This alphabetically arranged Lexicon helps readers to make sense of the dizzying list of blues artists who have contributed to thise body of music. The book is fairly broad and includes many crossover type bands (blues derivation of Rock, for example), with a brief history and list of essential recordings from each artist.

I expected the book to be somewhat more "readable" rather than a catalogue of artists; however, it is useful as the latter. You will not be disappointed with the volume, and you will probably pull it out frequently when shopping for blues music, reviewing artists heard on public radio's blues shows, or when browsing the internet for non-copyrighted blues recordings (many of the oldest recordings are in public domain).

The price also makes it worthwhile. If it guides you toward a single, more satisfying blues recording (or helps you avoid a single stinker), then it's paid for itself.

I must say that I do not know a whole lot about what makes a good blues cd/album. Well for people like me or people wnating to find out more information about this very popular music form one should this source in question, i.e., All Music Guide to the Blues: The Experts' Guide to the Best Blues Recordings (2nd Ed)
by Michael Erlewine (Editor), et al . In here one will find the biographies of more then 965 blues artists, reviews of recordings historical essays. Highly Recommended,

this book it's very well written. Got lots of essays on every blues styles and sub-styles, very well written too. Got lots of music maps for almost all of the essays, very well traced. Got lots of helpful and factfiled info about each entry, and a very helpful and great reviews on each artist albums...nothing to tell more about it. Here you learn a little about blues history, you learn about the blues records and wich ones do you chose, and the artists bios...

Oh, there is no fanatic like a convert. And Nabokov's writing in the English language bestows his found tongue with rapture. This is Nabokov's finest (I suppose in this 21st century, I just don't find Lolita shocking! shocking! the way its rookie readers must have) and one of the top ten novels of the 20th century.

Surprisingly, you'll find that this book composed of a 999-line poem and the commentary written on that poem by a colleague, has a plot. It is ingenious, twisted, brilliant. One of the most finely crafted works of art ever. I've picked up the word "replete" in relation to art from Steven Pinker, and this work is repleteful. The words, the language, the structure, the social criticism, and most of all, the beauty, as I contemplate and re-contemplate this work, grow ever more replete.

I love this poem. "I was the shadow of the waxwing slain/ In the false azure of the windowpane" and its delicate rhymes and trips and footfalls are savored with every single re-reading. He brings an outsiders perspective to the language with rhymes we don't "see" but hear: "Come and be worshipped, come and be caressed / My dark Vanessa, crimson-barred, my blest" and it sometimes feels like he's introducing you to a new English language.

So who wouldn't like this book, I suppose, should be a question the reviewer should try to answer. Well, I just can't imagine anybody that's ever bought a novel not liking this one, so I suppose if you're a pure non-fiction reader, this ain't for you. And Nabokov is a bit bloodless at times, you won't find the wild, sloppy joy of a Kerouac, or the brawny aggressiveness of a Hemingway, but finely finely crafted and turned and polished words delivered impeccably, perfectly.

Please, please, read Pale Fire. The more of us that carry Nabokov's masterwork in our hearts, the more he will have "lived on, flew on, in the reflected sky"

Nabokov's strength always lay in creating "mirror worlds" to our own; those mysterious counterparts in which resided our hopes, a little beauty, and danger.

His images are striking and evocative of the mirror world. It may not have been in this book, but I remember one image in particular: someone observes, from a bridge across a small pond in the park, a leaf falling into the crystal placid calm of the pond, rushing to meet its etheric double somewhere in between the two worlds of "real" and "mirror".

In "Pale Fire", Kinbote's land of Zembla is the mirror-world. And it isn't so much that this mirror world "exists" in the world, but that Nabokov makes it a part of our world through Shade's poem, Kinbote's fantastic stories, and in Kinbote's (our) yearning to find another world in books.

This is a brilliant explication of those forces which Nabokov saw in the literary world. Satisfyingly post-modern, hilariously contrived, and with a structure that seems to accomodate perfectly Nabokov's themes, "Pale Fire", I think, proves his old adage that, "Beauty plus pity, that is the closest definition we can have of art."

Post Script:
Some have suggested that Shade's daughter is the real focus of the story, by virtue of the fact that she is passed over, swallowed up. I don't know, but it just goes to show that any reading of this book will be a rewarding one. Keep it on your bedside table.

If I had to take one Nabokov novel to a desert island, it'd probably be "Lolita", but that's daft, it's never going to happen; so after a few years' hemming and humming I concede defeat and admit that "Pale Fire" is VN's _other_ English-language out'n'out masterpiece.

