Who would think that an unfinished autobiography could be so good? But despite its rough edges and the odd passage of interest only to the author, the Life of Henry Brulard is very good indeed, and as moving as The Red and the Black. Early in the Life, Stendhal describes the pleasure of reading Florentine goldsmith Benvenuto Cellini's memoirs, so fresh, he notes, that they seem to have been written yesterday. The same could be said for Stendhal's own autobiography.

I use this book for instructing my third year marketing students who find the case study section particularly helpful. The glossy pages of international statistics make for easy reading. A very good value for money book.

I have to admit that I (mis)judged this book by its cover. I saw "Agile Software Development", and from that I figured it was a bunch of squishy, feel-good BS about XP and other bandwagons. When I opened it up I found that I couldn't have been more wrong. This book is simply packed full of great stuff. It provides a solid introduction to Agile Development and eXtreme Programming but, of more interest to me, it is a GREAT BOOK on object-oriented design.

This book has dozens and dozens of practical but concise examples illustrating everything from relatively simple object-oriented design concepts such as Meyer's Open/Closed Principle to subtle and complex issues with class and package dependencies. Examples are always accompanied by UML diagrams and Java or C++ code is brought in when appropriate.

My company provides training in object-oriented design and this book now sits at the top of my recommended reading list, the position formerly occupied by Larman's (also excellent) "Applying UML and Patterns".

As a manager, I'd have no hesitation to buy this book for any developer who'd take the time to read it, and I'd consider reading it "on the clock" to be time well spent.

Agile Software Development is a great Object-Oriented Design book that presents it's subject in the context of Agile Development. The book delivers solid design and programming advice in a very "light" style. Not light in that it avoids technical detail! No, Bob seems to have taken the principles of agile development and applied them to the art of technical book writing.

The book is divided into six sections and has four appendices. There are numerous UML diagrams and many code examples in C++ and Java. If you don't know UML two of the appendices will introduce you to it.

The book takes a top down approach to presenting the material. You are first given a quick overview of agile development practices. I particularly liked the Testing and A Programming Episode chapters from this section. The second section presents five high-level design priciples that every developer should learn and apply.

Case studies dealing with a payroll system, weather station software, and testing software are then presented. Each case study section starts by discussing the design patterns that will be seen in the case study. Section Four discusses subdividing the payroll system into packages. Six principles and a set of package Dependency Management metrics (I've known them as the "Martin Metrics" for years) are covered. The book wraps up with the two UML appendices mentioned above, a comparison of two imaginary developments, and an interesting article by Jack Reeves.

In my opinion Agile Software Development Principles, Patterns, and Practices is the best OOD book out there.

This book has had a profound effect on my coding. Uncle Bob does a masterful job putting together the fundamental principles, patterns, and practices that make him and his cohorts gurus. This book introduced me to a number of very important ideas in a very real context and helped me solidify some of the things that I only kind of understood. If you don't have your own personal guru to learn from, this book is the next best thing.

...that captures the essence of human experience. Urgent - natural - inevitable. A good variety of forms - entertaining for the minimalists in particular.

I've been quoting her story "Spring Spleen" to people (in its two-sentence entirety) because it's so delightfully short and it conveys its meaning perfectly. I appreciate quirky and inventive writers very much and found SJII to be an enjoyable read. She's up there with Russell Edson and Padgett Powell as a master of the short form.

I love this book and also felt the need to counter the 2 star reviewer who quoted a one line story from the book without including the story title or the italics. Both are essential to taking in the story because Lydia Davis does not waste a word, even on the title. Most of the stories leave the reader with something universal, even when the "univeral thing" goes unsaid. Some of the stories were so close to the bone that I feel I could've written them if I could pare off words as well as she does. I found the book thought provoking and highly entertaining.

I wish I hadn't waited so long to experience Proust, for now having read "Swann's Way," I see that his deeply sensitive prose is a reference point for almost all of the introspective literature of the twentieth century. As the story of a boy's adolescent conscience and aspirations to become a writer, the book's only artistic peer is James Joyce's "Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man."

The narrator is presumably the young Marcel Proust who divides his recollections between his boyhood at his family's country house at Combray and his parents' friend Charles Swann, an art connoisseur. In fact, the path that passes Swann's house, being one of two ways the narrator's family likes to take when they go for walks, gives the book its title. Proust uses the theme of unrequited love to draw a parallel between his young narrator's infatuation with Swann's red-haired daughter Gilberte and Swann's turbulent affair with a woman named Odette de Crecy.

