The story of William Palmer is at once comic and tragic, for it is the story of a seemingly good man - a country doctor in nineteenth century England - who also just happens to be a forger, philanderer, fixer of horse races and common thief. But the law did not ultimately punish Dr. Palmer for any of these crimes; he is instead condemned by history as one of England's most notorious serial killers, a poisoner suspected in the deaths of his mother-in-law, wife, brother, children and his best friend. I recognized this tale from an adaptation on the PBS series MYSTERY from a few years ago; Palmer was portrayed as a cold-blooded sociopath who used his knowledge of science to serve his own narcissistic ends. So let us then thank Robert Graves for presenting the other side of the story, one supported by the facts and in the same mold as his other great historical fictions "I, Claudius" and "Claudius the God - Graves purports to show what really happened in that small village of Rugeley and the miscarriage of justice that occured at Palmer's trial. The author suggests that Dr. Palmer's most egregious fault was to run afoul of the "combined might of the Police, the insurance companies and the Jockey Club" - especially the latter, whom Graves smirks "would feel a hundred times less aggrieved with a man who garotted a fellow-criminal, an unwanted child, or an ailing relative, than with one who poisoned race-horses." There is little doubt that Palmer stole from friends and family alike or that he attempted to profit from the life insurance policies of those not long for this world; one of the book's most hilarious scenes has Palmer convincing his drunkard brother Walter to insure the remainer of his miserable life: "What about selling your life, Watty? You know it can't be a long one, not above ten years at the rate you're going . . . If you last beyond eight years, I'll be the loser, yet I don't mind taking the risk, if you promise to play fair. What do you say, Watty, old chum? It's easy money, like pledging your skeleton to a hospital." The genius of Graves is that he is able to contrast these moments of high comedy against the overwhelming conclusion that Palmer died a man innocent of the charges against him, namely, the murder of his friend John Parsons Cook. Justice was only a tool here, not the result, it was used to condemn a crook for his notorious life - Palmer was to become an example to all cheaters and deadbeats. I recommend this story to the reader who is able to draw his own conclusions about history - and one who enjoys a good laugh along the way.

I had to read this book for an independent study in Grade 12 English and I can honestly say that I was completely reviled by the utter lack of content in this quasi-classic book. I found there to be no plot and very little substance in the entire book and I am very disappointed in the judgement of the critics who put it #14 in the list of the top 100 books of this century. I cannot say that this book is good because lying is a sin and I don't want to go to Hell. I, Claudius cannot be a good representation of the works of Robert Graves because it is a pitiful example of a book, period..

Probably the greatest historical novel I have ever read. Julian by Gore Vidal is up there as well, though of course "I, Claudius" is the model on which it is based. He puts flesh to the accounts of Tacitus. Wonderful stuff.

Lying may be a sin, but poor taste in literature is a greater sin.

This is one of the most accurate historical fictions ever! have you not read suetonius or tacitus? All the events are real! Robert Graves is not reperesented becuase he was not trying to write as himslef, as said in the introduction. Real life doesnt usually have a cut and dry plot, which is why most books dont follow their main characters for more than a short period

I suppose I 'enjoyed' this book in the same weary way I 'enjoyed' the same author's Wife To Mr Milton, which is also narrated in a female persona. The ever-so-clever wheeze here is to suppose that the Odyssey was indited not by Homer, nor even by another Greek of the same name, but by the Princess Nausicaa, a memorable character in it, largely for her peculiar-looking name. The Princess is not on such firm ground as Mrs Milton, whose husband definitely was one person and who definitely wrote Paradise Lost and other noble works. When I was last up-to-date with Homeric scholarship (thirty-odd years ago), the English-speaking scholars had at last been converted to the view that the Homeric epics were a cumulative effort of a whole tradition of illiterate bards. This view found a shrill but entertaining and very readable proponent in Denys Page, Professor of Greek at Cambridge, whose The Homeric Odyssey is in fact a far better read than this book, even if you don't know Greek. Page even has no great opinion of the Odyssey as a poem, a very tenable view I would say.

So Graves's princess is a fraud of the worst order, a pale shadow of the 'dim phantom' who visits Penelope in Book IV. She is not purporting to be anybody in particular, but a whole lot of people. Her/their poem sucks anyway. And --wait for this -- she does not even know what her own name means! She thinks it is something to do with BURNING ships! Can you imagine a people as superstitious as the ancient Greeks having the princess of an island that got its living from the sea called 'Burner of Ships'? The derivation of the name is from the root 'kas' with the 's' lost between vowels in the usual Greek way, and that root signifies 'excellence', which you must admit makes a lot more sense.

