After a lot of browsing among different editions of Melville's works, I chose this one because it was attractive and cheap and contained all of his acknowledged masterpieces. Getting "Moby-Dick," "Billy Budd," and his greatest short stories and poems in one well-made volume, for ($$$) bucks, is indeed a pretty good deal. I wish Library of America would start commissioning some scholarly introductions for their books, though. Their volumes seem to be geared towards intelligent people who are not necessarily experts in a particular field, and it would be useful to provide an introduction that places the works in context and gives a brief idea of the latest scholarship.

There is a "Note on the Texts" here, which is really of interest only to specialists, and a chronology of Melville's life, and some rather random and cursory endnotes: there are only a few pages' worth for "Moby-Dick," for example, which could be annotated much more extensively (and I'm sure it has been). It's unclear why the editors choose to explain some of Melville's allusions but not others. So if you're looking for a well-annotated "Moby-Dick," look elsewhere.

As for the works themselves, there's little I could say about them that hasn't been said a thousand times before. Every one of Melville's lines crackle with dark intensity; his writing is relentless, wild, eccentric, sometimes out of control, but even then it's a pleasure to follow him on his fiery way. His is a kind of uniquely American tragic sense, the dark flip side of Emerson and Whitman's democratic individualism. Ahab, and Bartleby, are supreme individualists, but their uncompromised visions lead to doom rather than liberation.

"Moby-Dick" stands out as the great American novel. Billy Budd, written much later, stands as a sober counterpoint. Taken together, Melville's many-layered texts deconstruct western civ (American variety) in the same way that Homer did for the Greeks. From Melville to Madonna-see how we run.

Anyone who loves Moby Dick and is looking for another Melvillean challenge, buy a copy of "Mardi and a Voyage Thither". Alas! many marvels await thee whosoever has the time and fortitude to muse through this early Melville Masterpiece! Reading this novel is like watching Melville's genius grow, while you voyage through his mystical, metaphysical world. The following are some excerpts of what to expect on this joyous journey:

"We are off! The courses and topsails are set: the coral-hung anchor swings from the bow; and together, the three royals are given to the breeze, that follows us out to sea like the baying of a hound. Out spreads the canvas -- alow, aloft -- boom-stretched, on both sides, with many a stun' sail; till like a hawk, with pinions poised, we shadow the sea with our sails, and reelingly cleave the brine."

"But how fleeting our joys. Storms follow bright dawnings. -Long memories of short-lived scenes, sad thoughts of joyous hours -how common are ye to all mankind. When happy, do we pause and say - "Lo, thy felicity, my soul?" No: happiness seldom seems happiness, except when looked back upon from woes. A flowery landscape, you must come out of, to behold."

"For there is more likelihood of being overrated while living, than of being underrated when dead. And to insure your fame, you must die."

"My cheek blanches white while I write; I start at the scratch of my pen; my own mad brood of eagles devours me; fain would I unsay this audacity; but an iron-mailed hand clenches mine in a vice, and prints down every letter in my spite. Fain would I hurl off this Dionysius that rides me; my thoughts crush me down till I groan; in far fields I hear the song of the reaper, while I slave and faint in this cell. The fever runs through me like lava; my hot brain burns like a coal; and like many a monarch, I am less to be envied, than the veriest hind in the land."

"Of the highest order of genius, it may be truly asserted, that to gain the reputation of superior power, it must partially disguise itself; it must come down, and then it will be applauded for soaring...that there are those who falter in the common tongue, because they think in another; and these are accounted stutterers and stammerers."

"The catalogue of true thoughts is but small; they are ubiquitous; no man's property; and unspoken, or bruited, are the same. When we hear them, why seem they so natural, receiving our spontaneous approval? why do we think we have heard them before? Because they but reiterate ourselves; they were in us, before we were born. The truest poets are but mouth-pieces; and some men duplicates of each other;"

"Faith is to the thoughtless, doubts to the thinker."

"Some joys have thousand lives; can never die; for when they droop, sweet memories bind them up."

"Now, I am my own soul's emperor; and my first act is abdication! Hail! realm of shades!" -- and turning my prow into the racing tide, which seized me like a hand omnipotent, I darted through. Churned in foam, the outer ocean lashed the clouds; and straight in my white wake, headlong dashed a shallop, three fixed specters leaning o'er its prow: three arrows poising. And thus, pursuers and pursued flew on, over an endless sea."

