The power and skill of Waterhouse's works are displayed in a calendar created with a craftmanship that is rare to find today. A beautiful item to display in the home or office.

Thank you for making such a wonderful collection of the masterpieces of John William Waterhouse. As a Language Arts teacher, I put this calendar on my school shopping list for September. The collection of paintings will serve as a timekeeper, a visual aid for group discussions and journals, and a thoughtful present for co-workers. Recent emphasis on interdisciplinary projects will make it a great instructional tool in combining English, Arts, and History.

I own this calendar and plan to buy more because the quality of the pictures and paper cannot compare with any other. This is a great present for co-workers during the holiday season and a thoughtful thank you gift.

I've used this guide to travel from Estonia to Lithuania via Latvia, and I can assure that the coverage of those countries is absolutely great. The stories included in the book are simply juicy drops of culture, and surely they capture your interest and push you to get more deeply in the history of those sites you are visiting. No matters where you go, you will find the essential information and much more than that. This guide worth the money.

As with all of Lonely Planet in Eastern Europe, this book is excellent. The historical background is particularly good, it makes some sense of an extremely complicated, and at times, surprising history. This are in many ways countries, almost of myth and old stamp collections, that have come back to the real world -a fairy tale in more ways than one. This book keeps that spirit alive, and I highly commend it.

In common with our Lonely Planet publications, the book is extremely strong on research and honesty; the latter sometimes can border with cynicism, but then I do not see anything wrong with this. It is perhaps a good idea to have realistic expectations.

For getting around, lodging and day-to-day needs, the book is superb (although upon arrival, you will also want to buy one of locally published "In Your Pocket" guides - these remarkable and inexpensive magazines are in the league of their own).

Unless you already know a lot about the history and spirit of the Baltic states, you may long for some more pictures and articles where timetables and opening times are NOT mentioned. In this case, Baltic States by Insight Guides can be recommended as a supplement - but by no means as a substitute.

The Baltic countries, which do not have a streamlined and shrink-wrapped tourist industry, are a destination where a Lonely Planet guide is needed, whatever your budget. Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia are friendly and well-developed, but even premium-paying customers can seldom expect to be steered through their holiday or business trip without a bit of understanding how things work. This book is a perfect tool fitting this purpose.

Naxos audio maintain their high reputation with this excellent production of Milton's classic; wonderfully read by Anton Lesser, with Laura Paton as Eve.

Paradise Lost can be a difficult read. Personally, I could never get round to comitting myself to the book, but this reading really brings it to life, and is well worth spending the time and money. Milton creates many wonderous and fantastical images and characters. Satan is shown as a tragic hero, tormented by the innocence of Adam and Eve, and prompted to revenge. Milton actually uses his characters to play 'devil's advocate' (literally!) by asking many paradoxical questions of the biblical story. Considering this book was first printed at the height of the witchcraft paranoia of the seventeenth century, it's amazing he managed to get away with it.

Full of allegory and layers of meaning, this is a CD set you can enjoy again and again.

Merritt Hughes was a Quaker??
Anyway, despite the date of publication (1962) which leaves the commentary a little outdated, in that it doesn't really address Stanley Fish or Joseph Wittreich or some other big Milton scholars' recent contributions to the subject, this edition is great, for beginning milton readers and more advanced alike. The introduction and footnotes are among the most complete available anywhere with good references to hebrew, classical, and other motifs within the poem. It addresses the ptolemic vs. copernican debate (sun round earth or earth round sun) and Milton's astronomy in some depth in the introduction, maybe beyond what will be interesting until you've finished the poem.
A timeless edition, I would say, which is why its still popular after 40 years, much better than the penguin classic edition.

Who are these presumptuous people who are reviewing Milton??? They just want to see themselves in print. I'm just reviewing the printing itself. I like it a lot. It's a small reddish hardcover. It is VERY plain. No forward, afterward, footnotes, line numbers, or ANYTHING. And that's what I wanted. It's just the poem! (with milton's beginning paragraphs of course). Pretty high quality job. I don't recommend it for the first time reader, but for more experienced ones that want to read it without dealing with everyone else's interpretations, etc. I want to read a poem not a textbook.

Not only did I purchase this book, I purchased one for a friend of mine who is a quilter. The quilts and the incredible stories behind them are powerful motivators for those who wish to accomplish anything, not just quilting. It is the triumph of the human spirit and proves that deep down, each of us has an indominable core. I am envious of the skill that these women posessed and of the oral history and cultural traditions which have been created and passed down. It's a reminder of the scope of human potential.

I am an Alabama native. I have visited Gee's Bend, Alabama many times, but mainly to EAT!! They have more than pretty quilts in Gee's Bend. I have seen the quilts but because I love quilts and even tried unsuccessully to make one but, not being an expert, I guess I did not appreciate how popular the Gee's Bend quilts would become until I saw the story on CBS's Sunday Morning about the quilts being on display at the Whitney Museum in New York. The current quilters visited the opening at the museum and song those old gospel songs to their many fans.

