This is an excellent book, illuminating both the life and intellectual development of Howe, one of this country's foremost literary critics, and the world of New York's literati much throughout the twentieth century. It gives insight not only into the thoughts and work of this serious, idealistic, and highly intelligent man, not only into his complicated, social, religious, and intellectual background, and his encounter with the new world, at times clashing against the values of his ancestors, but also into the riveting history of Jewish socialist ideas, stemming directly from the Pale, shaping the American political, intellectual landscape throughout the century. In the process, it reveals the widening split within the Jewish community, the potential of the developing "kulturkampf," and the winding path of the bitter struggle, still characterizing the polarized groups of the more traditional and the more radical academics of our time. Reading Alexander's work, one learns not only to appreciate Howe's vision and moral development but also to place them in the context of the history of Jewish intellectual thought in search for the Messianic age. One may even note some of the crucial commonalities between this search and that of a number of European Jewish literati in our century. Of course, Howe's paradoxical attachment to the "world of our fathers" was not an option there. As true children of the Enlightenment, some of the European intellectuals remained simply detached and alienated from the tradition; others became communists or "Catholic socialists," following the instructions of the Popular Front and struggling against the transgressions of Franco rather than paying attention to the threat against Jewish life and being in Nazi Germany. Howe was more complicated and more "Jewish" than that (of course, he also had both more freedom to be Jewish and later more time to learn about, and recognize the consequences, of the Holocaust). Yet the process of living in, and the difficulties of assimilating to, a hostile world in need of redemption show deep-seated commonalities between these groups. They also reveal the ramifications and the price of such process and such need. While aware of the power of these forces, Alexander treats his subject truthfully and sympathetically. And despite his critique of Howe's initial opposition to both US involvement in World War II and the creation of the State of Israel, Alexander remains true to his task to trace Howe's steps and penetrate his ideas and imagination as truthfully as possible. The result is that he paints his subject as a great tragic character, vulnerable, torn by contradictions, intelligent, insightful, and despite everything, "better than ourselves." This is an excellent book, beautifully written, moving, exhilarating, and dramatic.

