This is a book is quite good as most Norton Critical Editions are. It has a lot of what is needed by students for a course on Blake or, more likely, a course that spends part of a term on Blake.

It has some biographical material and some maps of England and London at the time Blake lived. There are also a good helping of black and white as well as color plates of Blake's illuminated works. The color plates are only good - the color is not produced beautifully. The student will only get an impression of the true power of Blake's artistry. However, a good teacher will point the student to the Blake Archive at:... so the students can see the works more completely with variants and in better color (if you have good video cards and monitors).

One of the best parts of this book begins on page 176 where working drafts are shown and compared to the final versions. There is also a nice selection of critical writing on Blake - criticism from Blake's time through the present. There is also a useful bibliography.

In some ways this is "Erdman Lite", but it is much more portable than Erdman and for an introductory course on Blake it is probably sufficient. I am glad that I have it in my library.

But please don't stop here!

Nice book, but too bad its front picture cover is defaced by Norton's double-layer of big gold stickers with high-tack adhesive that makes them impossible to remove without adhesive remaining on the cover.

This is absolutely the best compendium of Blake's work which articualtes an outstanding range of his vision. This edition acknowledges the poetry and color paintings of a consumate craftsman of the imagination on high quality, acid free paper and is nylon stitched and bound in signatures to last a lifetime. Books are rarely made this way but the Norton edition is a beautiful rendering of the first, and perhaps, primary British Romantic poet.

'[W]hen you have eliminated the unsaleable plotlines, then whatever remains, however tasteless, must be the truth!'
(Guts, page 51)

Well, if this is the truth, I'd hate to hear about the unsaleable plotlines...

Guts is a spoof horror novel, and tasteless it most certainly is. The plot (if that's the right word!) runs a little something like this: a scientist hypothesizes that the human stomach is intelligent, finds a way to communicate with it, then the stomachs rebel (literally) and start killing people in various unpleasantly gory ways.

Still here? If so, Guts may well be your sort of book! The trouble with reviewing something like this is that, awful as much of the book is, it's all deliberate. So we can note the cardboard characters, the flour-and-water plot, the excessive amounts of bodily fluids, the howlers ('After the research paper on termites which had brought him his master's degree in etymology...'); but we can't criticise them because they're supposed to be bad.

So we're just left with the jokes then. And, luckily, the jokes are very good. No horror cliché is left untouched and the whole thing is just gloriously silly. The one downside is that, since the object of most of the satire here is a certain kind of book, there's a lot of reference to the fact that this is a novel, which can grate after a while. But there are enough other jokes to make up for it.

In short, if you can stomach gross-outs, there's a good read to be found in the bowels of this book. It will be at-tract-ive to some... okay, that's enough.

Another plus point is that the book is quite short. I wouldn't have the guts for any more!

Guts is a romp from start to finish, written by two of the funniest writers in the business. Every cliche of the horror genre is mercilessly parodied to excruciating effect -- excruciating in two senses, because not only will you find yourself laughing until you hurt, you find that these two authors can be at least twice as excruciatingly revolting as the most extreme (and famous) of the splatter novelists.

In keeping with the genre's prime exemplars, plot is sacrificed at every turn to the joyously detailed gross-out, but the story goes something like this. Crackpot scientists get the idea that our intestines are not a part of us but in fact a symbiotic organism. In attempting to contact these independent organisms they inadvertently spark them into rebellion. Dragging themselves free of their host bodies, the hate-filled intestines go on the rampage, wreaking terrible vengeance on the human race.

Somehow relevant to all this are such items as a vast sentient cheese that must be placated by daily, doggerel-filled rites; a neo-Nazi desperate to find someone to persecute because, in dismay at falling membership, his movement has had to recruit members of every conceivably minority in attempt to bolster the numbers; a sexual encounter with the Sphinx; as many deliberately asinine pseudoscientific theories as can reasonably be fitted in among the gross-outs; an R2D2-style robot that is not only cuter than its movie counterpart but also a Biblical fundamentalist and a lesbian; a tabloid journalist trying despairingly to change the habits of a lifetime and tell the truth; and much more besides.

