This book is a nice compilation of a set of interviews with the heads of some of Europe, Asia and America's largest banks. The interviewer does a nice job of keeping a few strong threads (technology, risk, globalization) running through the interviews while allowing each discussion to probe different challenges and opportunities.

This book could have been better if it probed the technology issues a little deeper. It appears that the interviewer may not have been adept in this area.

I would highly recommend this book for people looking to get a clear, broad understanding of banking trends and strategies without getting mired in terminology or esoteric banking processes.

The Introduction by Dean Flower to GREAT SHORT WORKS OF HENRY JAMES contains one of the few misprints I found in the book. Instead of `her,' the description of "The Turn of the Screw" which correctly states, "it is her ordeal to be the only one who sees" when the ghosts appear, then has "but here ordeal subtly changes into obsession." (p. ix). In the story, "The Beast in the Jungle," the word `bankrupt' is given an extra r, so the list of things which the main character has not been branded by reads, "It wouldn't have been failure to be brankrupt, dishonoured, pilloried, hanged; it was failure not to be anything." (p. 471).

The characters in "The Beast in the Jungle" are man and woman, concerned with an idea which she brings up when they finally meet again, "that again and again has made me think of you since; it was that tremendously hot day when we went to Sorrento, across the bay, for the breeze." (p. 453). Mostly he had tried to remove the element of comedy from their conversation. "What he had asked of her had been simply at first not to laugh at him. She had beautifully not done so for ten years, and she was not doing so now." (p. 455). He had furnished a deep sense of foreboding that he might be overwhelmed by something "possibly annihilating everything, striking at the root of all my world and leaving me to the consequences, however they shape themselves." (p. 456). After ten years of thinking about how it might happen, she was brave enough to ask, "Isn't what you describe perhaps but the expectation--or at any rate the sense of danger, familiar to so many people--of falling in love?" (p. 456). Those who have fallen off the deep end in the other direction might have more ideas for weird movies than this story ends up with.

On a more comic note, I think this book illustrates American ideas as being like a little girl who is expecting to be queen of the world, but when she is growing up, she discovers that she is only Daisy Miller. The story, "The Pupil," might be a sign of how readily America could adopt the task of teaching the rest of the world America's democratic values, only to discover that the world doesn't want to be pandered to as much as it would like real support. Short works of Henry James amount to only six stories in 490 pages, ranging from 18,000 to 71,000 words each.

I also have a book by Stephen Donadio called NIETZSCHE, HENRY JAMES, AND THE ARTISTIC WILL. Published in 1978, a major part of that book (pages 62-118) started me thinking about the relationship of "American Identity, Universal Culture, and the Unbounded Self." Henry James was born a year before Nietzsche and lived to the middle of World War I, so their lives had some common elements, and Donadio had a lot to say about Ralph Waldo Emerson, who died in 1882, as someone who appeared to be one of the most advanced thinkers of the time to both Nietzsche and Henry James. Donadio's index lists four of the stories in GREAT SHORT WORKS OF HENRY JAMES, all but "Washington Square" and "The Aspern Papers." He found a lot of interesting comments in the Prefaces of Henry James, notebooks, and other papers. Anyone who wants to gain familiarity with the actual works might start with GREAT SHORT WORKS OF HENRY MILLER, and it is good that one of the shortest of these stories, "Daisy Miller," is first.

Thanks for scholars like Nicholas Delbanco who hunt down biographical details that enrich our knowledge of famous authors lives. Here is a book that offers a savory meal for the literary gourmet. Henry James liked donuts. Stephen Crane chain smoked. Conrad the English stylist spoke with a thick Polish accent. Ford Madox Ford embellished his recollections with untruths. H. G. Wells treated offers of help with cocky independence.

The author contends that for a certain interval these men associated with and admired each others literary accomplishments. "South of London in 1900, a galaxy of talent assembled that beggars in accomplishment anything the English language has since produced." He provides quotations and photographs that demonstrate social intercourse between the big five. Between the initial overview and the concluding summary, three chapters provide respectively a view of Stephen Crane on a visit to England to meet the other masters of ficti! onal prose, a study of the collaboration between Ford Madox Ford and Joseph Conrad, and an examination of one of English literature's most famous disputes - James vs. Wells.

I found the book informative and interesting and recommend it to any admirer of any of the five writers singularly or in combination. About those we admire our curiosity is insatiable. Did Shakespeare like his eggs over easy or sunny side up? We have his Hamlet, his Lear, isn't that enough? Some might say no. We have Crane's "Open Boat", Conrad's "Heart of Darkness", Ford's *Good soldier, James' *Ambassadors, Wells' *Time Machine*. Still, it's natural to inquire about the virtues, quirks, and foibles of their creators. *Group Portrait* gives us a taste of the traits that rounds out these illustrious authors.

