It's hard to imagine today, but there once was a time when the simple written word could send shudders of fear and loathing down the spines of mainstream America. And no one gave Mr and Mrs Front Porch USA the shakes more than Terry Southern. His novel "Candy" was banned and branded as pornography before it even reached our shores; his take on the military in "Doc Strangelove" earned him the label "pinko." But, like all great satirists (which he certainly was) know, "telling it like it is" often times means "taking your lumps like a man." And Terry took plenty of lumps, and humps, but never let his trials and tribs get in the way of "making it hot" for people. Although the mighty lions of 60's pop culture are now - alas! - all nearly gone, this volume of previously unseen TS works serves as an excellent reminder of a time when humor meant more than just being funny, and words alone had the power to give people the coniptions. And as "Now Dig This!" reminds us, while Southern took on all comers and suffered no fool gladly, he was a gentle giant who did so whilst nudging us playfully in the ribs - not poking us in the eye. "Now Dig This!" is a great addition to any modern humor library, and a worthy addition to the Southern canon. Bravo.

In these heartless consumerist times, irony has become debased. Thus the arrival of this anthology of previously uncollected and unpublished work by Terry Southern is not only a delightful surprise, but profoundly neccesary. Just as his 1967 anthology, Red Dirt Marijuana, proved that Southern was not just the great black humorist of the post-WWII era, but a great short story writer and essayist, so does Now Dig This affirm that status. No one has ever managed to quite duplicate Southern's mastery of so many forms: the letter as put-on, gonzo journalism, literary criticism, screenwriting and short fiction. Southern fans will be delighted at the inclusion of "Heavy Put-Away", a superb essay on Kurt Weill, and reminscences of Stanley Kubrick and Frank O'Hara. For first time readers, I have only envy. Now Dig This will be your all expenses paid ticket to a world of darkness and laughter. To paraphrase Ringo Starr, who acted in adaptations of two Southern novels, Candy and The Magic Christian, Buy a Terry Southern book today. Now Dig This is a very, very good place to start your spending spree.

Hard core Terry Southern fans and first time readers alike will find much to enjoy in Now Dig This. This anthology is a wonderful distillation of uncollected and unpublished work spanning the buttoned down cool of the fifties to the post-Reagan and Bush nineties. Now Dig This offers readers a chance to rediscover Terry Southern in his many guises: as a great short story writer, master of the zany epistle, screenwriter par excellence, raconteur (his memories of working on Dr. Strangelove and staging pranks with Frank O'Hara are worth the cover price alone), critic, journalist (doing Gonzo before everyone else), and all around grand guy. For those who have become numbed out by the coopted irony of our consumerist present, it is refreshing and inspiring to back to the source. To paraphase Ringo Starr, buy a Terry Southern book today.

I used this book with a 7th grade class of "reluctant learners" and was completely delighted by their enthusiasm. All of the projects we tried (about 3/4 of those offered) were successful. As I was operating on a low budget, I appreciated being able to use the easily found materials and ingredients listed in the procedures. The Faux Marble project results were especially astounding. Get this book and enjoy!

A review of this book will appear on our web site: The Dinosaur Interplanetary Gazette www.users.interport.net/~dinosaur after December 1. You are welcome to quote it if you'd like and we'll have a link to the book. Thanks! E. Summer dinosaur@interport.ne

I teach three levels of Systems Engineering and Architecture courses at the Naval Postgraduate School. I have now used this book for 2 years for the Labs.

The students each study and make presentations on the different case studies; relating there results to the Systems Engineering Process and the Architecture Hueristics.

Last Quarter, one class voted this book the best book of the quarter.

Cheers

Orin

Mrs. Caliban is a lonely housewife, who has lost a child, and whose marriage is falling apart. Then, she is rescued by a sea monster, who loves fruit and makes passionate love to Mrs. Caliban all day--or is she rescued? Or destroyed?

This deceptively simple novel forces you to decide. Ms. Ingalls does not force her answer down your throat, but gives you a story to which you bring your own thoughts and values.

Is it a fairy tale which ultimately goes bad? Is it a metaphor for the dangers of extramarital affairs, and in particular the danger of trying to escape reality through an affair replete with fantasy?

Is it a warning against the addictive, and ultimately destructive, power of drugs?

