This book really made me realize the basics again. As I read the book, it really made me realize where I was going wrong with my own selling approach, and pointed out the simplicity in the solution. The examples and subject matter is relevant to todays business situations, and he uses effective quotes and stories to drive his points home. It is important to note that I read this book in one sitting! This is something that I never do! This book is entertaining, has a relaxing tone, and is an easy read. I highly recommend it.

I am so tired of the latest management fads that I skip most new business best sellers in protest. Surprisingly, Sandbox Wisdom was not about fads nor was it trying to create one. In fact it really has less to do with what we usually consider the business read and more to do with things we probably already know but forgot. At least forgot how to apply to our businesses. What made this a must read is the need and the way to connect with our customers in a meaningful way. With nine out of ten current business top sellers concentrating on the internet and its applications to business we need Sandbox Wisdom to apply to e commerce activities to remind us that the internet brought us together and gave us a way to connect yet created at the same time the most impersonal of mediums in which to conduct our business. Tom Asacker reminds us that no matter what the business or the medium, we need to keep our transactions human above all else! Thank you Mr. Asacker for this gentle yet forceful reminder.

We all look back on our childhoods and remember how much simpler life was then. As Tom Asacker points out through the use of a simple, yet powerful parable, there's no reason, that has to change when we grow up and become professionals. "Sandbox Wisdom" instructs us how to remove the shackles of business theory and corporate rules and apply the power of child-like wonderment to the world of business. In doing so, we learn to be more creative, open-minded and, as a result, more attuned to what it is that makes our customers buy from us. Most business books make you say, "huh?" "Sandbox Wisdom" makes you say, "aha!"

Firstly I'd like to say...Thanks Tom, for helping to keep me in a job! Up until recently I worked as a Network Administrator in Sydney and believe me, your books saved my bacon on more than a few occasions! I first received the electronic edition of the Encyclopedia of Networking whilst studying Computer Technology and e-business in Sydney. The encyclopedia was included as part of the overall course and many references were made in the college's learning guides to certain chapters when more detailed information was necessary on a particular topic. I'm currently involved in the area of Multimedia and Telecommunications and recently obtained a copy of the latest edition, The Encyclopedia of Networking and Telecommunications and am amazed at how much extra and updated information has been included. I keep the book close by at all times and find myself referring to it quite regularly. I could now honestly say that it's become my IT bible! It covers all aspects of networking, the Internet, Electronic Communication, topologies, protocols, security and various configurations in absolute and thorough detail. The encyclopedia also comes with a CD that can be loaded onto your computer as a PDF file and the search facility works brilliantly. I must say that if anyone is involved in, or wants to know anything about Networking and Telecommunications this book is an absolute must! Personally, I can't see how I could do my job without it. Thanks a million Tom! ...John Botica

This all-encompassing book / CD-ROM are filled with thousands of explanations and analyses of core and cutting-edge networking and telecommunications topics from Abilene to QoS to ZAWS. Updated to include coverage of all the latest technologies including Cisco, Microsoft, Nortel Networks, 3COM, and more.

Extensive cross-referencing throughout helps you understand the relationship among the technologies. This is a must-have resource for every network professional. The book also includes a guide to the Internet engineering documents.

Detailed coverage of ASP (Application Service Provider) Bluetooth Cryptography Distributed Computer Networks Embedded Systems Hacking and Hackers InfiniBand Java Linux Load Balancing Mobile Computing NAS (Network Attached Storage) Network Processors Optical Networks Outsourcing PKI (Public Key Infrastructure) QoS (Quality of Service) SAN (Storage Area Network) Switching Fabrics Transaction Processing UNIX Webcasting XML.

The CD-ROM includes complete, fully searchable version of the book with thousands of hyperlinks to related topics in the book External hyperlinks to author-selected Web sites for further information Illustrations of complex networking topics.

I haven't found any other book like this and is by far the best reference I could find about networks.

