Buy "Trying to Save Piggy Sneed" instead, since it includes this work and several other pieces. It's just my stupid opinion, but I think the publisher deserves a big dope slap for republishing this seperately.

I am a big John Irving fan and have read almost all of his novels. This book was a big disappointment for me, though. Rather than deeply delve into the events and people who shaped his writing, Irving provides perfunctory descriptions of the major events in his life as a writer and wrestler. He devotes much more attention to the scores of every wrestling match he ever took part in than to details regarding the process of crafting his novels. For wrestling fans, this book might be just what you are looking for; for others, I would skip it and re-read Garp.

The Imaginary Girlfriend is a terrific memoir. Irving, while taking a break from writing novels, decided to pen a short autobiography, but he brought his usual sense of humor, ability to develop characters, and readable style to the project. The story does an excellent job of explaining the life events and people who have shaped his character and writing, which I think is very useful when trying to understand and appreciate his other books. I think this story itself is some of Irving's best writing and is certainly worth the short time it takes to read. I would recommend, however, instead of paying for the memoir alone, you purchase Trying to Save Piggy Sneed which includes this memoir as well as several short stories. You will not be disappointed if you are an Irving fan or just enjoy good, entertaining writing.

This is a beautifully printed work with an eye-catching cover but from a historian's viewpoint, filled with information that just simply cannot be checked out. It is plainly evident that the author does not like his subject and this dislike is evident on every page. Churchill was a great, if often badly flawed, leader of wartime Britain and this book is not balanced in any sense at all. This is little more than a ... polemic. One ought, at the very least,to damn with faint praise.

Author Irving wrote a significant work on the Allied destruction of the undefended Saxon museum city of Dresden in 1945. It was well-researched and carefullly written. That was a long time ago and Irving, who has churned out many other books in the meantime, has never lived up to his initial promise. The Churchill books are thinly written and display the author's animosity towards his subject on every page. His works on Adolf Hitler and his people, on the other hand, glow with unfeigned appreciation and praise. A good historian, if he is worth the title, should write with objectivity and not to a preconceived idea. In all of Irving's books one can find signs of considerable research and this alone is their primary worth. Irving has been able, in years past, to locate and utilize many hitherto obscure diaries and letters. However, that having been said, what Irving does with this information is quite another matter. For a researcher and persons possessing in-depth knowledge of Irving's subject, these books, including the ones now under review, have considerable merit. For those newly arrived at the subject of 20th Century political history, the Irving books should be taken with much greater care. Irving initially denounced the notorious fake "Hitler Diaries" and then, seeing that they were being accepted by the British media, reversed himself and proclaimed them to be absolutely genuine. It has been said that Irving was the first person to call these documents fake and the last to authenticate them. The Churchill books have much of valuable technical interest in them but precious little objectivity.

This is the second part of Irving's Churchill 'biography'. It is fascinating reading, but tends not to be a easy a read as his first volume. The fact that Irving is not an admirer of his subject is clearly evident, but it seems that only people outside the UK have this uncritical mythic view of Churchill that certainly does not stand up to reality. Personally I find Irving's view of Churchill to be refreshng and probably the most truthful version of the man thats out there to be read. Churchill is painted as an intelligent, uncompromising and rather ruthless individual on one hand and sympathethic, understanding and somewhat noble gentleman on the other. This book is far more ballenced than the worthless and grovelling 'biography' that Martin Gilbert wrote.
Forget all the nonsense and hyperbole that surrounds Irving and his enforced labelling and read the book, in fact I would urge eveybody to read any Irving book and then make up your own mind and not be swayed by the biased opinions of other people.

The trial transcripts are available on line (for free!!!!!). Imagine that, you can get an unbiased take on the evidence! Van Pelt gives very compelling testimony (unlike some of the other highly paid "witnesses" for the defense) but why pay him again for it?

A fascinating look at a trial which brought to light the nefarious and underhanded way in which Holocaust deniers and revisionists twist the facts of history. A must-read for history buffs, truth seekers, and legal eagles.

This book was horrible...no plots, no metaphores; nothing I do not agree with the writing style of the author and I don't think that anyone who knows a good book when they read one, would either.

Este es uno de los mejores libros de John Irving. Yo lo considero a el uno de los mejores escritores contemporaneos norteamericanos. La historia de esta familia es triste, comica, y increiblemente adictiva. Yo le recomiendo esto libro a todos mis amigos, y pare ser honesta yo siempre recomiendo todo lo que este escritor escribe.

Irving met Erhard Milch in Dusseldorf in the late 1960's, and admits that he was intrigued by the life of this old man who was once Gorings Deputy, the second most powerful man in the German Air Ministry, the chief architect and mobiliser of the Luftwaffe, a Field Marshal and the man Hitler said knew more about aviation than any other in Germany.

It is obvious that Irving respected and liked Milch (you don't spend four years researching someone's life if you don't respect them and I doubt you can spend four years with someone without ending up liking them) The feeling was mutual as Milch gave all his diaries and notebooks to Irving. It is natural then to expect this book to be the most authoritative, well researched and detailed account of Milch's life. That it is. It is also one of the best histories of the Luftwaffe. The book tells the story of the Luftwaffe from the earliest days with the formation of the Air Ministry in 1933 through to its eventual defeat. Defeat was not by way of battle or any specific incident but was indicated by the Luftwaffe's impotence and total inability to stop the massive allied bombing raids on the Reich beginning in late 1943.