On a completely different level, it seems to me that Mrs. Calliban tells the story of creating a story. First a few bits of fiction creep into a writer's otherwise mundane existence, just as Mrs. Caliban hears things that appear very real to her, but no one else hears. As the author continues writing, fictional characters appear on stage, full blown--just as Larry appears in Mrs. Caliban's kitchen. As the novel progresses, its fictional characters begin to take over the author's life, and the fictional world becomes more real than the temporal world the rest of us live in--in an almost sensual way. Then, when the book is finally finished, the characters die--there is nothing left to create and the characters you have created are released to the wider world. Note that the only character left standing at the end of Mrs. Caliban is the narrator herself. And no matter what she does, she can never get Larry back.

Mrs. Caliban is an easy, quick read, but stays in the mind after--like every good book, the more you think about it, the more insight you get. Highly recommended for anyone with a free evening to devote to a good read.

I'd heard about this book for years... Apparently it's considered one of the great modern novels in the UK, though it's not very well known here in Ingalls' native country. I loved the concept--a neglected Los Angeles housewife finding true love in the arms of the Creature from the Black Lagoon--and thank God Ingalls was literate enough to carry it off with style, humor and a great underlying sincerity. "Mrs. Caliban" rates with the best of Margaret Atwood, Fay Weldon and Angela Carter; its edgy depiction of interspecies romance also reminded me of the Canadian writer Marian Engel's savage exploration of the modern female heart, "Bear." Now that we Americans can finally get it, long may it stay in print!

This is a powerful short novel filled with playful words and images that are in dialogue with classical ideas of romance and gothic horror. It works on Shakespeare's idea of the interplay between dream and reality, but does so at a very domestically satisfying level. As the title suggests, this novel's focus is on the housewife and not the great green monster that finds his way into her kitchen. Yet, behind this simple romance is a thick plot of betrayal. This is tightly controlled by Ingalls who never gives anything away until it will make its maximum impact. It's a shame that this novel (and author!) seems to have fallen into a category of obscure fiction because it is truly inspiring in its creative inventiveness and deep psychological portrayal of corrupted innocence.

a review from the author of DREAMING YOUR REAL SELF: A PERSONAL APPROACH TO DREAM INTERPRETATION; and DREAM BACK YOUR LIFE: A PRACTICAL GUIDE TO DREAMS, DAYDREAMS, AND FANTASIES.

RITUALS FOR OUR TIMES is a well-written and lucid description of the importance of rituals in our lives, regardless of one's spiritual beliefs. In modern, Western, secular culture, many of us have forgotten the value of marking life passages in ways that speak to our individual needs. Well-organized and well-written, with helpful questions to guide us through planning a ritual and whom to include, RITUALS FOR OUR TIMES brings us back to the power and pleasure of even everyday rituals. Through their suggestions, we learn how we can plan rituals with forethought and conscious choice and without rigidity to old ways that no longer work. With touching stories, authors Imber-Black and Roberts demonstrate the potency of ritual to facilitate growth and resolve conflicts--old and new.

This is a great book for all sci-fi fans. The characters are as real as humans, and the story is very engaging. I picked this book up by chance at the library and thoroughly enjoyed it. It is very entertaining.

Out of the hundreds and hundreds of books I have owned, very few books make it to my 'keepers' shelf. Elsewhere is one of the few. It is absolutely one of the best collections of fantasy I have ever read and I reread it over and over again.

Particular favorites of mine are Pooka's Bridge by Gillian FitzGerald; The Judgement of St. Yves by Evangeline Walton, Sweetly the Waves Call to Me by Pat Murphy; and The Tree's Wife by Janet Yolen.

I can not say enough about this collection. Every year or so I make a vow to get rid of all my clutter and donate all my books to the thrift store. For Elsewhere to survive these numerous purges again and again is the highest compliment I can pay to it.

I love great writing, folktales, fairy tales, and mythology. This collection mixes all these elements up for some fascinating reading. If you like Terri Windling and Ellen Datlow's fairy tale retelling anthology series, you'll love this book, too. There are at least two more books in the series, and I can't wait to dive into them!

This is collection of short stories that offers a wide mix of speculative genres. Fantasy, SF, horror, and just plain weird. The stories run the gambit and most are good. "Jeo Defined" and "Moon Warrior" were excellent stories and well worth purchasing the book. Even just the so-so stories were enjoyable and all the authors are names to keep a look out for. In the end, this is a book of up and coming writers and a few of them will no doubt be big names someday.

