As time passes, the novels of Anthony Trollope (1815-1882) seem to gain in freshness, stature and influence. He lived long enough to see his modest reputation fade, in contrast to that of many of his famous novelist contemporaries. Nowadays the situation seems to be reversing.

Of special merit, amongst his huge output, are the so-called Barsetshire ("clerical") novels, and the so-called Palliser ("political") novels. Of the former, the last and longest is "The Last Chronicle of Barset". Not only are there fresh concerns, complications and current affairs introduced here, but there are also fond and final appearances of people and places encountered in the earlier Barsetshire novels. Everybody's favourite literary virago, Mrs Proudie, is again denouncing and dominating everybody. Trollope even contrives to create a character who has the temerity to say to her, "Peace, Woman!"

There are the innumerable characters of marriageable age, whose names are perhaps more memorable than their characters, whose charming dialogues and relationship problems are deftly laid out and interwoven. Above all, there is master story-teller Anthony Trollope, admitting finally that for him Barset has been a real place, a place where he as been induced to wander too long by his "love of old friendships, and by the sweetness of old faces".

Superb TV and radio adaptations of Trollope's Barsetshire novels have appeared in recent years. His novels read aloud well, too, and audio cassette readings, some of them unabridged, can provide endless hours of rich listening pleasure.

THE LAST CHRONICLE OF BARSET is one of the great novels in the English language, and yet it is not widely read. The reason for this is obvious: it is the LAST novel in the Barsetshire series of novels, and a relatively small number make it all the way through the previous five volumes. This is a shame, because while all the previous novels are quite excellent and thoroughly entertaining, the final novel in the series is a work of an entirely different level of magnitude.

This novel is also one of the darkest that Trollope wrote. The moral dilemma in which Crawley finds himself would seem to belong more readily to the world of Dostoevsky than Victorian England.

Can this novel be read on its own, without reading the novels that precede it? Yes, but I do feel that it is best read after working through the other books in the series first. This is hardly an unfortunate situation, since all the books in the series are superb (with the exception of the first novel, THE WARDEN, which, while nice, is merely a prelude to the far superior five novels that came after it). Many of the characters in THE LAST CHRONICLE appeared first as characters in the other novels, and the central character of the book, Crawley, himself appeared earlier.

Trollope is...one of the most entertaining writers the English language has produced. At this point I have read around 20 of his novels, and fully intend to read more. But of all his books, this one might be his finest. The only two that I feel are close to the same level are his incredible books THE WAY WE LIVE NOW and HE KNEW HE WAS RIGHT (possibly the finest work on excessive jealousy since OTHELLO). Anyone who loves the English novel owes it to him or herself to read as many of these volumes as possible. My recommendation would be to read first the six novels in the Barsetshire Chronicles, and then to move on to the other two novels I mentioned. If still hooked, then try his other major series of novels, variously known as the Political novels or the Palliser novels or the Parliamentary novels, which begin with CAN YOU FORGIVE HER?

How one man could hold in his mind so much of his age, and then relate it back to us peopled with so many and varied characters in--how many? 20?-- interconnected novels of surpassing richness of detail and sagacity of moral observation, is a great mystery of human psychology.

"The Last Chronicle of Barset" is surely one of the most successful and satisfying of the whole Barset and Palliser series, illustrating perhaps better than any of the former Trollope's admirable gift for creating multi-dimensional characters that are as recognizable to us today as they were in his time.

This is just plain fun--or not so plain, but amazingly enjoyable for something so filled with new and surprising information. Kastan writes well, seemingly knows everything that has been written on this vast topic, and makes it accessible and exciting.

Shakespeare as we read him! This is wonderful! hard to believe so much information could be made so available and fun to read. Well written and a good looking book--and the price is right!

this is informative, wittily written, and filled with surprises about how Shakespeare became "Shakespeare"; it is also a beautifully produced book, as one would expect from Cambridge.
The paperback makes a great gift for anyone interested in Shakespeare or in the history of the book, even as that history moves into the digital era. A great buy and a must for any college or good high school library.