I've always had a bit of a problem with "Pale Fire", in that Nabokov's cunning is designed to make me be more interested in the demented Kinbote's delirious commentary than John Shade's measured, reasonable poem, whereas in practice I find Shade much more congenial company than his loony editor, and find myself skipping through the book on rereads for snatches of the poet in action. But having just started it again for the, oh, fifth or sixth time, I confess that knowing Kinbote's quirks and secrets as well as I do, his goofy selfishness and insensitivity are truly hilarious. (e.g.: I love the way that, in the Foreword, he can't mention his car without prefixing it with the defensive epithet "powerful" - perhaps VN was hinting here at a cod-Freudian relationship, Kinbote unconsciously imagining car as phallic substitute, I won't go on, but you get the idea.)

Having also just reread Brian Boyd's mighty biography of Nabokov, I'm very attracted to the idea that Kinbote is Shade's invention. It does make the book tie up with fantastic neatness - although it also takes a lot of the impact out of Shade's senseless death. If Shade didn't really die, then the book isn't as subversively moving as it might have been - although, now that I think about it, it's moving in a rather more realistic and complicated way; damn these biographers and their privileged insight!

"Pale Fire" is both puzzle and lyric. It zigzags wildly around the heavens while keeping its focus firmly on that frozen swamp in which Hazel Shade disappears. Most of Nabokov's imitators copy the verbal exuberance, but fail to appreciate the beating heart. His best books throb with life as much as they crackle with wit and intelligence, and a book as clever and as lively as "Pale Fire" almost makes me want to forgive the author for condoning the bombing of North Vietnam. Not quite, mind you. There are limits.

This is my suggestion about reading 'Lolita' - the first time, delve into it without the benefit of annotations. Read an edition other than Appel's, or - if you're a stronger person than I am - simply ignore the numbers in the margin. Digest it for what it is, explore the story, create opinions and thoughts in your own mind. Even the most learned scholar will feel ignorant at times - Nabokov is, unquestionably, a genius of language and allusions - but I cannot stress enough how vital it is to read this book as an outsider. Allow a few months to go by. And then delve heartily into this annotated edition. The insights provided by Appel are gems, and makes an entirely new experience of the story. He's a passionate scholar and that is reflected in his careful detail, his concern with Nabokov's input, and his personal voice coming though the notes. Some of the notes hit you over the head, a few things seem glossed over, and his obsession with Nabokov's other works get slightly tedious to someone who isn't as dedicated to the author as Appel is. However, on the whole, the notes are absolutely precious and give a depth to the book that is continually lurking behind the surface during a first-time "ignorant" reading. I would have been horribly disappointed at the plot disclosures, as well as terribly confused at times, if I had read this version when I first read the book. But to the reader "in-the-know," Nabokov's genius shines through, as does his humor and sly cleverness that don't neccessarily pop out at first. The notes range from the purely practical (translations of the interspersed French phrases) to the explanatory (literary history is invoked at the most unlikelist of places) to the anecdotal (Nabokov's own musings, his expertise in entemology, etc). But take my advice - read it first without the notes, and then go back. You'll thank me!

I only recently read "Lolita", after having managed to avoid it for a good twenty-six years. Thank God I picked it up at last! I don't believe in "the Great American Novel" and I've never been able to choose one book as "the best I've ever read"-- before now. Whether or not it qualifies as an American novel (I don't see why not, but as Nabokov was born outside the U.S. others might disagree) 'Lolita' IS the best book I've ever read, hands down, bar none, period. // And yet, every time I recommend it to someone new, they comment, "oh, but that's a sick book. I don't want to read about an old man and a little girl. It's nasty.," or something along those lines. WRONG!!!!!! 'Lolita' is a beautiful, lyrical, funny, compelling, exciting adventure with a narrator who's insanely sane and a heroine one can pity but seldom respect. The plot is unpredictable even if you know the subject matter, and at times the tension generated by dear Humbert Humbert and his little Lo kept me up all night long, reading. // I love this book, respect it, and look forward to reading it many many times. Certainly I'll always find something new-- Nabokov is Joycean in the multitude and depth of his references, with a charming American tilt and sense of fun. :: READ THIS BOOK. I dare you to dislike it.

Full disclosure: I credit "Lolita" with turning me into the lit geek recovering English major type that I am today. Read it when I was eighteen; got sucked in on the first page by the haunting echoes of Edgar Allen Poe. No mere mortal should be able to perform the tricks with the English language that Nabokov got away with in this book.

Get the annotated edition. On a first reading it's more fun to puzzle things out for yourself, but when you go back (and you will) Appel's notes will show you everything you missed the first time around.

Much has been made over the supposedly pornographic nature of this book. Far more fascinating to me is its hilarious depiction of all that was middlebrow tacky in postwar American pop culture -- particularly tourist culture.