FinancialNeeds.com

I picked this volume up at TechEd 2001. The competition with other books in this category brought the race down to "McGraw-Hill's Encyclopedia of Networking & Telecommunications" winning by one length over the "Microsoft Encyclopedia of Networking".
Tom Sheldon provided the most well-grounded and well-rounded information to fulfill the title of an "encyclopedia of networking" compared to Mitch Tulloch's very good but more Microsofted (I think microsoft as a verb can now come into play) approach to the subject and its fields.
Sheldon's book contains a greater variety of entries and their corresponding information (i.e. terms/acronyms like "NSA" & "PKI") instead of a namebrand focused presentation. I would like to see a "Special Characters" index category like Tulloch's book has, but this is not as necessary when using the search capability of the book's CD edition (which is included and loaded with hyperlinks to outside information sources).
I highly recommend Tom Sheldon's book. It's useful, it's layout and design is easy on the eyes, and I'm glad to have it at my desk (when I'm able to return it there after tracking down who last borrowed it).

is the only way I can describe how I felt looking at the images in this beautiful book. God bless the men who made the ultimate sacrifice for others. This book is a breathtaking memoir on their heroism. Hopefully we will never forget

"The Brotherhood" is a spectacular and moving tribute to all of New Yorks Bravest. It is tearfully moving yet not in the least bit over done or surupy. The Photography is absolutely first rate and truely captures the heart and soul of the FDNY and the sense of loss that all NY feels for the men and women of the New York City Fire Dept.I have not read Frank McCourt's books, but after reading his moving salute to the firemen of New York City I can easly understand why many consider him to be among the greatest living and active writers today. His two pages of writting alone are worth the price of this book. Wether you wish to buy this book simply because you wish to help the families of those killed or because of it's potential historical value or perhaps because you are a fire fighter or fire buff you won't be disappoited by this wonderful tribute/book. A definite buy.

This large and attractive book is a highly moving, pictorial tribute to the firefighters who lost their lives in the September 11th attack on the World Trade Center. The pictures, often as large as the pages, are in color and black-and-white, and were taken by more than sixty photographers. The pictures themselves are highly poignant, showing firefighters, fire stations and trucks, and the touching shrines that spontaneously sprouted up in front of fire stations across New York City.

The text is small, and scattered throughout the book in the form of poems and messages. But, most moving of all is the list of firefighters, whose names run along the bottom of each page, from the front cover all the way to the back cover.

This book is a wonderful and fitting tribute to the New York City firefighters, and moving book to read. A portion of the profits from the sales of this book goes to the FDNY charities, which makes this book an even better buy.

Transformational change addresses the problem of how to deal with change when moving from a mass production oriented business to a customer centered customized production business. One of the truly unique perspectives of this book is that it discusses and details the process of such a change. Many similar books effectively argue the need for change but then provide no direction on how to make the change. Thomas Wentz' book provides detailed discussion and processes for creating that complete transformation of your business

In the past most businesses were based on a mass production focus. Success and management were evaluated on a numbers basis. How much has sales increased? How many items were produced during this period last year? This numbers orientation tends to cause people to work hard to meet the numbers as their primary focus. In this scenario employees typically don't go beyond what is expected of them. There is no motivation to create a unique world-class organization. Add to that the fact that times have changed and customers now require a solution or product that is customized to their specific needs. If you can't provide a customized solution or product then they will simply go to a competitor that can. Is this just another business direction change? Thomas Wentz argues that it is more than just a directional change, it requires a complete transformation of the business from one form to another completely different form.

A nice extra to the book are the numerous "Key points" scattered throughout the text. By summarizing the prior information in just one or two sentences and making it stand out from the text it is easy to quickly read over the key points of the book and refresh your memory on an ongoing basis. An excellent book on business and change that also has some applicability to personal change, it is a recommended read.

This book finally provides the process to address how leaders can transform their company. Many other books defined the need to rethink the "business of the business" but none actually outlined a process. I have not only read the book but also participated in several of Tom's Simulation exercises. With this experiential background, I can honestly express to readers that you will actually understand what Tom is trying to convey only after having experienced the Simulation in conjunction with reading the book. We all have seen managers who were trying to "fix" an organization into a level of performance desired by customers, stockholders, and employees. Given the changes in consumers' demands for customized solutions, organizations that were built within the context of Mass Production cannot be "fixed" into a new existence. Organizations must be transformed and created to compete within the new reality of Mass Customization and the required thinking of a "market of one."

