The book provides not only great color long shot photos of various Scottish castles, but also well-chosen detail shots that enrich the reading experience. You'll see marriage stones -- where one partner's coat of arms was chiseled off; lavish dining rooms -- with the door to the dungeon in plain view; and foreboding stairways with statues of St. George -- or is it Joan of Arc! -- overlooking. The text is lively and informative, with about 3 1/2 pages of text for each castle, much of it focusing on the human drama inside the walls. This is a wonderful overview, covering 27 castles in all. I wish there was room to cover more, but I was inspired to further research several of the castles.

An anchoress was a woman who dedicated herself to God by spending her life in a tiny cell attached to a church. A small window and a handmaid provided her only contact with the world. Often when an anchoress died, her cell was filled with dirt and became her tomb.

This anonymous guide was written for three anchoresses in western England in the first half of the thirteenth century. The author - believed to have been a Dominican friar - gives some advice on the proper daily routine for an anchoress to follow. Most of the book, however, deals with the inner, spiritual life - prayer, the love of God, and the way to resist temptation.

As translator Hugh White points out, 'the extremity of the anchoritic life was the extremity not of a margin but of a peak.' Through this guide written for an especially devoted few, through it we get an idea of how ordinary medieval people viewed their God and their destiny.

The book is also one of the finest examples we have of Middle English writing. Rarely has belief been expressed in such vivid metaphor. A woman who prays while angry is a she-wolf howling to God; a liar 'makes of her tongue a cradle for the devil's child and rocks it diligently, as if its nurse'; but repentance will cause Christ to return to the heart, just as a husband hurries back to his pining wife.

Ancrene Wisse is no mere historical document. When the author describes the excuses that people make for sin, or discusses the various types of flattery and slander, modern readers will recognise behaviour they witness - or engage in -- every day. From a seemingly bizarre ancient group comes wisdom for our time.

Excellent continuation of the Corbett series - Doherty at his finest.

This book by Hugh Laidman is one of the best that I have ever seen. It gives you a factual step-by-step process of how to draw animals. It is beautifully illustrated and the book tells you differant art techniques on drawing the animals. The book begins with easier animals to draw, then it slowly advances into more difficult postures and animals. In this book, there are all the animals from anteaters to baboons, and vultures to hyenas. I highly recomend this book for anyone who enjoys learning new art techniques and drawing a colorful variety of animals.

Edwin Lundie loved to use heavy, visible timbers in his designs of country houses and cabins. And he loved to use warm, earthy color tones, custom-made hardware and rough-hewn, rustic fireplaces and chimneys.

The result is soothing, comfortable and visually memorable.

His city houses have a storybook quality, evoking early New England. Interiors of these houses are lighter, more formal and delicate than those of his country houses, but there still are rustic elements in brick, stone, wrought iron and hand carved wood.

You can see all of this in The Architecture of Edwin Lundie, a lovely book filled with color photography and Edwin Lundie's skilful drawings.

The first step of the process of demonstrating is gathering old knowledge to serve as the "required ground" (72 a 25) for new, scientific knowledge. In order to work and to do its job, the old knowledge must be "true, primary, immediate, better known than and prior to the conclusion" (71 b 21).

Some people think that all knowledge is demonstrative. Other people, like Aristotle, think that "not all knowledge is demonstrative" (72 b 18). Thus, the question is whether the old knowledge with the above five features is the product of a demonstration?

In Chapter Three Aristotle shows the following:
i. If old knowledge with five features is demonstrated,
ii. then old knowledge with five features is "circular" and bad.

Old knowledge that goes through the three step process of demonstrating and comes out "true, primary, immediate, better known than and prior to the conclusion" is impossible, like an unbroken egg from a kitchen blender. The required knowledge for science is like raw material.

