As he does most of his book, Verne used some of the events of his age in detailing the adventures of a traveller setting sail from the USA to London. The cargo of cotton catches fire (much like you will hear that square-bailed hay will catch fire if stored wet - due to heat and composting), and the ship struggles to reach land before it burns. To complicate things, the captain is something of a neurotic and has gudied it off course.

The fire is quenched thanks to a crash into a reef; unfortunately the damages that have resulted from both the crash and fire eventually sink the vessel. Two rafts are made; one breaks loose of it's own and the second contains the survivors. Provisions for two or three months are lost during a storm, casualties mount, and canibalism is resorted to. In the end the few survivors land at the mouth of the Amazon.

Verne writes with his usual first person introverted narrative style. Conversation is rare. There's only a faint glimmer of romance involved. In short, this is a serious book, not a "popularist ..." yellowback, as some book critics might note.

Overall, if you are looking for "man's adventure" stories, and a break from touchy-feely novels, this is a good read. It is a break from over-glitz action movies; I could easily imagine a movie, if well directed and not too Hollywoodish, making a bit of money, since no movie I've seen yet has come anywhere near the images that came to mind when reading it. It's a real good suspense/scare story. Makes you glad that despite the failings of today's technology, you don't have to risk getting on board a ship and hear someone say "I've been shipwrecked nine times so far..."

From the 1870s, and for a quarter century, every new Verne novel had been issued in translation. Abruptly, in 1898, American and British publishers broke this tradition with The Mighty Orinoco (Le Superbe Orénoque), now available for the first time in English over a century later from Wesleyan University Press.
Why did the publishers of Verne's time reject this book, and nearly every one thereafter, although one or two Verne books had appeared annually under his byline in France until 1910, five years after his death? Since 1880, Verne stories had been mainstays of Boys Own Paper in England. American publishers came to rely more and more on utilizing the English translations, rather than commissioning fresh ones for use in the United States. Hence, by the 1890s, the anticipated taste of the British market came to govern what appeared in English translations on either side of the Atlantic.
The lack of a translation of The Mighty Orinoco has also been a factor in the conventional perception of Verne as a writer unable to place women in strong roles. The hero of The Mighty Orinoco is a 22-year-old woman undertakes a search for the father she has never known, whom she learns may have disappeared along the South American river that forms the book's title. To travel incognito, she dresses as a 17 year old boy, Jean, accompanied by one of her father's former military aides, Martial (whose name signifies his background). This is not simply the conventional story for youth of a girl proving courageous when faced with sudden danger. Instead it is a premeditated adoption of a new gender, a complete violation of the standard sex roles.
Along the way, she and Martial meet two naturalists, also exploring the river, and join forces. One of them, Jacques, cannot account for the attraction he feels toward Jean, deeper than what can be accounted for by male friendship. For his part, Martial is frustrated at his inability to shield Jeanne from this potential future lover. Only when rescuing Jean from drowning does Jacques discover her secret, and at that point their emotions can follow a normal heterosexual development.
Jean/Jeanne herself ultimately makes a similar transformation; for the search of her father, she had passed as a man, but once it is no longer necessary, she assumes feminine garb, which she had even brought with her. As noted in the critical commentary by the dean of American Verne scholars, Walter James Miller, Jacques remains attracted to the masculine side of Jeanne's nature, revealing Verne's insight into the dual aspects of masculinity and femininity present in individuals of either gender. As Germain exclaims of Jeanne, "Charming as a lad, and charming as a lass! It's true-I don't understand it at all!" (354) And on the return journey, calling again on those who knew them on the way out, Jacques has to explain how he married Jean!
It is easy to see why such a premise, as readily comprehensible as it may be to older readers, would be precluded when Boys Own Paper was such a crucial outlet. And that fact, unfortunately, denied for English-language readers one of Verne's best late colonial adventures.
Verne's journey involves a perilous passage, through steadily greater natural dangers, climaxing in abduction by bandits. However, their destination reveals not the heart of darkness, but one of light and civilization. Jeanne's father has become a priest and head of a utopian community, named Juana for Jeanne. He combines the best aspects of both a man of faith and one who insures the defense of the city, and the forces of righteousness defeat the bandits.
Verne well knew that his readers would quickly guess Jeanne's "secret," so he added mystery as the story unfolds, by initial withholding some of the motivations for her trip. Only in a fragmentary way are aspects of her past filled in, with the end jumping ahead to switch point of view entirely with her father's discover of his daughter and his rescue of her (he had thought she had died as a child). As Miller notes, the development and interweaving of the five plot "strands is a lesson in plotting." (374) In this way the reversal and recognition on which the novel relies remains fresh and vivid. The book is well-paced, with a perfect balance of varied and intriguing characters.
In typical manner for the genre, Verne reveals conflicting attitudes toward race and imperialism. There is a consciousness of racial difference, among Indians, Spaniards, and those of mixed blood (again, hardly likely to be approved of as reading for the Boys Own audience), but there are also no racist assumptions based on this background. Similarly, Verne sees typical benefits of "civilization," that is, white civilization, in the usual manner offered through missionary work, health, improvements in agriculture, and the like. The hope for the country's future is an Indian boy who has been educated at the mission, but who lost his father to the bandits, evoking parallels with Jeanne. The only true villain is the Spanish bandit Jorres, who, in another echo of Jeanne, is revealed to actually be the outlaw Alfaniz. Humor is derived from a trio of quarrelsome European explorers, true idiot savants, who are perpetually unable to agree on the river's tributaries.
Fortunately, again Wesleyan University Press's ongoing series of the Early Classics of Science Fiction, which will include a number of previously untranslated Verne books, has included all the original engravings, reproduced in an even higher quality than their previous Verne volumes, The Invasion of the Sea and The Mysterious Island. Pioneering Verne scholar Stanford Luce, who wrote the first American doctoral dissertation on Verne, provides a highly readable translation.