I still enjoyed the book as make-believe, insofar as I ever enjoy 'drag-artist' narratives. I enjoyed Wife To Mr Milton a bit more, partly because much as I detest her husband as a human being his big poem is my outright #1 in any language I can read.

Robert Graves had a great idea: he wanted to elaborate on the idea that "The Odyssey" was written by a woman and that the woman-author was one of the characters in the epic poem. Since the only virtuous human women in the poem are Penelope and Nausicaa, Robert Graves concluded that Nausicaa is a good candidate to be the poet.

The idea itself is quite brilliant. "The Odyssey" has always been called a "women's" epic because except for Odysseus, all other important leading characters are women and the story focuses more on domestic life than on war-like exploits. Thus, imagining Nausicaa as the epic's author is not so outlandish.

That said, "Homer's Daughter" the novel is hugely disappointing. One of the major reasons why it failed to impress me is that the tone of the novel was very impersonal. I was always aware that Robert Graves was telling the story instead of the proper narrator -- Nausicaa. Speaking of Nausicaa, she is extremely unappealing. She seems to be very intelligent and clear-headed but so cold and closed-off that I could not care less about her. All the personal stories failed to impress me because either they were almost cartoonish, like Laodamas and Ctlimene, or plain boring, like Nausicaa and Aethon. The meeting between Odysseus and Nausicaa in "The Odyssey" is one of the best parts in the epic. Especially, when Odysseus says to Nausicaa that best of all, he wishes that she would know harmony in marriage. The meeting between Nausicaa and Aethon in "Homer's Daughter", patterned after Odysseus' and Nausicaa's in "The Odyssey, cannot compare. Also, Aethon pops up in the novel but I do not learn anything about his character except that almost everyone who meets him has an immediate trust and affinity for him. Instead of telling us that, Graves could have shown better why Aethon inspires such trust.

Robert Graves is extremely good at telling myths and whenever characters do that in the novel, the stories come alive. This is why it is such a disappointment that he cannot reproduce the same magic when the action is between the characters in the novel. He also writes good speeches and the confrontations in the Council and between Aethon and the suitors are also well-realized. But when the characters try to related to each other, the result is unremarkable.

Robert Graves should have tried harder to expand on his idea but he seemed to be so enthralled with the premise that he pays little attention to anything else. All in all, this is not a bad book but not as interesting as it could have been or as other books that are historical novels based on mythology, such as Graves' own "Hercules, My Shipmate" and Mary Renault's "The King Must Die".

With the Sicilian princess Nausicaa, author/poet Robert Graves created an interesting and intelligent female character. He casts his Nausicaa actually both in the Nausicaa/Penelope parts of Homer's Odyssey. This young lady certainly doesn't sit still, but makes things happen. She solves mysteries, saves her brothers from murder and keeps her father's realm from being ursurped and herself from the suitors clutches. In the meantime she entertains Homeric ambitions. This is a very good novel but like the other reviewers I think Nausicaa isn't just such a compelling creation as the emperor Claudius. I felt too much Graves' stamp on her. As if it were for the author much easier to get into Claudius' skin than into Nausicaa's (and in the case of a young girl, one would expect some spontaneity too). This novel reads more as Robert Graves who is masquerading in the guise of Nausicaa than as an enchanting and appealing heroine. This Nausicaa doesn't entirely convince me as the reader, to believe in her, whilst the original Nausicaa of Homer has the power to enchant me time and again. Homer's Nausicaa is an unforgettable heroine. The pace of this novel may be a bit slow in the beginning but later picks up.

All in all for lovers of Homer and Robert Graves 'Homer's Daughter' is still an interesting and worthwhile novel, but not without its flaws.

I was assigned this book to read for my English 5 class, and I must admit that I really had to force myself to read it. I found it a bit dull, but maybe that's just me. The long geneology really confused me and it was hard to keep up with it. The book does not really concentrate on Claudius's ruling life as I expected, but on the lives of his ancestors and family. It says nothing about how he ruled Rome because it did not get to that point- it only gets up to the point where they elect him emperor. I found this book disappointing because I really wanted to like it after all of the hype it got. This books shows the cruelty of the Roman Empire- how people will kill their family just so that the descendents of their particular line will survive and become the next Emperor. The way they falsely accused people of crimes just to get rid of them was terrible, and the way they banished people and executed them wrongly was also horrible. I think that this is a good read for die-hard history buffs, but not for the average Joe who doesn't like to think much. It is well written, but a bit confusing to me.

History merges into a wonderfully written tale of the 4th Emperor of Rome. Lame and sickly, Claudius dodges the madness of his relatives while reveling the inside story to the rule of the Augustine Emperors. Finally when everyone kills everyone Claudius arrives. A spellbinding tale for anyone interested in history.