The jokes come fast and furious as the book races along. The inventiveness never flags. What more could you ask for?

I laughed until I was ready to burst -- which latter is exactly what, in the final cataclysmic scenes of this laugh riot, the giant cheese does. But that's another story.

Many years ago, Dave Langford and John Grant wrote something that they felt was the ultimate spoof horror novel. It was called Guts and it was so horrible that it was rejected with cries of extreme nausea by every publisher to whom it was presented. Langford dined out on the story for years, and professed (pseudo-) sorrow that nobody would ever read the rotten thing.

Well now you can. Cosmos Books have taken the plunge and published it - thus proving yet again that there is no subject matter so vile that the book can't find a publisher somewhere.

The "plot" (for want of a better word) revolves around the exploits of the sentient intestines of the major characters. The intestines rather resent their interior functions. They want to break out into the world, to live and love in the open air. (It gives a whole new meaning to the phrase "communicating with your inner being"). The bulk of the novel is made up of a series of set piece encounters between the rampant intestines and the populace at large.

Every intestinal joke you can think of and huge number that you can't think of and many that you wouldn't like to think of desecrate the text along with a lot of sly nudge, nudge, wink, wink digs at pseudo-scientific nut-cults, the reading room of the British Library and the sexual attractiveness of the Sphinx. I think there might be a kitchen sink in there as well.

That's not bad for a mere 173 pages! Langford's right - it's a rotten book. I loved it.

What can I say about this book that hasn't already been said? It's an invaluable resource for both published and non-published writers alike. The only complaint I have is that I would have liked to have seen a CN designation for "Creative Non-Fiction."

I bought this book a few weeks ago from the Pen American Center. I've found over 100 sources of funding that I qualify for right now and about 50 more that I qualify for later. I am really loving this book. It is designed in such a way that it's easy to scan all listings for ones that apply to you and easy to search for specific ones as well. In the back everything is indexed several ways, making things even easier to find.

The information they provide you with is comprehensive and extensive. Kudos to the editor and researcher!

If you're a writer, be it fiction, plays, journalistic, non-fiction, whatever, this book is a great resource for you.

This book is invaluable. It provides contact information for countless sources of funding, it's easy to use, and the range of grants and awards is astounding. Writers of every discipline, and from every step of their career, I think, will find something suited to their needs.

The Deathlord of Ixia is certainly one of the most well-written books in the Lone Wolf series. Following up Lone Wolf #16, The Legacy of Vashna, The Deathlord of Ixia takes the reader to the icy word of Ixia, where the Deathlord has been released and the entire fate of the universe you know rests on your hands. From the climactic voyage to the doomed city of Xaagon to a spiralling voyage through time and dimensions to the Plane of Darkness, the reader will be catapulted into agreeing that Book #17 of Joe Dever's immensely popular series is indeed a masterpiece

For a game book, Lone Wolf is certainly outstanding. The detailed discription, charachter options and everything makle it truly excellent. This book was no exception, and certainly one of my favourites. I especially like that you are able to finally deal with Tagazin. Just one thing though: Ixiataaga is impossible! I've tried at least fifty times, and I cannot defeat him! :-P

A very good book with a lot of fun. It's a little slow at the start, but once things get moving, it become worth the wait. In fact, this was a book in which its ending justified its beginning. It's a fantasy story which reminds us that all fantasy stories do not have to be about Tolkien and such. Every review I see of this book likens it to Alice, Dorothy, and friends. While this book does touch on that type of fantasy, it also contains a contemporary view which gives it a flavor all its own -- a new old fantasy. Pick it up, read it. You won't soon forget it.