Jules LaForgue, for so long underrecognised in his own country, is now seen as the father of modern poetry, especially influential on the work of Eliot and Pound in terms of persona, language, reaction to modernity, and the violent incongruity of his metaphors and images.

This edition boasts excellent prose translations of the poems by Graham Dunstan Martin. These may be insufficient for the non-French speaker, but the problem with translations that try to catch the spirit of the original rather than the detail, such as Ron Padgett's translations of Blaise Cendrars, is that necessary omissions can lead to dilution and distortion. So, I suppose, this book is best recommended for those, like myself, who have a smidgeon of mediocre French, and can compare their own efforts against Martin's grammatically correct translations.

His introduction is refreshingly free of jargon, and with great simplicity, he details LaForgue's tragically early life, his intellectual precusors, his cultural milieu, his themes and his methods. LaForgue's poetic skill often has to transcend the essential banality of his philosophy, and Martin's discussion of LaForgue's pervasive irony seems to suggest that his work is often about nothing at all if every comment, even if it's 'ironic' is ironically cancelled out by irony (oh yes).

The first selection of which I've just read is largely juvenelia entitled 'The Grief Of the Earth'. Martin warns of the young LaForgue's vulnerablility to Hugo's influence, based on considerable rhetorical bombast, and these poems aren't free of railing against God, the weather, 'ordinary' people, the world, the Unconscious.

But even this early in his oeuvre, LaForgue shows remarkable brilliance. He uses conventional forms, such as the sonnet or lyric, but rends their frames with the exciting violence of his vocabulary, the unnerving juxtapositional clashes he achieves. His poems often start out as one thing, offering a certain set of emotions, which, through irony, and exagerration, become something totally different, more disturbing. The 'Lament of the Notre-Dame organist' is a case in point. The hero begins grieving movingly for his dying lover, but he gets so carried away by his grand sentiments, that he thinks her already dead, and savours the lashing he'll give to the Almighty, and the eternal doleful Bach fugues he'll play. A pitiable, Romantic, lover has become something much more modern and disturbing.