Edward Alexander is not going to win the hagiography (lives of the saints) award of the year but he just might capture the critical biography prize because his tripartite study of the intellectual condominiums that co-mingled in the mind of Irving Howe is work of meticulous scholarship, felicitous writing style and a literate feistiness. The latter is perhaps the most endearing part of this absorbing book: Alexander has chosen to write a biography of a man whose political views, historical understanding and religious thinking (or lack thereof) he does not share. In fact, in a personal communication with his future biographer, Howe once referred to Alexander as my favorite reactionary. It is therefore a tribute to Alexander's skill th! at he has been able to reconstruct Howe's remarkable contributions to the American socio-political agenda and the Jewish component thereof while at the same time offering his, Alexander's, editorial strictures of Howe's political, literary and cultural myopias and tunnel vision. In his youth adolescence and early 20s - a period that coincided with the rise of Nazism and the outbreak of World War II - Irving Howe (né Horenstein) pledged his troth to the Trotskyite vision of the world, that is to say, an anti-Stalinist yet totalitarian form of communism which filtered the all political events through the doctrinaire lenses of the party line. The contrition which Howe expressed later in life about this part of his career could not be anticipated in the ferocious advocacy he advanced in his numerous articles in Labor Action about a version of history in which only the workers' causes and the class struggle had any validity. In this shameful and embarrassing period Howe was able! to analyze World War II as a unidimensional clash between! two capitalist systems. Alexander has gone through the painstaking and undoubtedly masochistic exercise of reading the articles that Howe wrote under his own name and under a pseudonym in order to document the vapidity of Howe's incredible ability to write about the most seismic events of the twentieth century - World War II and the Holocaust - without mentioning the uniqueness of Hitler's racial policies and, the targeting of Jews. There is no better example of ideological blindness filtering out unpleasant truths that might alter the rigidities of one's political beliefs. The ideological straitjacket which immobilized Howe's not inconsiderable intellectual potential was seen especially in the Partisan Review magazine crowd, among which Howe was a distinguished representative. The love affair which the largely Jewish coterie of Jewish intellectuals attached to that journal carried on with the American-English poet T.S. Eliot is a curious and archival example of the syndrome ! known as self-hate. Alexander notes with irony and some delectation the affection displayed by Howe and other Jewish intellectuals for a poet whose anti-Semitism was as unsubtle as his poetics was refined. Author Alexander also faults Howe for his inability in the late 1940s to register the importance of what Winston Churchill called an event of world history that would require two or three thousand years to conjure with - the creation of the State of Israel. For Howe and his ideological brethren Israel's re-birth was to be seen only under the rubric of fighting British imperialism. Even as late as 1982 when Howe was ready to celebrate Israel's creation, he made it a point to note that acceptance of the State did not imply any Zionist commitment. In his many digressions in this biography, Alexander rejects the use made by Howe and other (including this reviewer) of the term "Arab-Israeli conflict," as if it implied some kind of equalizing of responsibility. Says Ale! xander: "It's the Arab war against the Jews - period.&! quot; Alexander calls one of the chapters in his book The Request of Jewishness, by which he means Howe's slow and painful re-insertion into the Jewish orbit of history. In some ways it was predictable because Howe was a kind of Yiddish-speaking Marrano who despite heroic efforts to submerge his "parochial" heritage, found it bubbling to the surface in the soft cadences of the first language he spoke as a child in the Bronx and in the warmth he remembered in the image of his virtuous, hard working parents and the thousands of other simple Jewish immigrants who people the world of his youth. Later in life when he was reviewing a major book by a feminist critic, he conjured up the picture of his parents as an antidote to the rigidities of feminist theory. Howe's odyssey from Marxist ideologue to secular Jewish guru was neither smooth nor without its troughs and depressions. It began in the 1950s with his interest in editing Yiddish short stories and poetry, an exercise! in which he exhibited skill, sensitivity and sober judgment. It continued with Howe's entry into the university world, where, despite the absence of a Ph.D. in English literature and in a discipline notoriously prejudiced against Jewish scholars he achieved more than a modicum of success teaching at Brandeis, Stanford and Hunter College of the City of New York. The early 1960s was probably the turning point in terms of Howe's Jewish loyalties, as he himself hinted in his 1982 autobiography. Alexander details the controversy which swirled over Howe because of his unhappiness with Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem, a book which first appeared in serial form in The New Yorker. Howe organized a forum under the banner of his journal Dissent, during which the book was dissected asnd repudiated. Critics later argued that Howe had led a lynch mob against Arendt's book - a description which Howe and his supporters vigorously denied. By 1976, the bicentennial of the American revol! ution, Howe had come full circle with the publication of hi! s most famous book - World of Our Fathers. Alexander wryly observers that in 1940 none of the Partisan Review crowd could ever have conceived that their union-organizing, Trotskyite polemicist cum literary critic, would produce an affectionate, absorbing and best-selling volume about the hundreds of thousands of Jewish immigrants who had come to New York City beginning with the turn of the century. In publishing this extraordinary document Howe digested a library of Yiddish books, memoirs, letters, newspapers and other archival materials in order to tell his story and to let the participants of his drama speak out to history. Alexander recognizes the incisiveness of Howe's reconstruction of the Jewish immigrant community, its cultural riches and linguistic treasures. But he also advertises the book's weaknesses - its preoccupation with secular Jewishness at the expense of its religious dimensions. Howe's main argument was that Jews came to American for non ideological reaso! ns - to save themselves from persecution at worst and to make a better living for their families at best. Alexander does not contest this point but observes that there were thousand of other Jews who fled Czarist Russia and went to Palestine for ideological reasons. In the last decade of his life, before he was felled by illness Irving Howe injected himself in numerous political and literary skirmishes and Alexander is there giving us a lively play-by-play account of the victories, defeats and draws. Some of Howe's best critical works pivoted around the claims of the new university curricula where the books of "dead white males" are now denounced as holdovers from a despised canon. Howe would have none of this nonsense. Perhaps the best of Howe's writing was Holocaust memoirs and the difficulty of establishing esthetic criteria for a literature aages@interlog.comthat had no precedents and which "succeeded only when it failed." If there are any faults in A! lexander's stimulating biography they flow from a surfeit o! f its virtues. In an effort to be thorough Alexander has read virtually everything that Howe wrote and what others wrote about Howe. However, this reviewer found the parts about Howe's struggle with defining his Jewish of much greater interest than those parts dealing with Howe's interest in the esoterica of literary criticism, American ethnic politics, black writing and the American novel. Others will undoubtedly disagree. -30-

The last time my friend from Vilna visited, in 1993, I shared this book with her, purchased a few years earlier at a New York remainder sale. It contains both the Yiddish and English translations, on either side of a page, of 39 Jewish poets. Her lips began to tremble and move as she read the verses, in Yiddish, of poets she had known in Vilna, Abraham Sutzkever and very likely Moyshe Kulbak.

