This book is an autobiography of the life of Shirley Chisholm. It focuses mainly on the opposition she faced as the first African American woman to run for President and deals with the goals and reforms that she hoped to accomplish if elected.

At once a nice travelogue of Newport, Rhode Island, in the 1920's and a novel of human interaction, "Theophilus North" is a well-written and engaging (at first) book. It's just hard to understand why Wilder wrote it. There is so little of it in the way of dramatic or comic invention. The protagonist is a bodhisatva (a saint on earth) who spends his days doing good. All the time. You keep expecting some rising action - after 100 pages you yearn for it - but it never comes. Just one good deed after another. It isn't a bad read, and it might even be a good thing to put into the hands of teenagers (if you can get them to sit still for it). But there's no inner struggle going on in this first person narrative. And that makes ultimately for a weak plot. The book was something of a hit when it first came out, but it has since sunk to the obscurity it probably deserves. That saddens me, because I thought the author's "Our Town" and "Skin of Our Teeth" to be some of the finest writing this side of Heaven.

I read this book more than 20 years ago as a college student and I still find myself thinking about it now. I was a persnickety English student and I wouldn't have imagined the book was making much of an impression on me at the time. Maybe I needed to age considerably before I could appreciate Wilder's idea that you do get everything you wish for -- just not on your schedule, and seldom packaged as you may have hoped or expected.

this author, which has written books so beatiful, has given the world this one which is also beatiful, but pointless, i guess that the main character is himself. the book does not have a plot or at least is not going anywhere, but it is not boring, and it is a good read. i just loved it, even though when i finished i had the sensation of not being told anything new. the book has gone into oblivion and will propably stay there, the one i read i took it from the library and i was the only one who got it from the shelf in more than a decade, i guess it is there in the shelf at the library, waiting for another ten years until some reader will take it down, and write another pointless review about it....

LUIS MENDEZ luismendez@codetel.net.do

I am a fan of Emily Kimbrough's gentle, arm-chair travel books. But I was disappointed in this one.

Here earliest book, "Our Hearts Were Young and Gay", coauthored with Cornelia Othis Skinner, is a perennial delight, a book to be read and reread, especially when one needs a little cheering up or laughter.

Here later books, written alone, don't have the same poignancy but are still enjoyable. Included in these are "Floating Island" [cruising on a barge in France]; "Forty Plus and Fancy Free" [touring Italy]; "Water, Water Everywhere" [Greece, and barging in England]. The set-up is the same: 6 to 8 close friends travel together, from 2 to 4 weeks. Ms. Kimbrough weaves together gentle observations on human frailities with low-key and non-critical sightseeing.

"Floating Island" is one of her later books, and lacks much of the zing of the earlier ones. The book relates the adventures of a two-week cruise on a barge on the river Shannon in the early 1970s.

I recommend Ms. Kimbrough's earlier books [particularly "Our Hearts were Young and Gay", but also "Forty Plus and Fancy Free"] more than this book, if you are interested in a gentle read.

If you are interested in serious armchair travel, you would do better with any of H. V. Morton's classics ["A Traveller in Rome"; "In the Steps of St. Paul"; etc., recently reissued in paperback].