The other reviews have properly stated the strengths and weaknesses of this book. This book, in conjunction with Tarrasch's manual "The Game of Chess" has much to teach the average player; much more than many of the beginner/low-intermediate books that currently flood the market. This book is a forgotten gem, mainly because it wasn't available in English until recently.

And of course, there is little promotion of the book, which is all the more reason you should get it before it goes out of print forever, as I am surely it eventually will.

While I have not yet studied all 300 games cover to cover (I have studied approximately 100), I have read enough to make the following observations;

1) the production quality of the book is outstanding (i.e. binding, diagrams, text font, etc.)

2) the games span a large number of tournaments and a great variety of openings, and opponents.

3) the games are very well annotated - an intermediate chess player rated 1200 to 1800 can easily read and understand these games quite well. Also I like the style of annotations used throughout this book- a few variations mixed with much commentary. To me this is much more preferable than simply listing a myriad of endless move strings and some symbol with an evaluation. (which is what some other books try to do.)

4) Unlike some game collections by other players, Tarrasch includes a fair number of losses to his opponents in which he openly criticizes his own play. He typically goes on to point out the particular lesson he learned from the loss. To me, this makes the book very real, and increases my respect for Tarrasch, both as player and author.

By repeated exposure to certain concepts (i.e. open files, weak squares, outposts, pawn minortities, etc.) a student will rapidly incorporate these concepts into his or her play.

The only warning here (which has been touched on in the other reviews) is that Tarrasch tended to be rather dogmatic and general rule-based in his play than modern masters. Also, due to the time period in which the games were played, some of the opening variations used may look almost humerous to a modern player.

However, even with the caveats mentioned, this remains a most excellent study manual and a good representation of the style of play at the time. It is a safe bet that anyone who bothered to play over a sizeable sampling of games from this book could not help but improve their play.

Siegbert Tarrasch won a string of tournament victories in the early 1890s, making him arguably the best player in the world. But he passed up the opportunity to play the aging Steinitz (against whom he had +3-0) for the world title. So Lasker won the title instead in 1895, and forever after put Tarrasch in the shade, although he was still in the world's top five for another 20 years.

Tarrasch was also a great chess teacher. However, his writings can be very dogmatic, and his comments on some opening seem rather humourous in their naivety to modern masters. His writings seemed designed to make chess seem simpler and more rule-based than it really is. IM John Watson's brilliant book _Secrets of Modern Chess Strategy_ goes into this in far more detail.

It's very obvious that chess has progressed immensely in 100 years. So while this book is very instructive, it must be read with some caution. But it is a very important classic, that it's a pity that it hasn't been part of the learning English-speaking player's reading list until now. On the other hand, it was translated into Russian at least 12 years ago, since I gladly purchased a copy when I was there in 1988 despite my very limited Russian.

And it must be said that he was not nearly so dogmatic in his play as in his writings. There are a number of examples of almost Nimzovitchian ideas.

One instructive moment is his analysis of his victory on the Black side of the Advance French against Paulsen. After the standard moves 1 e4 e6 2 d4 d5 3 e5 c5 4 c3 Nc6 5 Nf3 Qb6 6 Bd3, Tarrasch gives his next move 6 ... cxd4 an exclamation mark, and points out that 6 ... Bd7 allows 7 dxc5. Yet almost everyone, even Watson, thinks that Tarrasch's great rival Nimzovitch was such a radical when he played this against Salwe many years later!