It's no wonder. Listen to the fifth stanza of Sutzkever's "In the Hamlet," about Siberia, where his father died in the 1930s. "Into the quenched corners of the room,/ The moon breathes its solitary brilliance./ My father's face is white as the moon,/ The snow's silence weighs upon his hands."

(Translation by Chana Bloch)

The poems are all that good, and better. It is eerie reading these great works. The rich literary heritage of Yiddish was all but wiped out in the Shoah. Yiddish remains vibrant in certain Jewish communities today, but only as a liturgical language. Few poets now work in Yiddish.

The great Yitskhok Leybush Perets, born in Zamosc, Poland in 1852 died in Warsaw in 1915. Leyb Naydus died in Grodno in 1918 and Moyshe-Leyb Halpern, from Zloczow, died in 1932 in New York. But several of these poets themselves perished in the Holocaust--including Kulbak (1940), Yisroel Shtern (Warsaw, 1942), Yisroel Rabon (Ponary, 1941). Others were swept into the maw of the Soviet war on culture, dying who knows where.

Some survived and later emigrated. Rokhl Korn, for example, fled to--and then from--the Soviet Union. In a sense, Aaron Teitlin, who emigrated from Uuarovo, Russia to New York in 1939 writes for them all. Certainly, he writes for me.

Six Lines

"I know that in this world no one needs me,/

me, a word-beggar in the Jewish graveyard.

Who needs a poem, especially in Yiddish?

Only what is hopeless on this earth has beauty/

and only the ephemeral is godly

and humility is the only true rebellion."

(Translated by Robert Friend)

####

We all need these poems and their humility. You can see why my friend's lips trembled. Alyssa A. Lappen

For Jewish Americans or anyone interested in a riveting story of one of the most influential mass migrations in all history (in short, for anyone interested in the history of America), this is a must-read. I am not normally a fan of non-fiction, but I devoured this book. How could it be out of print?

The best of the stories in here are brilliant. The dialogue is great, as well as the reflective passages. That a mediocre short story writer like Raymond Carver is lauded, while Schwartz is relatively obscure, shows that the cream does NOT rise to the top. I've read passages of these stories a number of times. I can't praise them highly enough.

Five of the stories here are flat-out masterpieces ("In Dreams;" "The World is a Wedding;" "New Year's Eve;" "The Commencement Address;" and "The Track Meet"), while the other 3 are extremely well done, if not as wholly satisfying. This collection should be required reading in every contemporary lit. class. It's got everything: all the themes of struggle, frustration and defeat, responsibility, ambition, all the thoughts that men have thought in every age, and captures its era so perfectly and completely I am in awe. Even though the stories are, in some ways similar (especially "In Dreams," "The Commencement Address," and "The Track Meet"), they are utterly original, beautiful, hallucinatory, profound, funny and heartbreaking. Schwartz -- that great voice speaking out against the crowd -- deserves to be heard at last.

This is an absolutely fantastic collection of short storys, each one is so presice and refreshing. I recomend it to everyone. His writing is striking, and extremely well written yet underrated.

This is the best Bunnicula book written. I have read the whole series and this is the best!

Bunnicula is a vampire bunny and he is on the loose. The Monroes, the family who owns Bunnicula, really don't have a clue about his escape. Bunnicula's pals Harold, Chester, and Howie are there to track him down in order to stop disaster. Chester has a theory that if Bunnicula bites the vegetables in everyone's garden they will turn into vampire vegetables and then attack the town. The message to the readers relays that ones mind can jump to many conclusions from the simple to the bazaar. Chester's idea of what may happen is defiantly leaning towards the bazaar. I like Celery Stalks at Midnight because the author told the story using animals which creates a hilarious picture in my mind.I recommend this book to all ages because of the animals and the mysterious happenings.

I loved the book and if your thinking about buying it go for it.However if you haven't read Bunnicula and Howliday Inn your really missing out on some great books and you should get those too!

The pets that are staying at Chateau Bow Wow want to escape before something terrible is about to happen. I liked the book very much because it had great descriptions that you cant picture in your mind. You are surprised at what's going to happen. It makes you want to keep reading until you find out what happens to the characters. It is also funny. There are other books by this author. The books are Bunnicula, Howliday Inn, The Celery Stalks at Midnight, and Nighty-Nightmare.