It's not all violence though. There is a lovely debate between a clown and Jesus over the paradox of free-will and God's omniscience; a strange lament by lonely Parisians for the superficial, but gay and alive, high society that has abandoned them during winter; a danse macabre by a grotesque infant whose mother calls him beyond the grave; and a mellow, despairing tribute to poetry, cigarettes and dreams as escapes from the living death that is our existence. I can't wait to try LaForgue's more mature work.

My last review was not accepted, possibly because I mentioned a LaForgue poem in which the poet smokes a 'cigarette' to escape existence as living death to dream, among other things, of mating elephants engaged in ritual dances. Of course, in no way was I condoning such escapism, and I'm not entirely sure that LaForgue was either, rather bemoaning the need for passive actions to retaliate against stagnant modernity.

LaForgue is most notable as the forerunner of Pound and Eliot, and there are startling similarities between his work and Prufrock and Other Poems, namely the persona adopted, the grappling with and alienation in modernity, the perverse wistfulness, the scalpel-clear language, and the violent non-conventional juxtapositions of images and metaphors.

Dunstan Martin gives an accessible, thorough, jargon-free introduction to LaForgue's tragically brief life, his cultural context, his themes and his methods. Sometimes his connections are a little simplistic, and his defence of LaForgue's 'irony' seems to self-cancel everything he wrote, but generally the introduction is a model of clarity.

I have just read LaForgue's early work, 'Le Sanglot De La Terre' (the grief of the earth). Martin warns that much of this juvenelia is negatively influenced by the bombastic rhetoric of Victor Hugo, and there's a lot of chestthumping, browbeating and wailing at Fate, the skies, the Unconscious etc.

There are, also, however, some remarkable things. The poems themselves are fairly conventional formally, sonnets, lyrics, ballads etc., but LaForgue reefs them to bursting point with the violence of his language, the startling imagery, and the mocking exageration. One masterpiece is a lament by a church organist for his dying lover; so carried away does he get by his grief, that he thinks of her as already dead, and talks about how he is going to spectacularly rail against the heavens, and play eternal Bach fugues for the rest of his life. What had been a moving and despairing elegy becomes something much more complex and troubling in the emotions it provokes.

The variety of his subject matter is remarkable, and not always so aggressive. There is a lovely poem framing a debate between a street clown and Jesus over free will and God's omniscience, which the latter fudges; and a childlike lyric of heartbreaking, melancholic, wistful beauty about, perversely, the dreariness of Paris in the Winter when the bright, gay social world moves to the country. This is so good for juvenelia I cannot wait to move on to his more mature work.

Martin's introduction is so jargon-free that it almost feels unscholarly. However, he manages to essay economically LaForgue's biography, his times, ideas, personality, themes, development, method and their demonstration in his work. Sometimes this can be a little simplistic, at others a little confusing. For example, Martin discusses at great length LaForgue's irony. This is fair enough, it is an important weopon in any writer's arsenal, especially one so phlegmatically iconoclastic as LeForgue.

However, whenever Martin decides what LeForgue's theme is, or whenever he does something a little gauche, he negates with irony. If everything LeForgue says is ironical, even the irony, than he's not really saying anything, is he? Better is his analysis of LeForgue's immense influence on modern poetry, especially on Pound and Eliot. His sensibly chosen examples show how indebted Prufrock and Other Poems was to LaForgue, in the persona developed, the language used, and the startling, non-conventional effects of clashing images and metaphors.

I have just read LaForgue's first works, Le Sanglot De La Terre (the grief of the earth). This is essentially his juvenelia, and Martin warns of his indebtedness to Hugo, his youthful pomposity and arrogance. This may be true, but if you're used to timid English poetry, even adolescent stuff like this is astonishing. LaForgue is most famous for developing the first French free verse style, but in these poems he adopts conventional forms. However, these burst with such violence, his words are barely containable ravages at decorum, his daring is so wildly out of proportion that one cannot fail to be excited.