The definition of raw material is "crude or processed material that can be converted by manufacture, processing, or combination into a new and useful product." The definition of crude is "existing in a natural state and unaltered by cooking or processing." The definition of processed is "treated or made by a special process esp. when involving synthesis or artificial modification."

The question is whether all knowledg is crude and unaltered or processed and modified? The anwer is that some knowledge is crude and some knowledge is processed. Aritotle writes, "Our own doctrine is that not all knowledge is demonstrative" and processed (72 b 19).

A person who says that all knowledge is demontrated "are faced with a difficulty" (72 b 33) that is "clearly frivolous" (73 a 17). Assenting to the universal, affirmative proposition that 'All knowledge is processed' is silly and frivolous, because of two reasons. First, every demonstration needs crude knowledge and no processed knowledge is crude knowledge. Therefore, no demonstration needs processed knowledge.

Aristotle supports the major and writes, "The necessity of this is obvious; for since we must know the prior premisses from which the demonstration is drawn, and since the regress must end in immediate truths, those truths must be indemonstrable" (72 b 20). Just as crude material is not processed, "prior, immediate and better known than" knowledge is not demonstrated. Immediate knowledge is not altered or filtered.

Accepting that all knowledge is processed is silly for a second reason. Aristotle explains, "Their theory reduces to the mere statement that if a thing exists, then it does exist" (72 b 33). The sad fact is, the person who agrees that 'all knowledge is processed' is the same person who must agree that 'a thing is because it is.'

Here is another silly argument: There is an animal in the Los Angeles zoo that is a kangaroo, and the animal is a mammal, because the animal is a kangaroo. (No, the animal is a mammal, because the animal has mammary glands.) In other words, to accept that all knowledge is processed is to accept some really ridiculous processes. Aristotle writes, "Convertible terms occur rarely in actual demonstration" (73 a 18). The logical tricks a person needs to employ in order to alter every single information bite are logical tricks that are rarely used in real life. Just as people cannot cut and trim every tree, people cannot process and demonstrate every known fact.

I borrowed a copy of THE ART OF THE CHINESE SNUFF BOTTLE. THE J & J COLLECTION from my father (who tells me that other collectors refer to this book as "the Bible"), and although I'm not yet a collector of anything, I was so impressed with this book that I want to share this discovery with others. I have since come accross some reviews of the book in Oriental magazines, and will be quoting from them as these professionals put accross their thoughts so much better than I. First of all, the luxury of the edition: "imposing size, lavish layout and exquisitive presentation of the background, two-volume work (800 pages, 1200 illustrations, 25 x 34.2 cm dimensions ... superb life-size photographs and extraordinary detail views ... " according to Jana Volf in ORIENTATIONS magazine, July 1994. As for content, Robert KLEINER wrote in ARTS OF ASIA, Nov.-Dec. 1995, "This vast work is arguably the finest book ever written on the arts of the Qing (1644-1911) dynasty. Each snuff bottle is taken as an opportunity to explore a differing aspect of Chinese aesthetics and culture, thereby, in small increments, revealing the inner meaning both of this culture and of the art represented by the bottles themselves ... The entire work (presents) a rigorous study of the art and evolution of the snuff bottle itself, and ... the underlying cultural background of China as evolved by the thoughts, beliefs and ambitions of the ruling Imperial household and the vast literati class, the scholars who oiled the wheels of the nation's life ... The J&J collection is almost unrivailled in its possesion of snuff bottles which can be used as exemplars of "Palace style ..." About the collection, Clare Lawrence wrote in the Spring 1994 issue of the JOURNAL of the International Chinese Snuff Bottle Society, "I think this is a truly great book of a great, if not the greatest snuff bottle collection in the world today." Finally, this book was awarded 1st. prize as the best art book produced in Hong Kong, in 1993. I must say it is a must to the serious art collector. Mathias F. de Carvalho

This is a very well-done life of W. H. Auden, a man who may well turn out to be the finest English poet of the twentieth century. It is a fascinating work, which traces Auden's literary and poetical development in tandem with all the events in his real life in this real world. The most important of them (for Auden) was his life-long love of Chester Kallman, which became quite complex over time -- Auden reported feelings of paternal solicitude, jealousy, and erotic rivalry -- all occurring at the same time! Unusually, for a major biography of a major poet, there are scenes from the poet's cottage at Fire Island, which help to situate Auden in a very real New York social world.

