Not for everyone, but it will appeal to those with macabre humor.

I make it my job to read some pretty weird books--as an aficionado of science fiction and fantasy, I sometimes run into some doozies-- but this novel by Gray has to be one of the strangest that I've run into recently. The fact that this novel was not published in the genre, and won a couple of mainstream awards makes me wonder what else I'm missing in the "mundane" fiction shelves.

Poor Things is supposedly non-fiction, as illustrated by its full title on the title page: "Poor Things: Episodes from the Early Life of Archibald McCandless M.D., Scottish Public Health Officer, Edited by Alasdair Gray." But this is all part of its mystique. Gray has constructed a literary puzzle, a Frankenstein's monster of a book that takes its inspiration from that novel by Mary Shelley as well as the works of Robert Louis Stevenson and H.G. Wells. McCandless is the titular biographer, but the story is actually that of the eccentric Scottish doctor Godwin Baxter and his "creation," Bella Baxter, later known as Dr. Victoria McCandless. Set in Glasgow in the 1880s, the plot entails how McCandless met Baxter, how he then met Baxter's protege Bella and fell in love with her, her subsequent departure, and the circumstances of her return. To reveal any more would be to dilute the heavy stuff of the novel's innovative twists.

If Gray were writing with the Fantasy label stuck on the spine of his books, I would have termed this one a "steampunk" novel for its revisionist look at medicine and technology in a pre-auto world. Fans of Tim Powers and James Blaylock should definitely check this one out.

I just finished the book a few hours ago and it's the best book I've read in a while. "Poor Things" is the story of a lonely doctor, Godwin, who reanimates a beautiful woman's body who commited suicide (in a unique Frankenstein-esque fashion). Godwin's creation was meant to be for his own selfish desire but like every Frankenstein story it goes horribly awry. The books goes into detail bringing you into points of view from every character, not letting you forgot what happened, and using excellent foreshadowing. Make sure you read the extra writings at the end of the book to get the full impact of Alisdair Gray's skills.

This was a book that was hard to put down. Galloway does an excellent job of putting the reader inside of each scene through his vivid descriptions and he keeps you thinking about what could happen next.

The story begins peacefully enough, with a group of hunters putting up camp in a near-dreamlike setting in the north woods. For the main character, Chase Krause, it is only his second time hunting, and he is intent on making this time out his best. Although the first day of the hunt unfolds peacefully enough, by the second day the reader senses something is definitely wrong with the weather. Then, just when things are going great for Chase, the snow begins and it soon turns into a non-stop fight against the elements just to get back to camp. What happens next is heartbreaking, but by the end of the book only the reader and Chase know how sad it really is.

The book flows exceptionally well, and best of all, you do not have to be a hunter to enjoy it.

This book was well written. It had action, suspense, and originality. I would recommend this book be made into a movie. The characters were indivdually wonderful. I will buy this book for friends.

If you are searching for a book that you can share with your family, and especially a romance that you could give to your 13 to 17 year old daughter, this is an excellent choice. As an adult, I enjoyed it, but there was a little less tension than I would have liked. I gave it four stars because it is a very good choice for a young adult. The characters were very likeable, but, as I mentioned, there might have been a little more excitement, without losing the innocence.

If you want a really sweet feel good romance, then this book is for you. I fell in love with this book and the characters. Mary Beth and Cameron are just so right for each other from the minute they meet as he seeks to find a buried treasure and she, with his help, make repairs on her house, while they are discovering love with each other and doing what they want to do in their lives. This is a very good book that will make you feel good inside!!

Plot description on this book's Amazon.com page. Fast paced, action filled and great story. I would have to say the story is as much about Flagan as it about Galloway. Mr. L'Amour weaves the story, the place and the times together so well. He always seems to throw a little romance in along with the action and always treats his characters with respect, they always stay true to their personal honor. Try this one

one of the lessons that this book taught me was that if you work hard that you will always sucseed .i also learned that if one desires somehting like flagan sackett did [the piece of land], that one will usually get it.another lesson that the book teaches is that hard work pays off, and that never giving up pays off.