Mardi, the forgotten child ,is yet entirely singular and needs to be read by those who have fallen under the spell of Melville. An encyclopaedic romp through an almost fantastical landscape of isles and warriors; Melville attempts to pull off one the most extraordinary acts of metaphysical fiction ever. He doesn't quite rein it all in but the experience of reading Mardi is utterly disorientating in the best way. Coming after Typee and before Moby Dick, it is somewhat of a nutty middle ground. The anthropological concerns of Typee are stretched to the limit. Like the stars in the sky, Mardi is vast; (the word is Polynesian for the world)--and as full of wonder.

The Lighting-Rod Man is one of Melville's lesser known stories. Despite the cold, dark setting, it is more comical than most of his works other works. This satire tells about one door-to-door salesman, and how annoying, pushy, and arrogant he was to his perspective customer (Doesn't seem like a lot has change since then), and how he ends up getting thrown out of the house.
The story The Lighting-Rod Man jumps right into the story in the first paragraph and just goes, which makes it much easier to get into and a much easier read for those that have a hard time getting started reading. I feel that it is worthy buying The Piazza Tales even if you just read this one story let alone the five other stories.

Put simply, this is the best collection of short stories by any American author.

With its great love and warmth, this book is a very special gift to readers: a great writer turning his attention to something commonplace--the relationship between a pet and its owner--resulting in a story that is not sentimental, hackneyed, or sweet, but a moving exploration of the love between animals and humans. Just reading Mann's simple description of how he speaks his dog's name, Bashan, and the electricity that name sends through his pet, is worth every penny.

Since no one else has written about Clarel, I thought I'd be nice to Melville and congratulate him on his epic poem. Although the poetry itself isn't always brilliant, I felt that the general tone of melancholic spirituality was powerful. Essentially, to me, Clarel was about a young man questioning his world, and searching for meaning in a seemingly meaningless existence. The book parallels Melville's own travels in Jeruseleum, and with this work, we get a glimpse into Melville's interpretation of spirituality. Highly recommended, considering that it is overshadowed by that other Melville work (Moby Dick, of course!).

Among the early products of the wonderful Library of America Series were three volumes devoted to the novels of Herman Melville. This volume consists of Melville's first three novels, Typee(1846), Omoo(1847) and Mardi (1849)

Melville's novels are based, more or less loosely, on his life at sea. The first two novels describe voyages to the Marquesas and to Tahiti. They are filled with lush descriptions of scenery, and tales of adventure. Of the two, Typee is filled with encounters with cannibals and Polynesian maidens while Omoo presents a wider canvas of characters and scenes. Both books emphasize the sexual openness and relative simplicity of Polynesian life as compared to life in the United States and both books are critical as well of attempts to Christianize the islanders. These are not unusual themes today and probably were not as radical in the 1840s as one might suppose. The stories are well told and the descriptions alluring. These books made Mellville's reputation as a young writer.

Mardi, however, is the gem of this collection. Its relationship to the earlier novels can be analogized, say, to the relationship between the young Beethoven's first symphony on the one hand and the growth of language and thought in the second and third symphonies on the other hand. Melville prefaces the book with the note that his first two books were fact-based but were received with "incredulity" while Mardi was pure romance and "might be recieved for a verity." (Little likelihood of that)

The book as in a baroque, ornate, and bravado style that Melville would bring to completion in Moby Dick. It is an allegory involving the search for Yillah, a strange, mthical maiden, through the seas of Mardi -- Polynesian for "the world". The narrator is accompanied by King Media, by the philosopher Babbalanja, the singer Yoomi, and the historian Mohi. There are many wonderfully exasperating discussions. They wander far and wide in search of Yillah and in there wandering we here many religious allegories and many depictions of the Europe and United States of Melville's own time. There are shadowy maidens, villans, long scenes in the empty wide ocean, and pages of Melvillian thought and bluster.

The book is high American romanticism and presents a religious and personal quest by the narrator that resounds of similar quests by many in our own day. For example, there is a famous unfinished novel of the religious quest called Mount Analogue by a French writer, Duhamel, which fits quite compactly into just a few chapters of Mardi. Mardi is a long, maddenlingly difficult book but worth the effort.

Americans can learn about themselves by learning about their literature and this book is a fitting place to start (or continue). For those with the patience, it is worth reading these books in order (perhaps with other reading sandwiched in between) to discover the growth of a great and troubled American writer and chronicler of the inward life, as well as of sea journeys.

This collection of interesting essays is about things I like. The subtitle is "Popular Music and Contemporary Theory," which promises an all out battle between the "What is Happening?" (knowing) and the "Is it Happening?" (feeling). Or in the language of pop music, between Marvin Gaye's "What's Going On" and REM's "It's the End of the World As We Know It." The fisticuffs between philosophy and rhetoric reverberate here in an articulation specific to cultural studies: The conflict between critic and fan. Is the goal to chart how capitalism and hegemony maintain their grasp on the culture industry or to celebrate the defiances and transgressions that make the Billboard charts a tally in the continual victory of life over death?