Screw "On the Road." "Lolita" is the ultimate road novel.

No doubt we owe a debt of gratitude to Robert Service. He has given us a badly needed new biography of this very important figure, one that incorporates some materials held secret in Russia for over 80 years. What is more, the work is quite complete for a shortened biography (he has a 3 volume version), with a few odd exceptions. Service performs on the whole admirably. His work is without major errors, and he gives us Lenin from start to finish. In workmanlike fashion, he moves chronologically through this active life, addressing the familiar issues with common sense. The style is pedestrian, but, no pun intended, serviceable. If you want to get to know Lenin in one volume, this is the one to choose.
Yet, for all of that, there are a number of areas, a few of them quite significant, where this book is ultimately unsatisfying. I found it odd, for example, that there is not a word in the book about the peculiar Bauman affair in 1904. Bauman (for whom the most famous technical institute in Moscow is named) was a disgusting character who seduced and impregnated a married fellow Bolshevik, and then boasted about it, ridiculing her in public. When her appeals to him for help fell on deaf ears, she appealed to the Party, and ultimately committed suicide. Lenin's decision to laugh this off, as the essentially harmless prank of one of his own, reveals quite early Lenin's basically amoral nature. Similarly, the dispute with the Mensheviks over "Exes", ie armed robberies to 'expropriate the expropriators', as Lenin infelicitously put it, is hardly addressed, even though this issue was not insignificant. It turned on the question of the Party's reputation (and, consequently, its potential for recruitment and its appeal to society) - was it to be a high-minded, even idealistic political organ, or was it to be besmirched by these activities, and thus identified with gangsters and their base criminality? Lenin recognized the Menshevik point, in principle, but actually did nothing to discourage Stalin's and others' gangsterism (indeed, quite the opposite) - again, an episode revealing Lenin's absence of moral standard. Service also ignores the last act of the suppression of the Constituent Assembly on Jan. 6 (OS), when the Bolsheviks gunned down the small demonstration of support, killing 20. (To be fair, this episode is hardly remembered today by anyone, including the most famous names in the writing of Russian history. Instead, they almost uniformly disparage Russian society, particularly the intelligentsia, for cowardice and irresolution in the apparent absence of any support for the Assembly. True, the demonstration was not massive, but those who marched knew, surely, what was likely awaiting them. These victims bear the conscience of Russia's commitment to its first democratic institution, and it is just shameful to ignore or forget them.) Or, the infamous expulsion of the flower of Russian intellectual life, the nearly 300 academics, world-renown scholars, and cultural figures in 1922 who, in a moment of uncharacteristic generosity, were not murdered on the spot, but actually permitted to take two pieces of clothing into permanent exile.
Inclusion of these relatively minor matters might have undermined the work's brevity and accessibility. Perhaps, but what is one to make of more major omissions? In particular, it can be shown that Lenin not only was not disturbed by the development of the Civil War, but actually welcomed and encouraged it. In fact, it is not too much to say that he, far more than any other single individual, caused it. In a series of decrees and directives, he made it impossible for the former "ruling classes", including the only nascent bourgeoisie, to live. Their turn to active resistance was most often undertaken very reluctantly (the sorry defense of the Constituent Assembly is but one example), an act of desperation and a simple matter of life and death, something to which they were goaded and prodded. Lenin was even surprised that it took so long. There is no evidence that Service is aware of the proof of this in Stephan Courtois' "Black Book of Communism" and Nicolas Werth's book-length article there on Russia.
Further, while Service cites some chilling documentation on Lenin's sanguinary attack on the church, he does not detail the well-known incident at Shuya, the most revealing of them all. It was this that served as the trigger for his shockingly violent rhetoric, long concealed, calling for the destruction of the church and the murder of its ecclesiastics. Again, see Werth.
It is in matters of interpretation that the reader is left most dissatisfied. While there is plenty of evidence scattered throughout the book to damn Lenin as completely amoral, the reader comes away from the book without a clear statement or unequivocal understanding of this crucial insight. In fact, I would argue that there is something pathological at work in a man who is absolutely incapable of any introspection, a pathology that remains unidentified and uninvestigated by Service. To cite the most critical example, there is no evidence that Lenin ever questioned, much less regretted, making the Revolution, despite the fact that it had violated all of his own theoretical principles. Yet, early on, certainly by 1920, it was possible to see that the Mensheviks were right in opposing it. It was catastrophic: Mass murder and massive starvation were its direct result. For Lenin, though, ideology takes second place to reality. This unstable balance between theory and necessity is crucial to understanding Lenin. And, the pathology which permits it, without internal debate or vacillation, had devastating implications for his subjects, but it is not explored.
Lenin's view of Russia as nothing but a backwater, only good for igniting the real revolution in the west, and of Russians as incompetent bunglers is never given the emphasis it deserves, nor the ultimate irony of his remaining in state on Red Square. Were it so, Service would perhaps see this, and the current condition of Russia, as possibly the ultimate revenge of history.

