An incredible tale told alternating between Agathon, an old Seer, and Peeker, the apprentice. There are many storylines going on because of the nature of the narration and as the story advances Agathon's past is thrust further and further into the light. Very unique subject matter, setting and style. You should read this book.

This very modern novel of a down and out pre-Socratic philosopher, self-exiled from Athens to Sparta, has stayed vivid in my memory for 35 years and more. It combines razor sharp satire, low comedy, a philosphical playfulness that reminds you of Borges, and an aching, bittersweet recollection of a life firecely lived. I can't think of a more continuously entertaining book. What is amazing is that it also draws the reader into a deep and uncompromising confrontation with the most serious questions of loyalty and love.

John Gardner gives us the view of the power of one man's life on those that he loves and those that he is employed to serve. Once a revered and respected "Seer", Agathon in his later years has been relagated to a decrepid one man sideshow of mystery and absurdity. As he took his fall from grace and stature, his personal life paralleled that fall. Through the choices he made in his life, he was forced to endure the consequences of his actions. For better or worse, he gained his wisdom and accepted dwelling in his fetid existence.

The two strands of the story--the life and times of a "wise man", and the rise and fall of political and social ideologies--demonstrate the degree with which these two human conditions are historically linked. As a result, it is often too late in the game that truths are revealed and roles are understood.

At the end of the book, Agathon achieves a certain level of freedom from who he is, in death, while hopefully revealing truths early enough to the "Peeker", who was his pupil.

"The Wreckage of Agathon" appears to be a metaphor for the life that he left in ruin and for the impact he had on a political system by virtue of the fact that he had existed and lived.

John Gardner's screenplay approach to writing novels pays off. This is his first novel based on the screenplay of a Bond film and he seems to have found his niche even though some of these events are a retelling from Ian Fleming's novel "Live and Let Die" with the same character being mangled again! However, this novel is based on Richard Maibaum and Michael G. Wilson's story for Timothy Dalton's James Bond in LICENCE TO KILL. It remarkably makes for an interesting read from an otherwise unsatisfactory film adding detail to scenes and venturing inside the head of the main character exploring his feelings and motivations. For John Gardner this is pretty inspiring stuff.

I know everyone hates the movie(I don't) that this book is based on. Well, if that's the case, read the book, as it is actually better than the movie(although the tanker chase just doesn't read as exciting as watching it). Most people dislike Gardner's book's when compared with Fleming's, but this one is top notch. The only problem is, Gardner goes to slightly...schizofrenic means to tie License to Kill in with the on-going Fleming series. Seeing as that Milton Krest appeared in an earlier(but almost completly unknown) Fleming Bond short story, and Felix Leiter got his leg and an arm bitten off in Fleming's Live and Let Die, Gardner has to resort to ignoring Milton Krest's death in "The Hildebrand Rarity" and the shark bites of Leiter's false limbs.

When I started the book it was interesting. Felix Lieter and his wife got killed by Franz Sanchez and his henchmen. Bond met Pam for a meeting that Felix was supposed to be at but he was dead so he couldn't be there.There were a couple of Sanchez'z men looking at them.

This is one of the best books from John Gardner's Bond series. The story concerns a headhunt for Bond where a variety of spies and assassins are out trying to capture and kill him, and in doing so, earning one million Swiss francs. Fast paced and very original.

I HAVE SEEN EVERY JAMES BOND MOVIE THERE IS TO SEE. I HAVE READ EVERY book by John Gardner! His Bond outings keeps the Bond Flag alive! Nail biting suspense! Great storytelling at its best in this great adventure!

The suspense is a mile a minute in this novel that sets Bond against SPECTRE for the last time. It has two women for oo7 to womanize and features him at his most efficient and ruthless. It also has a sexy double cross that makes it even more exciting to read.

Gardner has done it again by writing an engaging and thought provoking guide on leadership principles. When you compare Gardner to the other great philosphical writers, such as Drucker or Bennis, Gardner's outline and nine principals fill in the gap. Leadership is not power but it includes power. Leadership is not status but it may include status. Leadership is a constant self-evaluation.

Until I read this book, here's how I critiqued recent books on leadership: wish they would get some.