But none of this is what set Auden apart -- not his romances nor his politics. Unlike some other poets, Auden worked at his craft unceasingly, probably becoming a leading world expert on poetic meter.

And he worked at his art. Anyone who has ever practiced any sort of craft or art -- ballet, writing, whatever -- knows well just how hard it is to make things seem effortless. And so Auden could produce such "effortless" things as the opening to his "Lullaby" ---

Lay your sleeping head, my love,
Human on my faithless arm;
Time and fevers burn away
Individual beauty from
Thoughtful children, and the grave
Proves the child ephemeral:
But in my arms till break of day
Let the living creature lie,
Mortal, guilty, but to me
The entirely beautiful.

If that looks easy to you, just have a go yourself! :-)

In summary: a very good biography of a major poet. Highest recommendation!

Books of fiction and nonfiction, films, paintings, and museums abound in the ongoing ceaseless inspection of the atrocity and madness wrought by Hitler in Nazi Germany. It is an unfortunate fact that such turmoil gives rise to some of the best art in the years after the strife. Norman Page, in his brilliantly researched and written AUDEN AND ISHERWOOD: THE BERLIN YEARS, has selected two men of great significance in literature and poetry as his points of entry into studying the Berlin that seduced the world before it jolted nearly to an end. These portraits of Auden and Isherwood are really an examination of an historical time that altered the art world as inevitably as it altered our sense of the dangers of dictaorship.

Initally drawn to Berlin from the hallowed halls of English academe because of the rowdy free sex/hedonisitc atmosphere that had become Berlin, "Berlin meant Boys" and both our artists fled the England that sacrificed Oscar Wilde to find the open sexual freedom of the City of Sodom. Author Page gives us such a rich, fascinating ride through the places and faces of pre-war Berlin that we are finally allowed to see why Modernism started, why cinema became important, how artists such as Grosz and Dix and composers such as Weill and Stravinsky, scientists (Hirschfeld) and writers (Brecht) found such acrid colors for their creativity. Page is not confined to his title characters, though we learn more personal characteristics than any writer has dared to date: we are informed about Marlene Dietrich, Stephen Spender, Benjamin Britten, as well as a constellation of other characters encountered by them. This volume reads like a novel (not without some kinship to Isherwood's famed GOODBYE TO BERLIN), but its importance as a publication is its uncommonly thorough view of why Hitler rose, why the Berlin Wall was destined to be (and to fall), and why the center of the artistic universe was for a few short years the glossy, naughty Berlin.

This book is a must for those who want to understand the beginnings of sexual freedom, those fascinated by the inception of WW II, and for those who happen to love the poetry of W.H. Auden and the stories of Christopher Isherwood. Keep this book on your literary Reference Shelf.

This is a a very special book for people of "a certain age." I'm not at all sure that anyone under fifty would really appreciate its richness in conjuring up a life lived at the turn of the century -- Ransome was born in the 1880s -- by a nearsighted young English lad consumed with the idea that he was destined to become a writer. His incredible understated oddessy includes being at ground zero during the Russian revolution -- knowing all the major characters including Lenin and Trotsky -- learning to sail in fair weather and foul, and living a life of real hardship to becoming a celebrated author of one of the best series of children's books ever written -- The Swallows & Amazon books. His narration of the "Bohemian Life" of his day, the cast of characters of noted literary and political figures, his comments on what it meant to be educated in his world and time, made the book, for me, a vivid portrait of a world and value system that has, I fear, gone with the wind. A fine read.