The Simulation allows team members to "feel" the transformational change process and thereby it becomes more meaningful and alive than simply understanding the intellectual issues documented within Transformational Change. In particular, it becomes critical that a collection of individuals become aligned on the outcome the organization is trying to "create"; i. e., the Vision. More importantly, the individual boss can no longer "tell" the organization what the Vision should be. In today's world, team members must collectively create the Vision and enroll in that creation procss. Subsequent to alignment on Vision, then the Structural Framework becomes the documented process for leading the organization through transformation.

If you read this book and participate within a Simulation, you will not believe how you will be equipped to transform your organization and be prepared to deal with the realtiy of Mass Customization. This is a very important book that all leaders should read, and read again.

Written by the Thomas K. Wentz (President of Corporate Performance Systems Inc.), Transformational Change: How To Transform Mass Production Thinking To Meet The Challenge Of Mass Customization is a solid and deftly presented guide for adapting to the new and evolving demands and realities of a globalized marketplace where merely churning out vast quantities of a product is simply not enough to be profitable. Now, more and more, customers want goods and services uniquely tailored to their tastes, and they are willing to pay for it - so much so as to change the shape of international businesses worldwide. Learning how to incorporate customization for maximum consumer satisfaction and profit is a rocky road, but individual chapters of Transformational Change address a range of relevant problems including corporate restructuring, gathering appropriate intelligence, competitive advantages and disadvantages, and a great deal more. Transformational Change is a truly excellent resource and a highly motivational reading for business managers at all corporate levels of responsibility.

Having heard all of Dr. Childer's excellent audio courses available from the Teaching Company, I had very high expectations for this book. I was not disappointed; Wings of Morning is an exceptional book that details the war time experiences of a B-24 bomber crew from their initial induction and training, to their deployment to England as part of the 8th Air Force, through their fateful final mission in the closing days of Word War II. A final mission, incidentally, that the reader can not help but conclude should have never been flown.

Based on hundreds of crewmember letters home, Wings of Morning provides insights that go far beyond the usual combat narrative. The combat experience is here to be sure, but so is the training, off-duty hours, weekend leaves, camaraderie, devotion to duty, exhilaration, boredom, bravery, fear, hope for the future, and the families back home. This book, more than any I've ever read, gave me an appreciation for the near constant tension that these men must have felt. I repeatedly found myself asking what I would have done in similar situations and realizing anew why those who fought World War II are rightly called the "Greatest Generation".

Wings of Morning does not end with the loss of a B-24 crew over Regensburg, Germany, in April of 1945 nor with the War Department notifications to the families waiting at home. Professor Childer's uncle was a crew member on that tragic flight and the final chapters of this extraordinary book detail his quest to reconstruct the final mission of a B-24 known as the Black Cat.

I've read and own many good books about World War II but none has had the impact of Wings of Morning. Thank you, Dr. Childers, for this insightful and thought provoking work...

What a visceral impact Tom Childers' Wings of Morning had on me. Unable to put the book down, I read it in two days. Not only does the author vividly describe the training and every day life of a WWII bomber crew, he also makes you feel like Goodner's family, anxiously awaiting the next letter. Not wanting to give away the results of a frantic search to find out what happened to this crew after being shot down over Germany, let me suggest that you buy the book, curl up in your chair, and read as one hell of a story unfolds. Next to Guy Sajer's "The Forgotten Soldier", you'll have a hard time finding a better account of the war and the men who fought it. As an aside, Professor Childers has a superb course on WWII available through the Teaching Company. And I encourage all of you to seek it out as well.

I would conservatively estimate that I have read 500 books on WWII, and this would rate in the top three. I cannot recall a book that more completely gripped me from start to finish. Childers' unique "first person" story telling breathes life into young men that have long passed from this world. Through dialogue that seems very easy to accept as real, he makes us love and respect these true American heroes, and then causes us to feel the loss (albeit a minute fraction) that their families and friends felt almost sixty years ago. I cannot recommend a book more highly, even if you are not a WWII scholar. If you are, it is a MUST read.