Drs. Christopher Fee and David Leeming have crafted an extraordinary work examining the marriage of Celtic, Germanic, and Norse cultures and religious beliefs in Britain (particularly as they are seen via the literary traditions that chronicled them) in an effort to understand how the impact of pre-Christian peoples influenced the unique Christianity of Medieval Britain. While Dr. Leeming has provided extensive retellings of pagan myths, Dr. Fee has written insightful analyses of these myths and their import to the creation of a British religious ideology. Beginning with a scrutiny of the various pagan pantheons, the work then moves through detailed examinations of, among other things, types of deities, heroes and heroines, and the different sagas of the individual cultures. As an apocalypticist, I found the retellings and subsequent commentaries on Ragnarok and the Anglo-Saxon Fire of Judgment immensely informative and useful.
This is an extraordinarily accessible book. It is intended for the non-specialist and, as such, would be perfect for an undergraduate survey course, for an upper-level topical course on British mythology/religion, or for any scholar seeking an understanding of Britain's pre-Christian culture. I would also recommend it highly as a handbook for any medievalist who needs quick and informed accounts of any and all of these topics. Not only have Drs. Fee and Leeming eloquently opened up the field of pagan Britain to further inquiry and discussion, but they have done so in a work that is, above all, easy and enjoyable to read.

This book is a great read. It's obviously well-researched, and filled with intriguing facts. Furthermore, Fee has a writing style that draws the reader in and keeps him/her interested throughout. Highly recommended!

really intersting read with lots of interesting facts, not for the faint hearted, makes you think and relise alot of different things

Check out:
"An Introduction to Object-Oriented Analysis, Objects and UML in Plain English" by David William Brown.

ISBN 0471371378

All diagrams have been redrawn in UML, and the text has been extensively updated to use UML terminology.

This book is good for both beginners and practitioners. I used this book as text book for my course of OOAD. The book was not only interesting enough for students but it also helped me in my practical work.

The number of cases and exercises given are also sufficient but a few more are always good. Its an excellent book for anybody having beginner to intermediate exposure to OOA. The book is beautifully written and one enjoys reading it.

This book is exactly as advertised, describing Object Oriented Analysis techniques in plain English. While it takes awhile to get to the object oriented chapters, the author has provided enough introductory information such that those who are either new to information systems and development methodoligies, or need a bit of a refresher, receive enough background to be well prepared for the rest of the book.

I've attempted to read other books in the field, but they always seem to assume that the reader already possesses a certain amount of knowledge that apparently I didn't.

For those who consider themselves already somewhat knowledgeable in Object Oriented Analysis, Design, or Development, you may want to consider more advanced level books. Again, this book reads as advertised. It's excellent!

Few have doubted Kipling's literary genius but for much of the 20th century progressive opinion has caricatured him as the bard of racism, the poet of savagery, the versifier of militarism. Gilmour focuses on Kipling's complex relationship with the British Empire, and shows that these caricatures do not do justice to the poet's nuanced views. To take only one example, Kipling was perfectly aware of the foibles of his fellow Anglo-Indians, and he often paid tribute to the nobility of ordinary Indians. But he was also aware that British rule over the Subcontinent was a great force for peace and stability. The Bloomsbury set jeered his views but he was proven tragically right after Indian independence, which resulted in a bloodbath. Let us hope that Kipling is not proven even more correct in the event of a nuclear exchange between India and Pakistan.

Rudyard Kipling was both a great writer and a representative figure of the British Empire, dabbling in both politics and exploration and winning the Nobel Prize in literature. This biography is the first to examine not only his writing, but his world: The Long Recessional considers the history of his times and provides a lively, revealing probe of the man's changes.

The fact that Gilmour explores Kipling's writing in terms of these themes and how they reflected aspects of his character is a clear indication that this book is no hagiography. The focus here is on the subject of empire and as the subtitle says it is all about: "The Imperial Life of Rudyard Kipling". Gilmour quotes Kipling as saying that empire was "the fabric of my mental and physical existence." Kipling seemed to see empire as some divine right of England:

GOD of our fathers, known of old,
Lord of our far-flung battle-line,
Beneath whose awful Hand we hold
Dominion over palm and pine
Lord god of Hosts be with us yet,
Lest we forget - lest we forget!
(Recessional)

It's this thinking that Gilmour focuses on and thus Kipling's life and works can't be seen as anything but a study in THE LONG RECESSIONAL. That's one emphasis; another is what Gilmour identifies as the "two sides to [Kipling's] head". With this he's looking at writings that were chauvinistic, ultra-nationalistic and even racist. Poems such as "The Female of the Species" and "Fuzzy-Wuzzy" being cases in point. Gilmour then shows the other side of the man's head with writings depicting his compassion and humanity - "If" for instance. Kipling's life can't be completely studied outside the context of family and the sadness of losing children and an unhappy marriage. The times and circumstances through which he lived also influenced him. Being born in colonial India and living through the Boer war and WWI all served to paint the lens through which Kipling saw and wrote about life in a rosy imperial tint.