I found this book disappointing, because I expected it to be about the relationship between George Sand and Frederic Chopin while in Majorca. However, this book has absolutely nothing to do with either Sand or Chopin. This book is entirely made up of George Sand describing the scenery, people, and foods of Majorca, and just complaining about how she hated it there. And to make it worse, there are footnotes on every page saying that Sand was totally wrong about everything she was saying. I would not recommend this book to anyone, unless they wanted to read up on what Majorca was like during the 1800's.

Sand's chronicle of a wretched season spent on the Balearic island of Mallorca is the archetype for the "bad-trip" school of travel writing. Caustic, spiteful and utterly devoid of sentimentality or remorse, Sand (who was visiting with her beastly young daughter, Solange, and an ailing Frederic Chopin) trashes everything Mallorcan, from the olive oil, to the weather, to the landscape, to the moral character of the islanders. (If only the British and German package tourists who have colonized and defaced Mallorca in the 20th century had read Sand beforehand!)

An added pleasure in this edition is the sniping and meticulous footnoting by Mallorcan expat Robert Graves. He gainsays and qualifies nearly every contentious little gripe of Sand's, providing the reader with an interesting cross-generational literary (and personal) cat/dog-fight.

My guess is, if you enjoy the withering observations of Paul Theroux and his disciples, you will enjoy Sand's nasty little book. If, however, you like your travel books in soft-focus and heavy on the ambience and schmaltz, look elsewhere.

Robert Heinlein remains the twentieth century's most important science fiction writer, and the one most capable of provoking arguments. This collection of letters, edited by Virginia Heinlein from the surviving correspondence of over 100,000 letters now locked away in the archives in UC Santa Cruz until fifty years after her death, is the closest we're going to see in this lifetime to Heinlein's private opinions on a variety of subjects. Publisher Lester Del Rey insisted on the letters being cut up into various topics, rather than the more standard chronological presentation; many of these letters contain the backgrounds to a number of Heinlein's fictional and personal projects. Most of the letters are to John Campbell and Heinlein's agent from the late forties until the mid-seventies, Lurton Blassingame; most of them also deal with something Heinlein wasn't happy about, so the title of the book is indeed descriptive: many of them do grumble pretty seriously. There are only three books that really give a picture of Heinlein the man, rather than Heinlein the writer: besides this one, there is "Expanded Universe," with its prefaces and afterwords that often reveal private insights, and there is "Tramp Royale," a travelogue which is the closest thing we'll ever see to an autobiography. None of these books is going to interest a casual reader, but all three are pure gold to a Heinlein fan. Until we finally see a full biography (which may not be for another fifty years, since the correspondence is locked up), this is the best we've got.

Beginning writers are advised to 'write what you know'. But if you're a writer of science fiction, where the environment is necessarily something different from the everyday world of now, how can you do this? For those who have read Heinlein's fiction, this book will provide some insights into just how this feat is accomplished. Within these pages you will find the genesis of:

The detailed space-suits of Have Spacesuit, Will Travel from his period of engineering research work on high altitude pressure suits during WWII.

How to build plumbing, bomb shelters, and move boulders from his work on his Colorado Springs house (Farnham's Freehold).

The marvelous characters of the cats that appeared in Door into Summer and The Cat Who Walks Through Walls from the cats that at various times in his life were co-owners of his habitats.

The knowledge of fencing so evident in Glory Road from his time on the fencing team at Annapolis, and the entire cadet experience that became part of the 'Lazy Man' episode of Time Enough for Love.

These are just a few of the examples of where incidents in Heinlein's life became part of his fiction, giving it that 'true to life' feel so common in his works and so rarely found in other SF writers of his generation. But this book is not a well laid out autobiography, but rather a collection of his letters to various people, mainly his literary agent, and often the items described above are included as an aside to the main subject of the letters.

Most of the material concerns itself with the details of how each of his stories was generated, the arguments he had with various editors (especially a certain one at Scribners), his working habits and the problems that prevented him from working at various times. For the Heinlein scholar or fan, this is a gold mine, providing much insight into almost all of his work. And Heinlein's own character shines through these letters, a proud, patriotic, self-disciplined, stubborn, highly opinionated, occasionally abrasive man who knew the worth of his labor and his effect on literally millions of his readers.

The letters are organized by theme (Beginnings, Juvenile Novels, Adult Novels, Travel, Fan Mail, Building, etc) and this easily allows the reader to see the progression of ideas and events within each of these subjects. But it has a downside in that items referenced in, say, the Building section have direct impacts on his writing schedule for a book covered in the Juvenile Novels section. Sometimes these relationships, while important, are not obvious to the reader due to this structure. After reading this book twice, and seeing just how much this type of thing occurs, I think I would have preferred having the letters organized in pure chronological order.