I've read this book over and over again, and every time I find something new. I have bad allergies and serious asthma and I need to have all the facts. Allergy-Free Gardening by Thomas Ogren is full of facts, full of important material you really can't find anywhere else. I read everything I can get my hands on about allergies and I like to garden too, so this book is perfect for me. I like the way everything is arranged in the book, very easy to use. The plants are all allergy ranked on a one to ten scale (where one is best and ten is worst) and this makes plant selection clear and simple. Ogren's writing is excellent, always interesting and cleanly expressed. Many years of research went into the writing of this fine reference book, and it shows. The book covers a very wide range of landscape and garden plants, and includes plants from the tropics to Alaska. All the plants are climate zone ranked, cultural garden tips are given freely, and there is much advice on how to find actual allergy-free plants. These allergy-free plants, it turns out, are usually female plants, since they don't produce pollen. There are pollen-free trees, bushes, vines, flowers, and even lawns. The exact names of the best plants are all in this neat book and when I go to the nursery I always take my copy with me. One of the best books I own!!

Finally, an alternative to massive drug-therapy for folks with pollen allergies! Allergy-Free Gardening is a radical book, full of the valuable information allergy-sufferers need to excercise control over their immediate environment, the most likely cause of pollen allergies (unless you live in Tucson, where the city planted fruitless mulberry trees whose highly-allergenic pollen makes it impossible for some to go outside).

Ogren includes a comprehensive listing of plants and gives each an OPALS (Ogren Plant Allergy Scale) rating, so the informed gardener can now plant wisely and avoid plants that make people sick. OPALS is being used by the US Dept. of Agriculture in cities throughout the country-we can hope that with this new information, Recreation and Parks departments can begin making informed choices about what to plant in public areas so the likes of the Tucson fiasco is never repeated.

It's an indespensible guide for any allergy-sufferer who loves to garden, any gardener whose children or family suffer from pollen allergies, and should be required reading for all landscape architects. A real find!

Allergy-Free Gardening is an unusual new book, one that breaks new ground in an important way. I am an experienced gardener and I especially like the way this book is arranged. Everything is easy to find, perfectly understandable, and makes good sense. I find that the plant-allergy scale in particular makes this book highly useful. The author of this book, Ogren, has done a huge amount of work, and it shows. Surprising to me too, was the author's use of numerous interesting antidotes about different plants. This is a very well crafted book and everyone I've show it to has also been impressed. I would recommend this book to anyone with any interest in plants, gardening, and, or, allergy. The advice here will be invaluable in reducing allergies in cities big and small, and most of all, in the actual yards of the people who are smart enough to buy this book.

I have, for several years, been a member of various computer animation lists, and that's where I'm coming from with this review. This is the one book which has consistently come up on those lists when dealing with general issues (the Principles of Animation, etc), simply because it is the best. It is not the best tutorial book, since it is not written as a tutorial: it is a history of Disney. If you want a tutorial on computer animation, go elsewhere. But that will probably NOT be as much help to you as reading this book, because after reading this, you will be inspired. I think this is why people are so religeously fervent when speaking about it - not because they found it useful for the large number of techniques and tips which are slipped in throughout (though very many of them are out of date or not applicable in the computer animation world), but because the book inspires. I thought it was expensive, but after I bought it and read it the first time, I realised it was cheap at the price. It is gorgeously produced, and filled with colour pics and examples of what it talks about. Worth buying if you are into animation, or if you are interested in the history of Disney.

As any animation student or fan would know, this IS the book he or she would admires and stares for hours. "The Illusion of Life" is not just a history book about the Disney studio, but it goes beyond the history and concept; it goes in deep into storytelling, character animation, background design, concept/script illustration, character design, and many more. The greatest thing about this book is the author and writer, FRANK THOMAS and OLLIE JOHNSTON!!! Two of the veteran and master of Disney animation. They have been working with Disney since Sleeping Beauty and Peter Pan... the 40s and 50s! The writing is also very descriptive and easy to understand. Not only they get to the point, they also reveal several secrets and tricks in animation.