The Death You Deserve: A Novel by David Bowker is in effect a modern day horror story along the lines of Exorcist or Silence of the Lambs with one big difference-this book is very funny.

The story center on Billy Dye and his boyhood friend-now professional hitman-now known as Rawhead.

Their friendship as boys was based on a shared interest in the occult and the classic horror stories of the time. It's a friendship cut short by the incarceration of Rawhead after he stabs a fellow student.

Billy grows up to be a failed journalist and novelist of the occult. He comes to the attention on one Malcom Priest, the head of a violent Manchester gang who signs Billy on to ghost his autobiography. Billy's a professional sarcastic SOB and he finally alienates Malcom to the point that he sets Billy up to be hit by Rawhead-his hitman of choice though one he has never seen and knows nothing about.

As Rawhead takes aim at Billy's head with his 44 Magnum he realizes that this is his boyhood chum and spares his life. This, predictably, does not please Malcom and so the chase is on.

Up to this point the book stands as a run-of-the-mill mafia tale. Once rejoined, however, the mutual attraction that Billy and Rawhead have for horror takes over and elements of a classic horror story dominate the action. Rawhead puts Billy up in an old, apparently haunted house-the night hours are filled with groans, screams and the smell of blood. Flies and maggots infest the property. Billy's instinctively knows that there's something wrong here but can't bring himself to depart both because he's a target of subsequent hitmen Malcom hires and needs Rawhead's protection as well as his attraction to the supernatural aspects of Rawhead's persona.

The action-and there is pleanty of action-builds to a tumultuous ending.

Bowker can write. The book is fast paced, hip and riddled with sarcastic and farcical humor. It's also, at points, scary as hell. It's also riddled with lots of profanity and some truly horrific and graphic violence. Readers should beware-this is not a book for the easily offended or those who have any sort of queasy constitution.

This is a wild romp of a story. If you can handle it, you'll be glad you went along for the ride.

British author David Bowker, formerly of Manchester, gives an American readership a first glimpse of his incredible wit in THE DEATH YOU DESERVE. His fifth novel tells the story of Billy Dye, a failed horror writer. Billy's girlfriend has left him. His novel draws no reviews and, thus, no sales. He does interview a local gangster, Malcolm Priest, for a magazine article. Based on a diluted version of the story Billy has written, Priest hires him to become his biographer. Billy's troubles begin for real at this point.

Billy's character is the ultimate "loser." He wades into predicaments that should teach him lessons about the human psyche, but Billy manages to sink deeper into the muck of his own making via his acid tongue. He is soon put at the top of Priest's "hit list." Rawhead is the hitman hired to eradicate Billy, who soon finds himself kidnapped and held in a manner of protective custody. It turns out that Rawhead is a childhood friend from grammar school who had idolized Billy.

Bowker's wit is hilarious. His characters are real yet side-splittingly funny. Rawhead's many-sided character is a hoot to follow. He is both a professional killer and a student of supernatural literature classics, with an extensive collection of signed first editions. Billy is both impressed with and frightened of him. The two unlikely companions are knit by a tighter cord when they run from Priest's henchmen, bent on killing them both.

A little book, THE DEATH YOU DESERVE can be read in an afternoon with a thirst for more. Notwithstanding a couple of stumbles through British slang, Bowker's story is a great read. Billy is the bumbling bloke that endears himself to us by his misadventures in Manchester and beyond. Despite his shortcomings, he deserves a hearty cheer for his fortitude. Names like Chef, Dogman, Beast and Heidi are Bowker's clever insertions that will make THE DEATH YOU DESERVE a chuckle in the memory bank.

