I think David Foster Wallace is a brilliant writer, but can't really hit the target all the time. Either he is totally on top of something in describing it, or he writes himself into an intellectual loop that only he appreciates. When i read his stuff, i almost wonder if he is too intelligent for his audience, in that he tries to write about pop culture and similar themes that appeal to the average reader with such strength and knowhow that he seems like he's a genius stuck in a kid's mind and his descriptions of the kid's world can become too complicated for the kid to enjoy. That said, this book is well worth it, if not for the title essay on board a cruise ship which is hilarious then for the essay on amercian writing in the television age. There is a remark about irony in that essay which just blew my top off, it was great. The other notable essay is his "personal" review and account of a state fair, which is also equally funny. As for the others, i wasn't all that interested, in that i found them too wholly theoretical and dull. However, don't let this stop you, his writing is so original and fresh that its worth buying, not only for what it can give, but for what it exposes you to. Well worth it.

David Foster Wallace is a gifted writer and always a joy to read. His fiction is groundbreaking, and as this book proves, his nonfiction may even be better.

"A supposedly fun thing" is a collection of essays that are ostensibly stabs at journalism, the big joke being that Wallace is no journalist. He comes off as an endearingly neurotic-bordering-on-pathologically-self-concious red headed step child of Hunter S. Thompson. In fact, it could even be stated that this book is a sort of postmodern inversion of "The Great Shark Hunt", where Thompson's diving in head first to live inside the events he reports is replaced by Wallace's endearing midwestern unwillingness to get in the way and fear of making a nuisance and/or humiliating spectacle of himself.

Mixed in with all that, though, are startling on point revelations about the state of American Culture, what it means to be an american, the nature of art, and the human condition, which one normally doesn't expect from works about TV, Tennis, State Fairs, or Carribean Pleasure Cruises(in the title essay).

While it may not be as great an accomplishment as Infinite Jest (and the comparison to that magnificent book is the only reason this is getting four stars instead of five), "Supposedly Fun Thing" is without a doubt an incredible read and well worth the price of entry.

...but i really loved this essay collection.

Wallace is (IMO) a totally hilarious writer and the essays collected in this book are astute observations and analyses of a number of topics and events written wittily with a voice that is brutally critical yet somehow still compassionate. His accounts of things as varied as a day at a small county fair to his experiences going on a "luxury cruise" are filled with information, abstract analysis, biting wit, and self-examination. I laughed out loud frequently, yet it made me think about society and selfhood a lot as well. Highly recommended for fans of this sort of writing.

Why do so many reviews warn readers of the complexity of Infinte Jest? I found Infinite Jest to be a hundred times more readable than most of the stories in Girl with Curious Hair. The last story is ridicliously difficult to read and the ending makes no sense at all. Why would an author who deftly satirizes meta-fiction even in his first book (which some reviewers compared to the great metafictionists) purposefully try to be so difficult? Like the main character in Broom of the System tells Rick Vigorous: why don't you tell a real story instead of a story about a story? As a huge David Foster Wallace fan, I have to admit that I positively abhor Broom of the System and most of Girl With Curious Hair. They seem to be like cold, heartless exercises in how-avant-garde-can-I-be? and not at all pieces of writing that seemed like they were written by the author of Infinite Jest. But as my title eludes to, I am postively enamored with My Appearance. As an indictment of postmodern irony and its inability to truly accomplish anything, the story is flawless (well maybe the didactic dialogue can be a little off putting). More than any other living author, David Foster Wallace tackles the most important issues of the day to his generation and mine: drug abuse, depression, loneliness, irony, sex, and television. And, unlike other authors, he doesn't do it in a cute or ironic way. In an anthology of literary criticism from the 1950s, I read an article in which a critic expressed her feeling that writers of her decade had lost the ability to write about their culture and instead chose to focus on subjective explorations of individuals outside the bounds of society. I find current writers to be having the same difficulties, though instead of decadent novels about sex, drugs, and depression, todays writers write novels about mysterious byzantine paintings or soulless "satires" of the media in which the same sort of heartless humor and everyone's-a-whore philosophy found on late night TV is used to supposedly "skewer" that very phemenona. Those who are unafraid to face real, scary human realities like Wallace are the real heroes.