This is a book from one of the great observers of leaders in our country. Gardner emphasizes shared values and community building as the basis for great leadership. He also spends a great deal of time discussing renewal and how a leader must renew himself and his organization. Buy this book and Howard Gardner's Leading Minds.

Before discovering a dusty old hardcover copy of John Gardner's 'On Becoming A Novelist' in an infamous New York City bookstore (Gotham Book Mart), I was under the impression that every book related to the art of writing fit into one of three catagories. Either it focused on technique (Robert McKee's 'Story'), it offered encouragement (Anne Lamott's 'Bird By Bird'), or it took memoir form (Annie Dillard's 'The Writing Life'). I was wrong.

This book is a portrait of the writer as a young man (or woman). After years of teaching creative writing courses and wallowing around the publishing industry, Gardner acquired an opinion or two (major understatement). He correctly believed that writing novels is not a profession or a pasttime for the timid, and so he outlines the prototypical writer's 'character'. The purpose, of course, is to get the young writer to ask himself if he is really cut out for this. In the course of telling you what traits a talented writer must have (verbal accuity, a discerning eye, faith, etc.), Gardner offers up some brilliant insights into the craft. His discussion ranges from writer's block to writers' conferences, and while you may not always agree with him, his views are always thought provoking and perceptive.

In the end, this book may be mildly discouraging for the would-be writer who is currently on the fence. Gardner does not sugar coat his opinions, but I am glad for that. He has no qualms in informing his readers that worthwhile writing takes a great deal of talent, and not everyone has that talent. As he says, the worst that can happen after reading this book is that you will realize you don't have the right stuff, and you will move on to something else.

In reading this book, you get the impression that he was a brilliant writing teacher, as is evidenced by perhaps his greatest student, Raymond Carver. Carver wrote the brilliant introduction to this book, which familiarizes the reader with Gardner's personality and makes it easier to put the rest of the book in perspective. I, for one, would have loved to have Gardner as a teacher. As that is no longer possible (he died in a motorcycle accident years ago), this book is no small consolation.

Don't imagine that is book is out dated. It's actually better than most other books on writing out there today. Read it with your highlighter to capture some really helpful and inspiring advice. This is one you'll want to own.

There are lots of books out there on the mechanics of writing a novel. There are others that give you plot outlines, character sketches, or tell you how hard, hard, hard, or easy, easy, easy it is to build a career in writing.
Gardner, on the other hand, simply tells you how it is- at least from his point of view, and he makes it clear throughout that his advice to young writers is only one wall of the pigpen. The most refreshing aspect of this book is that it is geared to the "serious" novelist- i.e. someone who doesn't want to write books based on formulas or what sells, but just wants to write what they want to write. Gardner doesn't lie about the slim possibilities of making a living as a novelist, but he does give solid advice on how to make money without your job interfering with your work.
Though it was written more than twenty years ago, this book is still valuable today for the beginning writer- I'll keep it on my shelf for many years to come.

John Gardner wrote many good works, the Sunlight Dialogues being by far the best. In it he captures the range of hope and anxiety that made the 1960s such a thrilling and tormenting time to be alive. Using the small town of Batavia, New York, Gardner plunges the reader into the life of a prodigal son of the most prestigious family in town and that of the dedicated police chief. And do the intellectural sparks fly! The illustrations by John Napper are reminescent of those from the Yellow Book in the 1890s, by Aubrey Beardsley. There is a lot of subtle humor ("take a gun of, say, x caliber...") as well as dead-on observation of what makes people do outrageous things for perfectly logical reasons.
It's a roller coaster of a novel, so hang on and enjoy the ride. You might even want to go back for a second trip. I did.

I recently met a recent graduate of the State University of New York: Binghamton, an English major. He had never heard of John Gardner, author of the one American post WWII novel that stands comparision in scope and quality, if not import, with Middlemarch.