Mapping the Beat wants to chart a course between these extremes by tapping the critical powers inherited from Adorno and others without accepting his blanket rejection of popular music. Jacques Attali's Noise, with its Foucault-inspired historicist approach to music and culture, offers a way to conceptualize this methodological pathway. "Mapping the beat," the collection's introduction explains, means following Attali's lead in tracing the shifting boundary between what culture understands to be music and noise. Because the designation of 'music' is given to sound with order and because the perception of order is ideological, the boundary between music and noise is a political one. The boundary always reflects a political reality; the structure of music reveals/conceals/becomes/reflects the order of things.

The understanding that epistemological assumptions have political ramifications is not new, but Attali's work is important because it provides a conceptual starting place for a serious study of popular music. For one, Attali's celebration of jazz and especially free jazz contradicts Adorno's rejection. Adorno preferred the atonal algorithms of 12-tone compositions, in which all 12 tones of the scale have to be sounded before one is repeated so that one key does not become dominant. Adorno wanted the musical symbolic to be thwarted consciously, in an approach that could be justified in the abstract. Attali goes the other way, into the material use-value of sound as its own justification, in which improvisational composition reconfigured social relations immediately. Attali's Noise is a high theoretical expression of DIY attitude.

Attali's discussion is exciting because it tells us that noise is prophetic. We can look at contemporary music from the self-conscious compositions of John Cage, Brian Eno and Negativland on the one hand to the more visceral sound critiques of Bikini Kill and the Pansies on the other, and consider what the shifting boundaries between music and noise hearken. In this way, mapping the beat is about the relationship between "What is happening?" and "Is it happening?" At its best, the mapping of the beat would be a ritual examination of bones in the hopes of putting language to this feeling of impending we-know-not-what.

The conflict between the pop-music critic ("How should we study this thing?") and the fan ("This blows my mind!") that has famously inscribed itself on the formation of cultural studies is really about methodology. What is this methodology, formulaically announced-as-such by the introduction's subheading "Towards a Mapping of the Beat"? The dominant mode of pop-music analysis is to examine a piece of music at the site(s) of production, textualization and/or consumption. It asks how the music industry created a given product, what the product means symbolically as a text, and who is its audience. By contrast, "mapping" hopes to "cut across the division and links between institution, text, and consumption by focusing on how popular music constitutes a terrain of social and cultural identity that can be mapped in terms of its spatiality or, more precisely, as spaces of noise and places of music" (6). A spatialized analysis recognizes (with Lawrence Grossberg) that "economic, bodily, libidinal, emotional, and political effects, some of which are material and some of which are ineffable--cannot be reduced to the meaning of a cultural text and how that meaning is inscribed in production or interpreted in consumption (7). The significant effects of music have to be accounted for in relation to the physical spaces in which it lives.

With Lefebvre's opposition between representations of space (in which the powerful EYE surveys a field) and spaces of representation (where living practice occurs in quotidian, underground, embodied spaces), "mapping" charts a move from visual models of knowing to aural models of feeling. Much like McLuhan's movement from the visual and linear logic of print to the aural and spatial logic of television, the move from traditional Frankfurt-style analysis to "mapping" constitutes a desire to include the grounds of material existence in any consideration of the figures of popular music.

This move--from a practice of representing space from the imaginary subject position of omniscient third-person analyst towards an appreciation of spaces of representation--is illustrated in the introduction through the difference between an "Action Plan" map for the development of a community in Des Moines and a description of one of the author's own experiences living in that neighborhood. One representation seeks to control the community from afar, while another seeks to reveal it from an internal vantage point. In a certain sense, this is simply a move from critic to fan. In another sense, it is a profound relinquishment of the epistemological power that has traditionally been afforded the scholar in the name of a so-called objectivity. Spatialized analysis, it seems, is at least somewhat similar to situated analysis (a la Haraway).

I can only applaud this approach insofar as it underlines that politics are at stake both in knowledge and in music. The use of a run-down American community as an example reminds us that a 'beat' is not just what the quarter note sometimes gets, it is also the territory assigned to a police officer that pounds it. And if the beat is a territory, then a mapping is always a reterritorialization.

As these essays were gathered from a Drake University conference on popular music and therefore not conceived together, I can suggest an interesting game for the reader of this collection: Ask yourself to what extent the essays follow the methodology or aesthetic whose outlines are traced in the introduction.

