Any person or small group of people in business for themselves should apply the basic principals that this gentleman, Peter Montoya, suggests. Simply think of any celebrity or success, and their "brand" labels them immediately. Included in examples given in the book are Michael Jordan, Martha Stewart and Oprah Winfrey, but also consider Jim Carey, he stuck with his outlandish antics through the years and marketed those antics - look where he is. Consider Thomas Kinkade, he stuck to painting light, look what he's known for - "The Painter of Light". A last example is Weird Al Yanchovic - enough said in the name.

This book is easy to read and easy to apply with an advertising company available to help put its applications into the life and future of your self and your business.

Whether you are an independent professional interested in marketing your identity and services, or someone who is interested in improving their perceived worth at home or work, The Personal Branding Phenomenon is an invaluable tool.

Montoya points out clearly in his book how you can use your own strengths and identity traits to promote, improve, and shape a Personal Brand.

And it makes sense.

I can see how harnessing the power behind Personal Branding will be an awesome way to position myself to increase my freelance career and move up the corporate ladder at work.

As a manager, I can see how Branding can help my employees and make them more successful.

It's organic. It's natural. It's great.

Also, the book is very well written. It has great examples and comparisons that give readers an even better understanding of the philosophy.

This is a must read for small business owners.

It's a great book and well worth the money.

Not being one trained in marketing, I hoped Peter Montoya's book would guide me in developing a marketing strategy for my small business. It did much more than that. I now see how every area of my life influences my personal brand whether I am aware of the principles and insights in Peter's book or not. It has inspired me to take action.

I expected a serious book such as this to be work to read but it entertained me throughout. I particularly enjoyed the insight into why the personal brand of a person like Martha Stewart is vulnerable to revelations inconsistent with their image.

This omnibus edition of all the Lord Peter Wimsey short stories consists of the stories from _Hangman's Holiday_, _In the Teeth of the Evidence_, _Lord Peter Views the Body_, and _Striding Folly_ (the final 3 stories of _Lord Peter_), those of _Striding Folly_ being the most difficult to get outside the omnibus edition. See reviews of the individual collections if you want a more detailed discussion of the contents. If you get the omnibus _Lord Peter_, be aware that it contains the complete text of _Lord Peter Views the Body_, while HH and Teeth contain non-Wimsey stories that are worth having. If you're interested in an unabridged audio version, check out those for the individual volumes that have been cannibalized for the omnibus edition; Ian Carmichael has narrated unabridged recordings of most of the short stories, with the exception (so far) of a few that turn on visual clues given in the text.

I find the 2 stories from Teeth uninteresting, but those from HH are enjoyable. The stories from _Lord Peter Views the Body_ all predate the events of _Strong Poison_ - that is, they occur years before Lord Peter met Harriet Vane. In fact, some occur within two years of the end of WWI, such as "The Vindictive Story of the Footsteps That Ran", set in June 1921. For the most part, most of my favorite Lord Peter short stories fall into this group, with the exception of "The Undignified Melodrama of the Bone of Contention", an enormous (and to me, tedious) novella wherein the will of a recently deceased old reprobate was deliberately designed to create bad blood between his sons. Apart from that, we have such gems as the Attenbury diamond case, mentioned in later years as having started Lord Peter on his hobby of detection, a case featuring Lord St. George as a child staying in the Piccadilly flat (and featuring the first appearance of Bill Rumm, who later appeared in _Strong Poison_). We even have "The Fascinating Problem of Uncle Meleager's Will", wherein Lady Mary persuades her brother to help a friend with Red politics find her uncle's missing will. (It's much more entertaining than Hercule Poirot's only foray into a case of this kind, and more sophisticated than Jane Marple's only such case - Uncle Meleager had a wicked sense of humor.)

Harriet Vane appears only in the last two stories, both from _Striding Folly_: "The Haunted Policeman" and "Talboys", neither involving murder and both set after the events of _Thrones, Dominations_.

Each story is self-contained, but there is progression.
Lord Peter himself, and most of the other characters are self-efacingly described in a very endearing way.
The plot twists are mostly "high-brow" and often quite technical. Especially impressive the the female author of her time period so astutely describes such stereotypically manly things such as motorcycle enthusiasts, smoking-room society, poker playing, etc.

