If you're a Catholic Christian and want to appreciate your faith more, these books will serve you well. If you're not Catholic or Christian and wish to encounter the most persuasive apologetics, this is an excellent place to start.

Chesterton is a wonderful writer. A poet by nature, Chesterton focuses on the material and concrete in ways that seems both paradoxical and wondrous. In "Saint Francis of Assisi," Chesterton takes the most popular saint, and presents all those details that really make us modern secularists most uncomfortable with him. In another book here, he links St. Thomas Aquinas to Francis, showing that, despite their vast differences in temperament, they both strove to save and present the goodness of creation and nature and to rebuke (in word or action) those who would hold the bodily in disdain.

In a sense, the biographies here are more than biographies. They're filled with diversions, and those diversions all point in the direction of the remaining book, "The Everlasting Man," which is presented between the other two. The central point here is that the Incarnation is the central event of human history; it allows us to joyously celebrate the good of creation and nature, as God has blessed matter with His very being.

Also, Chesterton is a real pleasure to read, as this passage shows: "One of my first journalistic adventures, or misadventures, concerned a comment on Grant Allen, who had written a book about the Evolution of the Idea of God. I happened to remark that it would be much more interesting if God wrote a book about the evolution of the idea of Grant Allen."

His wit shines in the conclusion of this anecdote. To his bemusement, his editor castigates *him* for being blasphemous. "In that hour I learned many things, including the fact that there is something purely acoustic in much of that agnostic sort of reverence. The editor had not seen the point, because in the title of the book the long word came at the beginning and the short word at the end; whereas in my comments the short word came at the beginning and gave him a sort of shock. I have noticed that if you put a word like God into the same sentence with a word like dog, these abrupt and angular words affect people like pistol-shots. Whether you say that God made the dog or the dog made God does not seem to matter; that is only one of the sterile disputations of the too subtle theologians. But so long as you begin with a long word like evolution the rest will roll harmlessly past; very probably the editor had not read the whole of the title, for it is rather a long title and he was rather a busy man."

This volume contains the most important works of G. K. Chesterton, his study of St. Francis, his study of St. Thomas Aquinas, and _The Everlasting Man_.

I have chosen the word "study" rather than biography deliberately. Readers looking to find a strict chronological account of St. Francis or St. Thomas according to the modern or postmodern canons of historiography should look elsewhere. What Chesterton does is get you at the heart of these two saints. He tells you what they were all about. He is somehow able to convey to his readers the very air that these saints breathed.

And then there is _The Everlasting Man_. While it is hard to characterize, this is Chesterton's best work. Period. Written as an answer to H. G. Wells's _Outline of History_, Chesterton gets at what is most important in human history: the fact that God became Man in Jesus Christ. It really is an incredible book.

Chesterton had an amazing knack to cut to the heart of the matter. If you want to see what St. Francis or St. Thomas were all about, or to appreciate more the Lord who inspired these saints, I would highly recommend this book.

Ignatius Press has done the world a great favor by releasing their "Collected Works of Chesterton" series. If you can only afford three volumes, get # 1, 2, and 6. If you can only afford one volume, it should be # 2.

Chesterton's book on St Francis is wonderful. Unlike most modern books, it places Francis squarely in Christianity. (Many contemporary books on Francis portray him as a 13th-century hippie, which would have astounded the devout friar!)

The book on Thomas Aquinas is simply the best biography of him ever, and many noted Thomists have agreed with this sentiment.

But "The Everlasting Man" is the true pinnacle of Chesterton's amazing output. In one book he puts "comparative religion" into a new and brilliant perspective. C.S. Lewis listed "Everlasting Man" as one of the reasons he became a Christian, and it really will floor you.

(If you are short on funds you can always buy Everlasting Man as a single volume, too!)

Do you want to know what "To be or not to be..." is really about? The script for Hamlet is here. On the other hand, "Cry havoc and let slip the dogs of war" is from Julius Caesar, which also gave us "the ides of March." This book is a joy, and it contains the complete works written by the Bard of Avon.

It appears, at first glance, that this book only contains the comedies written by Shakespeare, but that is because there are three Tables of Contents within the book. These lists are placed at the beginning of each section, and the following page numbers begin at one again. However, not in the case of the Poems and Sonnets, which are in the Historical Plays list.