If "Mapping the Beat" turns out to be a theoretical aesthetic and not a methodology, all the better! Method, after all, is the ideology of academic conservatism.

In "Mapping the Beat," you may have noticed the italicization that creates a pianissimo in the center of mapping. Is this just a precious typographical tidbit? Was the point only to introduce a visual pun on the topic of music, for which any musical symbol would do? Or is this pianissimo in mapping an injunction to map more subtly, to decapitalize the M in Method . . . or to, as Otis Redding might have suggested, "Try a Little More Epistemological Tenderness."

Collaboratively edited by Tamia A. Burt, Joseph D. Thomas, and Marsha L. McCabe, Moby-Dick: A Picture Voyage is an abridged edition of a classic work of American literature by Herman Melville which is lavishly illustrated with both black-and-white and color photographs of relevant places, original artworks, images of the whaling industry and much, much more. A superbly presented and very highly recommended supplementary edition to Melville's masterpiece, Moby-Dick: A Picture Voyage features imagery on every page that draws the reader into Melville's evocative world and would make an especially welcome choice for any school or community library's Memorial Fund acquisition.

This volume is a collection of essays offered by important scholars to one of today's foremost historians of the ancient city state. The collection is generally of the specialist's level, although dedicated hellenophiles will find much here worthy of reading. Hensen has been very concerned with defining the city-state, and the conceptual focus of these contributions reflects that concern, without losing sight of the need for proper evidence and interpretation. For example, the essay by S. J. Miller shows the connection between ancient athletics and the ideals of deomocracy and oligarchy. J. Ober's essay on Socrates considers the persuasive eloquence of Socrates's speech before the jury in context with his own philosophical persuasions on the streets of Athens. Hansen's opening poem shows that he has not lost the gift of humor!...

In my opinion, "Impending Crisis" sets the contemporary standard by which corporate America can leverage the existing workforce for maximum productivity and profitability. The executive leader of today who doesn't understand that it's people who drive change, people who create technological change, and people who create the power to change through the procurement of knowledge, whether gained through personal endeavor or otherwise provided, has little chance of surviving beyond the first 10-20 years of this new century.
Roger Herman and his team have a very clear understanding of the past and present workforce, an understanding of the factors that have and will influence the workforce, and an accurate "future" view of those trends that will influence the evolvement of the workforce. This knowledge is expressed in a manner that is simple and relevant, the two most important elements required for the application of information necessary to inspire, motivate, and cause dramatic and positive change.
In my opinion, this book should be added to the toolbox of any manager, leader, organization, or company that understands the true value of people to their survival.

Finally, a book that connects the dots with all the data that supports what I've been experiencing all along as a small business owner: We're in an employee crunch that won't go away unless we as employers do some long-term planning NOW. Despite all the media hype about the highly qualified people on the street currently looking for work, I've been frustrated for the past few years in finding the qualified, productive few to fill the slots we have. Herman, Gioia, and Olivo explain why. Makes good sense!

But they don't stop with theory and statistics. (Granted, there are plenty of charts, facts, and numbers. But I liked those-adds credibility. I want authors to give me proof rather than platitudes.) They outline an action plan for employers to make sure they don't get caught in the crunch. I'm handing the book to my general manager and telling him to implement immediately.

By the way, I liked the readable style. Great pullouts of the key ideas. Easy to skim. You could even hand this book to a department supervisor or manager to cull ideas to correct department recruitment, retention, and productivity problems. Although it addresses big-picture issues of strategic planning, it certainly gets down to the details of the do-now-today stuff .

Dianna Booher, author of 40 books, including Speak with Confidence, Communicate with Confidence, and E-Writing

Herman, Olivo, and Gioia combine facts and figures with real-world examples to describe the next wave of workforce issues facing America. They go beyond the impending crisis and provide solutions. This team of workforce trend watchers and consultants has truly found the problem and offered practical solutions to address it.

Impending Crisis is written for business leaders and managers seeking solutions to look beyond the present and prepare for the future. This book is filled with research to backup the assertions and recommendations. More than 50 figures are used to support critical points. And, an extensive bibliography of valuable references is provided.

Reading Impending Crisis is not like reading many other business books. It is drawn from the research and experience of the authors who obviously know the subject and who care deeply about the issues facing the workforce and business.

I recommend this book to human resource professionals, business leaders, and students seeking to understand the workforce of tomorrow. Read it; discuss it; use it! The crisis is impending. So is the solution. Read the book; discover solutions!

Reviewed December 22, 2002 by John L. Bennett
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