I strongly suggest every animation fan and animator to get this book. It is expensive, but not rare to get. It is one of a kind! And do get it before it runs out of print!

Not a professional animator, I bought this book as a young teen when I was into Classic Disney Animation, along with it's companion volume. I lost both of them in a house fire, and so when I saw The Illusion of Life at the Disneyland Gallery I put several other Disneyland items down to buy it. This book is that good!

Now that I do hand drawn line animation I have found this book to be very helpful and informative. It may not answer all your questions, but it brings up issues you have never thought of, and these small touches are what made Disney animation king for so many years. If you don't want your work to look like Saturday cartoons for the rest of your life, this is a must have.

With both color examples of the layers of animation along with many black and white examples of character movement, this book is for both the professional and Disney fan. More geared toward the professional than the Disney glossy books "The making of..." Illusion will be held dear on your bookcase for years to come.

I used to read this book to my son, John, when he was little and he absolutely loved it. He never tired of hearing me read it to him. John will soon be 27 years old, but he still remembers this story and so do I.

The story is funny and involves a variety of jungle animals. It is also filled with suspense. Will the elephant sneeze -- or not? This book allows the reader to use several different voices and a lot of drama, something young children love.

When my son grew older, I joined an acting troupe, memorized this story, and performed it in children's theater, with others acting out the parts of the various animals. It was always a hit!

Somehow my original copy was lost and I have searched for years for another one. No one ever seemed to know about this book. I never even found anyone else who had ever read it. I am so happy that I now have a chance to get another copy and to get additional copies for all of the nieces and nephews in my family and for! ! the children and grandchildren of my friends. It will make a fantastic gift that will be greatly enjoyed and remembered for years.

I highly recommend this story to people who have, know, or work with young children.

I used to read this book to my son, John, when he was little and he absolutely loved it. He never tired of hearing me read it to him.

The story is funny and involves lots of jungle animals. It also has suspense. Will the elephant sneeze or not? This book allows the reader to use a lot of different voices and a lot of drama, something young children love.

Later, when my son had grown older, I joined an acting troupe, memorized this book and performed it in children's theater. It was always a hit.

I highly recommend this story to people who have or work with young children.

This is a wonderful book. It's funny, full of surprises, and the rhythm of the rhyming is so well done. I read this book to my children when they were young and it was one of their favorites. Now I read it to my grandchildren and they love it as well. The humorous but touching story line and the rhyming verses make the children want to learn to read it themselves. It's a classic and should be in every child's reading library.

Thomas Berger's Little Big Man, when written, was 20 years ahead of its time. What we now take for granted, i.e., US govt (read: white) anhilation of native Americans, Berger presented to us from another perspective: the Indians'. I was about 12 years old when the movie came out and can still remember how it was much discussed at the time. Make no mistake - for all the wit and humor in this story, it is a very serious subject and for its time was very powerful. Imagine the days not so long ago when George Armstrong Custer was a national hero. This book caused rethinking and revision of white treatment of Indians and Indian culture. Mr Berger's use of a fictional character inserted into historical events was a masterful tool. The humor that our narrator, Jack Crabb, uses to get his point across is infectious, his downhome wisdom sage, and his tender heart touching. For those who enjoyed Mr. Crabb's saga, do not miss his return (Return of Little Big Man), as well as another mockumentary character, Harry Flashman, and his historical adventures, courtesy of George McDonald Fraser.

A plodding first chapter by the fictional author of a fictional biography, is necessary because it prepares us for the story of Jack Crabb, Little Big Man. With the second chapter the hilarity begins (with some lapses in the regional speech). There is a minimum of a laugh per page. The tragedy is a man caught between two cultures. He admires the Cheyenne, his adoptive people, but is carrying so much baggage from his original upbringing that he feels shame and guilt. Consequently he belongs to neither. He is a man lost to both as circumstance moves him back and forth between them. The book is culturally, but not historically accurate. Still I believe it ranks with the best American fiction.