The book itself is filled with stories and lovely photographs of the quilts. All the quilts are hand-stitched, of course. I couldn't imagine anyone creating such beauty with a needle and thread.

I am so happy I pre-ordered the book from Amazon. It will be a prized part of my collection.

Congratulations!!!! A few of these women are my aunts and they have been working so hard at this all their lives, I am so happy that they are finally getting the recognition that they deserve. They used to make so many quilts when we were younger and just give them away to family members as Xmas gifts, now they are being hung in museums around the US and I have proudly displayed my childhood quilts so everyone will know just how proud I am of them!!! Now I know the Pettway woman will always be remembered for the proud and strong women they are.

My 5 year old loves this book and it has a very positive message!

What If Zebras Lost Their Stripes gives you a perfect occasion to open young minds to how adults of different colors and nationalities -- and kids -- should think about their diversity. With just a little thought, kids will get this top priority message instantly. A great contribution.

A wonderful book that encourages children and adults to appreciate each others differences. A classic!

Bought this book for the cover and was pleasantly suprised by the contents. Very well written, with all the paranoia and action cyberpunk fans expect.I wish he would write more like this one.

Our story starts simply enough. A clone is revived, and is found to be missing some memory. Darwin days, a time of hyper-evolution, where the weak die, from plate glass windows dropped from skyscraper and worse, forms the backdrop of the urban chaos that is the heart of any good cyberpunk novel.

What do you get when you take a young gang member out of France, put him in rigorous training of both the body and the mind in Zen without the morality, and then drop him in the middle of a war that goes bad?

You get the Whirlwind. And the voice of the Whirlwind calls to our hero across death, across 15 years of lost memory, across cultures.

Because those who sow the Wind will reap the Whirlwind, our hero is caught up in the events of a past life (his), that tears apart the current life he is trying to build.

As the reader and our hero uncover the mystery of his past life, the story builds to an inevitable conclusion.

We learn philosophy, and the trap of only getting selected pieces of philosophy. We learn what one must do to survive.

And we enjoy the book immensely.

An intense story with three dimensional characters and realistic portrayals of action, this is a fast-paced, gritty ride into the future. This novel is based on plot and characters (not technology or glitz) and is a real literary contribution to the cyberpunk movement. An enduring classic the day it was published, it addresses issues that are common to veterans of any war--what is life like in peacetime (after the struggle) and what is the value of a so called "broken" veteran of a horrible conflict.

It took me twenty years to finally pull Isaac Bashevis Singer's novel, Shosha, about Jews and the Holocaust from my bookcase and read it. One week later I had finished it and moved on to read Clifford's Blues. Two compelling and distinctive plys coil together to offer up complementary perspectives on the rise of Nazism in Germany. Singer puts a face on pre-World War II European Jews, richly depicting what it meant to be a Jew in western Europe in the years prior to and during the Holocaust. For most modern Americans this is a fairly familiar story.

Williams offers up a tale much less familiar. He introduces us to Clifford Pepperidge, a gay, black, American jazz musician who spends a dozen years incarcerated in Dachau prison, one of the many labeled undesirables who were captured as the Nazis rose to power. While other prisoners suffer the misery of prison barracks and captor abuse, Clifford sits in the comfortable home of a gay Nazi officer and his bovine German wife. There as a servant, Pepperidge allows himself to be used sexually and musically by both husband and wife, the price of survival. In his daily interaction with other prisoners he sees that good men, those with the character and ethics to stand up for their fellows, rarely survive long. It is those who capitulate, who sink down into the muck, who lose their humanity who will endure.

Williams provides us with a fascinating picture of how people react to power and influence, even when it clearly is evil. We see the German burger who blinds himself to the fate of those caught up in the hungry trap of Nazism. The German officer who grasps at every opportunity to accumulate wealth and power. The many who stumbled forward in step with a horror that grows ever larger and more malignant. Where Singer presents a picture of people desperately trying to hold onto their hopes and dreams even in the face of rising oppression, Williams shows us the convolutions that strip away humanity in both victim and oppressor.

The writing is strong, and Williams clearly took the time to do the necesary research to bring his story to life. Richly developed characters hold the reader's interest. It is not a book to be quickly forgotten. Williams holds a mirror up and asks us to look at ourselves and think about how we can be shaped and influenced by people and events. His darkside tale underscores the possibility of our own tumble in inhumanity and evil.

I read this book a year ago and it haunts me still.

John A. Williams has crafted here a story so compelling, so engrossing in its depiction of life lived on a razor's edge, that you loathe putting it down; you may feel chills when you've finished it. It's that disturbing, and that good. CLIFFORD'S BLUES affirms that Williams retains his gifts (fresh as ever in his mid-70s!) and mastery of his craft.