Harold, Chester, and Howie are at it again. The Monroes' are going on vacation, and the rabbit, Bunnicula, is going to one of his friend's house. Meanwhile, Chester, the cat, Harold, and Howie, the dogs, are going to Chateau Bow-Wow, what they call Howliday Inn. There's a big mystery going on, can you solve it? You can solve the mystery with Harold, Chester, and Howie by reading this book.

A great book for anyone, young and old. Chester, Howie, and Harold are back at the dreaded Howliday Inn. There's new charecters, such as a couple new dogs, and even a weasle! A ghost dog tells them to beware of the secret of Howliday Inn... Escape while you can... But what is it? Read this amazing, humorous, and mesterious book to find out.

I.J. Singer's work is a large-scale novel, with a multitude of characters and plots, the first attempt of a Yiddish writer to break away from the traditional short fiction depicting life in the shtelt. It is the result of exposure to European literature late in the 19th century, and reflects the dilemma of Jewish milieu torn apart from its traditional roots and having to face the rise of capitalism and communism. The main character, Max Ashkenazi is despicable by all means, obsessed by money and power, with a Machiavellian mind, and despite all his success has a sad end in life. Considering the conflicting time in which the novel takes place (first four decades of the 20th century), the main plot reflects the author's pessimistic and skeptic view of the place the Jew might have in modern society: be it amongst the capitalists or the communists, the Jew will always be misplaced and will never loose his stigma as scapegoat in times of trouble. The reader familiar with wthe work of Joshua's younger brother (Isaac Bashevis Singer) will certainly realize that the brothers share little in terms of literary production, each one with his own merits, albeit I.B. Singer surpasses in magnitude and depth.

The story begins at the beginning, prior to the nearly simultaneous birth of two brothers. Not quite Cain and Abel, the brothers grow apart and together, mixing people,places,positions. With verve and breadth, it tells how each individual becomes his own choices, with the help and the hindrance of the Jewish community in Poland in the early 20th century. What a story!

This book is an amazing piece of work. You can really see the struggles that the Jewish population in Poland had to endure in the decades before WWII. Some of the characters are truly detestable at, other times they are to be pitied. All in all, a very tragic book.

I would not buy this book if it were your first forray into the realm of Kafka. But the short stories first, then Amerika, then the trial, and then, if you could make it through the trial, try this read.

The new translation is excellent (I've read both translations) and puts an even grimmer spin on life in the village of the castle.

Please note: Kafka died before finishing the book and he never really prepared it for publication. There are sentences that run half a page, and paragaphs that run almost a whole chapter. The final page ends mid sentence.

If you are a fan of Kafka then this book is a must read, especially if you read the Muir translation of The Castle.

The Castle is a powerful look at a town full of people trying to gain meaning for their lives from something outside of and wholy removed from their selves. The townspeoples alienation from each other and needy grasping toward a Castle that they can dream about but never touch is a disturbing one with strong parallels in today's celebrity worship, religious fundamentalism, and statism. Similiarly, K.'s descent from activism to conformity illustrates the power of mass society and the desire to fit in over the indivdual's need for a self-contained self.

The problem is the book is tooo long. Kafka induces a sense of futility and alienation by making his story move at a glacial pace with minute changes taking chapters to occur. And while this technique works, it's certainly not some great literary accomplishment.

So while The Castle is a relevant treatise on how we give, or fail to give, meaning to our lives; it's also an incredibly dense and difficult read.

Translation means everything! Over the years I've read much of Kafka especially during adolescence and into my early twenties when his worldview spoke most directly to my own attempts to understand how the world really worked. Of all his books only The Castle totally defeated me. I must have begun it five times in my life, only to abandon it partway through. Now I know why. It wasn't Kafka. It was the translation.

Mark Harmon's translation brought Kafka close to my ear and heart, the way he used to when I was younger. I could see the darkness of his interiors, feel the cold of his snow covered wind blown exteriors, smell the stale beer of the taproom, taste the small meals and strong coffee served, sense the animal []attractions of his characters. Most of all I could really hear the voices of his people as they simultaneously revealed and concealed themselves through their stories.

Sometimes I laughed out loud. Sometimes my hair stood on end at the dark realities which this book unveils. The Barnabas family stories in particular chilled me. Especially in this time of fear and shunning by powerful majorities of the 'others'in our societies and in the exhaustion of the 'cleansings' and genocides of the last century, the fall of that family made me feel like I was inside a hateful part of our past, present and future.