Long before Micheal Blake's politically correct tome "Dances With Wolves" gave voice to other side of the American West, Thomas Berger wrote the expertly crafted, humourous, tragic and down right entertaining "Little Big Man". Written in 1965, when it was still fashionable to portray the Native American as a "in the way savage", Berger deftly blended the genres of tall tale and history in a manner that really has yet to be matched.

The character of Jack Crabb is cut of classic cloth. His story may very well be pure hogwash, but it is filled with touching humanity that underpins all the comedy. Berger portrays The Cheyenne people, or the "Human Beings" as possessing many of the same foibles and warts as their European counterparts. They are not painted as noble savages as in Blake's new agey work, but rather as complex characters deserving of respect and honor.

Berger's General Custer is a wry study of madness that somehow avoids cynicism. One of this book's many virtues lies in its ability to lend the Western myth a critical eye, while avoiding the nihilistic pessimism that frequently goes hand in hand with such work (something the film version couldn't avoid).

"Little Big Man" is a must read to all who love good yarns spun with a big heart and a bigger mind.

Any book defined as a true classic is likely to be thought of as stultifying and incomprehensible...at best. Yet, there are dozens and dozens of books that are true classics and still manage to speak to today's modern audience. Boccaccio's Decameron is one such book.

The Decameron was written around 1350 during an outbreak of plague in Florence. It is the fictional account of ten young people who flee the city to a country manor house and, in an effort to keep themselves occupied and diverted, begin telling stories.

Ten days pass in the pages of the Decameron (hence its name), and each person tells one story per day, making a total of one hundred stories. These are stories that explore a surprisingly wide range of moral, social and political issues whose wit and candor will probably surprise most modern readers. The topics explored include: problems of corruption in high political office, sexual jealousy and the class differences between the rich and the poor.

The titles themselves are both imaginative and fun. One story is titled, "Masetto da Lamporecchio Pretends to be Deaf and Dumb in Order to Become a Gardener to a Convent of Nuns, Where All the Women Eagerly Lie With Him." And, although the title, itself, is a pretty good summary of the story, even a title such as this cannot adequately convey Boccaccio's humor and wit.

Another story that seems surprisingly modern is, "Two Men are Close Friends, and One Lies With the Other's Wife. The Husband Finds it Out and Makes the Wife Shut Her Lover in a Chest, and While He is Inside, the Husband Lies With the Lover's Own Wife on the Chest." A bit long for today's modern world, perhaps, where popular books are dominated by titles such as John Grisham's The Firm, but the outcome of this story is as socially-relevant today as anything that happened in fourteenth-century Florence.

The Decameron, however, goes far beyond plain, bawdy fun and takes a close look at a society that is unraveling due to the devastating effects of the plague. The people in Boccaccio's time suffered terribly and the book's opening pages show this. The clergy was, at best, inept and, more often than not, corrupt. Those who had the misfortune to fall ill (and this includes just about everyone) were summarily abandoned by both their friends and family.

Those looking for something representative of the social ills of Boccaccio's day will find more than enough interesting tidbits and asides in these stories. Serious students of literature will find the ancestors of several great works of fiction in these pages and readers in general cannot fail to be entertained by the one hundred stories spun by these ten refugees on their ten lonely nights.

Giovanni Boccaccio THE DECAMERON. Second Edition. Translated with an Introduction and Notes by G. H. McWilliam. cli + 909 pages. Penguin Classics. London: Penguin Books, 1995. ISBN 0-14-044629-X (Pbk).

Second-hand opinions can do a lot of harm. Most of us have been given the impression that The Decameron is a lightweight collection of bawdy tales which, though it may appeal to the salacious, sober readers would do well to avoid. The more literate will probably be aware that the book is made up of one hundred stories told on ten consecutive days in 1348 by ten charming young Florentines who have fled to an amply stocked country villa to take refuge from the plague which is ravaging Florence.

Idle tales of love and adventure, then, told merely to pass the time by a group of pampered aristocrats, and written by an author who was quite without the technical equipment of a modern story-teller such as Flannery O'Connor. But how, one wonders, could it have survived for over six hundred years if that's all there were to it? And why has it so often been censored? Why have there always been those who don't want us to read it?