I read Girl With Curious Hair after Infinite Jest, so I thought I had some idea of what to expect. The stories in this book are so different from one another, and from Jest, that I shall now review them separately.
Little Expressionless Animals-This story blended the absurd business of game shows perfectly with the absurd story of a savant lesbian and her autistic brother. This was probably my favorite story.
Luckily the Account Representative Knew CPR- This story was the very crisp. It is short, and it is still detailed, but it is not an extravaganza like the others. It is a good story, though, and very clever.
Girl With Curious Hair- This story is hilarious and very perverse. My brother says it is pro-Republicanism, but I do not believe him. It may be too perverted for many people.
Lyndon- This is a good example of DFW's ability to recreate actual famous people. It is also a comment on the different kinds of love people have. I don't think that I understood it.
John Billy- John Billy is an excellent example of DFW's style. It is a simple story about the hometown hero Chuck Nunn Jr, told in a complicatedly Kansan dialect and with a bizzarre twist at the end.
Here and There- This is a story that I enjoyed very much. It is a dialectic account of the failure of a genius to love. It has an anti-ending similar to Infinite Jest, though, which many find troublesome.
My Appearance- This may be the best story in the collection. It explores the conflicting themes of sincerity/naivite and irony/cynicism. It also stars David Letterman.
Say Never- This story was about a man who cheats on his wife and then with his brother's girlfriend, and then confesses. It is told from his p.o.v., the brother's, and their mother's friend Labov. I didn't like this one that much, but the style is, as usual, amazing.
Everything is Green- This one is only two pages long and doesnt make any sense as far as I can tell. If it were more than two pages long, I might advise skipping it. But then, if it were more than two pages long, it might be good.
Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way- This novella made me think alot, about stories and postmodernism and commercialism. I liked it alot. However, like Barth's Lost in the Funhouse that inspired it, at the end I did not understand it.
On the whole, this is an excellent collection and there is something to like about each piece, except maybe Everything is Green. I recommend it and Infinte Jest to pretty much anybody.

DFW is a phenomenal writer. This book is a good introduction to him for those that may not have the time or attention span for Infinite Jest.

The title piece is probably the weakest story, with a stream of conciousness that just doesn't quite work right. Most of the other stories and beautiful and exhilirating, though. Westward the Course of Empire Makes Its Way (I think I got the title right, it's been a while) is the best short story I've read in years. The Jeopary Story (I can't remember the name; you'll know it when you get to it) is insane and beautiful.

This is a must read.

By the way, I just don't understand the unfavourable comparisons to Pynchon. I like Pynchon, but Wallace is on a different level. Comparisons are inevitable, I suppose, but to me, the similiarities just aren't that striking.

Photoshop 6 Web Magic is one of the best books on the market for presenting realistic and useful how-to's. By following the step-by-step instructions, anyone can recreate the exact project displayed in the book. A CD is included which provides everything a person needs to use the techniques detailed in the book. But the steps are written in such clear and simple to understand words that you could recreate the projects without the CD.

Embossing, background, re-touching, custom shapes navigation bars and animated attention getters are a few of the things you can learn from spending an evening with Photohop 6 Web Magic. These subjects are the things used in the real world. They can be put to use immediately on your web to give it a professional look. Even if you have never used Photoshop, this book has such good detail that you can walk right through the project without a problem.

A great addition to my Photoshop library. I loved working through Foster's "Photoshop Web Magic 2" tutorials, but this book really showed me how to utilize the new features in version 6. Great animation effects too!

I am teaching a high school course in web programming. The course will cover HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and web graphics. The ideal book on Photoshop for this class would: 1. be focused on Web graphics (Photoshop is not just a web tool, and other books spend a lot of time on other aspects). 2. be clear, with bite-sized examples and step by step instructions 3. include as topics creating background graphics, animation, and image map rollovers 4. be inexpensive Well, three out of four is not bad. Photoshop 6 Web Magic is too expensive to require students to buy it. Otherwise, it is what I was looking for. The price of the book probably is due to the high cost of color reproduction. If your idea of a book is large quantities of verbiage, then you will feel very cheated here. But for my needs, less is more. I can use the examples in this book to give students a sense of accomplishment. This should be better for them than a comprehensive treatise that is less accessible. Should you buy this book? My guess is that you will like it more to the extent that: --you prefer learning from examples to learning from theory --you prefer a book that is organized around particular problems or projects to one that is organized around the features of the software --you really want to focus on the Web aspects of Photoshop 6.0 I fit that profile, and I am pleased with the book.

