Janet Lewis was an extraordinary poet. She was still writing into her 99th year. Though best known for her excellent novels of historical fiction (i.e. The Wife of Martin Guerre), Lewis' poems are written with a strong, gentle touch, utterly unpretentious. Find the time in your busy life to take a walk with Janet Lewis.

Ohio University Press/Swallow Press, located in Athens, Ohio, has put out a handsome collection of Lewis' poems, ranging from 1918 to 1994. Poetry was her first and last love, and this is obvious in Lewis' writings. Her diction is clean and spare; this is the real Poetry Mc-Coy - no extra words whatsoever. It isn't high-minded either; there aren't any of the tricks or thorny obscurities that often drive newcomers away from poetry. Lewis focuses on nature; animals and natural settings. Even the things she writes on that are not strictly "nature" are infused with the essence of it; her piece, "The Tennis Players," includes notes on the changing of the sunlight at dusk, and, after all, they're playing tennis on the lawn. All poetry, I think, should be read out loud, but especially poetry such as Lewis'. She is not dogmatic about rhyme, yet it's in there, as subtle half-rhymes, or those that skip a few lines before chiming in. These words work best when they're read, and left to float and settle in the air, like a pregnant pause about to give birth. Lewis' poems stretch for no more than, say, twenty lines, and usually they number less than that, being potent as they are. Barth's notes on each poem are a lovely addition to the book; they help explain an obscure reference, or whom or what in Lewis' life inspired a specific poem. Lewis wrote a number of elegies for relations and friends; these notes are helpful, to understand why these people were important. These notes round out the poems, making them fuller and more enjoyable.

I bought the first book in this series last April for my then 6 year old daughter, and in the past 5 months she has managed to read almost the whole series. She wants to stay up late reading them, because she doesn't want to put them down. I would highly recomend these books to anyone looking for very entertaining and morally sound books.

this book was funny,educational and even sad in someplaces. You will learn about the "golden rule" better than you have ever understood before. The boy that they call fiddle sticks played the fiddle and liked to play soccer.

Who doesn't like pizza? Well have you ever tried a pickle pizza? Try one, and try this book. This is a book that will demonstrate the wonderful fact: everyone has their own opinions and tastes and that is ok. A pickle of a book about a subject that most can relate to.

i am just writing a report on janet lewis and i am looking for a few poems to look at, but this system does not allow me to read. Why is that? can you improve it?

"So many places have fabulous names./Like Fried, North Dakota,/The Court of St. James./Siberia, Nigeria, Elyria, Peru,/The White Nile, Black Sea,/And Kalamazoo!/The Great Wall of China, South Pole and Loch Ness,/And 104 Fairview - that's my address!// Thousands of spaces are places to be-/Discover the World of GE-OG-RA-PHY!// Travel by boat or by car or by plane/To visit East Africa, Singapore, Spain./Go by yourself or invite a good friend,/But traveling by poem is what I recommend." J. Patrick Lewis takes the reader on a marvelous geographic journey through poetry. From those who discovered and mapped our world, Columbus, Magellan, and Marco Polo, and amazing phenomena, the Aurora Borealis, San Adreas Fault, stalactites, and stalagmites, to oceans, islands, mountains, places, names, and geographic terms, Mr Lewis fills his poems with the many wonders of our amazing world. Each clever and creative verse is full of interesting and engaging facts, trivia, and fascinating details, and complemented by Alison Jay's beautiful and expressive, evocative artwork, in the soft subdued tones of old maps and globes. Together word and art bring geography to life with imagery, magic, and wit. Perfect for youngsters 9-12, A World Of Wonders is an innovative and inventive collection that challenges the imagination and sends it soaring. "Make the Earth your companion./Walk lightly on it, as other creatures do."

I have read this book and although it was very accurate and well written, it was not the sort of book that I was not able to put down. I would recommend this book to anyone who is fascinated by minute detail.

