In "Against Decoration," the Afterword to "Viper Rum," Mary Karr defines the two sins of contemporary poetry: 1)absence of emotion and 2)lack of clarity. One can accuse Karr of neither. Like her prose, Karr's poems are direct and self-depracating, yet brimming with an emotion rendered with crystalline prose and multi-faceted images. Karr is an immensely talented and very important literary voice. I encourage anyone interested in poetry to pick up "Viper Rum".

I enjoyed "The Devil's Tour" (Karr's other in-print book of poetry) so much, and bought "Viper Rum" as soon as I found it. I was not disappointed. Reflecting on loss in various forms, Karr says what she means, and says it beautifully.

No 'decoration' here - the poems prove that the poet's ideas presented in the essay "Against Decoration" (at the back of this book) work very well.

The idea of poetry is a wonderful thing. At some point in childhood I was taught that poetry consists of beautiful words which cut to the core of the matter and which strongly, easily move the reader's emotions in few words. This idea really stuck with me, but I have never found a poet who so completely fulfilled it (few even came close, really) until I read Mary Karr.

Mary Karr's work is a pleasant change from most of the newer poetry. It is a refreshingly emotional look at death and suicide. These themes weigh heavily in the first portion of the book yet are not overpowering, and actually serve to demonstrate well the mindset of a person with suicidal thoughts. In addition, she includes an intriguing insight into religious beliefs, subtly pointing out some of the hypocrycies therein. The second half of the work, a treatise on her neliefs of the role of poetry is also very valuable. She explains the need for emotional content in poetry and the necessity of clear presentation of these ideas. As a college student, I give the work high praise in that I will not sell the book at the end of the semester. Overall, it is well worth a glance.

The poems in 'The Devils' Tour' are gorgeous - straightforward, but far from simpleminded. I am generally quite wary of poetry... there is so much potential for either intellectual elitism or, conversely, oversentimental silliness. Not so here. The first poem ('Coleman') - a recollection of a young interracial friendship or romance and its consequences - is especially beautiful, and also very sad. A book of poetry definitely worth owning.

I do not have much to say to recommend such classic poems. A person may choose to find out which works are considered "indispensable" and may or may not avail themselves of the pleasure of reading them. What I like most about Eliot is the symbiotic relationship he had with Pound as his editor on "The Wasteland." A long time ago Horizon magazine printed the first draft of that poem with Pound's notes and sometimes "brutal" excisions. I must say that the final product IMO is much better than the unedited version. If only more Modern and Postmodern writers had editors like that! Or even ANY editors, in some cases! The art of editing is like diamond-cutting. This judgment does not negate the adamantine brilliance of the author.

Attention: all cranky four year olds, five year olds, eight year olds and thirty-five year olds on long car trips.

Attention all parents burned out by reading The Pokey Little Puppy over and over again.

Attention cynics whose primary memory of Winnie-the-Pooh is the Dorothy Parker quote (from her "Constant Reader" column in the New Yorker) "Tontant Weader frowed-up".

This book is a treasure for all who hear it. There is gentleness and not a little wit in these stories. Contray to the book description above, the book is read by the late Charles Kuralt. His inflection adds much to the story. One senses that he is amused; but he is never condesending. Now I will always prefer Kuralt's version to my own bedtime efforts with my children. Charles Kuralt must have loved Winne-the-Pooh mightily. How lucky we are that he left this delightful gift behind.

Upon looking for reading materials for my fourth grade class I stumbled upon "A House At Pooh Corner" by A.A.Milne. I leafed through it and ...fell in love with it! I have become A Pooh Fan!
As I informed my students we were going to tead Winnie The Pooh they all whined thinking that it was a "baby book". Well they were immediately charmed by A.A.Milne's beautiful language, unique style and sophisticated humor. They read the book, demanded other works by the same author and completed a project about the book. We`re even celebrating Pooh's Birthday in our classroom and have become Pooh's, Eeyore's, Tigger's, Piglet's, Rabbit's,Kanga's, Roo's ,Owl's and Cristopher Robbin's eternal fans. Do Not Miss the chance of a close encounter with the finest literature.