--- Reviewed by Judy Gigstad

Horror novelist Billy Dye needs cash so he accepts the assignment of interviewing the crime kingpin of Manchester, England, Malcolm Priest. Surprisingly, the interview goes quite well as the boastful Priest profanely brags equally about his life of crime as much as his support to good deeds charities. Proud of his efforts, especially getting out with his skin intact, Billy consumes too much alcohol, which leads to his handing in an uncomplimentary picture of Priest.

Sober, Billy wonders if his knees, elbows, or fingers will be broken, that is if he lives to feel the pain. However, Billy gets a break as the editor turns the piece into friendly fluff. Pleased with the article, Priest hires Billy to ghostwrite his memoir. However, Billy being Billy manages to quickly destroy the good will of the article. Priest casts the die that Dye must die so Billy ends up in a graveyard facing execution by Raghead the hit man, who wears a bag over his head to hide his identity from his customers and victims. However, Billy's luck finally changes when Raghead turns out to be his closest childhood friend, who loyally tries to protect his buddy from Priest's gang of thugs.

THE DEATH YOU DESERVE is an entertaining crime thriller that satirizes invincible hero types defeating armies of trained killers. The story line never takes itself seriously, which leads to readers receiving a wild tale populated by an eccentric cast. Though Billy is the star, Raghead and Priest make the tale as caricatures of criminals.

Harriet Klausner

This is a masterpiece in self development work.He graphically narrates the importance of travel and education.The advice to his son Phillip is both practical and scholarly. Though at times one may get the feeling of "over kill", Chesterfield has embellished and tempered the book with sound practical knowledge.
Foremost, in the steps for acquisition of knowledge, was the advice given for taking up the study of various languages, especially Latin. The book makes for compulsive reading and must adorn every library.

After reading a children's collection of Chesterfield's writings (The Book of Good Manners) I decided to get this Oxford paperback edition of the actual full-length letters themselves. Chesterfield's complete letters fill six volumes, so any one-volume edition is going to be a selection, but it was the subject of manners which made these letters famous, and this subject is mostly written about in his letters to his son and his grandson, and this edition contains 85 such letters. It also has a few letters Chesterfield wrote to various friends and associates and letters having to do with the functions of his various political career. Even if one doesn't much admire Chesterfield's advice to his offspring (for whatever reason) these insights into behaviour and human nature (in the halls of power or not) are not a bad thing to have an understanding of in your overall world-view. Despite the apparently famous and oft-quoted line from Johnson that these letters teach the morals of a dance master or a prostitute (what Johnson was probably saying was these letters describe the 'surface' of society and the insights and advice in that sense tend to come across as shallow, yet I think it's fair to allow Chesterfield to assume the potential character and substance and depth in the human beings who may practice the manners with the artistry that he describes them) some of Chesterfield's insights come out of (without trying to sound dramatic) esoteric teachings and schools, or at least border on the practices taught in higher schools. 'Tact', for instance, is a worldly word for a higher spiritual practice of seeing things from the point-of-view of other people as-well-as being objective enough about yourself that you can know what kind of impression you are making on others. 'Not expressing resentment', as well, is an art of a high order (dealing with emotional energy in general), beyond the obviousness that expressing resentment makes you look like a fool. In fact, Chesterfield paints a cumulative portrait in his letters of a human being who is not just 'going-through-the-correct-motions' but who is actually, potentially, more conscious (and capable of being more conscious) of himself and the world around him than the average human being usually is. Having said that, I'm sure Johnson saw enough trained monkeys (of the human kind) in his day fully capable of practicing these manners that Chesterfield describes, and so it's understandable that he may have cringed a little upon discovering their publication. Yet, hollow men (or mental vacuums) and fools aside these letters are worth the time of anybody interested in increasing their understanding of themselves, human nature in general, and society at any level.