There is an additional list for the exquisite plates, which add another dimension to the historical significance of this library. The artwork, such as the three witches who enter to thunder and lightning in Macbeth, is extraordinary. You will find the work of:
*Sir John Gilbert (1817-1897) who created almost 750 pictures just for Shakespeare's works.
*George Cruikshank, who was the son of Isaac Cruikshank, a Scottish painter, and the primary illustrator for Charles Dickens.
*Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester (1532-1588). Dudley knew Shakespeare, and was once courtier in the court of Queen Elizabeth I.

For any student or lover of literature and art, or as a writer's reference, this is a requisite.

Victoria Tarrani

This book is an excellent buy. If you like to read and always find yourself wishing you had more of a great writers work then this is the way to go. It contains almost if not everything he ever wrote. The book cover is flawless. If you know some one who collects books or do yourself than you got to get this one. I would however not recommend this for young kids because of its size.

THE LIBRARY SHAKESPEARE IS EXCELLANT. IT CONTAINS ALL OF SHAKESPERARE'S PLAYS, POEMS, AND SONNETS. IT HAS A BEAUTIFUL HARDCOVER, YET IT IS STILL THE EXACT SAME WORDS THAT SHAKESPEARE WROTE. I HIGHLY RECCOMEND THIS BOOK TO EVERYONE!

Memoirs and Stories of a Madman is a brilliant work.

George Gilbert sculpts anecdotes from the life of his main character, Wolf into a larger than life statue of a man who proceeds from one misadventure to the next without learning a thing and making the same mistakes over and over again. Drugs, sex, foreign travel, encountering the famous as well as the infamous keeps this book rolling right along. It is one of those books that you pick up and not put down until you are finished a couple of hours later. If you have read it completely or are picking it up for the first time, turn to any page and get a mega-dose of life experience, wit, sarcasm and philosophy either by Wolf or folks he has crossed paths with like John Wayne, Alan Ladd, Hemmingway, Faulkner and many more. Read about the [woman] who had to be buried in a Y-shaped coffin.

I can't help but think that Wolf's misadventures as a San Francisco cabbie and the rest of his mayhem filled life are the not so subtle glimpses of life's realities. Do Wolf's base, eccentric primal callings represent the collective consciousness that we, as a society are too arrogant to look at? Would we be too afraid to admit to ourselves, much less anyone else, that a little bit of Wolf lurks within? George Gilbert brings a lot to the table with this book. Is Wolf the man who comes here from back in the cave-dwelling days, the Roman Empire and all it's debauchery days or is he a modern day silicone-ruled guy doing what we all at some level could digress to rather quickly? I am somewhat embarrassed to admit I see a little bit of Wolf in me. Give it a read and see if you don't see some of Wolf in you as well.

I've read Gilbert's book - more than once - but I'll never ride in his cab. What Alfred Hitchcock did for motel showers in 1960, George Gilbert has now done for San Francisco taxi cabs in the new millennium.

Opening MEMOIRS, etc., is like boarding a roller coaster in Dante's Inferno. Turn a page and the world drops away beneath you. Up - down - jerked around on a nightmare ride while Jose Greco flamencos on your head. This is not a book to curl up cozy and warm with on a dark and stormy night. This is a book to pick up when you've run out of Dostoyevsky and Jim Thompson and still need a neat jolt of literary art in the raw.

Like The Inferno, MEMOIRS passes through levels, but not in any formal sort of sequence. The territory of Gilbert's imagination shifts and tacks: slips and slides and morphs into different, new and fresh zones as easily and gracefully as a super CD changer. Gilbert weaves elements of fact, fantasy and delirium into a dizzy and dazzling narrative that races toward a focal intersection where all lights are GO! And the ensuing wreck is just what you might - or might not - expect.

The thing with thrill rides is you always get off. You can close this book, but I don't know if you can ever put it down.

According to Thoreau most men lead lives of quiet desperation. If Memoirs and Stories of a Madman can be taken as evidence George Gilbert has led a life of noisy desperation. Out of that cacophony he has fashioned a piece of writing of high quality and originality.

In order to enjoy the special delights of this book one must first read it from cover to cover. I say 'cover to cover' instead of from beginning to end because there is no beginning or end. No story at all in fact, but rather a bewildering jumble of fragments from twenty or more stories that never got written. Rather than recognizable characters you have unconnected characteristics attached to various names, many of which are impossible to keep track of. The exasperation of this first read-through is somewhat ameliorated by the frequent eruptions of humor that are raucous, bawdy and surrealistic by turns, and at times, all three together.

