This book was published several years ago but its portraits of Europeans remains vivid and provoking. Even though it's out of print (shame on the publisher!), this remains one of the best examples of literary journalism, and a valuable travel reader for anyone visiting Europe. It's well-worth the effort of buying it second-hand and we can only hope that it will be reprinted in the future.

Kramer is one of the leading exponents of literary journalism, so it's perplexing that this book is out of print--especially since it contains several classic essays that she wrote for the New Yorker magazine. Some of the essays are over a decade old but they hold true and remain great reads. Most memorable are the ones on Berlin and the Wall--absolute gems of style and voicing that alone are worth the book's price. Highly recommended for anyone visiting Germany or living there.

Firstly, i would like to confess that i am not a philosopher. Better still i know nothing about philosophy. I plucked this book off the shelf at my community library because i've heard of J. Gaarder and his better known Sophie's World (which incidentally i have not read too). Once i started reading this book however, i could not put it down. I was captivated by the twin storyline of Hans Thomas who left Norway with his philosophical father in search of his mother who had "went out into the world to find herself"; and that of Baker Hans, Albert Klages whose mother died when he was a child, Ludwig the German soldier and Frode who found himself stranded on an island with nothing but a pack of cards for company. This is a story-within-a-story in which fantasy and reality, the past and present, are brilliant mixed. I could not put the book down and had to read on chapter after chapter. Interwoven seamlessly throughout the narration are thought-provoking questions about our existence and the mystery of life. To sum up my feelings at the end of it, i was captivated, intrigued and fascinated. This book deserves a second reading and i'm only too sure that i'd enjoy it more.

The Solitaire Mystery is more than a book. In the words of Mr. Coreander, a character in The Neverending Story by Michael Ende, "There are many doors to Fantastica, my boy. There are other such magic books. A lot of people read them without noticing. It all depends who gets his hands on such books."

I believe that Gaarder truly gives readers a new doorway into 'Fantastica', by analogy. He demonstrates how literature can be an art only the imagination can truly understand. After the first time I read this book I had become so immersed into the story, I picked it up again and began reading it again. This is definitely a book to get your hands on. If you desire to read a book that shows the wonders of life, the mystery of adventures, a window into your innermost being, this is the book. I have read Gaarder's Sophie's World and loved it as well. These two books are significantly different and both contain a genuine 'must read' story. Gaarder's style of writing is not confusing or hard to follow. But the nature of the story is one that makes the reader think, look inside themselves for understanding, and encourages them to re-evaluate how they see life and all its wonders.

The imagination, spirit, soul, and what can be called the 'innermost being' takes on many forms, and they all gather strength to take flight from different books in a variety of ways. Read The Solitaire Mystery and see where it takes you.

Jostein Gaarder simply has done a wonderful work in this book. Written two year before Sophie's World, The Solitaire Mystery also deals with Philosophy inserted in a fictional story. The entangled plot about the young Hans Thomas and his little book about deck of cards and the solitairy game is one the achievements of this narrative. Other magnificent point about it is the way the author deals with the reality of the characters and inserts it in the fantasy of the little book's plot. This is one of the best books that I have ever read. I simply couldn't stop reading it until the end. With its magical and fairy-tale elements mixed with the deepest questions about the meaning of life and the search of self-knowledge, the book catches the reader's attention. The end is touching ! After my pleasant expercience reading Sophie's World, I was sure that I would have a nice time reading The Solitaire Mystery, but I never expected to be so moved with it. You MUST read this book !

...

As a young boy, Michael Curlew finds himself in Una Teague's backyard, a world of vibrant colors in Roberta Gellis' "The Colored World." His first visit is all too brief, and soon he finds himself once again in his own world where everyone and everything are shades of gray. Each time he visits Una's world, however, problems arise. As the century draws to a close, Michael yearns to stay with Una, but his very presence in her world may well destroy her.

One kiss at a New Year's celebration and Luke Carver falls in love in "Black Satin at Midnight" by Robin Bayne. That memorable kiss, though, is all Luke has for the woman's date whisks her away before he learns her name. Nine months later, he takes his daughter to her first day of middle school and finds the woman of his dreams, his daughter's teacher. Cara Janson remembers him, too, but the millennium will soon be upon them and she knows there is no future for them or for her.

When her friend sends Sydney Parker a puzzle box for Christmas, she is ill prepared to face the secret she unravels in Jackie Kramer's "The Bride-Seeker." Sydney finds herself kidnapped and taken to the future by Sergeant Drake Fremont. He knows nothing about love and romance. He's just looking for a woman to claim as his own. He may be handsome, but Sydney is not and never will be any man's possession.

Doreen Madison is proud of her daughter's and son-in-law's success in Jane Bierce's "The First of Someday." When she meets their business partner, Lance Hoffman, at Cyber Horizon's New Year's Eve party, Doreen knows that it's time to return to her own life. Lance, however, disagrees.

