I remember reading these books on my summer vacations to my grandparents...I was bored and the local town librarian recommended them to me. Many years later, looks for books on mysterious houses for a nephew, I remembered and re-discovered them. My favorite is An Enemy At Green Knowe. The story is full of twists and turns and quite frightening events, with the excitement lasting just long enough to tantalize the reader. You feel the house itself is a living breathing character, as is true of the entire series. This is the kind of book an adult needs to put in the hands of the student -- as is true with A Wrinkle In Time -- and sit back while the child becomes wrapped in the world of Green Knowe. A superior children's book!

Why is this book out of print?

In this, the fifth Green Knowe book, Tolly AND Ping come to spend the summer with Tolly's great grandmother, Mrs. Oldknow, and do battle with the forces of evil as personified by a newneighbor, Melanie Powers.

Absolutely wonderful -- my favorite part is the very end, where everything comes together serendipitously to defeat Miss Powers, leaving you to feel that all is right with the world.

Like Tove Jansson's Moomin books & Arthur Ransome's Swallows & Amazons series, L.M. Boston's Green Knowe books remain underappreciated by American readers. Even so, these three series are arguably of vastly superior quality to the ubiquitous Harry Potter, Narnia, and Roald Dahl books. An Enemy at Green Knowe is the 5th in this series of 6 which do not need to be read sequentially. Tolly, the protagonist of the first 2 books is now united w/ Ping, the hero of books 3 & 4. Those familiar w/ the series will know that the "shadow protagonist" is Mrs. Oldknow, Tolly's great-grandmother & owner of the manse Green Knowe & its magical environs.

Green Knowe is a place whose past haunts its present. Mrs. Oldknow relates to the 2 boys an incident out of Green Knowe's past, when the mysterious Dr. Vogel took up residence at Green Knowe as the family tutor in the year 1630. Dr. Vogel became caught up in some nefarious activity, and as the boys soon learn, the evil force that was unleashed by Dr. Vogel still lurks in the present day. They must confront this challenge to Green Knowe and its proprietor in a series of hair-raising events -- although written for children, this book is not for the faint of heart.

The Green Knowe books differ from one another quite a bit, but in my estimation this one ranks w/ Children of Green Knowe as the best. While that one was delightful for its innocence, this one is notable for the way in which it gives the reader chills.

Boston's prose is graceful & intelligent & is recommended for the literate grade schooler. These books are the logical starting point for a reader to progress to the works of Susan Cooper, Alan Garner, and Robert Holdstock.

No mention of the Green Knowe books would be complete w/o mention of the marvelous illustrations by Peter Boston. Unfortunately, the Odyssey Classic reprints chose hideously garish covers, although to their credit they preserved Peter Boston's interior illustrations. Still, their choice of covers probably explains why these books are now out of print.

Is about a girl that is opressed by her mom and sister and she is trying to find her personality, she gets to be the leader of her class but then she realized that she can be herself and not imitate anyone.Is a great book to read more than one time.

Este libro trata de cómo una niña ve lo que pasa en su familia, con su madre dominante, sus 2 hermanos y su padre, el cual se va de la casa a causa de no poder hacerle frente a la madre y después muere.Aparte explica la busqueda de identidad de la niña a la cual todos querían que fuera como otras personas. Es muy bueno.

Odd that some of these are out of print and some aren't, but any public library with a collection dating back to the sixties should have a copy.

Stones is indeed about Roger, son of the Norman lord who built Green Knowe, and the building of Green Knowe. Like all of the series, mysterious and imaginative and full of historical detail.

Like the best books of this type, the series creates a world of which the books merely touch the surface.

Highly recommended.

Tolly, the hero of most of the other Green Knowe books, is a supporting character in this one. 'Stones' is centered around Roger, son of the Norman lord who first built Green Knowe. His travels into his future bring him into contact with Tolly, Susan, and some of the other children from the series. Without being dry and preachy, this book conveys the richness of English history along with the warmth of its characters and story.

I am a World War One vet. This is the best book I ever read about war. It tells the inportances of life and death. It tells how it is to see a brutal war it is a very good book, but I would think that after know what it's like that if you had a grandpa in World War One, be greatful of that.

Anthropology, history, and a journalistic slant all combine to provide a thorough understanding of how government and commercial mechanisms can harm a neighborhood and, thus, its inhabitants.

Maria Vesperi is an incredibly gifted writer who clearly knows the literature of sociology, anthropology, and economics. There's a good dose of symbolic theory woven into her text and it comes across seamlessly. A great read!

In this, the third of the Green Knowe series, Tolly and his grandmother are away (presumably in Cornwall). Two women have rented the house for the summer and ask three children to stay. Ida is the niece of one of the women, Ping and Oskar are refugees. The children are turned loose on the river, where they have many fine and imaginative adventures. These books are all quite wonderful. This one is actually in print. The others can be found at public libraries. Don't miss them. the next in the series is a Stranger at Green Knowe, also in print.

Ping, one of the refugee children from the River at Green Knowe, returns to spend the summer with Tolly's grandmother at Green Knowe, as Tolly is on a vacation with his parents. Ida has written to Mrs. Oldknow, asking her to ask Ping to stay. The adventures this time center on an escaped gorilla who comes to stay in Toseland Thicket -- a tangle of woods across the moat from the Green Knowe garden. Also a wonderful book. Imaginative and sensitive and mysterious.

Rilke's "Duino Elegies" form one of the most perfect collections of lyric poetry you can ever hope to get your hands on. Unfortunately for the David Young translation, however, there is much less Rilke than there ought to be; a series of strange decisions on Young's part casts a shadow over even the brighter moments of his rendering of this masterpiece.