This is probably the best biography of Lenin that I have read. It is interesting, easy to understand, very detailed, and is fair towards a man too often judged superficially. Lenin was one of the major figures of the 20th century, and he had a tremendous impact on the world. He was also far more complex than many of his biographers have made him out to be. He was neither a benevolent idealist (as Soviet propaganda would have one believe), nor was he a Stalin-style dictator (although they had some things in common).

Instead, as Service's book reveals, Lenin was an ideologue who, while having the best interests of the country in mind, was willing to ruthlessly kill thousands of people to maintain his dictatorship. Service does an excellent job of depicting Lenin as a many sided individual, and he includes lots of background information on the personal side of his life that makes it easier for one to view him as a real person (also, it is often easy to see connections between his actions as a politican and his personal life).

All in all - a great biography for anyone wishing to understand the true Lenin.

Service is a British historian of Soviet Russian history who has written this quite good narrative of the life of Lenin. While not definitive, it is nevertheless the best synthesis of the political and personal life of Lenin

One of the better reasons to read Service is that while he has no qualms about outlining the viciousness and brutality of Lenin and the Bolsheviks, he is also not a hard line ideologue. He is a historian and he takes history as he finds it. There is none of the strident cold-war dogmatism of Conquest or the russophobia of Pipes that often make their writings come uncomfortably close to political diatribes rather than analytical histories.

Service walks the fine line between personal and political biography fairly well. He also has the added bonus of being a good narrative historian which makes this an immensily readable book.

Lenin's early life is covered in good detail. What Service does well is to show how, after brother Alexander's excecution, the Ulyanovs were marginalized by the very class of society they had aspired to, and how this effected both Lenin and his sisters. Service goes on to show the interaction between Lenin and his female relatives and how this carried on throughout his life.

Being a total biography- personal and political- the political side gets a bit of a short shrift at times. Lenin as shown as the "bookish fanatic" and hypocondriact who is all revolution all the time with little time to spare in life for other diversions.

His single-mindedness is such that he dictates executions (never naming individuals just groups) to achieve his ends. What Service show best is how his temperament in childhood carried on to his political life- never brooking disagreement- throwing tantrums and denounciations- and rarely compromising.

And yet Lenin is at heart, a middle class bourgeois in his social manners. His personal relationships with women are not especially notorious save for a life-long relationship with Inessa Armand who may or may not have been his mistress.

Personal without being gossipy and showing Lenin's idiocincracies without being psychoanalytical, Service handles his biography well. All in all this is a highly readable, not perfect, but enjoyable biography of the life of one of the century's most notorious figures.

Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited written by Vladimir Nabokov is a rather enchanting, but poetic book about the author's early life. A recollection of his youthful years remembering is father as more liberal-minded and his mother as he describes her as very beautiful.

The author takes on a trip though time, a time soon to be shattered by the Soviet dictatorship. The author writes in a style that commands the English language, but with a foreign taste, making for an interesting read. The author's choice and usage of words will challange you so, be prepared to with a good dictionary and the meaning may be the secord or third usage.

The life style in St. Petersburg and the surrounding countryside are recalled by the author in a writing style wholly his own as he uses all the powers of an excellent writer to convey this intensely human, yet cultured story.

The book has splendid country estates, nostalgia, lost childhood and paint a rather unique picture of a loving family suddenly torn from peace to terror of the Bolshevik Revolution. We are taken on a tour de force through England for education, An emigre life in Paris and Berlin.

But most of all the book is a work of nostalgia and lost childhood written with a unique style by a master stylist of the English language.

I have spent the summer drowning in Nabokovian puddles, but this autobiography is the least satisfactory yet. On the plus side it (naturally) contains some of the most beautiful sentences I've ever read. The seamless flow from concrete detail, scrupulous description, misty nostalgia to philosophical speculation is dizzying and inspired. The chapter on the author's mother is quite possibly the most gorgeous piece of writing in the language, but my favorite is the melancholy portrait of his uncle, a fascinating, loveable, moving character who might have enriched a novel. The battle between the natural and the human worlds are convincingly balanced, with history swooping in for final victory.