What the overview of this first read gives you is not a world but the author's way of seeing his world. Once you are oriented to that you can take any single line, paragraph or group of pages and they all have an immediate resonance. It is like the best kind of jazz, where the improvisations on a standard tune amount to a composing of music in the act of performing, and because of knowing the tune the listener can jump in at any riff and it's happening. With Memoirs and Stories of a Madman the word by word movement may be sometimes inventive, sometimes hallucinatory and sometimes confessional, but it is always alive, vibrant, imbued with a naked vulnerability that is exposed with a defiant courageousness.

Many people don't realize that Chesterton wrote his most famous work, _Orthodoxy_ *long* before he had officially converted to Catholicism. _Orthodoxy_ was published in 1908, and Chesterton was received into the Catholic Church in 1922.

If _Orthodoxy_ was written as a defense of Christian sanity against the heresies of the modern world that were driving men mad, the works contain in this volume are Chesterton's defense of the Catholic Church as the bastion of that Christian sanity.

This volume would be worth the purchase just for the short essay, "What Do They Think?" -- or even for the reminder that "Christianity is not a religion; it is a Church." I *highly* recommend this book.

That answer is summed up by Gilbert's own words, "To get rid of my sins." Indeed, he writes..."For there is no other religious system that does really profess to get rid of people's sins. It is confirmed by the logic, which to many seems startling, by which the Church deduces that sin confessed and adquately repented is actually abolished; and that the sinner does really begin again as if he had never sinned."

And this beauty is found only on page 9. 540 delightful pages follow.

Ignatius Press has done a wonderful deed in reprinting the collected works of Chesterton. This is Volume III, and it deals exclusively with Chesterton's writings on Christ and His Church.

Like all of Chesterton's work it is a delight to read. In it he tries to answer an unanswerable question - that of his conversion.

In the end, Chesterton is left to say, "I might treat the matter personally and describe my own conversion; but I happen to have a strong feeling that this method makes the business look much smaller than it really is.... I would say chiefly of the Catholic Church that it is catholic. I would rather try to suggest that it is not only larger than me, but larger than anything in the world; that it is indeed larger than the world."

This is a three volume "heavy" textbook, both in weight but certainly also in the scope of its content and the basis for learning public health from an international perspective. This fourth edition is dedicated to professor Walter W Holland, who was the original founding editor of the textbook first published in 1984. The present editors are affiliated with UCLA School of Public Health, Department of Public Health at the University of Glasgow, Department of Community Health at University of Auckland and National Institute of Health and Nutrition in Tokyo.
The first volume presents the scope, the second presents the methods and the third the practice of public health with a total of 101 chapters from close to 200 international contributors
Each chapter is extensive both in its research, details and scope with relevant references and suggested bibliography. It is truly comprehensive in its international scale and the editors must be congratulated for making a clear, consistent and easy read textbook. The subject of bioterrorism with reference to the antrax scare and other possibilities in the wake of the Twin Tower attack is reviewed from a public health aspect. The index extensive.
My own interests of child public health, adolescence, disability and mental retardation were well rewarded with fine chapters and a scholary discussions of even the current classifications of disability, handicap and intellectual disability. The chapter on adolescence had fine suggestions for health policies on a local and global basis.
This is an important book that should be found at every public health library and at the side of specialists in public health medicine.

...

The third edition of this excellent survey of public health has been available for some time now, I would encourage readers to request that rather than the out-dated second editio

I have read this book many times and found it to be an outstanding collection of short stories about Native Alaskans' traditions, folklore and religion. The book contains many short stories that are centuries old. The author has done an excellent job of gathering these stories into a volume that incorporates beautiful drawings by Alaskan native George Aden Ahgupuk. I would recommend that anyone interested in Native Alaskan folklore obtain this book. The book continues to provide me with many hours of satisfaction. An excellent book 'written' by authors who will never be heard from again.

Chesterton's _Autobiography_ is one of the best Christian autobiographies that are out there. Follow Chesterton on his journey out of the insanity of the early 20th century and into the freeing sanity of the Catholic Church.

Chesterton's insights into various figures and movements of the early 20th century are a great joy to read, and still are important today in combatting various contemporary insanities. If you want to understand more about one of the greatest English authors of the 20th century, this book is a must have.

