One sword. The true sword, EXCALIBUR. Forged from magic and courage, it bears the power of heroes and kings. Its nature is unique, but its forms are legion. It can appear... has appeared... will appear, anywhere, at any time, in a thousand hands in a thousand guises. For Excalibur is the force that protects the souls of Good's guardians, and changes the course of destinies...

Tales of the history and manifestations of Excalibur throughout time, gathered by three of the most experienced anthologists in the field and featuring: Esther M. Friesner, Owl Goingback, Jody Lynn Nye, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, Judith Tarr, Susan Shwartz, and many more.

Featuring

"CONTROLLING THE SWORD" by Kristine Kathryn Rusch: The ancestral sword drew generations of children to their destiny but forever cursed all who were unworthy of its touch.

"LASSORIO" by Eric Lustbader: The sullen warlord Lassorio ruled a dark, diminished Camelot until the night a snow fox led him to a place of magic, horror. . . and love.

"THE GOD-SWORD" by Diana L. Paxson: Centuries before the time of Arthur, a Swordbearer and his Druid lover must join the battle for the soul of ancient Britannia.

"SILVER, STONE, AND STEEL" by Judith Tarr: Joseph of Arimathea carried a Mystery to the world's end and discovered his place in an eternal dream of wizards, gods, goddesses, and blood.

"SWORD PRACTICE by Jody Lynn Nye: The young boy-king must discover: Does Arthur rule the sword or does Excalibur rule the king?

"GOLDIE LOX, AND THE THREE EXCALIBEARERS" by Esther M. Friesner: What're you starin' at? Even Merlin's verklempt when the destined Swordbearer for the age turns out to be Brooklyn's Lady of the Lox teen deli waitress Goldie Berman! Who knew?

Starting in 1976, Edward Said has argued that Western scholars of the Middle East are continuing "an unbroken tradition in European thought of profound hostility, even hatred, toward Islam," and he singles out Bernard Lewis as their de facto leader. Strangely, when Lewis in turn argued in favor of the Orientalist tradition - that unique effort by members of one civilization to understand the outside world in depth - his colleagues with near-unanimity abandoned him. Still, the battle is not entirely over. While Lewis himself retired from the fray, his highly talented ex-student, Martin Kramer continues the not-entirely-lonely effort to defend several centuries of Western scholarship on the Middle East.

In The Jewish Discovery of Islam, Kramer takes as his starting point several comments by Lewis about the important role of Jews in developing nineteenth-century European attitudes toward the Middle East and Islam, then asks: Did Jews actually made a distinct contribution to the Western discovery of Islam? His reply - and that of his nine contributing authors - is a resounding yes. He and they argue that nineteenth-century Jews found in the Muslim world a model directly relevant to their current situation. Looking about for arguments to bolster their case to join the mainstream of European life, they pointed to Islamic civilization at its height as to show the benefits of integrating Jewry. This in turn meant they had to prove that Baghdad and Cordoba represented peaks of human achievement.

These "pro-Islamic Jews" routed the opposition and their empathetic, sympathetic approach rules the roost today. Kramer's book has many implications: By showing that the main Orientalist tradition derived far more from sympathetic Jewish approach than from the hostile Christian one, it devastates Said's grand theory of Orientalism. It establishes that recent Western attitudes to the outside world - such as the Third-Worldism of the 1960s and the multiculturalism of today - owe their existence in good part to the success of the pro-Islamic Jews' long-ago efforts of humanize Islam. Muslims eventually also picked up on the romantic Jewish myths about Islam and made these a standard part of their own self-image. Finally, Muslims now living in the West owe much to the Jewish scholars who laid the groundwork for their finding an at least partially hospitable reception.

Middle East Quarterly, December 1999

This book talked about real life in a fun and interesting way. It told me about what was going on happen in my teen years. The pictures showed me what I was reading about. I really recommend this book for all kids, because it made me more comfortable and let me know what I can look forward to. You should buy your kid this great book!!!!