This book has a selection of short Lord Peter stories that are as entertaining as always, but the reason to buy it is the glimpse it offers of Harriet and Peter as parents. The final story takes place at Talboys, and it centers around the Wimseys' domestic life. Lord Peter's eldest does not disappoint in his spirit or his intelligence, and Peter and Harriet fulfill all expectations as they lovingly handle their children.

Peter Spier certainly deserves all the praise he has received for this lovely book. Still, I have to admit to feeling heartbroken -- even at my age -- by the pictures of the doomed animals for whom there is no space on board, watching the Ark forlornly as the waters rise around them.

Yes, that's how the story goes, but perhaps parents might want to decide in advance how to respond if their child asks anxious questions about what will happen to the animals left outside.

This book won Peter Spier the coveted Caldecott Medal for the best illustrated children's book in 1978. Most Caldecott Medal winners enhance the story with illustrations. But a few transcend the written material by becoming the story. Noah's Ark is of the latter category.

The book opens with a scene of brutal war on the left hand page. On the right hand page is the image of Noah tending to his agricultural tasks. The words at the bottom of the page say simply, " . . . But Noah found grace in the eyes of the Lord." Next, there is a translation of a Dutch poem written by Jacobus Revins that tells the briefest outline of the Noah saga. The rest of the book until the last page is wordless. The final page shows Noah after the flood tending to his agriculture with the words, " . . . and he planted a vineyard."

The illustrations provide nonverbal stories about Noah. You see the enormous task it was to build an ark, the difficulties of rounding up all the animals, the even greater challenges of taking care of them during the flood on the ark, and the process of returning to the land as the waters receded. By using only illustrations, you and your child have some latitude as to how you wish to interpret the story. You can be very literal, or you can be more poetic. A lot depends on how sensitive your child is. I can remember feeling frightened as a young child to realize that God could choose to destroy virtually all life on Earth.

The illustrations are brilliant for portraying perspective. The ark is made to appear enormous. Yet there are some illustrations during the flood where the ark is clearly tiny in the context of the worldwide ocean.

There are a lot of stories within the story. For example, the sequence where the dove is released and brings back a sprig of leaves from dry land is quite interesting. Many themes are carried out in a number of ways as well, including the notion of being a loyal servant. You can have many wonderful discussions about why God directed Noah to act as he did, and what the lessons are for today.

The colors and use of pen to fill in details are quite rewarding, as are the delicate individual watercolor images within thoughtfully planned out compositions. Noah has a benign and spiritual appeal in these representations that make him seem like someone you would want to spend time with. Rather than seeing him as remote and hard to understand, your child will probably appreciate Noah as a version of a friendly, supportive grandfather. The promise for the future is wonderfully captured by a gorgeous rainbow at the end. The overall feeling of these cartoons is not unlike the work of Walt Disney's studio animators during the 1930s.

One potential way to enjoy this book even more is to write out your own version of the story, as dictated by your youngster. As she or he matures, you can write new versions that your youngster creates. He or she will probably enjoy seeing these in the future, as a wonderful momento of growing up.

Another interesting alternative is to take another well-known story, and to create a totally illustrated version with no words.

Get to the heart of any important story, in order to grasp all of its meaning.

My 4-year-old son was completely smitten with this book the first time we read it. He loved to look at all the details; the illustrations are wonderful. The book beaufully portrays God's vengeance and God's ultimate love. What struck me was the accuracy of the biblical story that so many of today's Noah's Ark books overlook or twist: - the length of time the flood waters took to receed - enough time for the animals to procreate (especially the bunnies!); - that God chose Noah, not that Noah was some sort of savior who, on his own, saved mankind; - the depravity of humanity (a city on fire); - the mess and smell of animal waste and the hard work to care for the animals - it shows Noah shoveling manure.

I strongly recommend Peter Spier's "Noah's Ark" for anyone who is interested in teaching children biblical truths so often secularized in today's world and also for the beautiful illustrations and details.