I've now lived part of my life within bureaucratic organizations, even as an 'official' and I understand as I couldn't as a youth how absolutely Kafka has gotten to the deepest truths about how our power structures work. What it's like to be enmeshed as part of them, and-or to be at their mercy. It is hard to find free space in the world.

I used to think Kafka was a genius and an artist of the highest rank. Now, reading him in an excellent translation I understand that he was also a prophet.

For the younger reader exploring Charles Dickens, this abridged version will not be intimidating. It'll help open the door to classic literature, and challenging ideas.

"Oliver Twist" is a complex story about the English welfare system for orphans, overlayed by a story of love, family, and the pursuit of each.

What is missing from this version is Dickens' long descriptions and thorough presentations of a situation. What makes Dickens great, in part, is his multi-woven characters, filled with color and excitement. Some of that is lost here.

That said, this is an excellent choice for an older child having trouble reading, or the younger, aggressive reader. The story about Oliver Twist is strong enough to endure an adaptation, but, later on, it is a thrill to read the original version.

I fully recommend "Oliver Twist" by Charles Dickens.

Anthony Trendl

Like so many of Dickens' novels, Oliver Twist is a fantastically crafted and engrossing novel. Dickens follows the life of a young orphan boy, Oliver, who grows up amidst desperate poverty in London in the early 19th Century. Dickens leads the reader on a delightful and engaging romp, as Oliver escapes his orphanage, gets mixed up in the wrong crowd, and ultimately comes out on top.

The story within Oliver Twist is very engrossing, replete with many twists, turns and surprises that are occasionally tragic but more often witty or flat out hilarious. The characters are all superbly developed, and the multiple story lines are intricately and cleverly woven together. Oliver Twist is an excellent introduction to Dickens, and patient readers will find this novel accessible. The intricate plotline does require some concentration, while some readers may be annoyed by Dickens' notoriously lengthy sentences.

This is an important book to read for it is heavily engrained in Anglo-American culture and most first-time readers will recognize many of the names (Fagin, Artful Dodger) and scenes from previous cultural references. While clearly enjoyable at the superficial level, the novel also makes a powerful statement about poverty and the power of the human spirit in the face of depravity.

This book surprised me, not by the quality of its writing, which one can expect from Charles Dickens, but by the violent, lusty primal quality of the story. This is no dry musty tome, but a vital novel that arouses both passion and intellect. A literal page turner, I found myself having more than one sleepless night when I just couldn't put it down.

Inside are some of the major characters in the realm of fiction; Fagin and his gang of child thieves, including the Artful Dodger. Nancy, the proverbial hooker with a heart of gold. Master Charles Bates (was this a pun even then?) Bad Bill Sikes, who shows the darker edge to all of this dangerous fun, and the innocent, pure Oliver Twist, who is the very definition of nature over nurture.

A great book, and one that I am glad to have finally read.

Jude The Obscure goes against the normal strain in its treatment of topics ranging from marriage, ambition, dreams, and class-society. The book takes shocking twists and turns, and even though the subjects are often depressing, the sheer shock of what has just happened makes you want to read more. Hardy's main character is Jude, a poor, parentless boy whose ambitions far exceed the restrictions his class would put on him. Throughout his childhood he pushed himself in the studies of academia, he would always be seen with Latin books while delivering bread to the villagers. Eventually, as Jude grows he decides to move to Chirstminister-Jude's dream starting from his very early days of youth. Christminister is the center of all academic pursuit and home to the greatest colleges of learning. We follow Jude's adventures there, along with all of his attempts to being admitted into one of these institutions. This is not easy for a young man who has no money or family status behind him. One of Jude's great battles is between his burning desire to achieve higher learning, and his weakness towards women which draw him away from this goal. The elements which Jude's eventual children present, make an outlandish story even stranger by their actions. Certainly Hardy intended the children to present us with some additional lessons to consider while contemplating the book.

The book was difficult for me to read, as mentioned in other reviews, the depressing subject matter and gloominess is not inherently an inviting thing. However, by unfolding the story as Hardy did, following the dreams and failures of young Jude, I learned some lessons that I do not think I could have otherwise. I received a strong personal impression in the importance of not giving up on yourself. That even if your opportunities are not optimal, or you environment is not perfect, that you still have the ability to reach for your dreams. And at all costs you should not give up on your dreams, or believe that you are not capable of accomplishing them. I also thought a lot about the acts the society would have us perform, which are not securely right. Having read the book forced me to reflect about the daily choices I make, how many of those are really mine, and how many are artificial restraints institutions would have me believe I must make.

