I first encountered Karl Kerenyi by way of another of his books, _Eleusis_, a study of the mysteries of Demeter and Persephone. Let me tell you, I love the way that man's mind worked. In the case of Eleusis, and also in the case of Dionysos, there are secrets that the celebrants of the rites took to their graves. But rather than just say "we'll never know what really went on", Kerenyi leaves no stone unturned in an attempt to figure it out. Using myths, art, and "urban legends" from ancient times, which often dance around secret subjects, Kerenyi puts together a more coherent picture of the religions of these ancient deities. The myths and art may dance around the real mysteries, but if you "dance" around enough and see the material from enough different angles, you can get a pretty good idea of what isn't being said.

Dionysos originated on the island of Crete, where he was considered to be the same deity as Zeus, and was a dying and resurrected god who presided over mead and the mysteries of death and rebirth. From there, his cult was taken all over the Mediterranean world, and changed along the way. His rites changed, too, and Kerenyi shows us all of the different ways he was worshipped, from the bull-sacrifice on Crete (with a great chapter on the god's notorious wife Ariadne) to the roving maenads of rural Greece, to the sacred tragedies and comedies of classical Athens. Then we see Dionysos again on the walls of the Villa dei Misteri in Pompeii.

In a way, _Dionysos_ is differently focused than _Eleusis_, where the author was trying to reconstruct what happened on one particular night. This book is more protean, following the thread of the Dionysus cult throughout distance and time as it changes. Recommended to anyone who loves mythology.

Karl Kerenyi has a way about him. A way to touch the reader with word of clinical precision that none the less convey emotion and power to the reader that is probably as much to do with translator Ralph Manheim as the departed author himself.

The subject of Dionysos and the startling workings of his ancient religion are given thorough study, and one is left with a feeling of having experienced the god himself through the writings of the author to whom the subject is so dear. Read this book as an insight into a bygone era, an insight into the human need for religion, an insight into Dinoysos the God, and most especially, an insight into your own mind.

For those of you not yet acquainted with Danilo Kis's rare genius of bringing his reader into strange, undefinable dreamworlds, then The Hourglass is a great place to start.

Set in 1942 in the ethnically mixed Vajdaság region of Hungary, the story traces the gradual descent into madness of one E.S., railway clerk, who realizes that insanity is the only dignified refuge left in an ever-darkening world. The first part of the novel is a grotesque, rambling catalogue of E.S.'s acquaintances, friends and family who all meet horrid ends as the wheels of the Holocaust start to churn. E.S.'s world slowly slips into the abyss as the pogroms, persecutions and deprivations slowly evolve into a full scale death factory, serviced by the same railways that E.S. is convinced are the only refuge of sanity and international neutrality in a Europe turned upside down. The truly fiendish irony is that these mobile 'Switzerlands' as E.S. calls them are what made the Holocaust possible in the first place. Fast, accessible anywhere and keeping to time, they fed the hellish ovens with their human fuel.

In the rest of the novel, E.S. lucidly describes his 'work' duties in a slave labor battalion, where he and his group of comrades were forced to make bricks under bestial conditions. All the while, E.S. writes down his 'Diary of a Madman,' no doubt a reference to Gogol's masterpiece, where an unknown inquisitor (Kafka's Trial?) mercilessly interrogates E.S. about the minutiae of his simple existence. Struggling to give some sort of rational explanation to the whole chaos surrounding him, he falls deeper into the black hole of madness. As does anyone who tries to rationally understand the inane senseless of the Holocaust.

Yet, despite his impending destruction, E.S. maintains his humanity. How? By writing it all down. Making that 'bourgeois horror novel.' By creating something out of the void and thus giving us hope that we shall all earn some measure of eternity by what we leave behind.

If Franz Kafka's Joseph K. had lived in the early 1940's and been ordered to wear a yellow star in Czechoslovakia, he would have resembled a character known only as E. S. in this story of wartime Hungary by Danilo Kis. The trial of an individual and his family at the hands of a vague and hidden totalitarian force are described with growing horror and gallows humor in ''Hourglass,'' a chilling novel in which time is running out for a marked man riding along the tracks of mortification.