Some of these poems are extraordinary. In one a church organist laments his dying lover. So carried away is he with his sorrow that he dreams already of her death and the immense grieving he is going to offer. In another he extols the escapist pleasures of narcotics as an antidote to the living death that is life. There are wailings against God, the elements, fate, the Unconscious. One lovely poem frames a debate between Jesus and a clown over free will and God's omniscience, with the former fudging the matter.

But there are also quieter, more gently melancholic poems, such as the lament of the Parisian poor for the gay bright aristocracy, whose winter absence makes the city seem desolate, and yet whose transformative power is also a kind of death. These are so good I cannot wait to try LaForgue's more mature work.

Witcover's book on the vice presidency is about the best that's available on the subject. He writes with a barely veiled motive -- to cast doubt on the United States's dangeous and footloose way of choosing vice presidents -- and the book was clearly a product of the Quayle era, now almost forgotten. Still, his history of the federal government's most irrelevant office is detailed and thorough. But is this book still accurate? Quayle's successor, Al Gore, became the most involved vice president in history. And Gore's successor, Dick Cheney, has surpassed Gore in clout already. Gore and Cheney have redefined the office that once neutered figures like Hubert Humphrey, and hopefully this will lead to greater emphasis on veep choices in the future.

Jules Whitcover's examination of how vice presidents have been selected over the course of American history was written as a response to the disaster that was Dan Quayle. While acknowledging that it is difficult to convice worthy candidates to agree to run for the office that was once described as "not worth a bucket of warm spit," Whitcover argues that Presidential candidates have a duty to the country to try and select the best available individual. Unfortunately, political considerations often stand in the way, as was the case with Qualye. Whitcover's book is informative and very enlightening. It is also quite relevant as another Presidential campaign heads for the home stretch.

I picked this out of a "Bargain Books" collection, and it sat at my bedside for over a year. I finally got around to it and loved it!!

The author has retranslated and EXTENSIVELY annotated Verne's original story. You'll learn all sorts of fascinating detail about the history and science of the era. Well worth a few nights of insomnia

I own the ORIGINAL hardcover edition of this book... It was printed [a lot] in the 1960s and you SHOULD still be able to get a nice copy of it in good condition for [an amount of money]. ...

DON'T buy the reissue version of this book unless you DON'T want the reprints of the comics in the HC version in FULL color.

From what I understand from people who have bought the paperback reprint, the publisher has NOT reprinted the original stories in full color NOR have they reprinted the full pages, either!

Big disappointment for people who actually WANTED to read the original stories in addition to Feiffer's text. Perhaps the publisher could not obtain the rights to reprint the original stories in their entirety in full color, ...

Still, if you want to read the sentimental recollections of a old-time comic book fan, you could do a lot worse than Jules Feiffer's prose. It is amusing and worth half the admission price of what I paid for my hardcover copy.

The question YOU have to answer is -- do you want to pay for a book that's an abridged version of the original?

My review is based on the original 1965 hardbound Bonanza Books edition. I mention this because, according to another reviewer, the more recently released softbound edition is both abridged and without some or all of the color comics that make this book such a joy.

Feiffer writes several pages of introduction that trace both the history of comics from newspapers to comic books and his own development from a child infatuated with everything about comics and super heroes to an adult writer/cartoonist.

I grew up following the adventures of many of the comic book super heroes he presents here. (Comic books were in their heyday and cost 10 cents.) By the time I was "into" comics, these super heroes were already well established and their super powers were taken for granted. In THE GREAT COMIC BOOK HEROES, Feiffer includes many of the comic book sequences that reveal how these super powers came to be. Here's some of what I learned from Feiffer:

Superman, as most of us do know, was sent to earth as a baby from a planet whose destruction was imminent. Inhabitants of that planet were all endowed with what, on earth, were super powers.

Batman didn't really have super powers. From the time when, as a child, he saw his parents killed by gangsters, he trained his body and mind to function as a crime fighting machine.

The Human Torch was, in fact, not human. He was created in a lab.

The Flash got his superhuman speed as a result of breathing gas fumes during a lab accident.

The Green Lantern got his powers from a green ring made from a magic green lantern.