While the prose is definitely that of the neoclassic, this text is filled with insight into the nature of society, relationships, business and leadership. I found a dusty old copy of this text in our university library when I was an undergraduate, and it has stayed with me throughout my life. Imagine that these are letters! Each one as carefully crafted as a published essay, and each with a specific point all aimed at the same goal: providing the author's son w/ the tools (weapons in some cases) necessary for success. Here's an example (a paraphrase, as I do not have the text at hand):

Each man is born with all the passions, but in each there is a governing passion which runs stronger and deeper than the rest. Seek out each man's governing passion, and when you have discovered it, remember never to trust him where that passion is concerned. Play upon it to your own advantage if you wish.

The text is full of wisdom such as this. I'm delighted that Amazon can find it for me.

Mason's collection of essays is a wide-ranging and overall pretty good collection of essays. The title essay is sort of a 'literary memoir', and while I expected it to be one of the better essays, it really isn't. But there are some excellent essays on Auden, Tennyson, Frost, Heaney, Louis Simpson, J.V. Cunningham, Anne Xexton, and Irish poetry. And then there are the essays meant to further the cause of the New Formalist movement. They almost sound like propoganda, but they are well written, enjoyable essays that make sense. And my favorite essay is "Other Lives: On Shorter Narrative Poems." Mason is a phenomenal narrative poet, and anyone with an interest in narrative poetry should read this essay.

