I read this books several years ago, and found it very amusing. It not only tells Barnum's story, but it also gives background on the lives of the different people associated to him, like midget Tom Thumb. Recommended.

31 is a collection of stories by Lawrence Clayton. Clayton, author of many books about ranches in Texas, tells his favorite stories about ranches and cowboys in the West Texas area, particularly in Shackleford and Throckmorton counties. It is a good collection, particularly to those who are interested in the history of Albany, Texas, and the cowboy culture that still exists there.

The Boy in the Bush is a minor work being a collaboration between Lawrence & Mollie Skinner. It is still a interesting read containing "Laurentian" ideas more fully worked out in his other novels.

This is probably the best single text I have ever seen for the practicing physician interested in clinical gastroenterology. The book is practical, clearly written and does not contain a great deal of extraneous material or information of interest only to laboratory scientists. Illustrations and tables are excellent. The text is very up to date. The physiologic descriptions are concise and valuable. All in all a must for any physician who comes in contact with patients who may have digestive diseases.

Stimulating and thought provoking critical approach to Lawrences work. Ground breaking research by the late Prof. Yudhishter 30 years ago, this book is still a 'must' for any serious Lawrence reader.

John Keats (5934-0, $19.95) adds to the research guides in the 'Major Poets' series, blending a biography with extracts of major critical essays examining the poet's works. New to the Major Short Story Writers series ($19.95 each) is D. H. Lawrence (5947-2) and Henry James (5943-X), which use similar approaches to examine the major themes and ideas of each writer. All are recommended as basic library acquisitions.

When Larry Levis, author of The Wrecking Crew and The Widening Spell of Leaves, died unexpectedly in May of 1996, he left behind Elegy, a collecion of twenty poems. Readers will recognize the style of Levis. His poems are labyrinthine and digressive in a way that many readers might find off-putting, but his associative peregrinations do little to detract from the overall power of his work. Readers will find the same themes they have come to expect from Levis: death, ecstasy, and human indifference. Reading Levis' work is like witnessing a car accident--a particularly bad one--your own.

If we, the reader, are skeptics and believers of the possibility of art, if we imagine that there is another space language occupies outside of that small room that is our lives, if we are willing to accept ironies and unwillingly acknowledge the tragedy that has always been the recurring theme of the individual, then this book is the past, the present, and future of our desire to live. It's hard to comprehend that there can be anything so miserable as a wish to live forever or anything so beautiful as two old horses named Anastasia and Sandman, but Larry Levis is one of the greatest poets in the American language and culture because of his ability to texture language and improvise narratives so fluid that the reader understand and arrives at that place where all words and all stories begin and end. That place being the middle or the ever-present present that exists when a word is spoken or read and the mind attempts to find the object, the meaning, or the example for what that word represents. Or that ever-present that becomes the present as the story teller remakes the story so that it is again something real and intangible and we experience it because it is there and we do not experience it because it is not there. I don't know how else to explain the book and each poem that invites the reader to examine mortality without the immediate allusion to death but the difficult exercise of life and the ironies it weaves around us. It is impossible to read this book and not feel completely desperate, lost, and in want of every moment of passion we've ever owned and lost to circumstance, fear, the idea of being embarressed in front of our peers. Even the depraved moments we've had in our lives seem worthwhile in the language, story, and voice of this book that is so much of heart of its author that it remains a ghost behind its words. And if you've ever wanted to be bridge your life as an adult to your lost childhood, if you've ever wanted to be invisible, or drive as fast as your car could go, or found yourself talking to a horse, a tree, an empty page that replies without sympathy, without comfort, and even mocks you in its silent and indifferent manners, then this book might remind you of how it felt to have so many desires with nothing but your hands to carry them with.

An introduction to role playing that couldn't - Dicing with Dragons tries to center on the idea of RPGing, but quickly descends into a mash of specifics from different game systems and author's observations. It even includes a mini-solo adventure.

I bought this book as a teenager. In a way, I think it was an attempt to respond to some of the misguided attacks on role playing games of the late 70s and early 80s. I remember it being touted as such when it was releasd. In that respect it did not really succeed. But as an introduction to role playing, it was quite a good book. It proved to be an excellent tool in explaining to friends and family what role playing was all about. I recommended this book to my friends who were interested in role playing, but who were not quite grasping the concepts. It focused a bit too much on the FRPG genre, but that was what we played at the time, so it worked out quite well. The mini-adventure was actually really fun. Ian Livingstone had a series of adventure books that came out using the same mechanics as the mini-adventure in this book, and I bought several of them as a teen. The discussions of the different RPG systems were quite helpful, if for nothing else than to explain what was available at the time. It was difficult enough in the 80s to find anything other than D&D books, so knowing what you were looking for was a big step.