The cute patterns in this book could be used for many different projects. Charts are large enough to use easily.

Literary St. Louis: A Guide features fifty authors who lived and worked in St. Louis in a guidebook that is ideal for visitors or city residents wanting to explore the diverse literary history of this fascinating region. Enhanced throughout with photographs, maps, illustrations, and colorful anecdotes, the reader is treated to a St. Louis Literary Chronology, commentaries by literary luminaries ranging from Mark Twain to Tennessee Williams, a locations list, bibliography, and a very useful index. If you are planning a trip to St. Louis, Missouri, then William Gass and Lorin Cuoco's Literary St. Louis: A Guide offers a unique, fun and informative approach to sightseeing and historical surveys.

This book was the primary text in a university workshop I just took on "Philosophy in Children's Literature." Being a big fan of Benjamin Hoff's "The Tao of Pooh," I approached the book with great hopes. Williams' tongue-in-cheek conceit is that the Bear of Little Brain is, in fact, the greatest philosopher that ever lived. All of western philosophy before Pooh was mere preamble and the twentieth-century existentialists were familiar with an heavily influenced by the "Great Bear."
I felt that Williams was more interested in being clever than in whatever other goal he had in mind. He presents the philosophical concepts too briefly and dismissively to be of much value. Worse, it seems he spends more space extolling the brilliant Pooh that really discussing how the (sometimes stretched past the breaking point) passages from A. A. Milne's stories relate to philosophies. Like any one-joke movie or TV series, it just got repetitive and annoying after awhile.

This book is funny. The author has a great sense of humour in making his arguement. I found it enjoyable even though there are philosophers that he obviously enjoyed writing about more. As a bonus, it serves as a great indroductory "philosophy for dummies" sort of book for a beginner to the subject like me.

"In which it is shown that all of western Philosophy is merely a preamble to Winnie-the-Pooh." This book proves, once and for all, that Pooh bear is in fact a Bear of Enormous Brain. It also shows how Eeyore is obsessed with the Platonic Forms, and how Christopher Robin is indeed stupid compared with the Great Bear. This book will delight all readers, not just Ursinian scholars (students of Pooh) and philosophers.

Gass is so cutesy he makes me puke. He consciously seeks to be "postmodern." Every sentence is an occasion for another metaphor which serves only to prove how good Gass is at coming up with unusual metaphors. When he reviews the works of others, he preens himself on enjoying their "subtleties" like any 4th-rate critic. Ick, ick, what a pri__!

The ideas behind the writing are nothing new. Basically the modern world has embraced TV and other media and abandoned literature, and Billy isn't too happy about this. Well, Billy, the philistines aren't listening to you. They can't even understand you. That's why they're philistines. Genuinely strong spirits don't need you to tell them.

His sentences strike defeatist-defiant and heroical-stoical poses; seldom could I find any genuine enthusiasm for any pleasure simple or complex. It's all forced and repulsive.

For genuine thought-poetry, read the Philosophical Investigations of Wittgenstein, not this literary pretender.

For anyone tired with the last fifteen years of "hip" postmodernism, this is an inspiring collection of darkly comic and seriously focussed essays ranging from the dillema of language and meaning to the innanity of literary prizes (which is especially juicy and hostile due to the fact that Gass, in the ranks of Pynchon, Gaddis, Reed, Coover and Ashberry, has never won one). Gass's prose cranks up the brain with lightening quickness, exercising synapses that haven't seen this much attention since German romantic criticism. He explores the epiphanies of recognition much differntly than the contemporary semioticians and psychanalysers because he expands his own inquiries in a playful use of language that demonstrates rather than deconstructs. Gass may not be our Walter Benjamin, but in an American literary landscape reluctant to relax and break wind he is our flatulator par excellence.

Absolutely no laymen, and few lawyers (only those nerdy, dweeby law professor types) could or would read this book. I was required to read it thirty years ago in law school. I was surprised to see it still in print. Granted, a lawyer should know what the ancient English forms of action were, but not in this detail (even with charts!). Only thing I can imagine worse or more boring would be to have sat through Professor Maitland's lectures, from which this book was derived. On the other hand, we have too many lawyers as it is. Maybe all would-be law students should read this before they applyy--could cut down on applications!

F.W. Maitland is a genius at showing how the present got here out of the dim past. To do so, he takes the reader to an ancient age when the "common law" that today we take for granted was still forming, and where the modern reader can barely recognize--let alone comprehend--the assumptions according to which the English people of a millennium ago lived their lives, ran their businesses, and settled their disputes. A subject seeking to right a wrong had few choices: submit to such archaic processes as trial by battle, trial by ordeal, or wager of law, on the one hand; or petition the crown for special, personal relief. The sovereign powers of judging and legislating were still undifferentiated, so obtaining judicial relief from the crown was an extraordinary process, almost as cumbersome as enacting general legislation. This book tells how the extraordinary process of royal justice evolved into the ordinary manner of settling private disputes, eventually supplanting the more barbaric forms of justice that previously held sway (although those forms were not fully abolished until the nineteenth century).

To commence a lawsuit in order to resolve a private dispute may seem perfectly routine today, but it was a fairly new concept in ancient England--at least at the level of the national government--and it did not grow up overnight. Ancient justice was usually a private, local matter, where the feudal lord held court and physical or economic power was often more important than law or right. The idea gradually developed that certain matters fell within the "king's peace," where the central government would consistently administer a generally applied policy without respect to wealth or power. These cases were at first exceptions to the rule of local justice, and so the "forms of action" grew up as the precise technical procedures by which the petitioner invoked the royal writ against local feudal lord's court. The local nobility was naturally jealous of any royal encroachment, so the forms of action were narrow and technical, and any deviation from the precise formula was fatal to the petitioner's case. Gradually, more and more cases fell within the king's peace, the writs grew more flexible, and--over the next half a millennium--the right of petitioning the central government for the redress of grievances became so common that the fledgling United States recognized it in the first amendment. But that process was a long slow painful one, and Maitland unmasks it with great care and detail, so that the evolution of an ancient and alien system of justice into the familiar modern system is evident to the modern reader.

If you are interested in the evolution of the English system of parliamentary government from the feudal era to the present, I also recommend Maitland's "Constitutional History of England."