This book is a collection of essays and reviews by poet David Mason, who thinks that contemporary poetry and its professional readers have neglected "nonacademic readers" like "the educated common reader." Through a critical style that incorporates the anecdote and that admires Louis Simpson's "refreshingly personal criticism," "as if we were hearing after-dinner opinions," Mason's text follows the goal of his Preface: "I have in mind that audience of grown-ups arguing about books even while they discuss . . . the latest political tremors or a new movie coming to town." Mason's taste for life in poetry criticism, whether communicated through autobiographical or biographical techniques, doesn't mean that he remains uncritical of self-absorbed forms of art. In the title essay, for instance, Mason acknowledges "the useful legacy of Eliot's ideas" in support of "the self so distanced from itself." Of the book's sixteen sections, five open with personal anecdotes. These anecdotes quickly become relevant to their subject matter (whether regionalism, self-indulgence, sentimentality, Tennyson, or Yeats). Given Mason's opposition to self-indulgence, one might argue that Mason develops contradictory attitudes toward forms of expression, or that he is critical of the personal in art, but then makes self-absorbed statements like, "Nowadays close reading often bores me," or, "I have sometimes felt that I was part of a story, and that I had a sacred duty to transcribe as much of it as I could." Yet such personal statements have relevancy to the larger poetics/rhetoric of the essays. Besides, wouldn't it seem odd--and bad writing at that--to claim that "poetry helps us live our lives" without then providing here and there a few examples from life when it has? Mason claims, "People do quote poetry, or refer to it--some do, anyway--and they connect it to their lives." He then supports this claim with the example of when his mother once remembered six potent lines by Yeats. Yet Mason's theory about why "people remember poems or songs or key phrases at surprising moments in life" is questionable. He says that "the best forms of expression are often those we most want to remember." But he suggests that these best forms of expression are those that are so large, so universal, so full of matter, that they "convey 'a general truth'." "Universality is suspect in some quarters, I suppose, but I submit," Mason says, "that we cannot have great art without it." When Mason then quotes from W.H. Auden's New Year Letter, he means to show how such poetry that conveys truth makes things happen because, as Auden once said, it survives--in the memory, among other places--as a way of happening, a mouth." Yet the section he quotes, like so many Auden lines, might seem to some less like a memorable poem and more like lineated philosophical text. What are the best forms of expression for poetry? This is an important question for Mason. On the one hand, there is the often difficult poetry of magnitude, and on the other, that of locality, which is less difficult. Mason proposes that the former is usually formal, whereas the latter is typically free verse. He worries that the latter is generally practiced by poets who "ought to hold themselves to higher standards than they sometimes do." These standards are the focus of Mason's important essay "Louis Simpson's Singular Charm." A New Formalist and one of the editors of the anthology Rebel Angels: 25 Poets of the New Formalism, Mason believes that meter "is . . . a kind of compression that, in the right hands, lends language a supercharged memorability." He finds that Simpson, with his rejection of meter, "has courted danger, choosing a slighter technical range that often highlights his lackadaisical diction." Mason's essay is good at providing us with passages--from articles by and interviews with Simpson--about this Jamaican-born poet's reasons for this rejection. The reasons involve Simpson wanting his poetry to be more accessible and direct for an audience like the one Mason advocates. Simpson believes free verse better lends this accessibility and directness. Mason disagrees, making some convincing arguments; one is that Simpson "comes to that tired solecism that meter is un-American." Readers need only digest what is arguably the most important essay in The Poetry of Life, "American Poetry in the Nineteenth Century," to be reminded of the great American poets who worked sometimes accessibly and gorgeously in traditional forms. But in arguing that Simpson's stylistic change toward accessibility and directness "leaves disturbing implications for the art," a change which sometimes lends Simpson's poetry what Mason calls "deliberate banality," Mason may not be true to his aversion to the Twentieth-century critics who have prized difficulty in poems. Perhaps Mason, who from time to time in this book reminds readers of his career as an English professor, is more on the side of J.D. McClatchy, "accustomed . . . to respect the authority of difficulty," than he is on the side of Dana Gioia, to whom Mason devotes a chapter, desiring neither anti-intellectualism nor a ban of difficulty in art, but, instead, a popular audience for poetry? Accessibility, difficulty, formality, memorability, popularity, universality--these are the interesting buzzwords of The Poetry of Life. They are perhaps defined and discussed with the most clarity and precision in Mason's superb "Robert Frost, Seamus Heaney, and the Wellsprings of Poetry." Though this essay has as its primary concern a comparison of Frost and Heaney, it draws this definition and discussion in, and in very enlightening ways. Though different in many ways, both poets, Mason asserts, "have made use of colloquial speech in their poetry" and "refreshing rhythm and idiom with materials that are at least partly extra-literary." Mason demonstrates this use, rhythm, and idiom through focusing attentions on and drawing connections between each poet's images of work, play, and water. No doubt, these images are universal. And Mason knows precisely when and from what poem to quote, showing that Frost and Heaney often image the world without either that magnitudinous air of Auden and Eliot or that more banal, informal language of Simpson.

Mason is a rarity in this day and age--a poet-critic who writes in a public idiom. He is clear in his aesthetic criteria, but not so dogmatic that his work lacks room for surprise (I was surprised to see him so enthusastic about John Haines, for instance). What is most important about his writing, though, is that it is elegant as well as insightful; these essays are as much a pleasure to read as the poets he discusses. My own efforts at poetry criticism lack the warmth and elegance that allow Mason to wear his erudition lightly. The elegance, direct tone, intelligence, and accessibility of these essays give me hope that poetry criticism outside the university is not in critical condition. Cheers to Story Line Press for supporting this important poet's work.

This is an excellent guide for those seeking God. As I read it, though, I found I wanted to read John of the Cross' words more literally (this book is a paraphrase). Having tried translations by Peers and Kavanaugh, I prefer the latter. Hazard's paraphrase is very helpful even as an introduction, but I've discovered that as I'm ivest myself in following John's rather complex sentence structure, I find incredible richness. At this point in my journey, I find his writings far more significant and helpful for me than any contemporary writer from any stream of christianity.

I have used this for personal retreats and for Lent. My experience of this tool changes with each circumstance, it has helped me grow and the beauty of John of the Cross becomes richer and richer.

Please, read this book! Read it for your spouse. Read it for your children. Read it for everyone you love, but especially for those who you don't love. And, above all, read it for your relationship with the Lord, for it will never be the same.