are ready to know the facts but don't leave it too late.