This is not a book for someone who has not read at least a few of Heinlein's fiction works, as the material will hold little interest other than some points on how the publishing industry works and just how this particular writer worked (which is not the writing class recommended method). But for those who, like myself, have read all or most of his works, this book can add a richness of background to his fiction works, a sense of 'growing closer' to the man who many call the greatest writer of science fiction, ever.

Of course it's true that we can never really know another person, certainly not someone whom we've never met, but one way of getting at least a glimpse of another's inner workings is to get a peek at their personal correspondence.

GRUMBLES FROM THE GRAVE is not only a collection of renowed science-fiction author Robert Heinlein's letters, but a look at most of his work, with input from his widow Virginia. There are also plenty of photos and reproductions of cover art from many of his novels.

Another brilliant and beloved science fiction writer, the late Isaac Asimov, wrote in his book A MEMOIR that he thought that GRUMBLES shouldn't have been published because it showed a "meaness of spirit" in Heinlein...

Heinlein comes out looking like a conscientious, caring man, so I truly have no idea what the good Dr. Asimov meant.

Especially entertaining was the in-depth look at the decade-long
birth of Heinlein's masterpiece, STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND, and reading Heinlein's short work "I Believe".

Nice book.

There is always something so heinous about the death of a child--especially if that death is at the hands of those they trust. We saw this in the deaths of the children in Houston at the hands of their Mother. This event happened nearly 50 years ago, and for those of us who remember it, it might as well have been yesterday. This is a well-written book and worthy of the effort of it's author.

Mike Williams

Been a Wrox fan for some time. This is the worst book their team has produced. The material is cursory at best and totally theoretical. Very few practical examples. Never thought I would point to an MSPress Step-by-Step book, however it is far superior to this junk.

I found this book to be helpful in understanding how to utilize multidimensional database design. It was nice to see that Microsoft has some affordable alternatives one can turn to in the data mining and data warehousing market. Once again WROX has produced a helpful product for professionals in the computer industry.

I bought Sakhrs version of this book for SQL Server 7. This is not just an upgrade but a look at the new functionlity found within SQL Server 2000.

This book is a dream if you are involved within Analysis and even looking at the new DTS Analysis functions has helped me.

Comparing this with other books, by far this is the one that is well written and doesnt just come out with the obvious.

Basically youll get very little information about owning a franchise. Some decent figures are in there (but I am sure could be found elsewhere on the internet).

What you will get is some type of financial statements for franchises that provide them. There is nothing special in this book! Most franchises do not provide financial information, so most of the franchises in here are no name franchises you probably haven't heard of (some are recognizable though).

Also they do not all follow the same format. Looks like the author took the information the franchiser sent and just reprinted it. You will not necessarly find cash flow in all of them. Some may just show expenses, etc.

Overall I was disappointed. All the information in this book could be obtained directly from the franchiser. For example if your interested in buying a dairy queen and dairy queen wont give you any financial information, dont expect this book to have it.

I found the "How to buy a good business at a great price" book (...) much more valuable. (...)

This book can either be good or very bad depending upon what you want out of it.

If you are looking for a book to help you strategically help you decide upon which franchise that would be most suitable and profitable for you, then skip this one.

This book will best serve those people who are at the very beginning of thinking about openning up a franchise. In fact, those people may even be disappointed as well.

This book gives a very quick synopsis on the different franchises available. There is very little differentiation between the different franchising, with the exception of product type. For example, you can examine the different pizza franchises, but don't get enough information about which franchises are best.

So, if you are looking for just a few thumbnail sketches at the highest level, then you will probably enjoy this book. If you are looking for something more, then keep looking.

In the mid-nineteenth century, Barnabas Barbellion wants to be Pope. But he is not a Catholic. He's an Anglican rector, with a wife, three children (one illegitimate) and a mistress. This peculiar book is partly a murder mystery story, but most interesting for its similarities to the extraordinary 'Hadrian the VII' by the so-called Baron Corvo. Both feature clerics of overweening ambition who achieve the papacy under bizarre and unlikely circumstances. In both cases the central character is unloveable to the point of repellence: cold, hard and slightly mad men. In 'Graves' the prose is distant and the action hard to engage with. There is an Edwardian feel to the writing, although its author, a noted architecture academic, penned the book in 1975. I thought the basic murder mystery plot was a distraction to the book's description of how the devious Barbellion eventually achieves the pontificate, and disappointed that there is virtually nothing about his reign as Paschal IV. However, the sheer audacity of Barbellion's machinations holds your attention.