This classic is listed under the age group of four to eight, and as a Poohphile I am quite appalled that it is. Winnie the Pooh books have such wit, wisdom, and humor that gets better every time I read them. Their not just for children, they are for everyone. Over the years, Christopher Robin, Winnie the Pooh, Eeyore, Piglet, Tigger, Kanga, and Roo have become some of my dearest chums. I once heard someone say, or perhaps I read it, that "books are like dear friends, and who has too many friends?" I am quite inclined to agree with that statement. This book is a dear friend of mine and I hope that you shall make it yours. :)

Definitely helps you get yourself pointed in the right direction. My only complaint is some bad links on the webpages recommended.

Now in an updated and expanded fourth edition, The Adult Student's Guide To Survival And Success shows the adult learner how to overcome fears, study and pass tests, get financial help, gain family support, balance work and college, create a portfolio, be resilient and adaptable, use Internet resource, achieve educational and technical proficiency. The collaborative effort of educators and psychologists Al Siebert, Bernadine Gilpin, and Mary Karry, The Adult Student's Guide To Survival And Success is enhanced with a website of its own and this new edition shows how to go online to practice, develop Internet skills, and even take educational courses online. The Adult Student's Guide To Survival And Success is "must" reading for anyone returning to school after a prolonged absence due to parenthood, career changes, or retirement.

Mary Karr's moving, touching, hilariously funny and poignantly sad memoir is at once destined to become close to a classic. I can't recall ever reading a memoir this detailed, this humorous, or this poetic. Words simply fail to describe 'The Liar's Club'.

Karr grew up in a seemingly nasty little town in Texas, where there doesn't seem to be anything remotely redeeming about it. Add to this a family who is completely wacky: an artist mother who drinks, threatens her life, and disappears at times for days on end; a father who also likes to drink, work and tell stories with his friends; a typical older sister who both loves and despises her. Yet in spite of this environment, or maybe because of it, Mary is able to rise above her turmoils to escape with a love of writing, reading and life itself. Her memory of early childhood is astounding, her sense of humor unmatched, and her words tumble off of the pages with ease.

I heard nothing but good things about this book before I read it, and I was not disappointed. This is a true work of art that rightly deserves a place in literary history. Read it today, and experience a journey into a talented writer's beginnings.

Mary Karr grew up in an ugly place, the refinery/swamp town of Port Arthur, Texas, and in an ugly situation, with a mentally unstable mother and a hot tempered, hard drinking father. Yet out of such ugliness, she extracted great beauty in order to write this dazzling memoir. Despite Karr's dysfunctional childhood, her writing is completely devoid of woe-is-me whining or psychobabble.

Karr has a gift for spinning a tale, perhaps inherited from her father or honed at gatherings of his friends in "The Liar's Club," a group that met to drink, play cards, and swap stories. And boy, the stories she tells! There's the stories about her mother's manic/pyschotic episodes, including one time when she set her children's belongings on fire, another time when she attempted to drive the family off a bridge, and a third time when she threatened her lazy husband with a gun. Karr also tells about her inconsistent relationship with her father, who suffered a difficult life but emerged, if not unscathed, then unbroken.

Most remarkable about the book, though, are not the amazing stories but the matter of fact, even at times hilarious tone in which they are told. The woman telling these stories is no victim; she is a survivor. A miserable childhood did not cause Mary Karr to surrender her spirit, but rather forged her in fire and made her stronger.

A friend gave me this book, saying she had liked it but wasn't crazy about confessional memoirs.

The Liar's Club may fit that description, but don't be put off, because it's absolutely fantastic. Mary Karr's writing routinely verges on prose-poetry and is, despite its dark subject matter, funny enough to make you laugh out loud. Then, once you're laughing, she turns around and hits you with something so brutal that you're caught up short.