And yet Speak, Memory is fundamentally dislikeable. The tone grates: imagine a whole book written in the style of Nabokov's forewards - arrogant, didactic, humorless. That's what nearly kills it - the lack of Nabokovian playfulness. There are a couple of real-life events that are so shocking that they verge on farce, but in general the tone is reverent and uncritical, and the madness of Nabokov's greatest narrators has no place here.

The young Nabokov is thoroughly dislikeable (but then so is the Nab of the forewards), 'something of a bully' as he admits, but the episode with his brother was shameful, disgusting, and made me not want to read one of his books again. I'll get over that, but it's says something that one finds that monster Humbert more sympathetic than his creator. Of course, the narrator here isn't unadulterated Nab; he's as much a creation as any of his characters. He's just not a very interesting one, neither insane nor funny. As Michael Wood suggests, the absences in this very word-, idea-, people- and event-heavy book are some kind of a failure. What we're left with is literature's most stunning prose poem since Woolf's To The Lighthouse, with a big black hole in the centre.

I honestly don't consider myself competent to judge whether Nabokov is one of the century's greatest writers. Like many of his contemporaries, much of his work is so obscure as to defy my comprehension, but I do very much like what I understand in Pale Fire and Lolita, both of which made the Modern Library Top 100 Novels of the Century, and, of course, to read him is to be exposed to an English language and a prose style that one little knew existed. So I am more than willing to acknowledge that he was a singular and immense talent. It is altogether fitting then that his memoirs too should be unique.

For the most part, Nabokov's mission here is literally to let his memory speak. In so doing he recreates late czarist Russia in loving, painstaking detail. While to the best of my knowledge Nabokov was never particularly identified with the anti-Communist émigré movement, this book is its own kind of indictment of the USSR. The case it lays out is not the political or the economic one but the historical and cultural one. As he says:

My old (since 1917) quarrel with the Soviet dictatorship is wholly unrelated to any question of property. My contempt for the émigré who "hates the Reds" because they "stole" his money and land is complete. The nostalgia I have been cherishing all these years is a hypertrophied sense of lost childhood, not sorrow for lost banknotes.

And finally: I reserve for myself the right to yearn after an ecological niche:

...Beneath the sky Of my America to sigh For one locality in Russia.

The crimes of the commissars are without number and most are far greater than this, but this richly textured, impossibly specific and deeply moving memoir so brilliantly transports the reader to what seems to have been a wonderful and altogether innocent existence that to that list of crimes must be added the Bolsheviks utter destruction of this world. Even if you've never liked any of his other books, do yourself a favor and read this one. Even the passages that defy comprehension are beautiful.

GRADE: A

"Vera was a pale blonde when I met her, but it didn't take me long to turn her hair white."

The above was taken from one of Nabokov's own journal entries and, although it may seem humorous, it is no doubt true. Pulitzer-Prize winner, Stacy Schiff, suggests, even in the title of her book, that Véra Nabokov was a woman who was only capable of being known as Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov. Her relationship with her famed husband, no matter what its course, was the defining factor of her life. And Véra would have it no other way.

Véra Nabokov has been described as Vladimir Nabokov's "disciple, bodyguard, secretary-protector, handmaiden, buffer, quotation-finder, groupie, advance man, nursemaid and courtier." She is, not unjustly, celebrated as being the ultimate Woman Behind the Man.

Véra graduated from the Sorbonne as a master of modern languages, but, sadly, she did not keep copies of her own work as she did her husband's. In fact, she probably would have denied that her own work was worth keeping, although everything leads us to believe otherwise.

In addition to transcribing, typing and smoothing Valdimir's prose while it was still "warm and wet," Véra cut book pages, played chauffeur, translated, negotiated contracts and did the many practical things her famous husband disdained. This remarkable woman even made sure that the butterflies he collected died with the least amount of suffering.

A precocious child who read her first newspaper at the age of three, Véra was born into a middle-class Jewish family at the beginning of the twentieth-century in Czarist St. Petersburg. In 1921, with the advance of communism, her family settled in Berlin. It was there that she met the dapper and non-Jewish Vladimir. Their marriage would last fifty-two years and be described as an intensely symbiotic coupling.

Although Vladimir traveled and conducted several affairs, Véra supported him throughout, struggling to raise their son amidst the Nazism that was beginning to fester in Berlin. Blaming herself for her husband's infidelity, Véra managed to rejuvenate her marriage and the couple moved again--this time to New York City--where Véra typed Valdimir's manuscripts in bed while recovering from pneumonia. Forever believing in her husband's creative instincts, Véra stood by his art even when debt threatened to overtake them. It was she who intervened on the several occasions when Vladimir attempted to burn his manuscript of Lolita.