Hogg's book was one of many 'Gothic' doppelganger novels produced at the time, as editor Cuddon makes clear in his introduction. What sets 'Sinner' apart is the fierce, unforgiving, saturnine, phlegmatic, terse, Biblical, paganistic, ugly beauty of the vocabulary and phraseology (Hogg was a shepherd and a poet), suited to a narrative lashed with hate, murder, bigotry and terror, whose sheer violence connects it with another shocking Gothic one-off, Lautreamont's 'Maldoror'; the way the 'double' theme of the novel is embedded not just in the plot, but in the rich formal patterning, from character groupings to the religiously and politically divided Scotland of its setting; and the wide literary adventurousness as a whole which, in its proliferation of stories, framing devices, and self-reflexivity create a labyrinthine, elusive, very modern text.

In recent times the genre of the psychological thriller has gained immense popularity. But it's a hardly a new art, as anyone familiar with Stevenson's famous Dr. Jekyll and Hyde will be aware. James Hogg's work does not enjoy the same legendary status as Stevenson's classic, but it is a worthy predecessor of its famous counterpart, anticipating it in many ways. In short it's very theological and psychological portrait of a man who is misled by the devil, evolving into a supernatural thriller. Published in 1824, it is widely regarded as the best work of the Scottish poet James Hogg (1770-1834).

It's a great script. The three-fold structure leaves open many questions about the interpretation of the novel, since the first and last part of the novel are supposed objective rational accounts of Wringhim's life by an unnamed editor, and yet the real truth of the murder mystery has to be elicited from Robert Wringhim's own irrational and subjective record of the same events (the middle section of the book). The structure of the narrative itself lends to the elusiveness of identifying the exact role of Gil-Martin as a doppelganger, an allegorical figure, a multiple personality, or an embodiment of Satan (this last being the most satisfying conclusion in my mind). In the end, it is still not clear who has really perpetuated the murders, and part of the brilliance of the novel is that it itself eludes a clear answer to the question "What happened?"

But it is not so much a murder mystery as it is a tale of the supernatural, and a deeply religious and psychological portrait of a madman. Some have regarded it as a satire on Calvinism, although it seems to me that shoe fits antinomianism rather better than Calvinism, because Calvinism maintains that assurance of election comes not through secret revelation, but through the fruits of election, which are a godly life. It could also be construed as a warning against intellectual arrogance, self-righteousness and hypocritical religious rationalism/fanaticism as embodied in Robert and his father. Certainly it is a deeply religious study in the deception of the evil one and the depravity of mankind, and chronicles a journey of human destruction.

But although one having a theological interest in these matters will gain greater enjoyment of the story, in the end it is just as much a psychological tale as it is a theological one. The occasional use of Scottish idiom by commoners in dialogue sometimes makes reading difficult, but on the whole this is a story accessible to anyone with an appreciation for a fine literary creation with a theological and psychological twist. It's a chilling classic that deserves more exposure than it has received.

James Hogg's masterpiece, this strange and evocative study of the effects of Calvinist doctrine on the Scottish mind, has slowly edged its way into the canon in the last twenty years largely because it is first and foremost a rattling good read. Like all the great Scottish novelists from Walter Scott to Robert Louis Stevenson to Muriel Spark, Hogg was haunted by the dual promise of Edinburgh both as the refined cosmopolitan Renaissance home of Boswell as well as the fanatically religious city of John Knox. THE PRIVATE MEMOIRS is a response to that dual inheritance, and the novel is filled with doubles and dual structures: two brothers (born on two floors of the same house) vie for filial recognition; one brother duplicates himself when he is visited by a devil figure, Gil-Martin, in his exact semblance; and the story is told in two parts, and one of those is itself doubled. Although the Scots dialect in sections is a real chore to get through, the book is a marvelous frightening read nonetheless, and NYRB has wrapped it all up in a glorious cover featuring a famous Blake illustration. This isn't an easy ghost read, but it is tremendously repaying.

Henry James, The Aspern Papers (Laurel, 1888)

One of James' shortest novels, and one of his least-known, The Aspern Papers is a (supposedly based on a true) story about a young biographer of famed poet Jeffrey Aspern (based, depending on to whom you talk, on either Browning or Keats) who contrives to get his hands on the love letters Aspern wrote to a mistress by presenting himself at the now-ancient mistress' Italian villa and passing himself off as a wealthy traveller and author looking for lodging. The mistress lives with her spinster niece, whose age is never given (one assumes mid-forties, a few years older than the narrator), and the two are impoverished. Things go as planned until the narrator finds himself starting to like the niece a bit more than he bargained for.