While I have read more entertaining books, I would have to recommend this one because of the unique perspective it presents. Hardy message allows us to think about important issues in a light not often seen through.

Jude the Obscure is a saddening book that deals with the oppression that society can force onto people. Jude Fawley's many attempts to rise above his social class and to become something better than he was born to are crushed time and again through society or the forces of nature. The writing itself is very readable; in the beginning of the book, I was very amused by how naive Jude was and enjoyed the way that Thomas Hardy used the language. The quality of writing never suffered through the book, but the plot becomes more and more depressing. In the final scene of the book, where Jude is finally dying after his life of oppression and tragedy, you feel incredibly sorry for all that Jude had to go through. Throughout his entire life he had been mocked by Christminster and all that it represented for Jude. Jude did all that he could to get there and become a scholar, but he was told to stay in his class and be content with what he had. Oppression through marriage of all of the main characters (Jude, Sue, Phillotson, and Arabella) was also explored through the entire book. Arabella is the mistake that Jude made that he cannot escape from. His one wrong choice early in his life ruins his chance for having a normal relationship with Sue, and in his final days he has to live with that choice. The underlying themes here are explored well by Hardy and give the reader a chance to see life from a different angle and hopefully appreciate what they have.

One thing I disliked about the book was the constant tragic events. I understand that Hardy was trying to explore certain themes by using such depressing events, but it was too much sometimes. When little Father Time and the children of Jude and Sue died, I was probably as crushed as Sue was. That is perhaps the saddest point of any book that I have read and it caught me by surprise. The tragedy of it was much more than I was expecting, and that is probably what Hardy was looking for. I didn't appreciate being bombarded by such emotional manipulators by Hardy.

The characterizations in the book were wonderful. Jude's aspirations that continued to be subverted by his weaknesses made him the perfect tragic hero. Sue was realistic, but she was never strong enough to earn my sympathy. She was just too weak, despite being the "liberatedEwoman. I came to dislike Arabella right from the start, and my dislike grew with each appearance she made. Phillotson was perhaps the most pitiable character in the novel, especially when he is persecuted for letting Sue go. The minor characters in the story add to these main characters and help to reveal who that are and why they do what they do.

Overall, Jude the Obscure is an excellent novel, but it does have its bad points. The thematic elements in the novel are explored in a thought-provoking way and the characters are portrayed in a realistic and poignant way that helps the reader to understand who they are and why they are being slammed by forces outside of their control. Those forces, though, are sometimes too strong and detract from what Hardy is trying to do with the novel. I would recommend this book, but be prepared to leave aside time to think about it afterwards. This book makes you sit down and think after you read it. If you don't do this afterwards, there will be so much that you miss.

As are Hardy's other books, Jude the Obscure is not an "easy read." Appreciating Hardy's work requires a little work and the ability to pay attention and to think a little along the way. But the effort pays off. Jude the Obscure is a great book about the human condition, at least as it exists for many people. Like other Hardy characters, Jude Fawley makes a mistake early in his life and continues to pay the price until the day he dies. He commits an act of folly that seals his doom, and nothing he can do can make it right. This would be merely sad or melodramatic were if not for the fact that Jude is a truly good man with truly good intentions. It is this that makes his story truly tragic. Not only is he trapped by the consequences of his early act of foolishness, but he is also trapped and eventually dragged down by the conventions of a society that is more concerned with status and class than with character and ability and more devoted to mindless tradition than to a considered morality. Most of what can be said of Jude also be said of his love, Sue Bridehead, although I found her to be a less believable and sympathetic character. I was surprised by the frankness with which Hardy deals with sexuality in 1895, and I can understand now the furor this book apparently caused in Britain and America upon publication. Hardy is a writer of great power and insight. He also knows how to build a great story. And he is a novelist of ideas. He has his faults, of course. At his worst, he is wordy, obscure, and pedantic. But at his best, he is one of the most emotionally moving of writers. At times his books flash briliantly with passion. At times, he is heartbreaking. Jude the Obscure is a novel that no lover of fine writing and a great story can afford to miss. The novel has haunted me for weeks since I read it, and it probably will for a long time.