Captain America got his super powers from an injection of a secret formula. He was supposed to be one of many superior beings created to fight "the Nazi menace," but the scientist who invented the secret potion was killed by the Nazis before he could make any more. He took it's "recipe" to the grave with him. Thus, only one super hero, Captain America.

Plastic Man got his super powers from another lab accident in which he was exposed to a mysterious acid.

These are but a few of the Super Heroes, in their original comic book form, included in Feiffer's book. These, in particular, fill in missing backgrounds for me.

In these old comic books there was no confusion. There were "us good guys" and "those bad guys." And guess what - the good guys always triumphed.

Jules Feiffer did the world a favor in 1965, when he put together this little collection. At the time, comic book collection was not really a hobby, and re-prints of older materials were unheard of. Out of a fond sense of nostalgia, he assembled and published the origin issues of his favorite comic book heroes.

Inside this excellent volume are the origin issues of most of the classic Golden Age superheroes. This collection is somewhat unique, in that the characters are from several different publishers who would never collaborate today. Assembling this collection of stories would cost a pretty penny in todays collector's market!

Included are: Superman #1 (1939); Batman #1 (1940); Marvel Mystery Comics #1 - The Human Torch (1941); Flash #1 (1940); All-American #16 - The Green Lanter (1940); All-Star #1 - The Spectre (1940); Flash #5 - Hawkman (1940); Wonder Woman #2 (1946); Marvel Mystery Comics #7 - Sub-Mariner (1940); Captain America Comics #1 (1941); Police Comics #1 - Plastic Man (1941); The Spirit Sunday Section (July 20, 1941); and a single page on the origin of Captain Marvel, a character for which he could not get re-print rights.

Thank you Jules Feiffer!

the book totally ignores one of the biggest micronesian countries...the Marshall Islands. Could you do Polynesia without Tahiti

This book is a must have for the hundreds of American teachers that come to fill the schools of Micronesia. It covers practically all of the native cultures of the islands, though not very "in-depth". The pictures show the true beauty of the islands and the people - how 'bout a sequel?

We bought this book to take with us on a five-month stay in India, and it was a great resource for our two daughters (ages 7 and 4). The pictures and text are engaging, and the author gives a sense of what life is really like for these kids. He makes a special point of including tribal and Christian children, not just Hindus. Which brings me to the one exception to a glowing review: how in the world did he manage to avoid including a Muslim child?

I like the premise of this book, a black comedy about the Holocaust, however, it never quite jelled into an good read for me. The book starts right as the war is ending and American tanks are rolling in to liberate concentration camps. A few odd survivors make their way across this bizarre landscape, meet up, and form a "gang." Through forgery and trading, they turn into rich men by cynically working both the system and the black market that arises with the fall of the Nazis. Everything is a buildup though, for the big score, a 4 x 4 foot cube of gold extracted from the mouths of Jewish prisoners. Along the way, there are all kinds of oddballs and kooks running around and sincere, naive people to be exploited. None of this is as funny as it's made out to be, however. The book is interesting for the unsentimental look it takes at the time and place, but it takes a little to long to accomplish that task.

Melvin Jules Bukiet has to be one of the most promising young writers around, based on the evidence of this book. I would love to say that it's as good as some of its promotion would suggest and that it accomplishes both of the things it has obviously set out to do: one, to write a realistic post-Holocaust novel with survivors as complex characters rather than symbols; two, to parody the genre of Holocaust literature, not in a spirit of cruelty but one of insight. It would seem to be almost impossible to do both at once, which is probably why "After" does not quite come off as either a novel or a satire. The heavy cultural symbolism which Bukiet is trying to send up ends up weighing down his characters to the point where--with one very significant exception--they stop being real people. The satire is also self-indulgent: one is never quite sure whether it is aimed at the reality of the Holocaust (which has, incidentally, received at least six "comic" treatments before this one), or at the serious literature of the Holocaust, or some of the more vulgar conventions of popular culture. The resulting book is something of a jumble, and seems to resort to current postmodern cliches more out of desperation than to make a statement. This is a real pity, because Bukiet is a spectacularly talented writer and could have written one of the great books of the century if he had been able to focus his material somewhat better. The best evidence of his talent lies in his fictional portrait of Elie Wiesel as "Der Schreiber." Subtle, compassionate enough to be brutal (and vice versa), and deeply insightful, it alone is worth the price of the book; it is worthy of such a master of real-life irony as Satyajit Ray, and calls to mind Ray's film "Devi" (with an added twist). The rest of "After" is not on this level--itself ironic, because Bukiet makes much of the contrast between his hero and "Der Schreiber" (a sign that authors should never fall in love with their characters). This book is highly recommended (from someone who almost never likes secondhand Holocaust fiction), but read it as much for what it doesn't do as what it does.