A sad epilogue to which Mr. Delbanco refers in his lead chapter is that this literary summer was so brief. Crane died in 1900. Eventually the other associations wither! ed. By 1906 the friendship between Conrad and Ford had coo! led. *Boon* published in 1915 dissolved Wells' ties to James with its ridicule of the latter. For a while there was Camelot albeit a loose confederacy of brilliant writers. A genius needs a tough ego to sustain him for the long haul to fortune and fame. An alternate lesson from *Group portrait, perhaps one not intended, but nevertheless patent, is that collaboration must eventually give way to ego.

Not only are the author's descriptions of shells up to museum-catalog quality (he is apparently an experienced shell collector), but Nicholls' illustrations are among the best I have ever seen in a natural history book. They are absolutely stunning in both their accuracy and their artfulness. This is reason alone to buy the book. My only complaint is that I wish there had been more descriptions of the species and their characteristics, instead of focusing on the shells alone.

This book has five complete novels for one comparatively low price! "Watch and Ward," is a novel that James himself preferred to ignore as a youthful indiscretion, but I found it a vastly entertaining and suspenseful love story. Roderick Hudson is a compelling cautionary tale. The American is a gripping story that cries out for a movie version (in my fantasy Peter Weir would direct, and it might star Tom Cruise and Winona Ryder, although I'm sure many others would do just as well). This novel has love, a duel, a frightful skeleton in the closet, blackmail, Carmelite nuns, etc. The ending should be adjusted along the lines of the play version that James later wrote. The Europeans did not grab me, but Confidence is a delightful novel with something James later tended to avoid--a happy ending. This collection provides a lot of great novelistic entertainment for the buck. The way the Library of America does it is that for one they are non-profit, and second they use top quality thin acid-free paper, which allows them to fit five books into the space of something slightly larger than one thick paperback. The book even has a silky little bookmark to hold your place. Classy!

I enjoyed "Washington Square" thoroughly. I believe any highschool student should read this if they are looking for a "book" report. I found it captivating and I couldn't put the book down. However I was a little disappointed in how the ending turned out, but what can I do?

For those who admire the style of the later Henry James, and enjoyed the final three "big" novels - The Ambassadors, The Wings of the Dove and the Golden Bowl - this much shorter and lighter novel - almost a short story by James' standards - will be a very pleasant diversion.

Obviously adapted from his play without much attempt to disguise this fact, the novel is driven by the characters' sharp and often witty dialogue. The characters are well drawn, and the story is unusually straightforward for James. While there remain the usual elliptical phrases and circumlocutions we've come to expect in his later novels, these have been toned down in the interests of dramatic momentum and the book is actually an easy read.

While it is certainly not one of the great James novels, it is nevertheless recommended to those who enjoy reading this author.

Peter Brooks' book, "The Melodramatic Imagination," would be helpful even due only to its serious examination of the structural and philosophical underpinnings of traditional French melodramatic theatre. However, what makes this study necessary reading is its convincing argument that melodrama exists as a driving force, not a distracting or somehow 'lower' element, in the creation of the modern novel. The melodramatic structure, shaped by high moral conflict and determined by its motion towards a final revelation of virtue as innocence, and is held together by a system of characters, images and actions become part of a signifying code that opens onto a moral world more cohesively meaningful than the literal world that can be represented by a more straightforward, perhaps more materialist realism. Authors of the nineteenth century novel needed this structure to retain urgency and significance in works from which motivations based on the sacred or the mythic had been discarded, and to make 'interesting' stories seeking to represent the lives of human beings in time rather than the explanatory deeds of timeless, imortal figures. A willingness to historicize a bit more, to relate an explanation of changing modes of representation to changing modes of production, would have made this work even stronger.

Now that the University of Nebraska Press has undertaken to publish the complete James correspondence, these one-volume samplers can be relieved of the artificial responsibility to do the impossible - that is, tell the whole story in 600 pages or less.

Horne's effort suffers in comparison to Edel's by its self-imposed mandate to favor previously unpublished letters. (Personally, I found these almost invariably of lesser interest. It looks like Edel skimmed the cream.) But his cannily selected interstitial material makes it a far more rewarding reading experience. I would say this now stands as the best introduction to the subject.

And for what it's worth: the Penguin Classics paperback edition is a very nice piece of manufacture - comfortably sized in dimension and font.