This book is great fun, intriging and suspensful. I love new authors - this one is really different. Highly recommend it.

Danny Finn, pop star at the top of the charts, tires of the constant intrusions to his life. He opts to 'disappear', at the suggestion of his agent. Danny soon finds out this arrangement is more than he has bargained for, and is soon running for his life. This is an exciting, suspenseful, wll-written and fun book.

The more I read of "The Forever Club", the more I wanted to read. I finished it in three days, and would've gone straight through it the first night if I didn't have to get up for work the next morning.

The plot is imaginative--many times I guessed wrong about where the action was heading and was plesantly surprised by the turn of events. Some of the characters are one dimensional, but, hey, it's a suspense thriller, not an Anna Quindlen novel. The characters do have some unusual habits and some great lines. And I loved the way it wasn't just the same old thriller fare. For example, there's a chase scene that doesn't include cars or helicopters or trains or motorcycles (I won't give away the vehicle used). I'm looking forward to the next book from this author.

I remember buying this paperback at a Supermarket in Tampa, Florida during the sweltering August of 1996. I once heard that if you remember something it's important, and since I gave this book away to the library about a year ago, I can only talk about a couple of the stories that stayed with me. Probably me favorite two were "Loop" by Douglas E. Winter (I actually read that one in a dorm room in Austin, Texas) and "The End of It All" by Ed Gorman. I can't really comment on the rest.

"Loop" is crisp, concise writing--yet passionate. Winter tells the story of a lawyer who develops over the years an infatuation with an adult film actress. His intense details of American culture really bring to life this doomed "love story."

"The End of It All" reads like an NBC TV Movie of the Week--but with a more focused story and a much sharper edge; the writing is so economical I compare it to a newspaper article. Gorman's impartial and blunt matter-of-fact writing style really got me excited about the short story medium again. Reading this will shock you, and impress.

On a Saturday night this summer, or any summer, staying home and reading these two stories will be much more rewarding than even going to a movie. They are that entertaining, not to mention provocative.

A collection of dark fantasy exploring the relationship between sex and horror with contributions by prestigious authors renowned in the field. The quality of the stories is uneven and the volume includes a few excellent tales as well as some ordinary stuff. The book starts with a long-awaited brand new story by Stephen King ("Lunch at the Gotham Cafe'") The following tales are by Kathe Koja, who tells the life story of a sexually unsatiable ballerina and by british author Basil Copper ("Gleading blades") who provides a new, disquiteting atmosphere to the time-honored theme of the serial killer. In Ramsey Campbell's "Going under" the cellular phone becomes the instrument of modern horror while in the late Karl Edgar Wagner's "Locked away" the forbidden sexual fantasies of a long- dead woman come alive through an antique gold locket. In "The end of it all" Ed Gorman recreates the atmosphere of the "film noir" of the 40s , while Douglas Winter ("Loop") perfectly balances horror with the sad after-taste of unfullfilled love dreams.

I've had bad luck in the past with Horror anthologies, so I put off reading Dark Love for a few Years after purchasing it. I should have had more faith in the Editors, because this is a rock-solid book, with not a dud to be found.