One of the trains he takes eventually must lead to a concentration camp. But the journal of the final months of his life is told with such authority in this imaginatively constructed story that the doomed character appears to be in command of his own destiny. ''Hourglass,'' translated from the Serbo-Croatian by Ralph Manheim, is evidently rooted in firsthand family experiences. The reader is informed that a letter attributed to E. S. in the novel is based on an actual letter written by Kis's father two years before his death in Auschwitz. But the universal elements in the story - the attempt to carry on the everyday routine of life and the disbelief in an official policy of genocide - offer a parable about the extermination of the Jews by the Third Reich and its collaborative governments in occupied Europe. Trains were essential for the Third Reich to fulfill the quotas for the Holocaust, and trains play an essential part in the novel. At one point, the narrator sees himself, with trembling hands, gathering up his papers in his seat in the first-class carriage and stuffing them into his briefcase along with bottled beer and smoked-herring sandwiches. The author then transforms an ordinary train ride into an act of terror: ''Who was standing beside him at that moment? A young blond conductor, who was aiming his nickel-plated ticket punch like a revolver at the star on his chest.''

The interrogation of the narrator is bizarre. It shows the police mentality at work in a police state anywhere. The narrator is questioned about a piano in his home. The line of questioning goes: Can the piano be used to send signals? Where in the room is the piano? Can you describe what it looks like? Why was an open score on the music stand? How do you account for the fact that the piano was open and that someone had been practicing so early in the morning? Inevitably, the answers to dumb questions sound somehow suspicious and lead to more questions.

The nameless E. S. wonders how he can avenge himself against the armed police. He indulges in a small act of defiance for his own self-respect: ''Several times he had blown his nose into a newspaper with the Fuhrer's picture on it. Was he conscious of the danger he was courting? Definitely. He always folded the paper as small as possible before throwing it into dense brambles or the river, thus doing away with the corpus delicti of his insane and dangerous act.'' There are deliberate breaks in style as the author shifts back and forth in chapters that are labeled ''Travel Scenes,'' ''Notes of a Madman,'' ''Criminal Investigation'' and ''A Witness Interrogated.'' The year 1942 is a crazy time in the Danube Valley for the first-person narrator. He is trying to maintain a semblance of sanity while composing a letter to his sister that forms the spine of the story. If there is a theme in the novel, it is summed up in the last sentence of that letter:

''P. S. It is better to be among the persecuted than among the persecutors.''

''Hourglass'' owes a debt to ''The Trial'' by Kafka. In the narrator's musings, Kafka is cited: ''Everything that is possible happens; only what happens is possible.'' What distinguishes Kis's novel is its authorial independence. A conventional narrative structure is ignored; it is the author's musings and diversions that magically build suspense. Some paragraphs run on for pages, others suddenly break into short questions and answers between the omnipotent state and its helpless victims. Kis forces the reader to work for him, to pay attention. That he succeeds is a rare achievement...

Kis's novel is one of the most important in the entire Eastern-european literature. It gives an incradible picture of a desintegrating mind, following, in a way the steps of Youce and Woolf, but still making a step towards postmodernism

What is it like to be a famous German novelist living in Switzerland during World War II? Innumerable Germans at their wits' end would write Hermann Hesse hoping that somehow he could help them. In this collection of short pieces, Hesse shows that the best way he knew to achieve peace was to use his pen.

It is worth getting your hands on this book just in order to read "The European," which reminds us that philosophy must above all be practical.

Hermann Hesse's "If the War Goes On" is different from many of his other books because rather than fiction, it is a book of short essays. The one which still stands out in my mind after 20-plus years is entitled, "The European". The book is worth reading. Hesse was, if I recall correctly, a pacificist whose nationality happened to be German, at a time when war was going on in Europe. The title of the book seems to reflect both the external political cirumstances of the time in which he was writing, but also, and perhaps mainly, conditions of conflict inside people. It is evident from biographies of Hesse that he struggled alot and documented this in his writing. It's time for me to re-read this incredible book.

I'v read this book not so long ago and I was stunned. It was like looking at painting being slowly painted in front of you. It's also one of those rare books you just HAVE to read more yhan once. I think it's one of the few rare wonderfull books I've read.

The successful day...as we will never find him. The question is: could we stand it?

When I was six years old, my mother took me to see the amazing PNB production of Nutcracker with beautiful sets and costumes by Maurice Sendak. Afterward, she bought me this book. The illustrations are wonderful, the story (which goes far beyond the plot of the ballet) is fantastic, and it has become a family heirloom which we read every year at Christmastime. It has never failed to excite my imaginiation and I cannot wait to read it to my children.