The first part of this book tells about three orphaned children, Erin Law, January Carr, and Mouse Gullane. They all three end up on a river raft that January has made and encounter many adventures along the river. Upon arriving at the black Black Middens, they meet Heaven Eyes and her "grampa". They stay the night and Erin and Heaven Eyes become close friends, just like sisters. Even after being threatened by Grampa, Erin refused to leave. Eventually all four children become close. Mouse becomes Grampa's little helper and they both dig in the Black Middens in search of some mysterious "saint," which is found at the end of the book. Around the same time, January Carr found newspaper clippings telling the story of Heaven Eyes' past. The next day while the "ghosts" are about to work in the deserted area that Grampa and Heaven Eyes have been living in, a mysterious occurrence appears from Grampa's body. At the end of this book, Heaven Eyes goes to live with the other orphans at Whitegates and their futures look brighter.
This is a good book; however, we feel that more explanations were needed for the character Heaven Eyes and the ending of the book could have been more intersting and detailed.

Heaven Eyes was a good book. David Almond did a fantastic job on writing this novel about orphan children who are mad at the world and think that nothing is right. It all starts when Erin Law, January, and Mouse take off from the orphanage on a raft that January made. Maureen, the social worker at Whitegates always told them that they were damaged children without hope of surviving in the world. They were going to float on the raft all the way down the river, but something terrible happened! They got stuck in the "Black Middens" where they meet Heaven Eyes. Heaven Eyes is a curious girl who thinks that Erin is her sister and Mouse and January are her brothers. She takes them to her home, which is a warehouse where magazines and newspapers used to be made, but all the kids are frightened by the way she looks. Her fingers and toes have webs between them, and she's a pale white color...>Erin played the role of a gutsy, sensitive, curious girl. Mouse played the role of a shy but fearless and stunning character, and January, was strong and very hard working.
I liked this book a lot, I would give it 4 stars ****! Anyone who enjoys adventure books or just exciting books that you can't put down because you need to know what will happen next will really enjoy this one!

I think this is one of the best books I have read ever. It is a great story and I love the way they discover the girl Heaven Eyes. This book is great and it is hard for me to imagine someone not liking it.

David Almond is by far one of the best Authors I have ever read. His books are so good and not like anything I have read before. The Story is a mostly realistic enviroment but one element is added that is not real. (that being Heaven Eyes)

It is about 2 kids that run away from where they lived, a center for 'damaged' children. This time they take a raft and float down the river until they get stuck in the Black Middens, which is a muddy part of the river. A girl with webed hands pulls them out tells them they are her brothers and sister. When she shows them to her grandpa he says they are not her brothers and sister, That they are ghosts. (which he refers to real people as) Erin Law (the main character) comes to Love Heaven Eyes as her sister and when her Grandpa dies they take her back to the place they live. Heaven learns that she was not just a creature pulled out of the mud, that she had a mum and a dad and 2 brothers too.

This is one of the best books I have ever read and I would recomend it to almost any one.

This book shows adopters who treat their new family in a humane way--unlike closed adoption, which is a system that's both outdated and cruel. I wouldn't recommend it as the first book prospective adoptive parents read on the topic, because the extreme openness of the Howells' adoption might make them think they had to achieve such closeness right away, but I do recommend it be read. I cannot fathom the comments of the reviewer above. Is she even a triad member?

In short, a good book on an important topic.

I completly disagree with the review that Kirkus Reviews has posted. This book changed my life after I read it. Like Nancy, I became pregnant in high school with the only reasonable alternative to be adoption. After speaking with a number of agencies, I decided that I wouldn't be able to place my child in the traditional, closed adoption. I loved the idea of open adoption because I could continue to see my son and keep in contact with him while continuing on with my own life. When he comes of age and understands what the situation is, I will be able to tell him why I made my decision and why I placed him. He won't question my love for him since I have played such an active role in his life. I understand that some people, birth parents as well as adoptive parents, may not agree or feel they could be a part of this type of relationship, but we think it works just fine for us.

WE WERE GOING THROUGH AN OPEN ADOPTION THAT HAD IT'S MOMENTS. I HEARD OF THIS BOOK BECAUSE THE SUBJECTS WERE ON A TALK SHOW AND I THEN PURCHASED THE BOOK. IT KEPT ME GOING AND I WAS AMAZED AT HOW SIMILAR THE HOWELLS' CONCERNS WERE WITH OUR OWN. IT WAS NICE TO SEE HOW IT IS POSSIBLE FOR EVERYONE IN THE ADOPTION PROCESS TO WORK TOGETHER FOR THE BENEFIT OF THE CHILD INVOLVED. FOR THE REST OF THE CHILD'S LIFE THEY WILL NEVER QUESTION WHO THE ARE OR WHERE THEY CAME FROM. I ONLY HOPE THAT OUR STORY TURNS OUT AS WONDERFULLY AS THIS ONE DID.