The book starts off with Stephen King's "Lunch at the Gotham Cafe, where a man and his soon-to-be-ex-wife find themselves confronted with a demented Maitre d'. The story is good (As most King stories are), but I found it more comedic than it seems to have been intended to be. (The way the Maitre d' keeps screaming "EEEEEEE!!!!" just struck me as funny...)
From there, the late, great Michael O'Donaghue contributes "The Psycho", a crazed Gunman on the loose story with a great twist ending.
Next is Kathe Koja's "Pas de Deux", probably the most realistic story in the book. It wasn't really my cup of tea, but it was well-written, and it had its moments.
Basil Copper's "Bright Blades Gleaming" is waaaay too long, and I saw the end coming a mile off, but again, it was a well-told tale. It could have been better if it was shorter, though.
John Lutz offers "Hanson's Radio", a tale of urban neighbors getting on each others nerves that I, a former Bronx apartment dweller, totally related to.
David J. Schow's "Refrigerator Heaven" is a chilling (Pun intended) tale of Mob torture gone HORRIBLY wrong. This story stuck with me for a long time after I finished reading it.
Ro Erg, by Robert Weinberg, starts as a bit of credit-card fraud whimsey, and goes off into totally unexpected territory.
Ramsey Campbell's "Going Under" quite frankly reeked, and I won't devote any of my time to describing it. (I guess there WAS one dud...)
Stuart Kaminsky's "Hidden" is an absolute gem; One of the best short stories I've ever read. It concerns a young boy who slaughters his family and devises an ingenious method of hiding from the law. The ending revelation is an absolute stunner.
"Prism", by Wendy Webb, is a short about Multiple-Personality Disorder that puts you in the head of the narrator. Short, but well-done.
The late Richard Laymon contributes "The Maiden", a dark tale of teenage lust, revenge, and the Supernatural. After reading this story, I've become a Laymon fan, and I'm hard at work collecting all of his books. The Maiden was THAT good....
Flaming Carrot/Mystery Men creator Bob Burden pens the hilariously demented "You've Got Your Troubles, I've Got Mine"; I felt dirty for laughing, but it was just so damned funny...Who knew Burden could write prose? Good job, Bob! More fun than a Spider in diapers!
George C. Chesbro offers "Waco", a creepy look at the inside of the Koresh Compound in it's last moments, as they're visited by a sardonic Vulture claiming to be God himself...
John Peyton Cooke's "The Penitent" is an S&M story that strong-stomached readers will find enjoyable. (I loved it.)
Kathryn Ptacek takes road-rage to a new level in "Driven"; I didn't really care for the ending, though...
John Shirley's "Barbara" is an interesting heist-gone-bad tale.
"Hymenoptera", by Michael Blumlein, features a Fashion Designer becoming obsessed aith an 8-Foot long Wasp (!). Weird and pointless, but I liked it nonetheless....
"The End of It All", by Ed Gorman, is a tale of Lust, Incest, Murder, & Revenge. Would make a GREAT movie...
"Heat", by Lucy Taylor, is forgettable, but short, so at least she makes her sick point quickly.

Nancy A. Collins' "Thin Walls" will resonate with apartment dwellers everywhere.
Karl Edward Wagner's "Locked Away" is a fun psuedo-porn fantasy that made me chuckle more than a few times.
The book closes with Douglas E. Winter's "Loop", a tale of obsession taken to a WHOLE other level.

Dark Love is probably the BEST anthology I've even read. I highly recommend it.

There are two stories worth reading in this anthology of supernatural Civil War-themed work: those by Collins and Somtow. (The latter is a depressing tale of race hatred, but at least it's well written.) One or two others are vaguely OK. The majority of them are awful. They are not written well; they are not researched well; they suck. The worst is probably Moorcock's surrealist nonsense, but Ballard's boring George Todd story, Wagner's silly cannibalism/undead tale and McCaffrey's sentimental plantation claptrap -- not to mention a plethora of Sherman's Bummers meet Zombies splatter -- just leave me bored. I'd recommend avoiding this.

Being a Civil War buff and zombie lover, I couldn't ask for any better combination. It was one of those books that was literally hard to tear myself away from. It's been awhile since I read it, but from what I recall there wasn't a bad story in the book. Holds your interest from beginning to end. One of those few books that I can honestly say I have every intention of going back and reading again.