The line on the cover of this book says "A Fairy Tale for Grownups of All Ages" and that could hardly be a better description of this charming, highly imaginative novel. I read it almost in a single sitting and the whole time I was doing so I had this lovely feeling that I was a child again curled up in bed with one of my favorite stories - Lewis Carroll, perhaps, or George MacDonald, or even L. Frank Baum. Lovely illustrations too. Thank you, thank you, thank you, John Grant, for having magically transported me back into that wonderful world! I would recommend this book to anybody, from children to grandparents.

... think "lots of highly intelligent people with recognizable names give their best parting words of advice to graduates"... it reads like quick snippets from commencement addresses that these people may well have given at some point. The words are true and often poetic and full of hope for aspiring young people. The phrase "sage advice" wants to work its way in here somewhere. What I wonder is... is this a book that young graduates will WANT to read? I appreciate it as a resource to offer with students I work with, but I'm also 5 years out... I'm sure I would not have picked this up to read straight through at 21. If you sat through your own graduation speaker, chances are you don't have a burning need to read through 15 more mini-speeches that offer the same basic "make your mark on the world" challenge. This is the book parents and well-wishers give to grads, though I'm not sure they're gonna read, so that's why I gave it 4 stars.

I haven't even read this book and I know it's good. How do I know? Because Madeline L'Engle's in it!

I had a few more comments on this book.

I think the author may be onto something here, something even more important than the idea of using Grant's life as a way to help business managers, perhaps.

I like history and have read my share of it, but I'd never been able to really get into the history of the Civil War, or even early American history in general, despite having had childhood friends who were into Civil War history, and even Civil war reenactments. The author's using an important figure of the time as a sympathetic character, a focus around which to build an interesting account of his contributions, also meant that he needed to present much of the historical context and discuss a lot of the actual history of the period. In the process he really wrote a mini-history of the events during this time that was much more engaging and absorbing than your typical history that I have read. As a result, I learned much more than I ever had before about this important phase of our history.

I think this approach would be equally applicable to other important figures and times. It might seem that this is just re-inventing the idea of a biography, but again, I've read my share of biographies too and this book was much more interesting the way Barnes did it. Much of that is because the author makes you feel like you are right in the center of the action with Grant during this critical time as he makes many of these difficult, life-and-death decisions. So if we are to call it biography at all, Barnes's approach is a much more interesting way to do it.

I hope the author may do other books like this as I would be very interested in reading them, too.

I usually approach these "on Leadership" series and most business biographies with a bit of skepticism, but I was really blown away by this book. Although I'm not a civil war buff, the author's narrative and vivid descriptions of Grant's triumphs and hardships kept me riveted and I couldn't put this book down once I started. The personal accounts of the challenges facing Grant and his tenacious ability to overcome them, are simply amazing. The author's contrasts of Grant vs. McClellan (the incompetent General which Grant replaced) lay the foundation for learning what not to do as well. Each chapter feels as if your grandfather is telling you these stories from firsthand experience, making them lessons you won't soon forget as you manage and lead in your business or organization. And in case you need a refresher, the author summarizes the leadership lessons at the end of each chapter. This is also a great book for teenagers who need a leadership training. It's easy to identify with Grant, and the way the author draws you into our history makes it even more valuable.

A well-written, clear, and perfectly adequate introduction to the life and thought of John Boyd, arguably the most influential American military thinker of modern times.

Coram's BOYD is the "good read", this one's for the student and theorist.

Curiously, some of the anecdotes involving Boyd's life differ completely from Coram's volume, e.g., the events surrounding the birth of Energy Maneuverability at Georgia Tech. I'm inclined to give the nod to Hammond here on the grounds that his versions tend to make more sense.

Although unquestionably an admirer of Boyd, Hammond's assessment is reasonable and balanced-he's quite open about Boyd's manifest flaws, his willful eccentricity above all, and makes it clear that Boyd was far from alone in his efforts to better the U.S. military.