This book is what is a 800 pages that let us drown into the life and toughts of one of the most brilliant architects in the whole world, Norman Foster.
This isn't a kind of book that describes the projects and works, this book give us the fundamental of the work, the process of construction. The cd that come together is a selection of works with animation and images, but is equal to the norman foster and partners site on the web, it could be more useful and different.
THIS IS A WONDERFULL BOOK ABOUT A GREAT ARCHITECT, THEYRE MASTERS , FRIENDS, AND PARTNERS.

David Kyle Foster has been there.

Hollywood Child Actor ... and Hollywood Male Prostitute.

Now as an Episcopal Priest, he ministers hope, healing,
and recovery to thousands across the world. His story,
his teaching, and his testimony to the healing power of
Jesus Christ the Lord is here in this excellent paperback.

I use this extensively in my support group ministry to
men struggling with life controlling sins and suggest
you find a copy of this book as quickly as possible.

Hopefully it will be reprinted soon.

Fr. Chuck Huckaby - ...

As a fifty-something gay man, I have taken many "recreational" trips to Latin America. This book captures the spirit of forbidden love in a hostile world. I can't think of a better gift for the Latino in your life!

..and if you didn't like IJ, you'll hate this one, though it is a shorter read. In Broom, we see the precursors of everything that's in IJ -- a wacky, fanciful alternate universe (Cleveland shaped like Jayne Mansfield, linguistic booster hormones in baby food, the G.O.D.), disjointed storylines told from multiple points of view, crackling and whip-smart dialog, absurd but still believeable characters (Rex Metalman who thinks his lawn is a WWI trench, Wang Dang Lang, the narcissist who thinks he's still in a rowdy frat, Wanda the imperious supervisor, and the inscrutable, machinating grandmother, whom we never really meet, Lenore Beadsman the first), outrageous plot occurrences (Vlad the Impaler, the irritable Cockatiel who becomes Ugolino the Significant, a Christian News Channel Anchor), and best of all (from my point of view) a whole bunch of frequently incoherent fun. This book was almost as much fun to read as IJ, and it has more narrative unity so I think it's a bit easier to follow, but at the same time I thought the ending was even more abrupt, and more difficult to figure out how things are intended to end up.

Funny, clever as hell, and a little bit precious, "The Broom of the System" is an examination of our postmodern culture from the inside out. Wallace looks at the cultural artifacts of our world, explodes them, and reassembles the pieces to create a kind of narrative arc from the chaotic blizzard of information - it's like watching cable TV, only everything means something, and adds up to some larger purpose. And if Wallace weren't such a teriffic writer, the thing wouldn't hold together; he is, though, and it does, and while there's a lot of intellectual depth to the work, it's also a ton of fun to read, funny and affecting, and Wallace's prose is some kind of inspiration, giving us, as someone said somewhere, THE literary voice of this decade (a feat all the more impressive given that the book came out in '87). It's not a flawless book: Wallce tends to go overboard and get a little self-congratulatory, and the thing isn't quite as focused as his later "Infinite Jest" (an even better novel, though more difficult), but it's more than made up for by the sheer innovation of the book. It may even be a metafictive dissection of the state of metafiction - it's that good, and it bears out that level of thought.

When I was in my early twenties, I read a lot of works by emerging young writers like Jay McInerney, Bret Ellis, and others. Looking back on it now, it seems unfair to put David Foster Wallace in the same category as those writers, as he is far more talented and imaginative.

"The Broom of the System" is Wallace's debut, and like most first-borns, it received the most love and attention. It's more accessible than "Infinite Jest" and can be read more easily in smaller chunks without having to figure out, for example, when the events being narrated actually took place.

There isn't much of a plot in "Broom," which is remarkable when one considers that the novel runs over 500 pages. Loosely speaking, it's about the travails of Lenore Stonecipher Beadsman, a 24 year old woman who works as a telephone switch operator for a magazine edited by her lover, Rick Vigorous, who is anything but. Her grandmother (also named Lenore) has disappeared from her nursing home, and Lenore is the only one who seems worried. But that's only a fraction of what the book is about.

It's full of stories within stories, some the sad submissions that Vigorous derides (but that are far better than his limp and self-indulgent attempts at writing), others little asides that seem irrelevant but aren't. Mostly, "Broom" is an exploration of language and ideas -- some chapters involve highly detailed descriptions of, for example, the Goldberg-like trail of a pebble; other chapters are entirely dialogue, with no description of who is speaking (but which is clear from context).

In other words, this is not a novel about sex and drugs (although there are sex and drugs), and it's not a shallow, Gen-Ex picture of excess. The nearest comparison I can think of, in a loose way, is Neal Stephenson's "Cryptonomicon."