This collection of horror stories inspired by the War Between the States has found the triple point between surrealism, history, and macabre insanity. Many of the authors, all of whom are well-known in this as well as other genres, have found new ground to tread in this well-edited compilation of "Civil" War-inspired horror fiction. From the tragic unwelcome homecoming of a maimed soldier in "The Sunday Go-To-Meeting Jaw" to the grim folly of "Terrible Swift Saw", there is enough plausible reality to anchor the supernatural twists of "Foragers" and "Darker Angels". "The Master's Time" is a very fresh piece by two newer writers with a stunning ending. One could find her or himself whistling "Dixie" to ease the tension if reading this in solitude. Once these unsettling 25 short stories find their way into your mind, your dreams will no longer be the same...

Many of these stories push the envelope of Nasty, and this anthology is not recommended for those with weak stomachs. Some of them are absolutely gut-wrenching, like John Shirley's "You Hear What Buddy and Ray Did?" and Mike Lee's "High Heels from Hell", while others are just disappointing (Rex Miller's "Brainchild"). Very few are particularly distinguished, and I guess my favorite has to be Howard (The Turtles, Flo & Eddie) Kaylan's "The Energy Pals", which hilariously lampoons the Power Rangers/Ninja Turtles territory. If you're looking for a few good nasty thrills, okay, but if you're looking for a great read, perhaps you might want to look elsewhere.

Though not all the stories are as taboo-shattering as the cover hype implies, a good bit of them are still excellent. Danielle Willis shows us the decidedly unromantic and unglamourous life of a vampire and her lover; Lucy Taylor gives us deadly autoeroticism and shows us what lies on the other side; Don Webb turns torment into art and Steve Rasnic Tem twists the family ties. An incident in a junior high school locker room destines one teacher for revenge in a story from Edward E. Kramer. There's also great work from Rob Hardin, Mike Lee and Howard Kaylan. A collection with far more hits than misses.

Take heed, this is NOT a book to show your parents... Take eroticism and mix it with horror, and you've got something you just can't put down, but you wonder why the heck you're reading such material...

I have always looked forward to the coming of a 3D stereoscopic atlas. The 3D effect in this atlas does not come out too well. If you are expecting a pop out kind of hologramic effects, you will be disappointed. The stereoscopic illustrations are on the right hand side page. They do not have labels to show you what you are looking at. You have to refer to the opposite left hand page. With the stereoscopic glasses on, that can be a pain. I could be the only one but those glasses make my eyes really uncomfortable after awhile. The CD-ROM is interesting. You can rotate 3D images. Again, no labels. Unless you are a neuro-anatomist or neurosurgeon, you will not be able to appreciate the full details of the images.You will be able to name less than half of the structures in the images. Message to students is to stay away from this atlas. I swear by good old Atlas of the Human Anatomy by the late Frank H.Netter anytime of the day. The text by Neary and Crossman provides a pretty good basic coverage, in terms of illustrations and text, of neuroanatomy too.

At last something not being a model or real brain gives you the chance to understand and appreciate neuroanatomy, especially the profound structures.
For the first time it is actually possible to get an idea of the fornix and ventricular system from a book.

As any Middle East specialist knows, there's no experience like being asked to speak in one of the major Israeli university fora: in the audience sit individuals with more knowledge and skills on Middle Eastern issues than perhaps anywhere else on the globe. And so, it is hardly surprising that scholars invited to address the Dayan Center at Tel Aviv University rise to the occasion, preparing major addresses that deserve to be made available to a much wider audience. This is, fortunately, what the Dayan Center has chosen to do, and its associate director has edited the inaugural issue with verve.

Gabriel Warburg provides what is perhaps the most incisive analysis of Hasan at-Turabi, the "soft-spoken" Sudanese fundamentalist Muslim leader who disengenuously tells a gullible West that his goals can be achieved without violence. Bernard Wasserstein confronts the discrepancy between what Israelis would like to believe about the British Mandate in Palestine and the historical truths emerging from the archives. Bernard Lewis adeptly argues the obvious but rarely made point that the Arab-Israeli conflict is but one of the Middle East's many problems. Steven Humphreys takes up the intriguing and almost never discussed subject of historians who write in Arabic about the Middle East: why is that their voluminous writings rarely attract Western interest? And, conversely, why do they pay so little attention to Western scholarly efforts on the Middle East?