Maurice Sendak's fabulous sets and costumes for the Pacific Northwest Ballet's Nutcracker are as much a beloved childhood memory for many of us in the Northwest as his well-known illustrations for Where the Wild Things Are. So when I saw this version of the Nutcracker with his illustrations, I simply had to have it. It does not disappoint! I read through it again and again, enchanted by the beautifully detailed full-page scenes and the charming characters dancing all around the text. And if you're only familiar with the ballet and have never read the original story, you'll be as amazed as I was at just how much more there is to the tale. Whether you're a fan of Sendak, the ballet, or just good children's fairy tales, this book is well worth the price.

Maurice Sendak's lusciously illustrated edition of E.T.A. Hoffmann's _Nutcracker_ is the most thorough and engaging edition of the book I have seen. The story was interesting to me on one level as a child and it still captures my attention as an adult. It is not a black&white, good&evil translation--the grey areas are emphasized. I *will* agree with the review preceding this in that Amazon does need to clean up its reviews of this book! Please.

This book was a gift to my family when I was a child - I loved it then, and enjoy it more every time I re-read. The story is more than just the plot for a ballet. There is a lot of background, description, and insight included, and they do a lot to make the book fantastic. What elevates this work to magnificent is the artwork done by Sendak. It is lush, detailed, and beautiful. I can't say enough about the quality of this book, and urge everyone to find their own copy. This is not just a Christmas story, but a wonderful parable for every season

Along with Holderin, Goethe, Schiller, Lessing, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Thomas Mann, Peter Handke is one of the greatest writers EVER to write in the German language. I've included Nietszche here because of his awsome control over the language and not because he is a fiction writer. That having been said, Across is, in my opinion, one of Handke's best books, however there are many others that are very close. Handke is obsessed with the detached observer and this work deals with a man who is fascinated by threshholds and how he goes through a kind of metaphysical transformation into one who has crossed the threshold and perhaps graduated to another level of being. The story is centered around an impartial observer of life who suddenly finds himself beating the crap out of a neo nazi and in this sense coming to "participate" in life. Handke's decriptions of nature and city landscapes are phenomenal in that they evoke with great color and clarity but without any sense of strain caused by forced metaphors or clunky words. There is an effortlessnes and beauty to the entire presentation, which in the hands of a less gifted writer would have come off as heavy and plodding and overdone.

A true masterpiece and what seems so strange is that this man is virtually unknown in America or Briatin. Even at Foyles in London the staff didn't know who I was talking about. Odd for a person who has been involved with famous directors like Wim Wenders...

One of the truly indispensible novels of the century in the German language. Stars? Hmmm. How many stars did the roof of the Cistene Chapel get?

As a child, my mother would read us the Nicholas tales but it was always difficult to make out the words between her laughter. We would giggle and roll around the bed, our stomachs aching. The humour easily managed to cross the age gap and is a clear display of Goscinnys comedy talent. The storys are highly descriptive looks into the minds of kids at a French school (English translation is as funny); narcissistic, self-obsessed, easily engrossed and overflowing with creativity. The adults are odd obstacles. The world the kids find themselves in is also odd. The author manages to capture both the childs' amusement at the strange reality we all find ourselves in and the childs vast lack of concern thereof. Like Adam and Eve, the children are free of guilt. And, like Adam and Eve, they couldn't care less.

If you can't check these out at a library (or can't just have these great works for just a few weeks) this trilogy is for you. Tin Drum, in my opinion, is the best of the set, expressing oppression and pain with the best of Grass's stark realism and sardonic wit.

This is a sad book to read. In fact, one would not expect that such a type of bad development would occur between the two most important figures of psychoanalisys. It is as if Marx and Engels had broken their friendship for life and began to fight for fame and glory in front of everybody. The spoil was huge: nothing more than the primacy for fame and glory in the first steps of psychanalisys.

Sure, the letters span a pretty much limited space of time of no more than 8 years (1906-1914) but the reader has to keep in mind that what was at stake was the establishing of the foundations of psychoanalisys all over Europe and also in the whole World.
What began as a cordial friendship and evolved into an almost father (Freud) to son (Jung) relationship, deteriorated into the most depressive fighting of personal primacy on many subjects. In this regard, it seems that the feud was initiated by Freud who considered Jung a type of his personal assistant to market the developments of his findings
THe fact that this is a abridged edition does not mean nothing except that here the common reader will find the most important material exchanged by the two great men and will be saved from some meaningless material of more burocratical tone.
Also of value is the introduction that ilustrates all the effort made by the two family sides to publish the letters, in spite the view by Jung that the ideal time for them to be published would be 20 to 30 years after his death.

THis is a must reading for anyone interested in the history of psychanalisys.