It's New Year's Eve and Katie O'Keefe is supposed to be meeting her blind date in Diane Kirkle's "The Love Bug." Instead, she waits for the computer technician to arrive because a bug has infected the company's computer system. She's not expecting the hunk who shows up or the crime he uncovers. By the time she reports to her boss and finishes with the police, the hunk is gone and she has fifteen minutes left before the New Year to join her date. After meeting the hunk, though, she's not sure she wants to.

Great-Aunt Lili is a ghost, or in this case, Jane Toombs' "Ghost of Love." Lili's determined that Beth Spencer not make the same mistake she did. Beth, however, isn't listening. She's come home to put the past behind her, in particular one Ross Collins. Although Lili hints of a disaster to come, she is forbidden to explain further. Beth must uncover the truth herself before it's too late.

Gellis' distinction between a world of color and one of gray painted a stark contrast in my mind's eye and made me feel Michael's yearning for the vibrant beauty. Read after the Y2K scare ended, I felt Cara's fear of coming doom silly, yet Bayne's tale is a good old-fashioned love story that captured my heart. Kramer's delightful mix of chivalry of old with gallantry of tomorrow while capturing the essence of romance and love stirred my heart. Those who wish for dreams that seem impossible will enjoy Bierce's tale, but I found it the least satisfying of the six stories because too much of the story involves setting the scene and meeting the characters, leaving little time for the romance to bloom.

Kirk's story gets my vote as the best in the collection. Even though I figured out the ending early on, she compelled me to keep reading. Reading Toombs' story, I didn't have to close my eyes to imagine the house or the characters. Each was so memorable that they combined to make a wonderful story that I will remember for a long time to come.

The dawn of a new century ties all these stories together, but each author interprets this theme in unique ways to create very different and memorable stories of love. No matter whether you're a fan of contemporary romance, time travel, the paranormal, science fiction, or mystery, Millennium Magic will satisfy your craving.

Each story is centered around the change of the millennium. Each author takes a different approach to the theme, and the result is an intriguing variety of looks at the possibilities. All six are highly engaging, enjoyable reads. We're now well past the start of the millenium, whether you believe that event happened in 2000 or 2001, but that didn't dim my enjoyment of these stories in the slightest. The group as a whole is so strong, they can be read at any time and still be as charming and delightful as if you'd read them on New Year's Eve.----

Karen McCullogh, Scribesworld Reviews

Most of these profiles are taken from Kramer's work as NYer correspondent in the 1970s, but they show the roots of a key issue still facing the continent: how to integrate and accept immigrants from other parts of the world. For North Americans, such immigration is the basis of our societies, but for Europeans it's a relatively new phenomonon and Kramer was intelligent enough to identify this when it started, in the 1970s. She introduces us to Algerian-French "pied-noir" who move to France, Turks in Sweden and two other cases. The pied-noir piece is especially interesting and illuminating, filling in a lot of gaps about my knowledge of France. The only thing missing is a piece on immigration in Germany, but Kramer covers that in subsequent books on Europe and Germany. All in all, well worth a read. Ahead of its time.

The book provokes mixed feelings. On one hand, a disturbing portrait of immigrants' isolation, but also a story of their courageous (sometimes out of desperation) perseverance in face of overwhelmingly difficult circumstances. You have to leave all your prejudices aside to understand what the author is trying to convey. If you can, you will gain an insight into the sometimes unbearable lives of the immigrants from their point of view: this you may find upsetting, even disturbing. The book also provides an interesting observation on the womens' roles in traditional societies.

Publisher's Weekly review of this book is totally off base. The armed, anti-government movement in Whatcom County is not a bunch of rag-tag losers. While Kramer gives an accurate picture of this particular patriot, many of the fearful, gun-toting self-proclaimed patiots hold down jobs, vote, and sometimes run for public office. Local Whatcom residents know more outrageous examples of patriots' behavior than Kramer notes. Axes thrown through school officals' windows, pantomimes of hanging those who disagree with them, endless nuisance suits against elected officials- I can't begin to tell you the instances I know about. I know several of the people interviewed by Kramer, and I agree with the information they gave her.

Kramer was quite snitty about Whatcom County. As is typical for 'New Yorker' writers, she is wittier than she is wise. Most of us do consider politics a social event. If we don't have anywhere to go on Saturday, we join another activist group.
She laments that the residents ignore the patriot movement, but that isn't true. When militia meetings were held, we had a very effective way of dealing with it- many average people attended as observers which successfully shut down bizaare talk. They operate best in shadows. When they burned a cross in a migrant labor camp, we rallied, marched, and demanded our county council condemn them.

Incidentally, at least one Whatcom County patriot is a Black man. He directed me to internet sites in order to convince me of the looming threat of the New World Order. He is by all other standards an intelligent, successful citizen.

Kramer's book is an important insight into militia activity in Northwest Washington. But not all Whatcom County residents are crazy.

What we have here is a journalistic report of a man who led a group of right-wing "Patriots" in the State of Washington for a period of several years. It was the self-styled Washington State Militia over which John Pitner presided in the early 1990's, and Jane Kramer gives us her impressions of his personality, his friends and family, and the larger circle of right-wing militants with which he was in touch.