The novel runs a bit over a hundred pages, which makes it an excellent introduction to James' extremely dry wit; it's much lighter-weight than the ponderous tomes he's known for. The prose here has an agility which is absent from works such as The Bostonians or The Wings of the Dove, but still manages to convey emotion quite well with only a few words and a gesture. The novel's last pages are a triumph of minimal writing, and probably deserve closer scrutiny than the works of James' that are normally assinged in English classes around the globe.

Oddly, the one major failing of this novel is that James abandons the minimalism every once in a while, and his characters go overboard with hysterical crying and the like so common to Victorian literature. In a book that's otherwise so controlled, these episodes-- never longer than a few sentences-- seem absurd more than anything; perfectly composed people suddenly collapse into tears as if shot with pepper spray, and then within the space of a paragraph are back to their cool, collected selves once again. These intrusions are minimal, and while they detract from the scenes in which they're placed, the novel overall is still a worthy one. If you've been turned off by James through exposure to one of those million-page drawing room comedies, you may want to give him another try with this. *** 1/2

"The Aspern papers" is a surprisingly short, sexy and suspenseful novel. It will completely change your opinion of Henry James; he shows himself to be an master of suspense and well played out drama instead of the ambiguous pussyfooting plodder that most people think him to be. There is a definite touch of evil in this novella. It takes place in a stuffy interior world dominated by an old sinister woman in a green shade. The narrator's intentions are quite amoral and evil. The narration is deftly created through sure touches of insecurity and self pity. The trick of the unreliable narrator is used to great effect. And at no point does it seem anything other than a seamless and effective method of narration.

Such is his facility with the essentials of theatre - concentrated narrative action; lengthy, dramatic scenes of dialogue; vivid characterisation; pointed use of interior space, exits and entrances, and the revealing image - you wonder why James failed as a playwright.

Of course, there is a defining element of James' art that is impossible in the theatre - narration. The nameless narrator of 'The Aspern Papers' is one of the greatest monsters in James' teeming gallery of inglorious masculinity - the editor of a revered American literary poet, who tries to wheedle important documents from a celebrated lover, the now-decrepit Juliana, by installing himself as a lodger, and flattering her aging spinster niece. Like most James heroes, who treat life like a selfish game, he has no idea what emotional havoc he is wreaking on the woman.

The tale has all the drive and tantalising delay of a crime story - the hero is both detective and criminal, and the suspenseful climax suggests what a great genre writer James could have been. As with Stendhal, just as exciting are the intricate, agonising dialogues between the narrator and the niece, each wildly misunderstanding the other.

But if 'Aspern' is a crime story, than the the criminal is of the order of Freddie Montgomery in Banville's 'The Book of Evidence', a brilliant, charming, frighteningly amoral man, whose check of social scruples is dicarded with shocking ease. His seemingly over-detailed account is full of gaps, self-defence, self-pity, evasion, vagueness, misremembering, disarming honesty and wild misinterpreations of others' characters and motives. He is a man who can't see beyond his own narrow goal, behind whom we always sense an unseen, all-seeing eye.

He is the forerunner to a second modern anti-hero, 'Pale Fire''s Charles Kinbote, another literary editor whose devotion to his subject has become mad and murderous. In a Victorian age full of cant about the ennobling power of art, James asserts, disturbingly, the opposite - repeated exposure to sublime poetry (and the book is full of ironic references to religion and glorious war) has only made the narrator emotinally dead, unable to respond to the humanity of others. This 'portrait' of an aging muse, malevolent and concupiscent is a stark warning to literary idealisers, and a sad study of human decline, but should also be seen as a reflection of the narrator's own desires.

'Aspern' is incidentally THE great Venice story, its watery decay somehow seeping through the narrator's blind egotism.

Quite honestly this book was one that I found I could simply not put down. This book was beautifully written by one of the greatest authors of our time. The characters were very well devoloped, from Peter to Wendy to Starkey the pirate. The imagery was amazing and I did not need the illustrations to be able to see what was taking place. Parents, I encourage you to buy this book for your children and also for yourselves.
I must say that I cherished the book and enjoyed it far more than the Disney movie. Peter's conceit was among the funnier moments, along with his memory.