An earlier review made me think this book was about a little girl with male homosexual parents. I bought the book as a gift for a family with two homosexual fathers. I was disappointed to find that the book is NOT about a girl with homosexual parents. It is about a little girl whose parents have divorced and her mother is remarried: her "two daddies" are her biological father and her stepfather. The book explores Jennifer's attempts to maintain relationships with both "fathers." It is a nice (not amazing) treatment of this topic.

Galloway conveys the difficult subject of this alternative lifestyle in a way that children can understand without feeling singled out in the world. Children should not be persecuted for their parents' choices. Galloway illustrates to children that are still okay even though their parents are often judged as not. This book is enjoyable, understandable and easy enough to read so children can read along as well. Every parent, homosexual or not, should buy this book and read it with their children. I believe that even a simple act like this can help end the fight against homosexuals.

What is consciousness? Where does it go when we die? Ronald Russell explores the answers to questions like this in his latest book, The Vast Enquiring Soul. A graduate of Oxford University, Russell has written thirteen other books. He describes this one as "a journey of exploration into the further reaches of consciousness." He says that consciousness is "our ability to know and understand, to be aware of ourselves and the world around us."

As part of his explorations, Russell delves into matters like psychokinesis (mind over matter), distant healing, remote viewing, and near-death and out-of-body experiences. His research has led him to the conclusion that consciousness "doesn't reside merely in the brain, but within our bodies, the earth, and the universe."

He relies not only on his own studies, but also those conducted by others from a variety of disciplines. He very neatly weaves all the available information into a tapestry of science, philosophy, theology, poetry, history, and the paranormal.

Russell says that consciousness is a part of everything that happens from before we're born until after we die. He asserts that consciousness isn't the same as soul--that our souls are the essential part of us that holds all our aspects, including mind, body, and consciousness, together. He urges the scientific world to consider the soul, and consciousness, when doing research; and advocates a new branch of study devoted to learning more about both the soul and consciousness and their roles in making us who and what we are.

"The more we can discover about our consciousness," Russell says, "the more of our potential as human beings we are likely to realize." The Vast Enquiring Soul is essential reading for all those interesting in exploring the most interesting frontier of all--their own consciousness.

Ronald Russell defines consciousness as "our ability to know and understand, to be aware of ourselves and the world around and beyond us." He takes as his subject all circumstances in which our consciousness moves into altered states and seems to extend its reach beyond material reality into other realms. "The work and personality of the late Robert Monroe" and The Monroe Institute (TMI) programs are acknowledged as his inspiration. Extraordinary experiences of ordinary individuals--usually discounted by established science--are the foundation of Russell's case.

Russell addresses the core issue of how mind may influence matter and transcend space and time by scrutinizing psychokenesis, telepathy, premonition, precognition, deja vu, and remote viewing. He theorizes that distant healing, which affects a person without physical contact with the healer, may be a variant of telepathic communication. The near-death experience(NDE)is considered from the perspective of those who have "been there; done that" and from the perspective of researchers.

Communication with the "unbodied" and its implications receive in-depth considerations, from biblical prophecy, through the "auditory hallucinations" of the mentally disturbed, to the "voices" heard by the dying, to spiritualism and finally modern channeling. He personalizes the whole spectrum with the reminder that "...most of us in a variety of situations have heard ourselves say something pertinent or even profound without any forethought..."

Transcendence, which catapults the "separate" self into a state of fusion with all that is, seems closest to Russell's heart. His examination of the phenomenon is replete with examples drawn from the lives of authors, housewives, physicists, philosophers, astronauts, poets, scientists, TMI GATEWAY VOYAGE participants, and even death-and-dying authority Elisabeth Kubler-Ross.