Véra Nabokov's tombstone bears the epithet, "Wife, Muse and Agent," and Nabokov knew the immensity of the debt he owed her. Late in life, he even refused to capture a rare butterfly he encountered in a mountain park for the sole reason that Véra was no longer at his side. Like her husband, Véra had highly developed aesthetic tastes and the two enjoyed a "tender telepathy." Often described as "synesthetes," the couple would have debates about "the color of Monday, the taste of E-flat." It is certainly without exaggeration that Nabokov wrote to Véra, "I need you, my fairy tale. For you are the only person I can talk to--about the hue of a cloud, about the singing of a thought, and about the fact that when I went out to work today and looked at each sunflower in the face, they all smiled back at me with their seeds."

Although many feel the Véra should have been encouraged to develop her own considerable talents, it can be argued that she did, and that her greatest talent was that of wife and helpmate. It is certainly one she choose freely and without rancor. The fact that her husband was fortunate, indeed, cannot be denied.

Véra is a book rich in detail, analysis and affection. Like all couples and all marriages, the Nabokovs were unique and they were special. To know one, was to glimpse the other, for with the passing of years, neither was wholly himself or herself. There are those who might not have understood Véra Nabokov's choices and might not have agreed with them, but they are the ones who have never known the ecstasy of a truly close relationship. Véra Nabokov was a most fascinating woman, one that made her own choices in life and lived them most happily. We can only admire her greatly.

In a vein not unsimilar to Brenda Maddox's biography of Nora Joyce a decade ago, Stacy Schiff compassionately and vividly weaves together the beautiful tapestry of Vladimir and Vera Nabokov. For those who thought the master's works can speak for themselves, they may want to think again. This lucid, brilliant book brings together the complex author's life, marriage, loves, ideals, frustrations, and, ultimately, genius as biographies rarely do. At the same time, Vera is no shrinking violet either and one wonders about what would have become of the author had she not been a tad forward about meeting him in the first place; certainly the history of 20th century literature would have suffered by it. My wish is that Ms Schiff continue in this vein...perhaps a different view of Frieda Lawrence or the long-suffering Mrs Dickens? Like this book, they will most likely be indispensable.

This is the book Nabokov fans have been waiting for, but suspected would never (COULD never) be written. From the opening sentences it's clear that Schiff has the stuff equal to her daunting task--to get behind the artfully constructed public face of two of the most brilliant, but most private, people ever to enter the public eye. Schiff does it with awesome research and a, by turns, witty, moving, penetrating, sometimes acerbic, but always admiring prose. The portrait of Vera, you feel, is definitive, but so, too, is the portrait of Vladimir--a portrait that points up the flaws and gaps in earlier depictions, like that of the dutifully plonking Boyd biographies with their laughable "interpretation" of Pale Fire. That Schiff is delineating the dynamic of a highly unique marriage (not just the two complex personalities that made up that marriage) makes her accomplishment seem all the more miraculous. Finally, Schiff's method is ultimately Nabovian in that she gives us a portrait of the master without peering at him directly: the book is Vladimir reflected in Vera's pale fire--which, as it turns out, is the best way to see him whole. Or, rather, to see them BOTH whole. After reading this book, it is impossible to speak of either Vladimir, or Vera, as a single entity, ever again.

I found this book good when trying to fine an album, but disappointing because it shows albums which are not in print (sometimes not even explaining that the album is unavailable). The reviews are inconsistant because of the many critics. Also the star rating I found to be very confusing. The artist profiles are interesting and informative. The charts for each specific instrument are also interesting. I wish the personnel was identified for each album, then indexed like the Penguin Guide, which is a better quality publication when it comes to jazz CD guides. Overall good reading and a decent resource when looking for an album.

This book, in all three of its editions, has been a constant companion on record and CD hunts with me. Not only is the third edition far more thorough than in the past, it also serves as an excellent place to keep track of what I've got in my collection. Given the constant repackaging of recordings, it's been my misfortune in the past to double up on recordings more than once. Not any more! Informative, deeply researched, and backed up by an online service that adds new releases, the "All Music Guide to Jazz" is an indispensable resource. Now, if they could only convince the record execs to release (or re-release) everything that's out-of-print on CD, I'd be very happy indeed. You can't go wrong with this book!

I wore out my copy of the AMG during the Ken Burns telecasts for a good reason. This book provides the best capsule overviews of jazz artists and their recordings, both for the famous and the obscure. Some artists have CD catalogs so big that it takes a book such as this to get a handle on their music. While a book of this kind tends to get outdated very quickly because so many CDs go in and out of print all the time, it is useful in finding that one recording which can give you the essence of the artist and where to go next. Some of the critics have a tendency to be repetitive or gushing but for a book of this size and scope, they do a good job on the whole. I'm eagerly awaiting the next edition of this book, which is probably the best version of all of the AMGs.