I didn't know what to expect from this collection of short stories but I was happily surprised. The stories cover a wide range from fantasy, science fiction, and horror to those hard to classify strange stories. Each one is worth reading. My favorites were the one about a radio personality who was singing the Siren's song and the one about a criminal who is forced to undergo "augmentation" to control him. Some wild stuff for a great read.

This documentary is so funny, it is almost cruel. After all, the Crusades were very serious affairs (God, country, heathens, invasions, and so on), so what is Terry Jones of "Monty Python" fame doing here, leading the new barbarians of the West in a Quest for the Greater Glory of God and a little bit of plunder? Well, he, and the whole BBC-A&E production team, are taking us to a journey Eastward, retracing the steps of the medieval pilgrim-soldiers, ignorant peasants and nobles alike who invaded Levant because they were religious zealots, greedy, and unscrupulous. Does this sound a bit one-sided? It is, and that is the only problem with this very entertaining and educational documentary: in their attempt to be fair to the Arab/Moslem side, the producers have ended up taking sides, which is not very susprising since the historical bulk comes from the late Sir Steven Runciman, one of the most respected and most widely read historians of the Crusades, whose bias against the "Franks" and for the Byzantines, is evident once one reads his great "History of the Crusades." Jonathan Riley-Smith attempts to balance the story with his commentaries, and it is no secret that his sympathies are with the Crusaders, but the program is structured in such a way that not even Riley-Smith's input saves it from being tilted. Terry Jones is simply outstanding with his British (Welsh) accent and deadpan humor as the perfect guide in this tour.
The Crusades were far more complicated than the simplistic Bad Guys (ignorant Europeans/Christians) against the Good Guys (enlightened Arabs/Moslems) picture would make us believe. Historical perspective helps us see the Crusades as a chapter in the (sometimes quite deadly) embrace of two world religions. Long periods of peace are punctuated by terrible periods of war and invasion. The Moslems got the ball rolling when they invaded the Christian lands of North Africa, Spain, and the Bizantine Empire. It took a while for the Christians to counterattack (just as it took a --shorter-- while for the Moslems to react to the Crusaders). When the Christians finally went on the offensive, their timing was not the best, and their choice of tactics was very questionable. Christendom was extremely intolerant back then, so everybody who was not a Christian, and many who were the "wrong" kind of Christian, were immediately suspect and dealt with mercilessly. What the program fails to mention is that Europe always had voices of dissent, and not all Crusaders were murdering barbarians, as not all Popes were conniving greedy zealots. The program also fails to provide the true historical setting of the Crusades: after the Crusaders were defeated, the Moslem world advanced into Europe from the East and South, and it remained in Western Europe (Iberian Peninsula) until the late 15th century. It was not until the late 17th century that the Ottoman Turks retreated from the siege of Vienna. The Crusades were a chapter in this stormy relationship of European Christianity and Islam. The producers of the documentary would have served their viewers better by being less politically correct. The slef-flagellation is appropiate and even funny in the hands of Terry Jones, but sometimes too much of a good thing is just too much.
Still, "Crusades" is an excellent program, mostly because I am sure it will interest people who otherwise would have never bothered with medieval history or the Crusades in particular. This documentary is the perfect place to start a healthy interest in history. I also recommend (in book format) Steven Runciman's "History of the Crusades" 3 volumes (try to get the Folio Society Edition: the prints are in color and the binding is superb); "The Oxford Illustrated History of the Crusades," and "The Atlas of the Crusades," both edited by Riley-Smith; "The Cross and the Crescent," by Malcolm Billings; "The Dream and the Tomb," by Robert Payne; "The Oxford Illustrated History of Medieval Europe," edited by George Holmes; and "The Encyclopedia of the Middle Ages," edited by Norman F. Cantor. For an interesting thesis that I find flawed, check Karen Armstrong's "Holy War." For a magnificent history of Islam, nothing better than "Islam: Art and Architecture," edited by Hattstein and Delius. And anything written by Professor Bernard Lewis on Islam, the Arabs, the Turks, the Jews, or the Middle East in general, is uniformly good.

Other reviewers have stated that if you are serious about learning all you can regarding the crusades, you should skip this book.

I disagree.