This volume of Chesterton's Collected Works brings back into print The End of the Armistice, the last book GKC wrote. I have always thought this was one of his finest pieces of non-fiction. It is thoughtful and articulate, as he always was. It shows how clearly he saw Hitler and the Nazis for what they were, at a time when an embarrassing number of English and Europeans who should have known better admired Nazi Germany. Finally, it connects Chesterton's abhorrence of the Third Reich with his religious convictions, making GKC in retrospect immensely more admirable as a Roman Catholic than Pius XII. The End of the Armistice is by itself worth the price of this book.

This is what all popular art forms should be. A social commentary as love poem. And poem this is. There is very little that someone can write about the Krazy experience without treading in the same terran as this wonderful book. This is were your Krazy love afair begins. And unlike Ignatz you don't show your love with a brick.

fine anthologies like this will have to do.

compiled principally by patrick mcdonnell (artist and author of "mutts" -- the finest contemporary comic strip) this is a good introduction to the best comic strip of all time. for some thirty years in the first half of the american century, george herriman created one of the greatest works of american art and literature. based almost entirely on variations on a theme (cat loves mouse, dog loves cat, mouse throws brick, cat deems said abuse [rightly?] as a sign of love), herriman caught the essence of a country barely growing up, as well as love in all its potential manifestations.

"krazy kat" can be appreciated as allegory, or it can be enjoyed simply as damned funny. this volume will allow you to have a bit of both.

but oh dear, when will some brave publisher issue the entire run?

Over the past fifteen years or so, a strange new breed of art-geek has mutated in the suburbian basements (of their parents' houses) across the American landscape; they aggressivley praise every third-rate creation in comics, trying ever so hard to convince themselves that any of them could ever matter to a serious person outside their little world. On occasion one of them will pay lip service to the genius of Herriman, a ritual that is expected of them, and then go right back to buying up the kinds of pretentious or deviant efforts produced by the current so-called masters of the medium such as Spiegleman, Clowes, Ware, McCloud, Crumb, Bagge, the Hernandez brothers, Chester Brown, and so on. The terrible shame of all this is that through this overhyping of the layer of scum that has risen to the top of the commercial pond, those precious few men of genius--Jim Woodring, Joe Sacco,and a handful of others-- that have chosen to express themselves in the medium of comics are thrown out with the proverbial bathwater by those who are intrigued enough by this sort of publicity to investigate the genre, as soon as they discover that they have been had. Herriman's books, which are all surreal masterpieces of infinitely higher consciousness, poetry, originality, beauty, truth, love (and everything else good in the universe!) than 99 percent of "fine" art and certainly all of the aforementioned funnybook fishwraps, cannot even stay in print in such an environment. For this reason, and because if you have any sensitivity at all to the sublime you will wear out your first copy and will therefore need a spare to share with your children, I advise all readers to purchase two copies of everything that has Herriman's name on it. You will find it a bargain.

I first read lives of the musicians when I was about 7 yearsold or so. Then, I thought it was terrific. I still do. However, I amnow 12 years old, and now that I have paid more attention to it, I see several faults, but overall it is still a very good book. First of all, their choice of musicians is not the best. I would have recommended Debussy and Schubert, like the Kirkus Reviewer. Some of the composers I have hardly ever heard of, like Igor Stravinsky or Nadia Boulanger. And while Clara Schumann was a great pianist, I think they should have focused more on her husband, Robert, a prolific composer, whose works are among the very best. Also, some of the parts of the biographies are questionable. Frederic Chopin may not have actually been romantically involved with Aurore Dudevant (George Sand), but in love with the Countess Delphine Potocka. The book states that the Waltz in D-Flat, or Minute Waltz, was written for George Sand's dog, when in fact it was probably written for Potocka. However, the book was still very well written, and I enjoyed it, despite the possible mistakes. I recommend this book to anyone who likes music, classical or not. So sit back and enjoy!

I loved this book because it made those musicians seem like real people instead of great-all-star-super-geniuses. It is full of strange little facts about all the famous musicians like Bach,Gershwin,Beethoven and Schmann.

---Megan W.

This book provides interesting insight into the lives of composers. I teach music to elementary and high school students and I read this book to all of my students. They all enjoy learning the details of the composers lives. The book presents the composers in such a way that the students remember the information about the composers. The book does not provide information about what the composers' music sounds like, and that is something I also like to teach. A great book to gain kids'interest in famous composers.