The author tells a story well, but also plays with the reader. Several times you will stop, scratch your head and ask,"Was that directed to me?...and then the story continues. I loved the cynicism or blind faith (in anything) of the various characters and the slow corrosion thereof. The subject matter is facinating and rarely explored. Best of all, this is not a sappy, emotional story, actually, quite the opposite. When a holocaust story makes you laugh, it should be explored

This work was not printed during Verne's lifetime. This was because of the depressing nature of the work. It is well written, and does have some accurate points as far as prophecy goes, automobiles, high speed trains, governmental control of education. However, Verne seems to suggest that society came to worship(or, at least, respect) science while ignoring the fuzzy studies of humanities. If you look around America today, the general ignorance of science is appalling, and fuzzy studies are becoming fuzzier all the time... So, as a look into the future, this novel fails miserably. As I note that at least one major newspaper reviewer criticizes Verne for being a "technonerd" that nobody reads, let us remember Verne is the father of science fiction(as in SCIENCE), and even his more famous works, such as "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea", have a great deal of contemporary science in them. If someone does feel science is boring and nerdy, he certainly will not enjoy this book and will be better off purchasing a comic book. In conclusion, this is not a great Jules Verne novel, but his worst is better than many novelists best!

Michel Dufrenoy is a man born out of time. Possessing the soul of an artist, he lives in a time when the artist is despised, and the industrialist is utterly triumphant. Where can Michel go to fit in? What place can an artist find in the Paris of 1960?

Jules Verne wrote this short book in 1863, but his publisher rejected it as unrealistic. In many ways, what Verne wrote was prescient. He wrote about electric lights, asphalt streets and motorcars, but he went far beyond that. He foresaw the future degradation of art ("I've even heard of a certain Courbet, at one of his last exhibitions, showed himself, face to the wall, in the performance of one of the most hygienic but least elegant actions of life!"), and the deconstruction of history in mass entertainment ("...History must be raped if she is to bear a child. And she was made to bear any number, who themselves bore no resemblance to their mother!")

This book is highly polemical in nature. Verne makes quite clear his distaste for capitalism and its concomitant mindset. Also, this story offers no great insight, but merely warns. I found the story fascinating for its seeming precognition, but did not find the story particularly entertaining. Therefore, I give this book a qualified recommendation--read this book as an interesting historical document, but not as an entertaining story.

Jules Verne is best known as an early science fiction writer. As most readers know, his "Inventions" include the atomic submarine (20,000 Leagues ...). In "Paris..." he is more of a futurist in the vein of George Orwell. In fact Orwell's writing style in "1984" is very similar to this book. Verne forsees the 20th century clearly but misses some important 19th century innovations. He writes about elevated rapid transit trains and computers. However, his Paris does not have inside toilets, an invention from a few years after the book was written. The plot - and there is one is - expounds the difficulties which a non-technical person has in a highly technical society. It is a first class tragedy. The society has no use for "The classics." Books, plays, etc. are written by committees with the aid of computers. Even the job of soldiering as an occupation is gone since modern technology has made war obsolete. Summing up, "Paris in the 20th Century" is fascinating to read while remembering when it was written and the plot although weak, still carries the book through to its sad conclusion.