Clifford Pepperidge is triple-crossed: condemned as "decadent" - for being American Negro, jazz musician, and active homosexual (especially impolitic when he's caught in bed with a prominent white man) - and interned "indefinitely" in a German concentration camp by Nazidom as it rises to power in the early 1930s.

This is a historical possibility we'd not thought of. Yet Williams, no stranger to historical fiction (see, for example, his novel CAPTAIN BLACKMAN), footnotes his text with incidences of real life black jazz musicians detained by the Nazis prior to the outbreak of World War II; I'd never heard about this.

John A. Williams has been publishing books, mostly novels, over 40 years. His heroes have tended to be "manly" black men: uncompromising, heterosexual, hard-loving, hard-drinking and cigarette-smoking urbane sophisticates. I've always taken them to be stand-ins for the author himself; perhaps they represent the image of manliness of a day not quite gone by.

Stepping out of his usual bounds and into Clifford's skin, however, Williams exhibits an even greater sense of manhood, an empathetic virility. Clifford may not fathom how he managed to get himself into such a mess, but he doesn't make excuses. He's as resolute about his sexuality as his racial and artistic makeup, though all combine to make him particularly alienated - and vulnerable - as he faces down brutal imprisonment with other Nazi-dictated "undesirables" (Communists, gays, Jehovah's Witnesses, Jews and gypsies) for twelve long years. He lives to see, almost veritably, the walls of his dungeon shake, practical escape, the possible passing on of his testimony - but at what cost?

I can say, with modesty and with pride, that I've read all John A. Williams' published novels. This is, for my money, his most powerful, arguably his greatest book since THE MAN WHO CRIED I AM.

Williams has always been a thinking person's writer and a darn good storyteller. In this extremely well written and deeply felt book he's rendered the poignant story of a character he made me truly care about. Clifford Pepperidge could be the long-feared-lost-or-dead relative whose tattered diary of surviving hell on earth has just been plopped down in your living room. How can you embrace all of what he's been through? What if it were you? The really eerie question is that, given history, or the record of human events, it's apparent that no one has a corner on inhumane depravity - we're each just as likely or capable of being captor or captive when, if, we allow a new holocaust. But when you look in the mirror, do you recognize the humanity within and extending beyond yourself? Will we remember?

If only half of what is published were half as well crafted. By the way, the Kirkus Review at the top says this is Williams's first novel. But this is John A., the author of The Man Who Cried I Am, right? Does Kirkus have him confused with another John Williams?

This book is worth the lists of 2 letter words, 3 letter words, words containing j,x,z etc. alone.
Just studying these lists and learning new strategies has raised my score significantly.
There are also a lot of puzzles which I'll tackle next. Good for anyone interested in improving thier score.

If you want to beat your friends every time when playing scrabble then this is the book for you. It will help you with the most important move in scrabble - the two letter words. That alone is enough reason to buy the book not to mention the hundreds of other helpful tecniques.

This is a great tool for getting better at scrabble. It may be a little too much for the casual player but for the enthusiast, its perfect.

I find Waterhouse the greatest of the late 19th-century British painters. His women are full of life. He was a master at capturing the slightest expression to convey the personalities of his models. His compositions are superb. Paintings such as the 1888 "The Lady of Shalott" and the 1894 treatment of the same subject are as powerful as they are beautiful.

Hobson makes his admiration of Waterhouse's paintings obvious. This makes the book a very enjoyable read. It is a wonderful introduction to Waterhouse's work. Hobson spends a lot of time discussing paintings--this is something that is too often forgotten in art history texts. He identifies aspects of Waterhouse's compositions that help make his paintings outstanding. He describes the literary sources of Waterhouse's subjects. He mentions the artists who influenced Waterhouse's style. The essays are clear and well-organized. Anyone who is interested in Waterhouse's work should read this book.

During my education and professional life as an artist and professor of art the work of the Pre-Raphaelites and their contemporaries especially Waterhouse was/is extremely appealing and inspirational to me and many of my peers who are painters or illustrators. His work is among the best of his and any era since. The lavish reproductions in this book do homage to the wonderful God-given ability of the artist. Waterhouse's nymphs, faeries and women are innocent, gorgeous, and fetching, his colors deep, dark and lush, his men heroic and altruistic. If you love PreRaphaelite era art, Romanticism, mythical stories skillfully representated in figure art, this is the book for you. Though I bought the book for the reproductions, I recently read the text and found it helpful.

I discovered the work of Waterhouse fairly recently at anexhibition of art in Seattle of paintings from England's RoyalAcademy. I fell in love with his work instantly, started looking for websites about him & stumbled across a website bearing his name which recommended this book. Needless to say I purchased it instantly. I agree with the previous reviewer that it is a shame about the b/w reproductions (many of them are reproduced in color on the website mentioned above), but it is more than made up for with the wonderful research that Anthony Hobson had done (I have found out that sadly he died in late 1999). To sum up: a wonderful introduction to the work and life of John William Waterhouse, a timeless master among British artists!