"How clever I am," he crowed raputerously, "oh the cleverness of me!"
It is humliliating to have to confess that this conceit of Peter was one of his most fascinating qualities. To put it with brutal frankness, there was never a cockier boy.
But for the moment Wendy was shocked. "You conceit," she exclaimed, with frightful sarcasm; "of course I did nothing!"
"You did a little," Peter said carelessly, and continued to dance.

The scene above was one of my favorites, for it is rare that Wendy was ever sarcastic in any way.
In any case, this book is a marvelous lesson for children (and teenagers such as I) who fear growing up. So long as you are pure of heart, Peter will be there and you shan't ever grow up. Not really.

I chose this particular edition, illustrated by Scott Gustafson, because the illustrations are rich and vibrant, in a word - gorgeous!. I never read Peter Pan as a youngster, but my mother-in-law read it to each of her children so I have continued the new family tradition, reading it to each of my children and thoroughly enjoying it along the way. The British expressions are a bit difficult for the youngest to understand, but the story is full of adventure and challenges to keep everyone coming back for more - and begging for just 5 more minutes before bed please!

I read this book just this year when my Language Arts teacher told us to read a book that had "good ideas". I've seen and loved the Disney version of this classic and wanted to read it. This book is so funny and enjoyable! It is about the adventure the Darling children (Wendy, John, and Michael) have when Peter Pan show up one day in their nursery room looking for his shadow. He takes them away to Neverland and they have all sorts of wonderful adventures. This is a great book for all ages! Enjoy!

If you can find another translation of this seminal book (see my review of Freud's Gravida), then do so. Strackey translates "kultur" (culture) as "civilization," "I" as "ego," and in general makes Freud seem so lifeless and cold-blooded that it's nearly impossible to get an accurate feel for his thought.

Without defending Freud's obvious reductionism, it needs saying that it was he who prompted us to ask: do the demands of modern life encourage or pathologize our innermost strivings? What do they do to our eros, our capacity for loving and feeling solidarity? And how do they stimulate our frustration and aggression?

While I disagree with Freud's conclusion that the total psychic repression of powerful passions is a necessary evil for the existence of culture, I do think he challenges us to wonder about just how high a price we pay for what we believe to be the "higher" and "nobler" achievements of the mind.

While I agree that Civilization and Its Discontents has some kernels of truth within it, I cannot recommend it either as a persuasive piece or as an introduction to Freudian thought. I do not know if, in his longer works, Freud actually supports any of his statements with more than the weak ancedotal proofs he gives here; nor do I know if he actually works through his arguments to a logical conclusion instead of relying on sensationalistic statements with no basis in his evidence. Suffice to say he does not meet the minimum requirements, in my opinion, for philosophical or scientific excellence, in this book. Furthermore, the rambling, vague, and disorganized nature of this book makes its usefulness as a mere introduction to Freud extremely weak. I would only suggest using it as a companion to such other works as Five Lectures on Psychoanalysis, or as an immediate overview and introduction to The Future of an Illusion (which, though written earlier than Civilization, more fully elucidates many of the principles Freud touts here). As a long-time student of classical thought, philosophy, and ethics, not to mention the fundamental principles of logic, I found myself highly unimpressed with this work, and saw no great haven of Truth within it. Further, having been raised by Secular Humanists, I am less than convinced of the practical merits of Freud's ideas. Read it if you like, but don't expect to find salvation or much enlightenment out of these few pages...

Freud's Civilization and its Discontents could arguably be one of the most compelling books you will ever encounter, if read properly. The problematic posed by Freud is a fundamental one. Freud argues that the demands of civilization and demands of our instincts are out of sync. He posits that humans are haunted by an assortment of powerful unconscious needs. These hardcore "needs" range from sexual fulfillment to a release of aggression. These primal needs for sexual fulfillment and aggressions were once the tools we used to survive. With the dawning of a new age, we no longer need to use these tools. We turn inwards. See, juxtaposed and interconnected is the other side of the coin, is civilization - a phenomenon that inhibits these primal drives. But we need civilization to give us a different sense of security. It is a catch-22. Throughout the ages, then the constant tug of war between these two forces has caused ruptures in our history was the tension is expressed in frustration.