Wheras the story of the Luftwaffe is about Milch and Goring it's also about others such as Ernst Udet and aircraft designers such as Willy Messerschmitt and Ernest Heinkel. It's about the successful planes Messerschmitt Bf109, Focke Wulf 190, Junkers 87 (Stuka) and the abject failures such as the Me 210 and He 177. There is discussion of those great 'might have beens' such as the Dornier 355 (front and rear, push-pull design) and perhaps the greatest example of a design that was too little, too late - the Me 262 jet fighter. Armaments, radar, production quotas, innovations and secret projects are all mentioned. So is the politics and infighting (such as the dislike that Milch and Messerschmitt had for each other) and the inefficiencies, bureaucracy and meddling that characterised the Air Ministry. If you have an interest in the Luftwaffe then this is a good item to add to your collection, but be warned, the writing style is very dry and I found it hard to read through.

Irving's American distributors have yanked his past books off the shelf under threat of boycott. The Anti-Defamation league finds Irving's books to be distasteful. The notion that publishers have nullified their contracts with Irving because of written inaccuracies is simply not true. Although I cannot claim to support all of Irving's findings, I do not like the notion of special interest groups determining what is "appropriate" reading and what is not.

'A Faulty History Dissected' takes aim at Irving and any other historian who has the audacity to deviate from the status quo. Jackel is undoubtedly in league with those members of the political/historical-writing community who wish to violate the right to free speech -oddly enough, something they claim to champion in other arenas.

Does David Irving deserve censure for his grotesque belief that Adolf Hitler knew nothing of the Holocaust? Of course. Is Eberhard Jaeckel the historian to dismantle Irving? No. Jaeckel himself has a long history of gaffes regarding Hitler. In 1983, he published in in Germany, 'Hitler's Saemtliche Aufzeichnungen" which purported to publish many "new" Hitler poems and drawings. The problem was that most of the work consisted of worthless forgeries. Jaeckel should have known this, any reputable historian would have known instantly.

The problem with Irving is that he is a diligent researcher, he just is corrupted with blatant racism which renders his conclusions on the Reich one-sided and specious. Any historian starting out with Irving's premises is standing on faulty ground. But Jaeckel is out of his league here and it clearly shows. His footnotes frequently lead to discredited sources and his conclusions are haphazard and disjointed.

Irving deserves critical, harsh examination, but it needs to be done by an historian of greater skill and repute than Jaeckel.

Sigh. I see the Holocaust deniers and quibblers are out in force here. Irving is "courageous" and a victim of "censorship" because he is harshly criticized and dismissed by all reputable historians. Sure.

Contrary to what you may have read in the preceding reviews here, Jackel is a very reputable historian, the author of two invaluable and highly regarded works ("Hitler's Weltanschauung" and "Hitler in History") that are required reading for anyone who studies Nazi Germany. There is nothing outlandish or shabby in his current book criticizing Irving--it is in fact rock solid, like all his other work. This compact, admirable volume makes a good companion to Richard J. Evans's effective debunking of Irving.

i don't know what the hell was going on. those damn yanks don't know what they're talking about. i could write a better book than this with my toes.

I was ensnared into reading this book by the promising name of the author. While I do not regret having read this book, I do not think that this does measure up to the 'Tin Drum'. If you are planning to read Grass for the first time, tehn this is not the book to get started with.

Some people, especially those who can not find fault with anything, least of all with literature, might say that the humor here is subtle as compared with the humor of the 'Tin Drum' where it was more ribald. To use the word 'subtle' in that sense would be more a misuse of the term than anything else. The humor remains dark here. The background remains war and nazi Germany. But still the main the theme is that of an adolescent hero (Mahlke) and hero-worship by the narrator (Pilenz) and others.

It would be a fair asumption that most of us have had some heroes during our school days. Therefore it is not too difficult to identify with the theme and the narrator of this book. The narrator here is Pilenz and his hero is Joachim Mahlke. Mahlke is a catholic teenager with an abnormally protruding Adams apple. He is a year older than the rest of the group. He is the best swimmer and diver and he often spends his time in a barge nearby the shore that went down during the war. He has the largest penis in the group and he is the most prolific masturbator. But he generally stays away from adulation. After a daring stealing act whereby he stole a nazi-German officer who was visiting his school, he gets expelled from his and the narrator's school. Later he joins the army and becomes a tanker. There also, he becomes a hero all of which is told in a 3rd persons voice. After his first furlough, he decides not to turn up for his military work again. Then an intrusting climax.

Throughout the novel, you have the nazi Germany and the unmentionable fuhrer as the background. The cruelty of that age is not explicitly stated here. It is amazing now for us , blessed with the advantage of hind sight, to observe that most of the Germans of that age did not recognize the fundamental evil of what they were supporting. They still had cold winters, they still had flowers bloom in spring, they still had wonderful swimming seasons in summer. The nazi youth's childhood was as naughty and gloomy as ours. Nothing was different, yet everything was fundamentally different. It is equally important in this context to note that the very reason for which our hero turns a deserter was not that he found out that he found war to be evil. It was more due to a combination of fear and boredom.

The prose here is at most times banal, unimaginative and boring. Compare that with the wit and intelligence of 'Tin Drum'. Only the descriptions of the church rituals and the sentences where all words are combined without period, commas etc remain the same.

I would recommend this book to someone who has already read Grass. If you are a first timer to Grass, start with the ' Tin Drum'. Otherwise, you would develop an 'anti Grass ' syndrome. Finally I must admit to be a Grass admirer.

While Owen Meany remains one of my all time favorites for the sharpness of its storytelling and the poignancy of its message, this novel disappointed. In an interview here in Dallas Irving claimed he did not have time to read others' works any more. Probably not true, especially in light of references to The English Patient in this novel, but I found The Fourth Hand to be a hodge podge of recyled themes and story lines. The level of discourse was un-gripping. and although the characters of both Zajak and Wallingford had potential to truly dazzle, their stories were truncated in the interest of a quick but not very enthrallng read, I thought.