A puritan has been described as someone who has an awful feeling that somebody somewhere may be enjoying themselves, and since The Decameron offers the reader many pleasures it becomes automatically suspect to such minds. In the first place it is a comic masterpiece, a collection of entertaining tales many of which are as genuinely funny as Chaucer's, and it offers us the pleasure of savoring the witty, ironic, and highly refined sensibility of a writer who was also a bit of a rogue. It also provides us with an engaging portrait of the Middle Ages, and one in which we are pleasantly surprised to find that the people of those days were every bit as human as we are, and in some ways considerably more delicate.

We are also given an ongoing hilarious and devastating portrayal of the corruption and hypocrisy of the medieval Church. Another target of Boccaccio's satire is human gullibility in matters religious, since, then as now, most folks could be trusted to believe whatever they were told by authority figures. And for those who have always found Dante to be a crushing bore, the sheer good fun of The Decameron, as Human Comedy, becomes, by implication (since Boccaccio was a personal friend of Dante), a powerful and compassionate counterblast to the solemn and cruel anti-life nonsense of The Divine Comedy.

There is a pagan exuberance to Boccaccio, a frank and wholesome celebration of the flesh; in contrast to medieval Christianity's loathing of woman we find in him what David Denby beautifully describes as "a tribute to the deep-down lovableness of women" (Denby, p.249). And today, when so many women are being taught by anti-sex radical feminists to deny their own bodies and feelings, Boccaccio's celebration of the sexual avidity of the natural woman should come as a very welcome antidote. For Denby, who has written a superb essay on The Decameron that can be strongly recommended, Boccaccio's is a scandalous book, a book that liberates, a book that returns us to "the paradise from which, long ago, we had been expelled" (Denby, p.248).

The present Penguin Classics edition, besides containing Boccaccio's complete text, also includes a 122-page Introduction, a Select Bibliography, 67 pages of Notes, four excellent Maps and two Indexes. McWilliam, who is a Boccaccio scholar, writes in a supple, refined, elegant and truly impressive English which successfully captures the highly sophisticated sensibility of Boccaccio himself. His translation reads not so much as a translation as an original work, though his Introduction (which seems to cover everything except what is most important) should definitely be supplemented by Denby's wonderfully insightful and stimulating essay, details of which follow:

Chapter 17 - 'Boccaccio,' in 'GREAT BOOKS - My Adventures with Homer, Rousseau, Woolf, and Other Indestructible Writers of the Western World'
by David Denby. pp.241-249. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997. ISBN 0-684-83533-9 (Pbk).

It seems almost redundant that I bother to rate this with yet another 5-star review (especially since I didn't buy it from Amazon-- Sshhhh, don't tell anyone), but this is one of the books that changed my life.

As a mind struggling to repair the damage caused by the American education system, I set out to follow other curriculums from times when learning was actually valued. Since many of the so-called "classics" American students today are forced to read in school are thinly-disguised socialist propaganda, I chose to look to much earlier times. I picked up The Decameron by chance, having remembered it from an off-hand statement a high school history teacher had made once. The book had everything, exalting adventure, romance, heroism, virtue, and other things I had been taught were subjective and dangerous. I found it the most refined and tastefully deviant book I had ever read and I have never been able to understand why students are not exposed to it as the basis for the study of literature.

Boccaccio's stories (told one per day, by each of the ten characters over ten days) give great insight into the midieval paradigm while poking fun at its obvious problems. The tales cover the whole of Europe, North Africa, and Asia Minor, which was very unique for their time. The rolls of heroes involve characters of every culture, race, religion, and background in the known world-- something unheard of before this book. Boccaccio's great love and understanding of women also shines through, the expression of which tops the list of reasons as to why he was exiled from Florence! Most of the stories are based on actual people and events, though the author takes a great deal of artistic license in some cases. A great many little-known facts can be learned by reading the historical notes (one reason why I chose the Penguin Classic version). Boccaccio surpasses every other man of letters (before him or since) in ability and creativity and will no doubt do so for centuries to come.