There's a solid discussion of the OODA cycle, probably Boyd's greatest insight and most effective contribution to tactical thought (as the Republican Guard recently discovered). Hammond carries out preliminary work in placing Boyd's concept among those of other military thinkers, in particular Clausewitz, which is valuable if not as detailed as it might have been. He shows little familiarity with Asian strategists, many of whom were direct influences on Boyd's thought. (e.g., Miyamoto Mushashi: "In strategy there are various timing considerations. From the outset you must know the applicable timing and the inapplicable timing, and from among the large and small things and the fast and slow timings find the relevant timing... It is especially important to know the background timing, otherwise your strategy will become uncertain." -["A Book of Five Rings", Harris translation, P. 48.] How's that for your Boyd Cycle! )

In Hammond's eyes, Boyd was a synthesist, applying previously isolated bits and pieces of knowledge to construct an overarching theory. A serious analysis of Boyd's work would require familiarity not only with strategy, but with quantum physics, modern clinical psychology, management theory, and half a dozen other equally arcane disciplines. To fully understand Boyd, one might be required to become Boyd!

One annoying note is Hammond's dismissal of Ronald Reagan's attempts to rebuild the military (something also found in Coram), implying that Boyd shared this loathing. If any actual evidence of this exists, I'd like to see it.

Finally, though he fails to make note of it, Hammond makes it quite apparent that Boyd was, above all else, a phenomenon better known in the East than our hemisphere. He was a sensei, a master, one who teaches arcane and difficult knowledge to a select group of followers, who then move on to teach others. This explains so much about Boyd-the almost medieval loyalty he inspired (even among people who never met him, as Gerald Martin points out about Coram in his insightful review of BOYD), his penchant for using the briefing as a teaching tool, the unwillingness to fit into any organization, the wandering from post to post, even the cheap and ragged clothes!

The sensei approach has its flaws (among them the master's unfitness for family life) sensei rarely do well at writing, which explains why Boyd never progressed with his magnum opus, "Creation and Destruction". This tends to throw the teachings into the hands of interpreters, some of whom may be less than capable. There's a danger that Boyd's thought might become Californized, in much the same way that the perfectly legitimate scientific field of quantum mechanics was rendered unrecognizable by various New Agers in the 70s and 80s.

But Hammond is not one of these. We need more--a carefully edited and annotated edition of the Green Book, to start with. (not to mention the tantalizing question: is there a videotape?) But we'll be discussing Boyd for a long time to come. Hammond's book is a fine introduction. It'll be awhile before we see better.

While I find it hard to disagree with some of the comments in the previous reviews, I would suggest that describing this as hagiographical is to criticize Hammond's performance of a job that he never undertook. The Mind of War, strictly speaking, is not a biography of John Boyd. It is better described as a presentation and discussion of Boyd's ideas. A person who is interested in learning about both Boyd's life and his ideas should read Robert Coram's book Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War along with The Mind of War. Grant Hammond has written a very important book. John Boyd's preferred form of communication was the military brief and, as a result, his ideas are virtually undocumented. Hammond had the opportunity to know and work with Boyd for six years and, to a significant degree, has written the book that Boyd never did.

Grant Hammond has written a long-overdue book on Col. John P. Boyd, USAF, the man who was the American genius behind maneuver war. Unfortunatley for Boyd, being a amverick thinker, he was shunned by his service. Fortunately for America, others, especially the US Marine Corps, listened to Boyd and incorpoated his theory into their doctrine of manuever warfare. America is safer because of this man's vision, and Hammond brings the man and his accoplishments to the light of the public-- atlong last.

Not a bad collection, but it's the concept of "Best Gay Erotic Ficiton" that I object to. Does the editor really expect us to believe that fully a quarter of the best gay erotica published last year appeared in just two magazines (InTouch and Indulge) owned by one publisher? Or that one writer (Bob Vickery, who is good) is responsible for a sixth of the best porn? Missing are any of the other topflight queer authors found in, say, Best Gay Erotica or Best American Erotica, and the mass-market magazine source of these stories makes for a certain uniformity of style and narrative approach. A lot of the stories are fun, few are revelations, and if the publisher had subtitled it "Good Stuff from Some of the Stroke Magazines" it would have been more accurate.