Middle East Quarterly, March 1995

Martin Kramer's monograph had its genesis before September 11, but its opportune arrival directly raises the question of how 2,600 specialist academics from 125 American universities and colleges had practically nothing to say - except after September 11 - about Bin Laden?

Kramer's monograph answers this question by placing it in the context of the ideological transformation of Middle Eastern studies since the Second World War.

As Kramer shows, the field was originally an antiquarian and linguistic guild that after the Second World War became highly politicized, dominated by sociologists and political scientists, and by 1966, embodied in the Middle East Studies Association of North America (MESA).

Kramer demonstrates that Middle Eastern studies has been characterized by political advocacy of Arab nationalism that specialists view as a beneficent force in a Middle East which they hold to be a region of burgeoning modernization.

Kramer's does not encompass a detailed aetiology of these ideas (which can be traced in large part to the Englishmen Arnold Toynbee and Sir Hamilton Gibb) but explains well the effects of these notions.

Kramer indicates how the discipline suffered a crisis of confidence in the late 1970s, which spawned the "triumph" of Edward Said's seminal work, Orientalism (1978). Said's work, as Kramer shows, was a pungent critique of Western scholarship, producing a new discipline called post-colonialism, which regarded all previous Western scholarship as a tool of Western dominance which deprived Middle Eastern societies of their own narrative, fostered racist assumptions and stimulated discriminatory practices. This new orthodoxy now accused "Zionists" like Bernard Lewis, and even Arab nationalist champion Gibb himself, of committing this alleged heresy.

But as Kramer ably shows, the new orthodoxy has not stood the test of time, with MESA failing to accurately predict Middle Eastern developments. The progressive forces expected to overthrow oppressive American Cold War arrangements, as Kramer shows, never materialised. Instead we got the decidedly non-secular, revivalist Islam offered to Muslims with Iran's fall to Khomeini in 1979.

Few MESA members, Kramer also notes, had anything useful to say about Saddam Hussein, who invaded and annexed Kuwait before MESA was inspired to consider his brand of Ba'athist Arab nationalism malevolent. These specialists, Kramer also shows, forecast disaster for what was instead a decisive US intervention in Kuwait that reaffirmed American prestige.

In answer to his critics, Kramer would concede that even the finest specialist cannot necessarily predict the choices of men. But he sees in Middle East specialists a more pervasive deficiency. For world wide, they mysteriously viewed Saddam as capable and likely to carry the enthusiasm of the Arab world when, given the opportunity of Desert Storm, his army deserted in droves and his subject peoples rebelled.

Kramer also indicates that the series of American policy errors in the 1990s - leaving Saddam in place, decamping from the scene of American blood-lettings, chartering an open-ended Israeli-Palestinian peace process dependent on the probity of Yasser Arafat - were inspired largely by the orthodox MESA attitudes.

Readers interested in how post-colonial texts serve as ammunition for Islamists and a handicap for secularist reformers in the Middle East, will find much of interest in Kramer's book. One example: Malcolm Kerr, one of the few MESA members not to have prevented his abiding concern for the Arab world to dispel his misgivings about Orientalism, was gunned down in 1984 outside his office in Beirut. He had become two years before president of the American University of Beirut. "There is surely irony," writes Kramer, that Said and the "progressive" scholars ... should have delegitimised the one university in the Arab world where academic freedom had meaning, thanks to its American antecedents."

Kramer duly notes that Said was later to say he regretted the enthusiastic reception of his book by the Islamists. But Kramer also observes that Said failed to explain why his writings were received thus, and Said's confessed inability to explain Islam to the West is a remarkably candid disclosure - which is widely neglected.