Intense romantic obsessions are a Proustian forte. Swann falls for Odette even though she is unsophisticated and frivolous and does not appear to love him nearly as much as he loves her. He is desperate for her, always sending her gifts, giving her money when she needs it, and hoping she will become dependent on him. It comes as no surprise that he is consumed with jealousy when he notices her spending time with his romantic rival, the snobbish Comte de Forcheville, and he is shocked by her lesbian tendencies and rumors of her prostitution. He finally realizes with chagrin that he has wasted years of his life pursuing a woman who wasn't his "type" -- but even this resignation is not yet the conclusion of their relationship.

Proust's extraordinary sensitivity allows him to explore uncommon areas of poignancy, perversity, and the human condition. One example is the young narrator's childish insistence on getting a goodnight kiss from his mother at the cost of wresting her attention away from the visiting Swann. Another remarkable instance is the scene in which a girl's female lover spits on the photograph of the girl's deceased father in disrespectful defiance of his wishes for his daughter's decency. And I myself identified with Legrandin, the engineer whose passion for literature and art grants his professional career no advantages but makes him an excellent conversationalist.

Few writers can claim Proust's level of elegance and imagery. The long and convoluted sentences, with multiple subordinate clauses tangled together like tendrils of ivy, remind me of Henry James; but Proust is much warmer and more intimate although admittedly he is just as difficult to read. The narration of "Swann's Way" is a loosely connected flow of thoughts which go off on tangents to introduce new ideas and scenes; the effect is similar to wandering through a gallery of Impressionist paintings. And, as though channeling Monet literarily, Proust displays a very poetical understanding of and communication with nature, infusing his text with pastoral motifs and floral metaphors that suggest the world is always in bloom.

We apply "classic" and "masterpiece" too liberally, but regardless of how loosely or strictly we deploy the terms, Marcel's Proust's extraordinary novel belongs to the shortest of short lists deserving such description. At the risk of hyperbole (though I do not thing it is hyperbolic), Proust is the one writer of the 20th century who perhaps belongs to the ages more than to his own time, who belongs with Shakespeare and Dante and Homer.

Many are put off Proust by not understanding the structure of his work and his writing strategy. The book, to many, seems to have no point and no plot. The novel actually does have a plot, albeit a simple and not easy to discern one: Will the narrator (usually termed "Marcel") become a writer? Through seven long volumes, we watch Marcel variously resolve to write and then forsake his resolve, we see him even forget for enormous lengths of time his intent to write. Through love affairs, through events with his friends, through reflections on all matter of subjects and experiences of every kind, Marcel finally comes in the final volume to rediscover his vocation and the subject of his work.

This first volume in the series contains many of the most famous episodes in all of Proust. The famous passage in which the Narrator tells of his not being able to fall asleep as a child is found in the first pages. The most famous section in all of Proust, that of his eating as an adult a madeleine that first creates an inexplicable sense of joy and then engenders a plethora of involuntary memories of his childhood, is also found in this volume. The second half is the remarkable story of "Swann in Love," in which family friend Charles Swann falls in love, much to his surprise, with the courtesan Odette.

This first volume glitters for the same reason that subsequent volumes do: Proust's remarkable sentences, in which he heaps phrase upon apt phrase on top of a carefully concealed central idea; Proust's extraordinarily complex, interesting, believable, and brilliant characters (I personally think he handles character better than any other author); and the wonderful passion and sensibility that permeates every page.

I will end with a piece of advice: Proust, more than any writer I know, gives back as much as you point into him. If you expend a great deal of effort in working through his masterpiece, you will be comparably rewarded. If, on the other hand, you pick up SWANN'S WAY casually, expecting a relaxed, entertaining read, you will be profoundly disappointed. But if you approach him with an open mind, a great deal of patience, and a willingness to work your way carefully through each sentence, you just might believe this to be the most remarkable thing you have ever read.

For a long time I could not bring myself to get through this book. The first chapter deals with sleep and going to sleep and this tended to lead to my mind wondering to other things. Unlike another French author (who is as like Proust as chalk is to cheese) Alexander Dumas, Proust does not attempt to fascinate with the first chapter. But once the novel gets underway, I could not put it down. The book has two main sections, one dealing with the denizens of Combray and the other with the title character, Swann and his love for the former prostitute Odette. The book functions as a series of very well etched vignettes complete with unforgettable characters and stories. Proust is a fan of Saint Simon's memoirs of the court of Versailles and uses these to comic effect throughout the book, particularly when describing the last days of an aged bed-ridden aunt, who he likens to the sun king in one comic section.

If it can be said to be about any one thing in particular, the book is a meditation of nature of love and human emotions. Proust is not anti-love, by any means, but he sees human relationships as multi-faceted and not always healthy or positive.