I did find myself wondering, as I'm sure others have, whether some embroidery may have been involved in the author's crystal-clear recollections of events long past. She appears to have kept copious journals, but still, you wonder how anyone could have gotten so much detail down with such precision, especially as a child.

Then again, maybe she's a hyper-sensitive person with a photographic memory. Ultimately I didn't care if parts of it were embellished a bit. She's such a good writer that if this depiction of events captures the truth of her childhood, more power to her. My main reaction was a weirdly worshipful desire to locate Ms. Karr and make her tell me more stories, the ones that didn't make it into this book. (Actually, I'd be surprised if this has not happened to her.)

This book pulls you in. It's funny, poignant, shocking, memorable. I give it five richly deserved stars.

First of all, let me echo other reviewers in saying not to expect anything like The Liar's Club. Mary Karr is still an enormously gifted writer, but while The Liar's Club had it moments of joy interspersed with various traumas, Cherry is just plain dank. Mary's exploits as a child weren't hopeless -- she had a resiliancy about her that assured the reader that she'd be all right, or some version thereof, in the end. The adolescent Mary descends deeper and deeper into a darkness that she manufactures for herself with the help of a pharmacy's worth of drugs and a heapin' helping of teen angst thrown in for good measure. I found it extremely interesting that Karr resorted to telling her story in second person in the last part, in which her relationship with drugs begins. I wondered to myself as I was reading whether she was using the second person narrative as a way of distancing herself from her high school self. In any case, the book is a much more difficult read than The Liar's Club, and I would definitely recommend that book before dipping your toes into this one. The reader emerges thoroughly saddened by Karr's own outright and between-the-lines admissions of her mistakes. I found her relationships with people especially dismaying -- but perhaps that was simply the way she chose to tell the story. The adolescent Karr is far from the precocious child of The Liar's Club. Her story is told from the bottom of an abyss -- I read an interview with Karr where she said that while writing Cherry, she would write for an hour and a half and then just collapse on the floor and fall asleep from exhaustion. I don't doubt it. A difficult yet rewarding book.

This book is like sitting and listening to your friend's "fast" big sister spill the details of her last weekend. You hang on every word, half apalled, half entranced....would you, could you? Mary Karr has given voice to life in small town Texas in the late 60's and early 70's. We all thought we were destined for something other than small town life. Meandering into casual drug use, slipping into casual sex, and the constant battle to find something "more". The language is clear and true and unsparing and alive. This was a worthy folowup to "Liars' Club" the memior focused more on the younger years of Karr, and the havoc wrecked by her parent's alcohol abuse. As Karr grows older, her parents as less in the story, a telling example of her ability to survive and to move away from dependence on them...and to somehow block or ignore their chaotic interference in her life. This is a great book.

I'd never read anything by Mary Karr before, but I bought this as an audio book to listen to on a cross country car trip. It was so funny in parts that once I actually had to pull over to the side of the road since I was laughing so hard.

It's rare to find a book about a teenage girl, whether fiction or memoir, where she is actually the subject of the story, not the object, and "Cherry" does this masterfully. You can see young Mary, trapped in the boredom of her small Texas town, wild and disrespectful and aching for something more.

There were parts of this book that really surprised me--I didn't know you could do so many drugs and survive. Although, I suppose Mary was the exception, since many of her friends didn't make it through this time for various reasons, and she hints that the story after "Cherry" ends will be even more tragic and full of loss.

I'm going to read "The Liars Club" next, and I hope that Mary Karr will write another book, telling us what happened once she left Texas for California.

I too was fool. This is NOT recordings of Richard Feynman and it is not BY Richard Feynamn. This is simply an NPR interview of the guy that wrote the book ABOUT Richard Feynman.

However, it is basically another tape of high quality NPR interviewing. ... and I have read many great books, simply because I heard about them first on an NPR interview.

Like all NPR programs, count on high quality entertainment when listening to this tape. Yet do not be mislead, these are recordings of the biographers, not of the famous subjects on whom they focused. (This is NOT "on" nor "by" Richard Feynman as one could have misunderstood.)