This beautiful book was in my family as a hard cover edition for many years and was a Christmas Eve tradition for my four sons when they were growing up. It's poor battered body disappeared some time after the last of my little ones went off into the adult world. I am so delighted to see it back again, though this time as a nicely affordable soft cover. Clement C. Moore's enchanting story poem already provides an atmosphere filled with warmth and joyful expectation and with the addition of Tasha Tudor's quaint, nostalgic water-colors from an antique New England the Christmas magic is complete!
The winter landscapes fill our senses and Tasha's own gray tabby cat and Welsh Corgi welcome us into this charming world.
Tasha's Santa that you will meet in this book has been portrayed as the poem describes him...a right jolly old elf. He's not that much larger than the corgi and his team really consists of eight "tiny" reindeer. His pointy ears and his Eskimo mukluks add to the delightful ambiance of the book. He dances with the toys and with the happy animals and we can truly believe it will be a happy Christmas for all.
I hope this book becomes a Christmas Eve tradition for many, many more families.

We have an inexpensive paperback version (see our reviews) of this classic poem, and we said that's enough for us. That was before we looked through this beautifully illustrated (by Bruce Whatley) edition of The Night Before Christmas.

The lyrics are the same, from book to book, but the fanciful illustrations in this one are enough to engage adults and children as they read this book together.

The perfect gift for any family whose Christmas tradition includes reading this classic!

I discovered this book 31 years ago, for my daughter and it is still loved by all the family. The illustrations are wonderful, warm, charming and delightful and bring a special meaning to the story. We still read it to all the young children on Christmas Eve and for adults we read the story and pass a grab bag gift every time the word THE is mentioned. It would not be Christmas without this book. It is magical.

Duby's work was ground-breaking in the 1960s, but has now become outdated. That is not to say that his arguments and analyses have proven wrong or been supersceded. It is outdated simply because it has been incorporated into much more detailed and comprehensive accounts written in the last thirty years (particularly by Norman Pounds).

That does not mean that this book is not worth reading. Duby's piece still provides a unique perspective. Although the work as a whole has been incorporated into much bigger books, no one has focused on the same characteristics that he has. Duby writes wonderfully on the gift and plunder economy, the importance of the medieval world-view to economic growth, and the change in technology. Duby's work is most valuable, however, for the image it creates. Duby follows in the French tradition of writing "impressionist histories." In this way Duby gives an excellent idea of what it was like to live in the early medieval period. In many ways The Early Growth of the European Economy is the perfect companion to Marc Bloch's Feudal Society.

This book is still worth reading because of the focus it has and the impression it gives. At under three hundred pages, it is a quick read, and provides an excellent introduction to the topic.

Includes an excellent section on the medieval gift economy, something which many authors have relegated to anthropology of the developing world. He is one of the few to show the pattern of looting and giving--to knights, to God, to King--that solidified social relations and acted as the road to power in the old social order.

This is without doubt one of the best history books written in the twentieth century. A work of great depth and breadth, it shows a master historian at his best. The analysis is rich and complex; just about every page is rich with insight and often turns upside down some old conventional wisdom (cf., for but one example, his assessement of the positive role the Vikings had on the redistribution of wealth and on economic quickening in general in Europe). This is a veritable tour de force, and one that should be required reading for anyone seriously interested in medieval history. Of course, some material is dated, and on some topics the author changed his mind later on in his career, but that does not detract from the force and brilliance of this classic.

This book is for general readers of Homer's epic poems. It provides long, summary rundowns of the poems from the various academic points of view. The author himself is a moderate on the subject of Homer and gives the impression that he is basically good-natured and open to all theories and so forth. One long chapter that is very interesting is a summary of the allegorizing of the Iliad and the Odyssey from classical times through the 18th century. He goes through each book of both poems and talks about the scenes that were the favorites of the allegorizers and he gives summaries as well of what each of the more famous commentators thought each episode meant. He has a long chapter summarizing the academic debate over whether the poems were written by one poet or many, etc. (The author himself comes down on the side of 'one poet', but he is not an ideologue about it...) The opening chapter describes all the 'Troy Stories' starting from the 1st century on up through the middle ages and Renaissance. There's a misc. chapter with sections covering, for instance, the History of Homer, the Anthropology of Homer, and the Geography of Homer (in this section he talks about some of the more eccentric theories of where Troy actually was and where Odysseus' travels actually took him...such as you would find in a more recent book like WHERE TROY ONCE STOOD by Iman Wilkins...) Overall this is an informative book for the general reader on many aspects of the poems, and even if you don't agree with the author's views (or even the general, rather sterile, academic approach of these areas of study) you can still get valuable information between and behind the lines. For instance, George Chapman's translations of the Iliad and the Odyssey from the days of Shakespeare come in for some snickering type criticism (for their allegorizing and Chapman's stated attempt to make Homer's "mysticke meaninge cleare"), but reading about those translations in this book made me want to go out and find an edition of Chapman's translations and read them for myself...