Reading this book has gotten me over my fear of lengthy exposure to Proust. I am eager to see further examples of his mastery of language and plot and look forward to eagerly reading the other books that make up A La Recherche du temps perdu.

This collection of 51 short stories, little fictions, and prose poems by Lydia Davis intrigues and rewards. The pieces come in every length. There's the 46-word "Odd Behavior," and at the center of the book, Davis gives us a forty page story, "Lord Royston's Tour," an extraordinary period travelog, written perfectly in the syntax and idioms of early nineteenth century Britain: "...a good deal tossed and beaten about off the Skaw, before sailing up the river." We learn in after-credits that the tale was adapted from a memoir Davis found, written in 1838.
She employs many styles, tones, and voices. The pieces come variously comic, peculiar, tragic, surreal, mysterious, whimsical, quirky, lyrical, cerebral, and earthy. Some are faintly Kafakaesque, Borgesian, Beckett-echoing, and most have plenty of Davis's originality. Some are very ambitious, others narrow in intent. Each defines its own terms as a fiction. If the reader finds one piece less than compelling, he eagerly continues, if only to see what she will come up with next. And is soon again enthralled. There are meta-fictions, such as "The Center of the Story," and a number of the pieces seem to be written for an audience of writers and sophisticated readers. Other pieces aim more broadly.
In "This Condition" the narrator conveys a state of generalized erotic feeling. It's lovely, sexy writing, a prose poem, with no single object of desire-- sexuality finding its echo in the universe of animals, minerals, vegetables; ideas, maps, texts. A sort of erotica for the lover of life.
In "The Professor," Davis's narrator, teaching English out West, reveals a fantasy of marrying a cowboy.
"...I started listening to country Western music on the car radio, though I knew it wasn't written for me."
She fastens on someone in her class who, though he'll have to do, doesn't quite fill the cowboy bill:
"The facts weren't right. He didn't work as a cowboy but at some kind of job where he glued the bones of chimpanzees together. He played jazz trombone..."
They have one odd date together, but nothing comes of it, and now years later, our professor, married and living back East, still finds herself subject to the cowboy daydream. Davis ends on a delightful goofy/comic note:
"I'm so used to the companionship of my husband by now that if I were to marry a cowboy I would want to take him with me, though he would object strongly to any move in the direction of the West, which he dislikes...."
"It would end, or begin, with my husband and me standing awkwardly there in front of the ranch house, waiting while the cowboy prepared our rooms."

This collection exemplifies the wild and wonderful possibilities in very short fiction where the only real rule is: Make it good. Davis knows how.

Since the short story renaissance of the late 1970's and early 80's, Lydia Davis and Mary Robison are my favorite short story writers (along with Mary Robison). Almost No Memory is her best collection. After I read it, I went back and read Break It Down, and found that disapointing. It was a worthwhile read, but Almost No Memory is the one to get. The story, "The Professor" is brilliant. It has a way of sticking in your mind, I think because it combines stark angularity with unexpected lyricism. And funny - I love the quip about the porfessor sharpening pencils and asking everyone to be quiet. "Glenn Gould" "Foucault and Pencil" "Mr. Knockly" and "The Cats in the Prison Recreation Hall" are also great. Paul Auster marries great short story writers. Siri Hustvedt's Iris stories in The Blindfold are also worth checking out. They are less experimental, but you can see the influence of Kafka (and also Jean Rhys, I think). With Davis I suspect that Beckett is very important. This book, and her novel, The End of the Story, are the Davis books you should pick up first.

All of the stories in this book have an awe inspiring precision and simplicity that hides some of the real work that I'm sure went into these pieces. Check out End of The Story if you want to see her talents put into the novel form...a sadly under appreciated book if ever there was one...I think Lydia Davis is one of the best contemporary writers and translators in the U.S. I can't wait to read her translation of Proust which is due out in the next year or so...

I found a great many of the stories not appropriate for children. They either ended in some horrific way, that would scare the average child, (my children are 3, 6 & 8) or they were disjointed, the beginning and the end, did not even seem to match. I found myself having to re-write the endings in telling the stories.

The Biography, Slavery and History chapters were informative, but still did not compensate for the other stories. I would not purchase this book again.

One Hundred and One African-American Read-Aloud Stories is a wonderful book that has a little something for everyone. Its selection of myths and fables will entertain while teaching moral lessons. Fairy tales, folk tales, and liar, fool and tall tales will encourage children to use their imaginations, while the stories on slavery, history and biography will educate. My only criticism is that the book is a little advanced for its targeted age range. There are no illustrations and young readers may have difficulty attempting to read the stories with no adult assistance. This is an excellent book that would complement any family library.

Reviewed by Latoya Carter-Qawiyy
The RAWSISTAZ Reviewers