One of our finest modern short novels, Lewis's "Wife" is a mostly unrecognized classic. Noted by many top authors for her incisive, spare, sparkling style, Lewis tackles some of the greatest moral and spiritual issues of mankind in this little piece. The prose is impeccable (you could learn how to write by imitating it), the story haunting, and the "message" deeply profound, moving, as well as important to the modern age. At heart, this novel is about the decision of a young woman of petty nobility in 16th century Languedoc to deny her happiness in behalf of her moral and spiritual convictions. It presents a seemingly small dilemma that will bother you and keep you thinking about the meaning of life and the foundations of your convictions for years to come. I won't say more, because there is a touch of the mystery novel in this work. Lewis is a minor master of prose fiction, probably mostly ignored because she was the wife of the great and highly controversial poet and critic Yvor Winters, who is one splendid writer himself. Her other novels are just as fine, with "The Trial of Soren Qvist" probably being one of the greatest modern novels. Evan O'Connell and Larry McMurtry are two of Lewis's chief admirers, by the way, though that might not say much depending on your view of those fellows.

I read this book for my English class. It was interesting and I love it. I could not put it down until I finished it.(^_^)

This book is more a chronicle than a novel, and wonderful it is to see it back in print. Janet Lewis wrote this account, imaginatively elaborated, of one of the most important families in the history of Michigan using the journals of John Johnston, the family patriarch, other family journals and memoirs, and personal interviews with members of the fourth generation Johnstons, whom Lewis knew as a girl. It is a superb read, nonetheless: rapt, poetic at times, historically accurate, elegant, and absorbing. It contains one of the finest depictions of Indian life ever written and certainly offers one of our finest portrayals of the "invasion" of Indian country by the fast encroaching Europeans in the late colonial period. Lewis's style is not for everyone, however. Her writing, as polished as it is elsewhere in her oeuvre, is a tad uneven in this, her first prose work (first published in 1932 by the excellent and now defunct Swallow Press). That's hard for me to say, since I love her novels and have long been one of their leading advocates. The narrative loses momentum and wobbles at times, and some characters are rather poorly sketched. Some scenes appear to be unfinished, dashed off, or ill-conceived. Her descriptive passages are, moreover, very intensely beautiful, almost imagistic. Lewis was a fine poet -- a very fine poet, I should say -- and her bent toward Imagism, as found in the poetry of Ezra Pound and many another leading poet in the first half of the 20th century, deeply influenced her narrative style. I love her passages of description, but I realize that not everyone takes to this sort of lyrical style. To sum things up, the novel is an account of the family of John Johnston, an Irishman who came to the wilderness around incredibly remote and rugged Lake Superior as a trader at the end of the 18th century. He married the daughter of an Ojibway "chief" (her nickname became Neengay), and established himself as one of the community elders in Sault Sainte Marie, Michigan, which was British at the time of his arrival in 1791, but became American in the War of 1812, an affair which plays a role in the story. Midway through the book, the narrative turns to the next generation of the Johnstons, John and Neengay's children, and later moves on the 20th-century Johnstons. It is astounding how quickly the world of the Indians changed, in less than 100 years, and the invasion that brought this change about is the main theme of Lewis's chronicle. In the opening, we read about John Johnston struggling to survive the winter in a small drafty cabin on the uninhabited western shores of Superior and in the end see the Soo Locks open and the Indians witnessing the once unimaginable event of long steamers coming up the once impassable rapids on the Saint Mary's River and entering Lake Superior. A number of important historical figures come into the account, such as Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, Johnston's son-in-law, who used Neengay's stories to form the tales that Longfellow later used to write "Hiawatha" (a somewhat sad fate for the fascinating myths of the Ojibway), and Lewis Cass, who led an expedition across Superior in 1820 after visiting Johnston's outpost and eventually became the first governor of Michigan. There's plenty more to keep your interest, and the history is mostly accurate, so far as I am able to judge. In "Invasion", you will discover some of the most perceptive writings on the life of the northern Indians and the frontier, as well as explore the meaning of the invasion that forms its theme. I hope you will give Janet Lewis a try. Check out what the star ratings mean for me at my amazon site.

This is another in the American Girls Short Stories series about Kirsten Larson, a nine-year-old girl from Sweden, whose family has moved to frontier Minnesota of 1854. In this book, Kirsten finds a young boy living amongst the debris of an overturned wagon. The boy forces Kirsten to promise to not tell anyone about him, but with winter coming on, Kirsten is torn between wanting to help the boy and wanting to be the sort of person who keeps her word.