Russell makes quite an impressive case for his major premise: subjective experiences such as ESP, telepathy, precognition, psychokinesis, NDEs, OBEs, and the transcendent moment, as well as abilities such as remote viewing, distant healing, and channeling, are reliable doorways into the dimensions in which consciousness reigns supreme. His arguments are closely reasoned and the abundance of personal accounts and academic references makes key resources readily accessible. If you truly hunger to know, be assured that there is quality nourishment here for your own "vast enquiring soul."

In The Vast Enquiring Soul: Explorations Into The Further Reaches Of Consciousness, Ronald Russell argues compellingly for the including of the human soul into everyday thought and conversation, that any scientific concept of the world will remain incomplete unless taking the soul into consideration. Russell evaluated current consciousness research by scientists, philosophers, paranormalists, theologians, poets and historians, and found that consciousness doesn't reside only in the brain, but within the whole body, the earth, and the universe. The Vast Enquiring Soul is an informative, articulate, fascinating, and at times inspiring, contribution to metaphysical studies and the nature of human consciousness.

Each chapter focuses on a different environmental problem, and reveals the various ways in which it can influence a battle's outcome. A section on storms, for instance, shows how the elements randomize success: in the 12th century, a typhoon ruined Kublai Khan's attempted invasion of Japan, yet relatively calm seas helped assure the Allied victory on D-day hundreds of years later. Another chapter compares and contrasts the dense forests of the Battle of the Wilderness during the Civil War with the intractable jungles of Vietnam. One lesson this book teaches is that bad weather usually favors defenders: the Germans used fog and precipitation to their advantage during the Battle of the Bulge, as did the Viet Cong during the siege of Khe Sanh. The authors draw a few predictable conclusions--planning, logistics, leadership, and tactics are all critical, they say--but on the whole they provide a fascinating look at how wind, clouds, waves, rain, snow, mud, sand, heat, hills, mountains, and islands (to name a few factors) affect war.

As one might surmise from the title, the twelve chapters and twenty-five case studies in this books all examine the role and importance of weather and terrain in warfare. Most of the chapters are fairly straightforward in what they cover: storms, wet, fog and clouds, seasonal change, forest and jungle, river crossings, peninsulas and coasts, islands, heat and humidity and the desert. These are somewhat less operate independently of each other and occasionally overlap. Each chapter begins with an overview on the science (ie. geography or meteorology) of the chapter's topic, for example, how and why fog forms, before proceeding into two case studies drawn from military history. The non-scientifically inclined can skip these introductory sections to the chapters and not miss anything. Two more broad chapters cover "terrains and corridors" and how "glaciers shape the land." and are really don't work as well as the other ten. These two subjects are broad and more or less self-evident, making them noticeably weaker than the rest of the book. The case studies are largely drawn from modern Western military history. Eleven of the case studies are from World War II, three from World War I, three from the U.S. Civil War, and three from Vietnam, one from Korea, one from the Sinai/Suez War, one from the Napoleonic era, one from the Mongol invasions of Japan, and one on invading Russia that spans several episodes. The overall lessons are fairly predictable: military planning and logistics must account for weather and terrain, both on a strategic and tactical level. One would expect the explosion in computer weather modeling and terrain mapping in recent years would alleviate many of the problems described in the book, and it would have been nice to have a chapter at the end discussing this. Still, it makes for a fascinating mix of military history and geography. The maps and diagrams are top-notch and the design of the book makes it a pleasure to read.

Is this a book on geography for a military strategist or a study of military geography for a general geographer? I'm inclined to say it is both.

The words, "...couldn't put it down ...", may be overworked but how often can they be applied to what is, basically, a text book?

The book is divided into 12 chapters, each based on an element of physical geography (terrain, weather, climate, sea coasts, etc.) Each chapter gives a very general background on the geographic element (all very much in non-geographer language) and then gives the chronology of two or three battles showing how the physical feature shaped the battle's outcome. The range of battles go from Kubla Khan's 1274 attack on Japan to Khe Sanh, Viet Nam in 1968. They stretch the globe from Iwo Jima in the Pacific to Gettysburg in Pennsylvania. It is a delightful combination of geography and military strategy.

