Seasons of the mind can be taught to rule the heart.

Joseph Conrad survived a life of tedium and hair breadth escapes at sea,
but dreamt of understanding what drives and saddles men's souls.
He is rumored to have killed a man in a barroom brawl

and then escaped to England to take on a new identity.

There is very little time for true understanding.

Father and author Conrad lived quietly in a London suburb
and wrote in epic stretches that left him sleeping on the floor.
One day he emerged from his writing studio
and did not recognize his own son in the hallway.

Life stumbles on through fields of crowded emotion.
There is no loss of honor in fearing life's many deaths.

I was amazed to see that I am the first to review this classic book. I borrowed this book and brought it with me to read while helping deliver a yacht.

The trip was a memorable one, for many reasons, not least among them was finishing "The Nigger in the Narcissus" a story of a dying black man's anger during last days of life aboard a ship, "Typhoon" the story of a steam trapped in a hurricane, and "Youth" the story of a second mate's trip to Asia on a dilapidated ship.

I especially enjoyed the descriptions of the storms in "Narcissus " and "Typhoon".

It is said that truth is stranger than fiction. Conrad's stories may be fiction, but they evoke a sense of realism that no other author manages to capture.

Conrad, a Pole, is arguably the best English writer of all time. His characters are unique and real, and the stories are real world, challenging situations that are unpredictable and yet follow the laws of human nature, and are therefore somewhat more than real.

This book is a nice compact size and print in type that is also easy to read. There is enough material here to carry with you on your voyage, wherever that may be.

If you want to bring only one book with you on your next trip, this would be a good choice.

I already own and have read a wide collection of Spanish grammar and reference books. Unlike the large, comprehensive volumes the serious language learner inevitably acquires, this book provides short, concise explanations which one is unlikely to forget.

Being relatively new to the teaching profession, Schaum's Easy Outline for Spanish has also helped me enormously in the classroom.

As the publishers promise, the reader does "get the essence the easy way".

I have never been a huge Conrad fan and reading this short story after seeing the beautiful film it inspired was a reminder why. Though it obviously is literature, it is plauged by Conrad's choice of Kennedy to relate the tale. Whereas Fitzgerald found that grace and beauty in seemingly sketchy or even trivial people and situations Conrad is either unwilling or unable to do so. It reads as though someone gave a good writer a beautiful romantic tragedy to write and then had them write it without any love or sentiment. Conrad's "Amy Foster" leaves you cold.

Tom Willocks, who does love Conrad, ran into this problem while writing the screenplay. Only when he realized everything was askew in Conrad's origional story because Kennedy's perspective was tainted was he able to turn the story inside out and find the vestiges of love and romance Conrad had omitted.

It is because of Willocks's wonderful screenplay and Beeban Kidron's handling of it that this is one of those rare instances where the film is better than its origional source. The film has the grace and beauty of fine literature because screenwriter Tom Willocks gave it such. Reading the screenplay will make you appreciate just what a difficult task such an adaptation is and how it is an art form all its own.

One of my favorite films is 'Plenty' with Meryl Streep and I was delighted to find that Fred Schepisi, the director of that film, was chosen to interview Beeban Kidron about the making of 'Swept From the Sea.' The 21 questions Schepisi asks and Kidron's responses are invaluable to anyone who loves this exquisitely beautiful work of art. There are little gems and insights into the making of the film you will enjoy immensely.

There are some nice stills to look at and as a bonus the entire credits for the film are listed as well. If you haven't seen this spare and lovely film yet you are missing out. If you have seen it you'll definitely want to own this as an addition to the film.

"It struck me that Amy Foster was one of the greatest love stories ever told, except that the love story itself had been left out."
Tom Willocks (screenwriter)

"The Partner" is a grim tale of human weakness spiralling down to a predictable horror; whereas his humorously baroque "The Inn of the Two Witches" reminds me in its tone of Washington Irving in LEGENDS OF THE ALHAMBRA, though set in a later time period.