The social music of this novel was instantly clear, quickly catching me up in the world of Fred Clumly, the police chief of Batavia, New York. Clumly's encounters with "The Sunlight Man" (a prodigal son with the look of a goatlike drifter) comprise the main action of this story. Unlike the word-spewing outcasts of Gardner's other novels, Clumly stands at the center of orderly small-town American life and its whitebread restraint -- which Gardner gladly turns topsy-turvy. The Sunlight Man sits in jail for spray-painting LOVE on a highway abutment outside of town, but Liberation is the business of this man, who has studied the mysteries of the East and the tricks of the magician's trade. Is he a small-town madman on the skids or a Merlinlike scapegoat? To find out, Clumly listens to their taped dialogues for clues. The Sunlight Man, not to give up his mysteries easily, toys with the imagination of the town while Gardner once again proves himself a Shaper-poet whose fiction is as fecund as Grendel's bog.

I have read one other of John Gardner's books, Grendel, and was very impressed by it. "Freddy's Book" is alright, but I wouldn't put it on the same level as Grendel. One of the reasons I would not put it on the same level as Grendel is because the voice of the narrator is not as interesting, but many of the ideas are the same. That being said, Gardner does have an interesting way of including treatises on nihilism compactly into the characters of Swedish clergy. The world Gardner creates is flawless, and, particularly if you haven't read anything else by Gardner, I would recommend this book.

I've now read seven of Gardner's novels, culminating with Freddy's Book. Gardner possesses the innate ability to so exquisitely frame his narravtives (as per Conrad, et al) that the reader is forced (and willingly complies) with the need to operate on dual planes of understanding, constantly reevaluating and connecting the minutiae of the periphery to bulk of the text with stirring results.

Freddy's Book is at the same time a sweet tale and one of great consternation for the reader. Certainly, the consternation is not directed at the tale but the truth that lies within. The most difficult face to gaze upon is that of our own as reflected within our souls. Freddy's Book grabs us, indirectly, by the hair and bids us look away from the creative genius of Freddy and at its oafish, reflective cage, highlighting the Freddyism in all of us, the seeker of truth and fairness in world long bereft of both, in the higly-polished bars.

Freddy is a martyr. We are the flames that consume him at the stake of innocence. Read this book.

I bought a copy of Freddy's Book in a second-hand bookstore when I was 15 and I have been working on understanding it ever since. I will be accused of hyperbole, but Freddy's Book reminds me of Plato: one plot framed within another, and terribly profound ideas couched in a deceptively simple story. Freddy's book (if you haven't read it) is a novel within a novel containing 1: a picture of modernity and 2: an allegory of modernity's advent. I suggest anyone interested in the history of Western thought mull over this book a few times (if you can find it).

John Gardner does an excellent performance of enticing the reader from the start and seductively inticing you into the novel. The character develops throughout the novel in a complex manner wothy of John Fowles (more synergistic with "The Magus" than "The Collector" or "Daniel Martin." As a female reader and a professor of literature, I am more sensitive to pornagraphic situations than the many readers, however I found the sexual description of oral sex with prostitute "Donnie" to be expecially poignant and representative of my own liciduous upbringing in Indianna than most depictions in literature.

I've read this book seven times since it was published and have over the years hoarded copies because it is so difficult to find (and thus lend to those seeking a good read). It is dense, complex, thought provoking, and even frustrating. Gardner thrusts us immediately into the mind, emotions, and experiences of the protagonist. He creates an idea-filled treatise on modern life and its struggles, a mystery, a psychological ghost story, and a funny excoriation of academia. It deserves more exposure than it got, but perhaps demands more of the reader than most want to give to a book.

It isn't difficult to understand why this novel is out of print. As one of the characters remarks, "(People) don't *want* to think. People want secure, happy families, pleasant barbecue parties, predictable-in-advance nights for bowling and the opera." Well, you're not going to get those kinds of things in this claustrophobic, dense novel about a man's descent into insanity. Peter Mickelsson, separated, with a son on the run and an estranged daughter, is losing control of his life. Or has given up *trying* to control it - he can't face the daily tasks of paying bills, teaching classes, or dealing with the thousand minutia that occupy the rest of us. Instead, he allows himself the luxury of endless introspective episodes, dwelling at length on Nietzsche, Luther, occasionally Wittgenstein, or Kant. His career is failing, the IRS is breathing down his neck, and he can't afford his next meal. So he does what no one else would consider - purchases a rambling farmhouse in the Endless Mountains and sets to restoring it.