As I am writing this, the world is discussing the possible intervention of ground troops in Kosovo. I hope the generals making the decisions have a sound geographic background. (Maybe Amazon.Com will send the Pentagon a few copies of this outstandingly readable work.)

While the advice in this book is valid, anyone who is not profoundly Christ-centered may find themselves uncomfortable with the Bible references and Christian focus on every page. If you're looking for a secular goal-oriented book to motivate yourself with, I'd suggest checking out "The Power of Focus" by Jack Canfield, Mark Victor Hansen and Les Hewitt. (The Chicken Soup for the Soul series guys). Packed with information, yet humorous enough to keep you reading, it's twice this book without the preachy-ness! (and not at twice the price, either).

...to go to the next level in every area of my life. I receive the scripture references in this book. There are areas in my life that need DISCIPLINE and this book gives me spiritual and natural insight to realize it is the will of God for me to be disciplined, in order to have what the Word of God say I can have. I believe I have been called out of mediocracy into great exploits. Dare to Discipline Yourself is a great tool to use(read) continually which will set me on the right path, in Him. I give this book a five star rating. Eventhough, all topics may not be a challenge for me at this time, I believe I can read all to relay to someone else. Thank you for making available this priceless treasure.

My friend has this book and I read it upon his recommendation. After reading this book, I came to Amazon.com to buy a copy for myself. I found it to be inspiring and a dare to discipline yourself! If you believe you are disciplined and don't need this book, my friend, let me tell you that you do need this book! This book will open your eyes! God Himself has inspired the writing of this book!

Maybe I missed something, but this didn't do a lot for me. It's a jumbled up ragbag of ideas which don't fit together coherently while its characters are unlikeable and without much individuality.
The story starts in a depressing world called Unthank, and follows the character Lanark as he arrives in town. He craves for sunlight in a world where there is none and since he's fast turning into a dragon he decides to throw himself down a large mouth in the ground (as you do...).
He comes out the other end in an institute where he is cured of his dragonhide and becomes a doctor for a short while before, like me, getting very bored and frustrated with the place.
So he decides to leave but that's quite dangerous involving a trip across an intercalendrical zone. Inevitably he leaves the hospital and takes along his girlfriend who, unsatisfyingly, doesn't seem to display any affection towards him at all.
In the intercalendrical zone, time moves erratically, and his girlfriend discovers she's heavily pregnant. They return to Unthank in the expectation that shortly the place will be swallowed by an even larger mouth and they'll be transferred to a sunnier land.
But Rima leaves Lanark, taking the (talking) baby with her. Lanark is then sent on a mission to return to the institute to ask them to save Unthank, which has suffered a pollution spill that threatens to destroy the place. At the institute he is stitched up by his rivals and finds time to meet the author of the book, who spends a chapter trying to explain what the hell the book is about. Lanark returns from the institute to Unthank in time to witness the place destroyed.
Books one and two in the middle tell the story of Duncan Thaw (Lanark before arriving in book three) and surprisingly this part of the book is a lot more readable. The chapters follow Thaw as he grows from a child to a sickly adult. There are some parallels with the Lanark story (Thaw is emotionally inhibited, he suffers an illness as a result, he can't keep hold of the girl he likes). In my opinion, if this story stood alone it would be a much more satisfying read. It's very reminiscent of the writer Iain Banks who no doubt was inspired by Gray. Interesting also the split between contemporary fiction and sci-fi which Banks also practices. However, in my opinion, a book like Walking On Glass by Banks is far superior to Lanark in that it made me think about the connections between the strands of the stories.
I suppose my review is a little biased because I'm not a huge fan of science fiction any more. But since the author asserts in his incarnation as god in the final chapters that he doesn't write science fiction I suppose I shouldn't worry.