Evil lurks inside the man, chomping at the bit for its first chance to escape, but his conscience keeps him from carrying out his cruel and undignified desires. In Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, the reader is presented with an enthralling vision of a failed experiment in which a man attempts to separate his pure, angelic qualities and his dark, wicked inward wishes into two individual beings. A variable is horribly miscalculated, and instead of ending up with two embodiments, he only ends up with his evil side, which comes to be known as Edward Hyde, and his own self, a compound of a wholesome conscience and a hidden-away, satanic instinct which is part of all human beings. Definitely a book that can be viewed in a depressing, "can't-ignore-the-truth" type of light, this novel may set some readers in a direction that has them recognizing other parts of their own personality.
The story is set in London, England, in a 19th-century time period. I choose to view it as an example of a sci-fi horror novel. It's quite different from other chillers because of its lack of a murderer or a dangerous villain per se that everyone's hiding from. Oh, sure, Edward Hyde commits acts of horrific atrocity, but if you look beyond the hard, cold facts, you realize that these criminal acts are not the true object of the plot. The actual villain in this book is meant to be portrayed as the volatile human soul. The novel shows how dangerous some evil desires of even the kindest, most generous people can be. Take for instance Henry Jekyll, the main character of this book. He's as compassionate and gentle a person as you'll ever meet, but through Edward Hyde, he commits unforgivable acts that you would never have thought of Jekyll. It's a twisted version of the relationship between Superman and Clark Kent, his alter ego. In the form of Superman, Kent goes around the planet saving people and taking criminals to jail. In the form of Edward Hyde, Jekyll goes around trampling children and beating kindly old gentleman with canes for no apparent reason, then makes up for the crimes by taking money out of Henry Jekyll's bank account.
The characters in this book are quite a diverse crew. Instead of the predictable situation with the mad scientist, the damsel in distress, and the dashing hero, this novel features a troubled, kind scientist, his worried friends the lawyer (Mr. Utterson) and the butler (Poole), and an old acquaintance of the doctor's (Hastie Lanyon) that had a quarrel with Jekyll over some sort of scientific matter, creating a certain thickness between them. Finally, you have the scientist's alter ego, Edward Hyde, a hideous, small young man. Utterson is a lean, serious man that never smiles. "I incline to Cain's heresy; I let my brother go to the devil in his own way," says Utterson drearily. This is taken to mean that he only wants to worry about his own business, and nobody else's. Poole is not described in great lengths in this book; he is a friendly, elderly servant of Dr. Jekyll's. Later in the book, Lanyon is implored by Jekyll, trapped in the form of Hyde, possibly for life, to get him the necessary drugs to temporarily change back. Lanyon meets a sad death.
This book is excellently written, although its length is quite miniscule (70 pages). Robert Louis Stevenson integrates a sense of mystery into the plot, and although most educated persons know the basic story, you will still find yourself bristling with anticipation. Rarely does that suspense turn into boredom, as it does quite frequently in Bram Stoker's novel Dracula and many older works of horror. The reader is easily able to tell the difference between the voice tones of different characters, e.g. when Henry Jekyll tells his tragic story at the end. His sophisticated language is effortlessly distinguished from that of others who may have entries. Stevenson's dark and detailed descriptions of cold, deserted streets may give you chills as you are sucked into his vivid yet sinister worlds.
If I hadn't been forced to read this book by a certain time, I still might have picked it up off the shelf and read it eventually. That's achieving a point of loftiness with me, because I tend to be quite impatient with my books, wanting instant gratification of my needs for action and plot twists. It's very difficult to compare this book to works of other genres. Many other novels don't implement suspense because it's not needed. This book, however, is based on suspense. It's easy to hold the audience's attention here because of the shortness, but that doesn't mean that Stevenson did a cheesy job with the elements of the story. Much is packed into this dwarf of a book, and anybody who needs (or wants, for that matter) suspense in their life should pick it up

Henry Jekyll is a renowned scientist and a respected man. But lately, his behavior has become strange, reclusive and mysterious. So his friend Utterson tries to find out what he's up to. In the meantime, terrible and strange things are happening by night in the streets of London. As the tale unfolds, we discover Jekyll's dangerous games with his own psyche. He discovers a drug that reveals his evil side, without any moral restraint, and gradually loses control of the drug. The narrative technique of Stevenson in this short masterpiece is simply perfect; its philosophical stand is frightening; its moral implications are relevant; and the construction of the story superb.