Kramer rightly devotes attention to the ascendancy of John Esposito, who progressed from a remote scholar on the fringes of Middle Eastern studies to its epicentre in the mid-1990s. Kramer defines Esposito's winning formula as the ability to produce scholarly and favourable volumes on Islam and Islamic society, shorn of Said's rancid anti-American and post-colonial baggage, and tailored to the needs of college texts. He refurbished the Islamist phenomenon as representing democratic, participatory movements, thereby sanitising them for the public and confounding patterns of social tension in the Middle East with those in democracies.

Kramer credits Esposito with popularising much of the outlook and attitudes of the post-colonial school and thus duplicating with the US government and public Said's success with the academy. As Kramer shows, Esposito has been duly followed by Augustus Richard Norton, whose new doctrine holds that 'civil society' in the Middle East is the wave of the future that threatens to uproot Middle Eastern despotisms.

Only such a doctrine, Kramer notes, could explain the appearance of historian John Voll before a US congressional committee in 1992. Voll argued, apparently with seriousness, that Sudan was a democracy when in fact it was (and remains) governed by a junta without political parties and the scene of savage persecution of Christians and animists.

As Kramer's readers will infer, we presently find ourselves at a potential crossroads, where matters could take a new course. In short order we have witnessed the collapse of Oslo, September 11, the speedy American military successes in Afghanistan, and subsiding Islamist fervour in the wake of demonstrated Western resolve. Kramer's monograph provides a timely explication of the larger and detailed issues involved. Its hostile reception at the latest MESA Conference forewarns us how it will be resisted. But as Kramer amply demonstrates, resisting the duty to deconstruct ideological fixations among Middle Eastern specialists has impoverished the field and misled government and now is not the time to compound the error.

A much needed declaration on the failures of Middle East scholarship. Academia has continued on its liberal path to build a Middle East paradigm rooted in hegemony and keeping up with the most modern intellectual jargin while ignoring the real situation in the Middle East. If the professors of Middle East Studies and MESA were more competant their opinions would be heralded througout America. However, MESA and academia aim at subverting those that do not buy into the dominant paradigm that America is imperalistic. Kramer dismantles this innaccurate paradigm in an accurate and revolutionary way.

Middle East Academia on college campuses has become a uniform mass saying in unison that imperialistic America's foreign policy has created this "Oriental" attitude that patronizes the Middle East. The academics reply they are simply telling the truth. I have yet to see a Middle East country not accept American aid. Middle East scholars have missed the reality boat on the Middle East. Where is the scholarship on Middle East terrorism? Fundamentalist Islam? Kramer is brutal, but honest in this assault and anyone thinking about Middle East Studies as an academic discipline must read this first!

The topic, at first glance, is very narrow. This is not a book about how to study the Middle East, nor about American academia, but about the intersection of these: how the Arab Middle East in fact is and has been studied in American universities.

Once this narrow focus is understood and accepted by the reader, there is a fascinating read here. Kramer is very knowledgeable about the inner workings of "Middle Eastern Studies," and more particularly about the Middle East Studies Association (MESA). The story he has to tell is actually more entertaining than most of the novels with academic settings, and the humor more mordant, because it is all true, alas. The second chapter about Edward Said is worth the price of the book.

Of course the Marxists and other Israel-bashers won't like this book -- it tells us too much about them.

That said, there are regretful lacunae in Kramer's book. It would seem that "area studies," of which the Middle Eastern is but one, can lend themselves to superficiality perhaps more than the traditional disciplines of history, language study, sociology, religious studies, etc. Kramer is a bit evasive on this. And Kramer is also a tad too fond of social science jargon. "Paradigm," a word introduced with the present meaning by Thomas Kuhn back in 1962, appears on practically every page of Kramer's book. Kuhn himself, in the second edition of his book, in 1970, found himself obliged to clarify his meaning.

But these are minor quibbles. I learned a great deal from this book, especially about the pretensions of (some of) America's academics. Five stars here, well earned.