First published in 1981 and set in the dystopic cities of Unthank and Glasgow, Lanark: A Life In Four Books by Alasdair Gray is an emotional and starkly brilliant saga about the struggle to love despite contradictions and vices in human nature that attack bonds of care or trust. A bleak yet compelling vision of survival and the endless search for something more in life, Lanark consists of parallel tales of an eponymous hero living in a bizarre city of the future called Unthank, and Duncan Thaw, a young Glaswegian of the twentieth century. This edition of Lanark is enhanced with a new foreword by novelist Janice Galloway and includes Alasdair Gray's "Tailpiece" which serves as an unusual addendum to this surreal and highly recommended novel.

I don't know if no one has reviewed this tome for fear of where angels tread lightly or what, but I have to say something about this amazing book, if for no other reason than to start a dialogue.

I first heard of this book from a Village Voice article about the republication of "Lanark" in a four-volume set. The structure of this edition is that it begins with Book 3, followed by the Prologue, Book 1, Book 2, and Book 4 is divided by an Epilogue that takes place 4 chapters from the end. This convoluted structure actually makes the book rather fascinating, in that Gray has said that he wishes for the book to be remembered in a certain order, which is why he put "Book 3" first. This edition also features artworks by the artist at the front of each Book, and the Epilogue features some interesting typesetting.

For readers of science fiction, this book will offer an interesting challenge, for books 1 and 2 are more a coming-of-age of the artist sort of affair. Books 3 and 4 center around the Lanark character, who is called Thaw in 1 and 2. The Thaw books reminded me many times of Maugham and Joyce, while 3 and 4 seemed positively Dickian. (Not to be confused with Dickensian, which slant-applies, if at all.) There's a lot of ferocious literariness going on in this book, yet there's all sorts of humor. And also a slice of life in a city I know absolutely nothing about. The depictions and commentary on Glasgow reveal a lot about the self-consciousness of 2nd-tier and below cities--the cities that are not New York, London, Florence, Paris, Moscow, etc.

I found this a wise book, filled with difficult ideas and a morose feel for the future of mankind and the difficulties of being a solitary individual in the anomie-infested modern civilization. Book 4 I think is a fascinating attempt to turn Hobbes's Leviathan into a sentient being, as viewed by the hapless adventures of the eponymous hero. I will be thinking about this book for a long time.

After all the good reviews I read of this book I thought I would love it. Usually I enjoy biographies. I found that this book is written in a style that makes the story a bit difficult to follow. I gave it my best shot but I did not enjoy it at all.