Freud is really informative when he posits that we turn this aggression inward. Perhaps it is how civilization has configured good and evil that is turning this mechanism out of sync. In an almost sado-masochistic move, the superego is now torturing the ego. It is the collision rather than the confluence that is ruining this forced marriage. I am not certain that Nietzsche really had this sort of impact on Freud but I am reminded of Dionysus and Apollo from The Birth of Tragedy.

Nietzsche was trying to convey a partnership between them more than a countering or perhaps better, a "healthy tension." To be human is to be stretched between these two domains. The Dionysian is the raw impulses, chaos, and absurdity of existence; the Apollonian is the ordering impulse that seeks order, the eternal (in logic, religion, or morality, etc.) and beauty. As a particular existence, we are comprised of the raw stuff that is life in its very heart. We are contradiction, passions, chaos; but we cannot live in this domain alone, because it is ugly, terrifying and absurd. Thus we are wont to make it beautiful, to create from it a habitable and beautiful world (and self). Without the Dionysian, there can be no Apollonian. Without Apollonian, life would not be bearable. Hopefully, Nietzsche (as does Freud) does not advocate a return to our "bestial natures." However, Nietzsche declares that it is better to be a Cesare Borgia than a Christian, for at least great things are possible with the raw power and nobility of the beast. The Christian, to him, is enfeeblement and brutalizes the nobility and power inherent in humankind. To be capable of greatness, one must be capable of evil and good. The Christian, however, esteems everything that is meek, pitiful and weak. Action is evil, the world is evil, and we must quietly await a better one. Nietzsche, and the existentialists, would resist any attempt to ascribe a "nature" which predetermines us. We are flux. We are change. We are in a constant state of becoming and there is no prior nature that determines what we will become.

Although Freud was a champion for the recognition of these primal urges, it cannot be said that he advocated a free for all. What is really powerful in Freud is that civilization is not seen to be purely an external thing and it has real consequences on the inside. Our superego - civilizations handmaiden on the inside - is now calling the shots. As we internalize what the external is telling us to do, how to act - like gnawing guilt it invades our psyche to the extent that no matter how we wish to transgress, we become and need the very thing that causes our frustration.

If you peg the most basic response to fight or flight, then civilization can be seen to have removed that which was causing all sorts of anxiety - as we no longer express and remove sexual needs and aggression "in the wild." Freud it could be argued is saying that the superego now attacks the ego denying out most elemental needs. Those needs though, because of the reconfiguration of civilization are suppressed. The two forces - the superego and the ego, instead of working together are working against each other. If perhaps there is a hope for a sense of a new humanism, that this might be the answer - finding a way for the superego to work with rather than against the ego, that is of course if you have bought in on the duality. The debate rages on.

Miguel Llora

Like my title says, I wish there is a two and a half star rating. I have read better skating books than this one, such as " Figure Skating For Dummies" and "The Essential Figure Skater". This book is too vague in some parts of the book and too much information in the other parts. Not a very good guide to figure skating. The pictures of famous figure skaters are the best parts of this book.

Having read this book through I was delighted to read such a well detailed and easy to read book without the usual complicated jargon. My children have read the book and enjoyed the pictures and diagrams and have said that what their Coaches have been saying to them has become much clearer.
Many thanks to Peter Morrissey and James Young for an excellent book.

This book is great ! Its diagrams shows all the important points pertaining to the different moves in figure skating. I'm an inline speedskater who admires figure skaters. But I have come to believe I'll never be able to figure skate properly because of scoliosis of the spine, a flat footed left foot and a high-arched right foot. Furthermore, the technical terms of figure skating is just confusing. I could never understand why figure skating is so much more confusing than say, the relatively easier Double-Push technique for speedskating. Thanks to Figure Skating School, all that has changed. Within two months, I've progressed from basic Three Turns to the Single Axle ! And all that was without any coaching. I simply read the book ! Isn't it amazing ? There's much more advanced moves to be learnt from this book. So get your copy now !

Irish writer Edna O'Brien's brief (179 page) biography of James Joyce was aimed at people like me who are curious about Joyce's life, but not curious enough to undertake Richard Ellman's definitive but massive biography. O'Brien venerates Joyce's writing, but recognizes the high cost to most everyone who had any contact with Joyce.