This book has a wide variety of stories, ranging from musclebound hunks to pretty boys. A lot of the stories are really good, especially RJ March and Bob Vickery's stories. There are several from each of these guys, and that's a good thing.

This is a fantastic book that lives up to its promise as the best gay men's writing. In particular, stories by T. Hitman who has been regularly featured in most of the big gay 'zines and R. J. March, Bob Vickery, and Grant Foster round out a provocative collection of first-rate writing. Highly recommended.

I find that Mr. Stevenson is a very talented writer because his story was described excellently and the suspense seemed very real.

Kidnapped is the story of a young man's adventures. This particular young man was named David Balfour. After his parents passed away David set off in search of his rich uncle, to find himself a new home. Little did he know that on his arrival that his uncle would try to chase him away with a gun, and would be the most miserly person David had ever met. For fear of having to feed David, the uncle had him kidnapped aboard a ship that would take him to America to work on the plantations. Due to an unexpected change in the weather, however, the ship was wrecked on the coast of Scotland, and there the adventure began.

On the back of the novel it says that this book has been enjoyed by generations and shall be enjoyed for generations to come. When I chose to read this novel I wasn't sure if that statement would be true. I was pleasantly surprised. I really enjoyed the story, I found it to be well written and exciting. I looked forward to the end because I was curious to see what would happen.

I'd say any book that is good enough to be deemed a classic has an importance all it's own. I have not read many classics but I find this book important because it holds a lot of information pertaining to the history and culture of Scotland and it's people.

In other words, this is a great story, read it!

Robert Louis Stevenson was without a doubt one of the greatest historical/adventure novelists that ever lived, and Kidnapped is unquestionably one of his best works. My only regret is that I waited so long to finally read it. It was a new and exciting change from Treasure Island, a book which I love, but have read approximately once every year since the second grade. Finally, longing for a little swashbuckle, and wishing for a way out of my Jim Hawkins rut, I picked up Kidnapped, and was immediately swept off on a thrilling, suspenseful and exhilarating adventure through the Scottish highlands. For days I sat rigid on the edge of my seat, eagerly following the young David Balfour as he was cheated of his inheritance by his wily uncle, kidnapped by pirates, and befriended by a cocky Jacobite outlaw. Breathlessly, I followed him and his companion as they were falsely accused of murder and forced to flee from British troops. Finally, I heaved a sigh of contented disappointment as the story ended, glad at the way things had ended, yet upset that it all had to end and that I would at last have to part from the two heroes of whom I had grown so fond. This is without a doubt a book that I will reread as many times as I have Treasure Island, and I envy the lucky reader who is picking it up for the first time. It is thrilling, exciting, suspenseful, unpredictable, and thoroughly intoxicating. After reading it, my thirst for such dashing adventure was so terrible that I immediately had to run to the library and lay my hands on every adventure novel I could find. I would highly reccommend it to every lover of adventure stories, particularly those with a historical base. I would suggest though that first time readers take a minute to read just a very little bit about the Jacobite rebellions, particularly the one of 1745. It will help greatly to clarify the story, and make it that much more enjoyable. (If indeed, it could get any better than it already is!)

Let me tell you now that 'Kidnapped' is my personal favourite, and I've already read it four times! You'll never get a moment to pause to take a yawn. R.L. Stevenson with his superb writing capabilities writes of a young man named David Balfour. When his father dies, he is told to go to his uncle's house. After several failed attempts to kill David the wicked uncle sells him off to a skipper of a ship. In the course of his stay on the ship David meets the Jacobite, Alan. I can't describe the novel in words you gotta read it to know what you are really in for! This is the greatest adventure novel I've ever read. If you have read Stevenson's 'Treasure Island' then you won't be disappionted with this one.