Janice Galloway, Clara

The life of Clara Wieck Schumann, the most celebrated piano virtuosa of her time, wife of Robert Schumann and best friend of Johannes Brahms, has inspired writers, psychologists, feminists and filmmakers since Clara's death in 1896.
Clara and Brahms knew they would figure importantly in music history and they were discreet, returning a lifetime of correspondence to the writers, carefully selecting the letters they left for biographers and even, in Clara's case, repressing the report of an autopsy done on Robert Schumann. Because of this orderly editing, many details of the lives of these three have been left to the imaginations of those who followed them. Even a book by the youngest Schumann daughter, strongly biased and unfortunately nationalistic, has to be read with some caution.
Thus Janice Galloway's Clara, which does declare itself a novel rather than a biography, should certainly be regarded as fiction, and strongly slanted fiction at that. Clara's teacher-father, Freidrich Wieck, is depicted throughout as a villain; Robert as a madman and Clara as a victim of the two. Brahms, though he was a central figure throughout Clara's life after Schumann's death in 1856, enters the story only in its last chapters and is depicted as a saintly hero.
Although I enjoyed Janice Galloway's style and her story, her depiction of these personalities was strongly at odds with the view of them which we have from their letters, from previous biographies, and, above all, from their compositions.
Even Schumann's late musical works show a genius struggling with but not vanquished by dementia. Biographers have speculated as to the cause of this malady and have guessed at schizophrenia, syphilis, alcoholism (Galloway seems to lean toward this last diagnosis.) Whereas Clara, editing Schumann's music for publication, wished to withhold some works from the fear that they were the result of an unbalanced mind, Brahms insisted that the pieces were musically innovative and worthwhile. He wrote a set of variations on the theme Schumann transcribed "from the angels" in the older composer's final days.
Schumann's autopsy report suggested an inherited (genetic) disorder, and a family tree would suggest something like Huntington's chorea, but somehow this possibility has not intrigued biographers. A subsequent report published at Clara's request blamed overwork for Schumann's dementia. The august biographer Harold C. Schonberg in Lives of the Great Composers says that above all, Schumann was "pure"--a state reflected throughout his music, but not necessarily interesting in terms of music gossip.
One invented utterance Galloway put in the mouth of Schumann was so offensive to me that I actually deleted it with whiteout before continuing to read the book. "Mendelssohn is Jewish," Galloway had Schumann say as if that statement revealed some negative opinion about the character of Felix Mendelssohn. There is nothing in all the literature to indicate that Schumann even knew Mendelssohn was Jewish, much less that it mattered to him one way or the other. One of Schumann's pieces in "Album for the Young", a heartbreaking elegy entitled only with three stars, was written just after Mendelssohn's death. The youngest of Clara and Robert's children was named Felix, after their friend, mentor and colleague. As a musician, I consider invention such as this unfortunate sentence libelous to a human being no longer able to defend himself.
I do recommend Galloway's book, however; it has a vivid, easy, original style and some interesting quotations garnered from other books. The reader with more than a passing interest in the lives of the Schumanns and in Brahms, however, should take more seriously the recordings of their works, their letters, and the letters, comments and dedications of their contemporaries.

With single-minded determination, born from years of mental discipline, thirty-seven-year-old Clara Wieck Schumann, dressed in black, took the arm of her friend, Johannes Brahms, and was escorted to the piano, where she would begin a new phase of her life, as a widow and the sole support of the eight children she bore composer Robert Schumann. Clara was well schooled for her life of self-denial and duty. A brilliant pianist and former child prodigy, she had been controlled by her domineering father, and she had had to sue him so that she could marry Robert Schumann, an unstable composer whose own demons exerted control over her life.

Robert Schumann's instability, according to the author, began at a very early age. As a young man, he believed that he was inhabited by two people, Florestan and Eusebius, and he often alternated marathon composing sessions (once producing 27 pages of music in a single day) with times in which he could find no inspiration at all. He had to have silence when he was working, and he was inconsistent in his behavior, often blaming Clara for small infractions over which she had no control. She had no life of her own. She was the primary bread-winner in the family, giving concerts regularly, despite the arrival of eight babies and the difficulty of practicing without disturbing Robert. Unappreciated and unrecognized by the public, Robert became frustrated and depressed, eventually admitting himself to an asylum, where he died in 1856, at age 46.

The ill-starred love story of Clara and Robert Schumann is as romantic as the music of Schumann and his contemporaries, but Galloway keeps this novel on a factual level, as much as possible. There are no flights of fancy here, no imaginative soaring into the stratosphere of romance, and no attempt to recreate the passionate feeling of their love or of their music. She has done enormous research into their lives and presents her novel as if time and circumstance are being filtered through the consciousness of Clara, her father, or Robert. Her recreation of domestic situations and scenes, combined with what the various participants have said about them in their (real) diaries and journals allow her to reflect their inner turmoil while remaining fairly objective as a historian.

Galloway's novel is thoroughly researched, full of information about the Schumanns, and sympathetic to Clara's enormous personal burdens. She is largely successful in bringing Clara to life. We never see Robert as a "normal" person, however, and the reader remains at a distance from him, observing, rather than feeling, what is happening to him. Yet Clara lived for forty years after Robert's death, and this reader would have appreciated a brief Afterword telling what she did during that time. Tied inextricably to Robert throughout their marriage, one can only wonder if she eventually found happiness on her own after his death. Mary Whipple