Although she argues (without convincing me) that Joyce was not a misogynist, she does not attempt to defend him from being viewed as a monster; instead, she answers her question "Do writers have to be such monsters in order to create? I believe that they do."

O'Brien provides interesting responses to Joyce's life and lifework. Hard-core Joyceans will already have processed Ellman's biography--regarded by some as the best biography of any writer ever written. The somewhat curious have a fine guide in O'Brien. Her book is generally readable, and I am inclined to trust her sense (as a novelist, as an Irish novelist) of what in Joyce's fiction is autobiographical.

The volume is an excellent match of biographer and subject, like Edmund White's biographical meditation on Marcel Proust that began the series of Penguin Brief Lives, a welcome antidote to the mountains of details that make so many biographies daunting.

As is almost consistently the case, the series of biographies produced under the collection of Penguin Lives has once again succeeded in providing a palatable doorway through which the hungry but busy reader can find the substance of an important if historically tough writer or artist. Edna O'Brien, herself an accomplished writer, here provides us with a fellow Irishman's view of the incredibly important writer James Joyce. Though most of us have at least read his 'Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man' and have seen plays and film adaptations of some of his other works, few of us feel we understand this complexly brilliant mind enough to say that approaching 'Ulysses' or 'Finnegan's Wake' would be easy reading. O'Brien gives us not only the chronology of Joyce's life, she also picks up on individual instances in his youth and manhood that served as fodder for his detailed novels of his Irish heritage. The writing is brisk, acerbic, challenging, and ultimately rewardingly educational. Finish this brief history and you most probably will run to the book shelf for another go at the master!

Biographies in this series are the perfect fun size. Light, but long enough to have a lot of real stuff in them, more than a mere introduction.

The very first sentence of this book invites you into Joyce with an imitation of his writing style, & after that Edna O'Brien shares generously & mellifluously her great understanding of the man, his life, & his work, drawing on scholarly commentary of his books & from the journals & letters of him & the people around him so that you know how they all felt about his life & their lives in themselves & for the purposes of this biography in relation to him. It's so well-written & so interesting -- what a life he had, crazy as he was, that -- I could hardly put it down. Edna O'Brien's great interest in him comes across truly.

Michener's books are long and all of us who are fans know this, but this one is probably the longest one. It does get a bit tedious at times, but the book is very good and it's worth persevering with it. I don't know what our reader from Denmark was thinking, but the book is certainly not dreadful. I found the history of this state totally fascinating, and it felt like I was there when Texas was just coming into being I felt like one of those intrepid settlers that were responsible for making Texas a state. I would like to visit this state sometime because it has a great history. The story was good and the characters strong. I especially liked the story about the Alamo. This almost mythic battle comes alive in the book. America you have a lot to be proud of in this state.

I'm actually surprised by some of the negative responses of the previous reviewers. Their opinions are certainly valid, and I wouldn't quibble with them, but I thought "Texas" was Michener's best fiction ("Iberia" is his best book) that I've ever read.

The history of the state was fascinating and well-balanced. The characters were more likable than in most of his books (except maybe "Chesapeake"). The book certainly is long even by Michenerian standards, but it never became tedious in the way "Alaska" did.

I think anyone who reads this book will be delighted by the magnificent effort Michener must have put into writing this. It's fun; it's fascinating; it's beautiful.

James Michener writes another of his super famous world renowned mega one word title novels that take a geographic area and tell the whole story with intertwining familys. From the inital journey into texas to the founding of Bejar (San Antonio) to the horror of Comanche Indian raids, to the fasinating detail of commerical real estate development! I have never read a Michener book I didn't consider a treasure, and this one is no exception.

For anyone who is afraid of reading a James Michener historical fiction novel....Just because the books are long and you might think it will be a boring history novel, it is not! The books are fascinating, trust me I have read almost a dozen of them so far and they have all resonated with me, Hawaii, Chesapeake, Centennial, The Source, Poland, The Drifters, Caribbean, Alaska, TEXAS! I love them all so much! And I wish nothing more than for all those reading this to pick up a James Michener novel now!! Start with Hawaii!