The onion-layer style serves very well its mission to reveal every event in a semi-slow but tense pace. The environment is insuperable: the dark, wet and gas-lighted streets of London, where Mr. Hyde's steps resonate frighteningly. The ending is horrifying and very well written and, overall, this is a gem of a book. It should be best read in loneliness, in the dark. It is much more than a simple horror novel, because it says something very real and very terrible: without moral restraints, our deeper self can be unbearably evil. It's true.

Ah, the classical dark tale of Dr. Jekyll and his mysterious, vicous, murderous counterpart, Mr Hyde. One of my favourite books, one that combienes science fiction and horror like few have others have done so well.

A book of suspense and mystery, it is foremost a book about psychology, exploring the sweet duality of Good and Evil. And though Hyde may be Evil, i have doubts about Jekyill being Good itself. No, the doctor is merely a troubled soul longing for freedom, and that's what Hyde gives. Freedon without consequences, a theme of debate even nowadys.

Stevenson's work is simply grounbreaking. It explores so many things: ethics in science; the limits of science and knowledge; how science may affect people. Like The Invisible Man, it talks about the tribulations of scientists and what are their limitations. It's also a dark view of science, for it makes it as something without benefits in the end.

But besides this, its still a horror story, a classical one, with all the old ingredients: dark nights; the london fog; a murderer walking about the streets after the next victims. And he does find a couple of them. In my chilliest moments, i like to think Jack the Ripper himself reed this book and decided to make it true.

Mikhail Lermontov was a poet by genius, a romantic at heart, yet by the time of his death at 26, he had already become something of a disillusioned realist. This tension between streaks in his personality is expressed openly in "A Hero of Our Time": the novel starts out as a romantic adventure beautified with most exquisite imagery, but is later transformed into a disquieting tale of manipulation and dark deeds.

The setting for this novel (which is really a loosely connected string of short stories) is the wild Caucasian mountains, to which Lermontov himself had been "exiled" to fight against the fierce Chechens. After the death of Pushkin, Lermontov took it upon himself to keep the great poet's legacy alive. The authorities did not take kindly to Lermontov's endeavour, and transferred the young officer to the war zone.

To 19th centrury Russian writers, the experience of the Caucasus and of 'Asiatics' in general was of tremendous value as a gauge of the value of Russian civilization. Juxtaposing Russian high society with the people of the steppes and the mountains became a familiar device in Russian literature, just like American Indians were used to symbolize the natural/unadulterated or the uncivilized/savage in American literature.

However, in "A Hero of Our Time" the officer Pechorin transcends the boundaries between culture and nature. In the early chapters of the book, Pechorin's adventures are described from outside, and seem extraordinary, bizzare, yet captivating. Later on, other stories are recounted in Pechorin's diary, and they draw a different picture of the modern hero: disillusioned, hateful, and profoundly unhappy. Life is a game which he has long mastered, he knows exactly how to play into people's pride, vanity and passion. Yet, at unlikely moments, a stir of long-forgotten emotion briefly produces a vulnerable, human hero with whom we, despite ourselves, are forced to identify...

A Hero of Our Time introduces a most memorable character, Pechorin, who, had the novella been named after him, would stand shoulder-to-shoulder with Eugen Onegin in fame. He derives from the same tradition as Onegin, that of the 'superfluous' man, though he moves beyond his predecessor (and prefigures others) in the degree to which he reeks havoc on a personal level. The novella consists of stories only nominally connected, and it is fair to say that the second half is better than the first. The centrepiece is the diary of Pechorin which contains a full narrative of his 'adventures' at a small holiday town. It just has to be read to be believed: it is 'lady-killing' and 'white-anting' at its clinically destructive best. Readers of Eugen Onegin will notice similarities, though the prose form allows much deeper characterisation, for which one is certainly not sorry. Lovers of later 19th-century Russian literature will appreciate this book in its prefiguring of characters and of settings in, among others, Turgenev, Dostoyevsky, and Chekhov. Lermontov died young and in a very Romantic fashion (a duel); one can only be sorry that he did not live to write more.

Lermontov died age 27 leaving a body of poems and one prose work, a loose collection of stories about his 'anti-hero' Pechorin in "A Hero of Our Times"

The novel presents the misadventures of a Tsarist officer through the account of his early friend and through Pechorin's own diary. Pechorin is an immoral man, personifying the corruption of the early nineteenth century military classes in Russia.

For the concentration of the evils of Pechorin, for his treachery and seduction, this is a surprisingly 'modern' book, though written in the 1840s.

I recommend it for its economy and the strength of its portrayal of Pechorin. By his early death, Russian literature was robbed of a writer who may have joined the pantheon of the great Tsarist novelists.