For example, Rilke was a genius at enjambment; that is, he was a master at placing his most important words at the very end or very beginning of a line, in order to highlight them. Think of the first line, which ends with "Engel," splitting it from the first word of the next line, "Ordnungen." (Young merely gives these words together, as "angelic orders," at the end of the third line.) By divorcing the angels from their orders in the poem's very first line, Rilke sets the tone that not all is right in the heavens.

And Rilke's line breaks are even more important than those of other poets, because they are few and far between, since his lines are nice and fat, often more than 13 syllables. Young's lines, on the other hand, are broken up into tiny 2- to 8-syllable, bite-sized chunks. This changes not only the rhythm of Rilke's verse--which obviously would have changed anyway, in translation--but its compositional emphases, as the structure of the most important lines is simply whisked away. And that is a tragedy.

Young's excuse for this unfortunate decision? He happened, while he was working on the translation, "to re-read some of William Carlos Williams' late poetry," and he liked Williams' stubbier, tri-partite lines. Rilke, however, is not William Carlos Williams, and Young's rendering of Rilke as Williams suffers because of this incongruity. (Oddly enough, though, Williams is another poet for whom every line break bears an awful lot of weight; too bad Young didn't carry that respect for enjambment into his work on the "Duino Elegies.")

Those interested in Rilke should do themselves a favor and pick up Mitchell's translation. I simply can't recommend this edition. It gets three stars because, despite the muddle, there are SOME beautifully rendered lines, and some of the power of Rilke manages to squeeze through. And that's always a wonderful thing.

For me, at least, Rainer Maria Rilke's Duino Elegies are the very epitome of poetry. I know others who, even though they admire Rilke above all other poets, prefer other "Rilke" poems, such as "Evening." For me, however, it has always been, and always will be, the Elegies. Certainly they are the most extravagant and elusive of Rilke's poems, even for those who count others among their favorites.

Rilke, who longed for a place of solitude in the country, arrived at the fortress-like Castle Duino, high above the Adriatic, near Trieste, in December 1911. His hostess was Princess Marie von Thurn und Taxis-Hohenlohe, who had invited Rilke to translate Dante's Vita Nuova with her. Princess Marie, however, soon left for more sociable climes and Rilke was left alone on the stormy, wind-swept cliffs of Duino. Rilke, at this time of his life, was known to commit himself to a strict regimen of work. Nevertheless, his poems, he has written, always seemed to burst upon him suddenly, like a thunderstorm on a hot summer's afternoon. And, one afternoon at Duino, the opening line of the first elegy burst upon Rilke like a flash of lightening.

There is no problem with the Duino Elegies...if one reads and comprehends German. If one doesn't, however, the problems of translation can be enormous. Translation, always a fragile task, becomes even more so when it involves poetry, and reaches its zenith with a work as sublime as Rilke's Duino Elegies. So many versions of these gorgeous poems exist (at least twenty), that the Elegies are certainly suffering from a case of "translation overkill."

In the original German, the Duino Elegies are the most sublime expressions of awe, of terror, of love, of splendor, of Life, that have ever been set down by the hand of man. In hands other than Rilke's, however, they can seem clumsy and more than a bit melodramatic. Rilke wrote delicately-calibrated poetry, without excess words and, the dread of all translators, the hyphenated word. But, all that aside, reading the Elegies in translation, any translation, is better than not reading them at all.

No matter how "angelic" these poems may seem, never doubt that they are expression of life in the here and now. As Rilke, himself, tells us, "the world exists nowhere but within us." These gorgeous poems are about the difficulties of living in this world, of not being heard by the angels, and of the tragedy that can so easily befall us. They are about Rilke's desire for solitude and his desire to escape it, i.e., the need and the utter impossibility of understanding and being understood completely in this life.

Although many of the translations are flawed, as translation by its very nature must be, the Duino Elegies remain the epitome of poetry. They are a cry of terror, of awe, of joy, of splendor at the lonely and solitary condition of man.

"For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror we can just barely endure, and we admire it so because it calmly disdains to destroy us. Every angel is terrible." - Rainer Maria Rilke, First Elegy

The Duino Elegies are quite possibly the greatest work of Rainer Maria Rilke, himself one of the greatest poets, German language or otherwise, of all time. The elegies, writen in the cold vast chambers of Duino Castle, deal with all the greatest issues of human existence: love, death, tragedy, God, and life's very meaning. Their language reflects their origin: like the Castle's empty stone hallways, the words are perfectly formed; they are fragile and beautiful; weightless and profound. Rilke's first elegy begins with a reflection on the awesome, terrifying power of beauty. He longs to experience it, but knows that it would destroy him. As he writes on, the reader grows to understand and feel not only Rilke's longing, but his fear. The terrible beauty, looming behind all the elegies, is present in the text. The poems inspire wonder, raise profound quetions with ineffable answers, and fills us with awe as it calmly disdains to destroy us.

The German text is perfect, but MacIntyre's translation is splendid and best conveys the work's haunting and desolate undertones. While it seems to me that everyone should own and cherish the Duino Elegies, it is an absolute requirement for anyone seeking to construct a serious collection of great poetry.

Delightful source for folklore concerning flowers! Serious and beginning gardeners will be entertained with the information discovered between the covers of this charming garden book.

Ably translated by Moishe Black and Maria Green, Love In The Garden offers a poetic fancy and lively wit as Jean-Pierre Otte's presents in anthropomorphic perspective the ingenuity and variety of (...) tactics of garden insects and flowers. Otte reveals intricate, humorous, and often horrifying intimate details about the frenzied (...) lives of garden flowers and insects that enriches the scientific knowledge of the reader as well as involving the reader (through(...) and all forms of sensation) to the turbulence of live. Love In The Garden is ardently recommended reading for anyone who has ever watch the small and varied life of within a family garden, up close and personal!