Mickelsson is by no means a sympathetic character, but in his refusal to face his troubles and the increasingly desperate world that envelops him, he could be a metaphor for society at large, eager for distraction, never actively considering the consequences of his actions in what is not an actual pursuit of pleasure as it is a passive *allowing* things to happen. He concludes, "Action was a problem. What was one to do if he knew every movement of the spirit was poisoned at the source?" Ah, the anguish, the soul-searching! Great, weighty BLOCKS on what it is to be human, what sorrows are ours, "Such was the fruit of all those eons of evolution, from hydrogen to consciousness: galaxies wailing their sorrow. Music of the spheres."

Search this one out. Read it on winter nights. It may offer some fuel for your own meditations. Serious books too often seem preachy, or worse, have an all-too-obvious agenda, are shrill, haranguing. What makes Mickelsson so absorbing is that he is UNcertain. That alone is remarkable anymore.

A joke is always funnier if you understand it, and the Alice tales are so full of inside jokes that you need someone to explain them. The Annotated Alice does just that. Carroll's tales are here, complete and unabridged, and the editors have painstakingly provided every piece of explanation and commentary you could ever wish for. Complete with Tenniell's original illustrations (although, alas, not colorized), this is a book any girl, little or big, can cherish.

Victorian-era readers of Lewis Carroll's delightful fantasies knew the poetry and song and public figures referred to; we moderns need to have the jokes explained to us, and Martin Gardner does a masterful job of it. We're fortunately past the more bizarre Freudian and Marxist interpretations of Alice that Gardner takes to task in his preface, but Gardner's annotations survive, as they should. The White Knight's encounter with Alice is heartbreaking when you know the background information, the lyric the White Knight's doggerel alludes to. By all means, give this to children at risk of being pithed by exposure to a certain indigo reptile; as children, they'll appreciate the story, and as they mature, they'll appreciate the commentary, and you'll have saved a budding intellect.

Alice in Wonderland is an extraordinarily fascinating and delightful story, replete with jokes, puzzles, and nonsense of the highest order. But in order to appreciate it fully, the modern, non-Victorian reader requires some guidance, as well as an adequate background on the man and the times that produced Alice. Martin Gardner, the greatest figure ever in recreational mathematics, provides readers with all the information they need to appreciate this story at its various levels. This book occupies a place of privilege in the library of every serious Alice fan.

Canadian newspaperman, John Green, beganing investigating reports of hairy, upright, apelike creatures in the late 1950's. This book was originally published in the late 1960's. Among the sightings discussed are some of the well-known, Sasquatch classics such as "The Albert Ostman story", "William Roe's sighting of a female Sasquatch on Mica Mountain in the 1950's" and other well known and lesser known sightings. Mr Green has personally investigated and interviewed witnesses in these cases and much more. This book provides a solid background of this subject from early sightings until the late 1960's. The Author worked with such well known investigators as Rene Dahinden, Bob Titmus, Dr Grover Krantz, and he also knew Roger Patterson. Mr Patterson's 1967 film of a reported female Sasquatch, in Bluff Creek, California is well known through out the world. This is also discussed in this book. This is a well written introduction to this subject by one the most reputable lay persons on this mystery. Readers are advised that Mr. Green has also written several other books on this subject subsquently, "The Year of the Sasquatch", "The Sasquatch File", and the encyclopedic, "Sasquatch, The Apes Among Us." This book is definetely one of the most important introductions to this subject, both for it's factual reporting and the amount of hands on investigation by the Author. It is a must own for anyone interested in this subject.

This is a very good and informative book by an honest man with knowledge about the subject that he writes about. Somewhat long in tooth. I wish more from this author would be forthcoming.

What I like about this book that it gives you early history on bigfoot sightings and footprints in the Pacific N.West. I enjoyed reading the stories on the William Roe and Albert Ostman incidents which they both actually encountered with the Sasquatches in the early 1900s. For any one who wants to read books on Bigfoot. I highly recommend to buy this one. These creatures do actually live in the N.California, Oregon, Washington and British Columbia Forests. Like finding a needle in a haystack except the needle (or needles) keeps moving and moving. Very clever creatures. Lenny's Gold Country Bigfoot Outpost (Private) Center, N.California