It is an important subject, especially in this period of terrorism on the left and the right. We know that there have been some home-grown right wingers who were involved in violence. But whether John Pitner was so involved remains moot. All we know is that he was convicted in a federal court of relatively minor weapons charges. Most of all, we don't know whether John Pitner is in any way representative of the really bad guys who probably are out there somewhere.

Kramer does not claim that Pitner is representative, but if he is not, what exactly do we learn from this book ? Only that there was this fairly pathetic, ineffective resident of Whatcom county who got caught, and whose friends and associates promtly abandoned him. Do we learn anything at all about the movement of which he is said to be a part ?

Kramer's prose suggests an all-knowing observer. But as she gives us the thoughts and something of an interior dialogue of her subject, she does not tell us how she knows what she says she knows about his mental life. And our confidence in her knowingness is not strengthened by her compulsive name-dropping. She refers to Max Weber, to Coleridge, to Durkheim, to Rousseau, to Clausewitz. Those of her readers who have also studied one or the other of these savants will not be impressed by these pretentious references. And neither does it inspire confidence in Kramer's research to see her confuse, several times, a federal circuit court of appeals with a federal district trial court.

In the far northwest of our nation grew up a band of soldierly brethren who swore to take this country back to the basics for which it was founded. These soldiers were not the scary Nazis or the Klansmen who killed those they styled their enemies and who robbed and burgled for the good of their cause. They were not like the Unabomber, but were social beings united in a movement. They were also not like Timothy McVeigh, although McVeigh did have some dealings with them, for they never really got down to action. They were the Washington State Militia, part of a "movement that has come, grotesquely, to be called the Patriot movement," and they were armed for Armageddon. They were the Paul Reveres, ready to ride through the nation under attack by its enemies. They had explosives, they had camouflage, they had their beloved guns, they had God on their side, and they were rebels without a clue. If you enjoy laughing at the folly of others, _Lone Patriot: The Short Career of an American Militiaman_ (Pantheon) by Jane Kramer, will do nicely. It does, however, tell a darker tale.

Kramer's main subject is John Pitner, a former ship-painter, unemployed, the self-described "founder, promoter, banker, quartermaster and commander in chief" of the militia. Kramer describes his beliefs and those of the militiamen around him in some detail. Pitner's mentor was John Trochmann, the leader of the Montana Militia. Trochmann, unlike most of the Patriots depicted here, made a good living from the movement. He sold hate literature and military supplies, and recruited men like Pitner to be the market for them. His credo, Christian Identity, "involved the conviction that God had made Negroes on the fifth day of His creation, along with the other beasts of the field, and not on the sixth day, when He made people." Pitner became expert at using the internet to learn the dark strategies of his particular enemy David Rockefeller, and the Rothschilds and the other Jewish bankers who ran everything. He knew about the vile machinations of the mysterious black helicopters which had hovered over his headquarters. He knew the unconstitutional nature of the income tax. He could rant about how the New World Order, with special help from former president Clinton, was closing lands to Americans in the name of ecology, and how they had sent "communist evolutionists" to the schools to teach biology. He could even manage to reveal these secrets after 44,000 volts of lasers had been fired into his brain, causing a blackout.

Pitner somehow had an Amway salesman's gift for getting people involved in his movement. However, their style of paranoia cuts both ways. When his men became dissatisfied with the long wait for those UN troops to invade, and with only promises of hidden weapons rather than real weapons, they began to wonder if Pitner was perhaps on the side of the feds. No, he wasn't, but a couple of his recruits were. He went to jail for three years on a charge of owning and transferring a machine gun (not, as the government had wanted, conspiracy). Pitner was saved by his wife more than once, and was bonded out by his sister Susan, who had a lesbian partner in the sort of relationship the religious militias would have strongly disapproved of. The sister's take on this delusional and charismatic man is key; she says that despite his desire for his militia to be taken seriously, the only ones to believe him in the end were the FBI. This is a tale of bumblers, told by a reporter with a novelist's flair for displaying comic characters. The scary part is that it is not hard to imagine that there are more competent sociopaths out there who might bring us the next Murrah Federal Building.

Jane Kramer doesn't know enough about poetic history, which makes this book unreadable. Ginsberg's exploits in America will pale, in the end, to his few poems of meagre merit. I didn't know this book was now out of print. I suppose that is a good thing, and makes any attempts at discrediting it pointless.

This is a fun, easy read that sketches Ginsberg and attendant loonies at the height of his reign as May King of the '60s Underground. Essentially an expanded New Yorker portrait, it tracks the poet's dizzying movements from the Jan. '67 San Francisco Be-In to its New York sequel that Easter. Kramer lays on the color a little thick in places--she's clearly writing for amused and knowing squares--but she's very much alive to the idealism of Ginsberg's slaphappy search for satori in the midst of hectic times. Kind of an 'Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test' Lite, "A.G. in America" is a breezy contribution to the Sixties myth.

"howl" about fact that Allen..with help from Grove Press, Larry Ferlinghetti,& other seasoned anti HUAC activists...rsiked a lot more than even todays literary intelligencia, to protect free speech. See tribute to J. Michelin,hip street poet, "Ragged Lion".by Bennett.