What happens when you fall so deeply in love so fast that you can't act to save your life? Conrad gives his answer in "The Planter of Malata," in which a successful loner named Renouard confronts the yawning vastness of an empty life. Felicia Moorsom is a bit two-dimensional and a prim and proper Victorian to the nth degree. This tale is a psychological thriller that does not let you breathe until the last line.

The final tale -- "Because of the Dollars" -- is my favorite. It reminds me of ALMAYER'S FOLLY and OUTPOST OF THE ISLANDS with its shallow-draft vessels penetrating into the heart of remote islands. Captain Davidson is a classic Conrad hero caught in a trap: How he manages to escape it at the cost of a wife who doesn't love him and, by the way, his ability to smile is one of the author's most perfectly taut stories.

It is amusing to read Conrad's preface to the stories: He seems to be wincing excessively in response to early criticism after circulating the stories to his friends. Needless to say, his friends were over-critical: WITHIN THE TIDES struck me as a treasure that I had somehow overlooked all these years.

"Drawing on an impressive array of recent theoretical writing about sociology, history, and psychoanalysis, and a wide range of hermeneutical technologies, Ash's study of Conrad's psychosical dilemmas attempts to show how Conrad as an individual responds in his writings to the historical processes and socio-psychological crises engendered by industrialism, imperialism, and the political tensions, latent and manifest, of Edwardian society...Ambitious, original and engaging." --English Literature in Transition

Nevertheless, Nostromo is a stunning and extremely pessimistic examination of the "heart of darkness" within all humans. Virtually all the characters are driven by self-interest and greed, and even our "hero" (Nostromo), is at times bestial and self-involved. But, I still loved this book! Joseph Conrad is like the literary equivalent of Paul Verhoeven- an extremely bitter artist whose dark view of the world serves to shed light on the audience. I know it sounds strange, but I mean exactly what I say.

The main action of the novel takes place towards the end of the nineteenth century in a town called Sulaco, which is the base of operations for the San Tome silver mine up in the nearby mountains. The administrator of the mine is an Englishman named Charles Gould, whose primary challenge is to find American and European speculators to invest money to keep the mine in business. The other problem he faces is a civil war between the present government and a faction of rebels led by a general named Montero. Gould's wife Emilia is a prominent figure in town, an elegant matron with a philanthropic attitude towards the downtrodden native mine workers and townspeople.

The hero, Nostromo, is an Italian sailor who settled in Costaguana for more lucrative work and is now in charge of keeping the dockworkers -- the "cargadores" -- in line. When Montero's troops invade Sulaco, Nostromo and Martin Decoud, an aristocratic Frenchman who runs Sulaco's newspaper, escape on a boat with the town's silver treasury to protect it from the marauders. Their boat is sideswiped and damaged by a ship commanded by a rebel colonel named Sotillo, and they are forced to moor on a nearby island and bury the treasure there. This island is the future site of a lighthouse to be maintained by the Violas, an Italian family whose patriarch, Giorgio, once supported Garibaldi and still reveres the man like a deity. There is obviously much more to the plot, too much to reveal in this review, and there are many additional important characters, but these are best left for the potential reader to discover.

Narratively, Conrad keeps the story moving with plenty of action and suspense combined with the typical excellence of his prose. Structurally, though, is how Conrad's novel intrigues its reader: He frequently shifts viewpoints, in both place and time, to give the effect of different perspectives of both the immediate events and the long-term history of Sulaco. Contemporary reviewers of the novel apparently saw this technique as an artistic flaw; in retrospect, it seems well ahead of its time.

Thematically, the novel presents a debate about the benefits and problems of imperialism and colonization, using Costaguano as a model colony and the Gould Concession as model imperialists. When Sotillo accuses foreigners of robbing his country of its wealth, Gould suggests to him that a country's resources (i.e., Costaguana's silver) can be used as an asset only from the cooperation of the native workers and the capital and technical knowledge of the colonists. Such a concept seems relevant to global economic development throughout the twentieth century.