I have quite a bit of knowledge on the subject, and found this book quite enjoyable. Instead of the usual dry, slightly boring books that try to remain as objective as possible, Jones and Ereira come out swinging.
They make no pretense about being *the* authoritative source for knowledge on the subject, saying just the opposite, and thereby allowing me to relax and enjoy the reading. They also apply a liberal amount of dry wit and biting sarcasm to point out the fanatical lunacy that the crusades inspired.

I was actually suprised by the amount of factual evidence and written documentation from that time that Jones and Ereira dug up and used. They indeed did their homework before setting things down on paper. Nice chronology and maps accompany traditional artwork depicting various scenes from the crusades.

I recommend picking this one up if you are just casually looking for information on the crusades, or if you've done exhausting research on the subject (you could use the break!)
And if you can, pick up the video series. The series is quite informative and very entertaining!

Being a scholar of history and Medieval Europe in particular, I found this documentary rather accurate on most points, despite what a few of the previous reviewers have said. Also, it was very entertaining. You can't beat that combination.

The only real problemswith it, is that it is only 4 hours long, and therefore, takes some short-cuts, oversimplifies a few things and is not as in-depth as I would have liked it to have been.

That said, it is still mostly true to the sense of the Crusades that is conveyed in many historical accounts, while at the same time cutting away the Pro-European bias that is present in many texts.

Some of the "facts" that the previous reviewers have mentioned (such as: the Crusades being a response to the Muslim takeover of the Balkans, which in actuality did not occur until well in the 14th century. another is the statement that the Muslims who eventually took over the Balkans were motivated by Mohammed's original fervor, which is also not true as these Muslims were Turks who only recently converted to Islam), are not really facts, and are clearly motivated by unfounded Anti-Muslim sentiments. I suggest ignoring them.

All in all, this is a very informative and enjoyable DVD set.

A good overview of Germany's famous airmen of World War I. Not only are the fighter pilots reviewed, but also Zeppelin and seaplane pilots, observers, and the the generals that reorganized the air service. Some criticism of what should have been in the book:
1.) drawings of the Allied and German aircraft
2.) drawings of the medals recieved by these German airmen.
Also, the grammar was not right in some cases, especially when referring to months. A good overview of the heroes of the German air force in World War I.

On the whole, this is a good book, with plenty of information about these fascinating airmen. If you are new to the history of WWI in the air, it offers plenty to get you started. However the reader should be aware that the book is rifled with inaccuracies, some of them quite puzzling. Some pictures are misidentified, and there are numerous examples of statements which simply do not square with the facts.

Some examples of the types of errors found in the book (there are many others):

1) In Boelcke's bio, the author states that Boelcke crashed to his death in a Fokker Eindecker (pg.42), which is incorrect. But to make the error more puzzling, four pages later (pg.46) in Erwin Boehme's bio, he describes the collision saying that Boehme damaged Boelcke's "upper wing". That is true, Boelcke died in a biplane Albatros D.II... which completely contradicts the statement in Boelcke's bio, since the Eindecker did not have an "upper wing", being a monpolane.

2) In Karl Emil Schaefer's bio, a group photo has KES identified as the 3rd person on the left. Somewhat remarkable seeing as the plane they are standing in front of (a Fokker D.VII) was introduced a year after his death.

3) Several places pilots are credited with downing Sopwith Camels well before they were introduced to the front. The planes were most likely Sopwith Pups, or 1 1/2 Strutters. It seems almost as though an editor with little knowledge of the period came across references to "Sopwiths", and plugged in the only plane he knew of from that manufacturer. For instance, in Goering's bio the author states that he was downed by "Camels" in November 1916. The Camel was not introduced to the Western Front until late Summer 1917. Such an obvious error should never have made it to print.

I don't want a prospective reader to think that this book is not worth having, because it is. Many of the pilots covered in this work receive very little attention by most historians of the period. Their biography's are a welcome addition to my collection. I just want everyone to realize that it needs to be read with care. Obviously whoever edited this book, either did not know the period very well, or simply did a sloppy job. Either way, it is a shame that a good book on a very worthy topic ended up with so many unnecessary flaws.

I totally agree with the reader from Shalimar, Florida, who said this book cannot be read in only one shot, cover to cover. Why? Because it deals with fast biographies of 81 airmen from Germany in WW I. Each og the histories are interesting, well documented, but it only makes you wanna know more!