The final chapter of this book is very nice; telling of wagon trains in 1854, and has direction for making flower crown (which I always thought was called a daisy chain). This is a very nice story, with Renee Graef's usual excellent illustrations. My twelve-year-old daughter and I are both long running fans of the Kirsten stories, and we both enjoyed this book.

This is a collection of essays by various historians on alternate military outcomes in history, arranged in chronological order from Ancient times to 1983. Although there are some interesting essays on the American Revolution and a few other areas, the book is very disappointing. The "big name" historians provide the worst-written essays, almost afterthoughts. The essay by John Keegan on what if Hitler had pursued a Mediterranean strategy in 1941-2 totally ignores logistics and Nazi political objectives. Stephen Ambrose's essay on what if D-Day had failed rests on non-military reasoning and is ridiculous (as if the Allies would have abandoned D-Day because of bad weather). In light of Peter Tsouras' excellent "Disaster at D-Day", Ambrose's essay appears pathetic. Other essays are rather pedestrian, like several on what if the South had won the Civil War. Yawn. How many times is this going to be passed around? Many interesting and almost situations, like Operation Sealion, or what if Iraq had invaded Saudi Arabia in 1990 are ignored. None of the essays do a very good job on strategic analysis and assume too much about single win/loss results (e.g. a Southern victory at Gettysburg was unlikely to have won the war, since the North had already lost several battles without any real reduction in its will to win). This book is a collection of not-very original quasi-historical fluff.

For anyone who likes history, this book is an uneven, but overall excellent and very enjoyable, series of exercises in "counterfactual" history. Not the silly, frivolous, or nonsensical kind, where Robert E. Lee all of a sudden is given a nuclear bomb, but instead serious, meaty (even highly PROBABLE) ones, like what would have happened if there hadn't been a mysterious plague outside the walls of Jerusalem, or if there had been a Persian victory at Salamis, or if Genghis Khan's drunken third son (Ogadai)had not died just as his hordes were poised to conquer (and probably annhilate) Europe, or if Cortes had been killed or been captured Tenochtitlan, etc.

The major flaw with this book is that the essays are of somewhat uneven interest level, style, and quality. Personally, for instance, I found the essay on the Mongols to be fascinating, sending chills down my spine! "D Day Fails" by Stephen Ambrose, on the other hand, didn't do much for me at all, nor did "Funeral in Berlin." In general, I would say that the essays covering earlier periods in human history tend to be better than ones covering more recent history. Possibly this is in part because the later periods have been covered to death. I mean, how many "counterfactuals" on the US Civil War can there be before we get sick of them? But a well-written, tightly-reasoned counterfactual which, based on events hundreds or even thousands of years ago, quite plausibly leads to a result where there is no Judaism, Christianity, or Islam, or Western culture at all, is absolutely fascinating in my opinion. If nothing else, books like "What If?" show how important CHANCE is in human history, as well as the importance of the INDIVIDUAL, as opposed to some Hegelian/Marxist-Leninist historical "inevitability." The bottom line is that it is rare that anything is truly "inevitable", and the aptly titled "What If?" gives us some excellent case studies.

Heard the taped version of WHAT IF?: THE WORLD'S FOREMOST
MILITARY HISTORIANS IMAGINE WHAT MIGHT HAVE BEEN, edited
by Robert Cowley . . . I often speculate about lots of things, and so do the contributors to this book--including Stephen E. Ambrose, John Keegan, David McCollough, and James M. McPherson (to name just a few).

For example, what if:
George Washington had never made his miraculous escape
from the British on Long Island in the early dawn of August 29, 1776?

a Confederate aide hadn't accidentally lost General Robert E. Lee's plans for invading the North?

the Allied invasion on D Day had failed?

These and a whole host of other questions are considered . . . the resultant answers are often fun, but at the same time, sometimes frightening . . . as in, Hitler's case . . . had he not attacked Russia when he did, he might have moved into the Middle East and secured the oil supplies the Third Reich so badly needed, thus helping it retain its power in Europe . . . can you just imagine the present-day implications for that scenario?

If you're a history buff, this is a MUST read . . . but methinks
that others will enjoy it and become much more interested
in the subject as a result . . . I know that I'm now looking
forward to Coweley's follow-up effort, WHAT IF? 2.