Tennessee Williams is one of my favorite playwrights because he was not afraid to define the stage and setting as much as the story and characters. Not About Nightingales is a great example of this. I performed in my high school's production of this play (we cut the gay character, welcome to surburbia...) although in a minor role, Shapiro. I think the staging guidance that Williams provides is great, and the core story is also very effective at illustrating the terrible conditions in prisons at the time the book was written.

However, there are lines that make me wince. Eva, the only female with any development, is stereotypical and has some horrendous lines here and there. "Explosions are such a...waste...of energy." It reads badly, and sounds worse on stage. There are others, with most of the major characters. These grate on the nerves when you're trying to believe in the intense drama that otherwise pervades the work.

Also, it's possible to see that Williams was indeed a younger writer when he wrote this than other works like The Glass Menagerie. His minor characters have no development whatsoever, and exist simply to portary the variety of races and ethnicities effected by poor prison conditions. Shapiro, for instance, is Jewish. At one point, dying, he says, "My people are used to suffering." Perhaps, but this sounds more like a Rabbi than a prisoner. The spanish prisoner, Mex, is essentially the same. Queenie, the gay character, is just...well...outrageously effeminate. It's hard to believe he survived his first few weeks in prison. I'd rather see more development of Butch/Jim and Jim/Eva. The lead roles in this play are great parts. Conflict is real and omnipresent for them. Jim and Butch are characters I'll remember forever. The Warden, too, is a great sadistic villian.

You have to make a leap of faith with this book, but it's worth the effort. If you can see the play professionally, do it.

Torn among O'Neill's rarely seen "The Iceman Cometh" and Miller's haunting "Death of a Salesman", I chose "Not About Nightingales" as the outstanding production on a recent trip to NYC. I was fortunate and honored to have seen this work with Corin Redgrave playing one of the major roles. This is, without a doubt, the best play of the 1998-1999 season on Broadway. It is a wonderful blend of William's poetry and some of the harshest, physical action I have seen on a stage. The entire cast was a joy to watch! Since theater is also literature, I'm positive you will enjoy reading this beautifully rough work by one of America's finest playwrights.

I love this play. I was fortunate enough to get to see it in New York with the entire original cast. The writting is beautiful. The play is so masterfully written that you won't want it to end. It's complete with the perfect ending, the perfect opening, the right amount of comedy and tragedy, and spectacular dialogue. The play is wonderfully engaging, and I would love to see it again. The characters are so clearly written and each have a life of their own. Get the play -- it's a masterpiece.

William H. White (Mark Rutherford) presents a completely honest account of his life in Victorian England. He reveals his struggle to find spiritual security in a world of doubt. At first glance, Rutherford may seem pessimistic, but only at first glance. He endeavors to take a spiritual journey comparable to John Bunyan (who, in fact, shared the same home town as Wm. H. White). Very apt for the modern reader who may find himself struggling with faith in a world of doubt.

The 'Autobiography' and 'Deliverance' of 'Mark Rutherford' is a fictionalized autobiography (in two parts) by the Victorian civil servant and writer W. H. White. White wrote to help people with personalities like his own -- self-educated intellectuals, lonely, oversensitive, depressive, and with poor self-esteem. Fortunately, he never descends into self-pity or sermonizing. His writing has long been admired for its extraordinary precision, poignancy and economy. This makes him one of the best of the late Victorian novelists, and a writer who rewards repeated re-reading.

Following closely upon the heels of NOT ABOUT NIGHTINGALES and SPRING STORM, this latest New Directions release is refreshingly optimistic for Williams. In this early play, he didn't feel confined to three acts, but instead wrote nearly twenty vignettes, some only a few lines long, to tell the story of Benjamin Murphy, employed at the Continental Branch of Consolidated Shirtmakers. Very impressionistic, this play opens with mechanistic technae in the background as Murphy's supervisors wonder where in the world Murphy is. He's literally found stairs to the roof! A place to smoke, but also a place to dream and to breathe fresh air. As the scenes proceed, the story becomes more and more fantastical and wild, with obsession and foxes and carnivals and millenial magic. Great fun--I'm teaching it to my high school freshman English students this year!

Rite of Passage is a great book for starting out a character and a pack. It give you info on how to get started and then an adventure to carry you through. Valkenburg Foundation is interesting if only for the nefarious skin-dancer Samuel Haight. An interesting read and it seems to have the makings of a classic adventure.

I was very surprised when I ordered this book and found out that yes, indeed, it was merely a very tiny portion of what I had expected. I suppose I should have known from the price, but the description (at least at that time) did not make it clear that it wasn't the entire dictionary.

While this may be a very thorough source for the words it covers, it should be noted in the basic information that this is ONLY 128 pages of a 15,000 page work. The description above is very misleading.

itz a dictionary. what more can i say

Hong on the Range is good fun, filled with puns (like the title) and jokes. It's a parody of every pulp western ever written with the hero the lone outsider with a secret(his secret is he's fully human in a world of cyborgs). It's full of outlaws and clever gadgets, not to mention several women none of whom are what they seem to be. Because it's anon-stop tongue in cheek parody, the humor gets tiresome at times. One wishes it would go somewhere, but still, It's endlessly inventive and perfect for what it is.

Hale, of London's School of Oriental and African Studies, has established himself as one of the West's leading specialists on Turkey, and his new book shows why. With much knowledge and intelligence, he deals with one of the central issues in modern Turkish history, "the Turkish armed forces' political experiences, and their position in the political system as a whole."

While Hale's detailed narrative goes back to 1960, the most interesting and original section concerns "the general and apparently voluntary disengagement of the military from the political system after 1983." This disengagement involves two main developments: the military's withdrawing from day-to-day administration of the country and its no longer seeing military policy as its exclusive preserve, outside the control of elected politicians. The remaining exceptions to Western norms are today in two areas: southeastern Anatolia, where the PKK campaign is underway; and in an arrangement whereby the chief of the general staff reports to the president (rather than the defense minister). As a result of the army's disengagement, Hale argues that by 1993, "the possibility of yet another military intervention seemed further away than at any time in the country's post-war history." If he's right, Turkey has entered a new political era.

Middle East Quarterly, June 1995

how could something as interesting as african mythology become this boring? it's a mistery to me.
i grew up with african mythology, with the stories, the jungle, the witch-doctors, the animals...all i got here was endless rhymes that might sound great if the story-teller were in front of me but was sleep inducing on paper.
so why a 2 star you ask, instead of only one star? for the effort...this book was written based on days/years of hard work...i have to respect that.