The idea behind the book was fantastic-- here finally are the personal lives of the three men whose historical story has been lodged within our literal and social culture. Then there is a fourth. As the cover states, while each story is enjoyable, it is really the fourth man, who never makes it to Bethlehem in time to see Jesus, who speaks the story of Christ. It's been a long time since I've so enjoyed a novel. What's more, it's well-written and creative and yet, it still has a STORY!!!!

The book about the unexpected trials and tribulations in search of the sweetness of life. Tournier has been one of my favorite writers.

Just as The Ogre presents a modern take on the legend of the Erl King, Michel Tournier receates the legend of the visitation of the Magi which has become a major part of Christian culture. Interestingly, as Tournier tells us in the Epilogue, the Magi are mentioned only in the gospel of Matthew and most of what we know of them was created much later. The book is a collection of interrelated tales told in the voices of five Kings including the traditional Magi, King Herod and the fourth King who is Tournier's ingenuous invention. Each King is profoundly affected by the birth of Jesus but it is the fourth King who experiences the most profound metamorphosis. Even though I appreciated the profound philosophic message of the book, it is the style of writing which is so impressive. I read each of the 250 pages in one sitting, unable to put it down. I had a hard time reading the last few pages because of the tears in my eyes. It has been quite a while since I have read anything so powerful!

Heidegger's `Introduction to Metaphysics' was banned in Germany until the early 1950s. Why? Some aspects of Heidegger's rhetoric, and certain passages, e.g., "The greatness of National Socialism ... ", lended themselves to Nazism. Written in the 1930s, `An Introduction to Metaphysics' maintains Heidegger's muddled and still unclear association with Nazism regarding his philosophy. His membership in the party still casts a long and many would say daming shadow over his philosophy. However, this work is still fascinating and, when read with Nazi filters, rewarding because in this work Heidegger introduces many of his preoccupations that will dominate his thinking after his turn (`Kehre'), e.g., truth, metaphysics, etc.. I studied it closely for my thesis and what is problematic is Heidegger's equation of the `power of the polis' with truth-Being. Power-truth siding on the power of the state and not the individual of liberalism is what needs attention. He moves radically away from this in later thinking. Heidegger is no democrat, but whether he is a full blown Nazi is up to the reader to decide. A must read for philosophers and historians of the period.

What a great book. I may of read about 4 to 5 Martin Heidegger books & this book flowed because it was easy to read. Well, the first part of the book was easy, got a little lost in the "Being As Thinking" section. His philosophy, minus the so-called...certain influence, helped me give up my Platonic ways of thinking. Martin Heidegger starts off trying to ask the most basic axiom "Why are there BEINGs at all instead of Nothing" goes through a brief history of the main words, tears the words & main question apart, & puts the words & question back together again. Then he explains how BEING turns into BECOMING (how things change), APPEARANCE (how things influence our senses), THINKING (How & what we think about our experience), & the OUGHT (The way things "Should" or "Could" BE). Basic conclusion: Western Philosophy started out correct with the pre-Platonic philosophers asking what BEING was & then after Plato the debate became about mind over matter while losing the original meaning & questions about BEING (Reality). A Must Read!

This translation is a long overdue revisitation of the first of Heidegger's books to appesar in an English version. This short book is an excellent introduction to Heidegger's thought in the 30s. The 30s were his most "Nietzschean" period, and also his most controversial period, because of his support at the time for the Nazi party. The 30s also acquired something of a legendary status among Heidegger scholars because it was then that he was working on his "Contributions to Philosophy". Otto Poeggeler (privileged with access to Heidegger's manuscripts) had been saying for years that the "Beitraege" was Heidegger's most important work, which made many people naturally curious about this work. When it finally appeared (in 1989, an English translation appeared in 2000) it proved to be as daunting a text as "Being and Time". The "Introduction to Metaphysics" dates from the same time, and could well be thought of as a companion piece to the much more challenging "Contributions to Philosophy."

Wonderfully and skillfully written account of a German sailor in WWII that also weaves parallels with Greek mythology to American classics. Sometimes lighhearted, sometimes bewildering imagery, but always an adventure that takes the hero to hell and back - several times. When one wonders if Teidemann ever makes it back, one realizes that the entire book is written in the first person and this somehow adds to the value of the story. A wonderful examination of the very worst in human nature and nature itself. You will never see seagulls quite the same after this.

One of the most entertaining books I have ever read,it displays a sense of humor and brutal realism seldom seen in today's historical novels. The characters are believable, and their simple honesty is refreshing in contrast to todays perfect characters that are a dime a dozen and very forgettable. Pick this one up if you are sick of the predictable and tiresome novels in which todays authors are mass producing with mind numbing regularity obviously using the same formula which enables them to mass produce the same stories under different titles.

Mr Ott takes you into the real world of the antics and lives of the German sailors on the smaller war ships of the era.[mine sweepers and subs] I find the ending somewhat disapointing because he really leaves it up to the reader to what happens to the hero??

This novel was born out of several previous short novellas, which Broch weaved together, adding new chapters and orderered to tell one multilayered story, a rich, complex and deep one. It is the story of A., a Dutch financier who lives in Germany. The three parts of the book correspond to the years 1913, 1923 and 1933. Besides portraying the pre-Hitlerian Germany, it is a metaphysical novel, in the strictest sense of the concept. The fundamental subject is indifference as an attitude towards life. "A" is indifferent to practically everything, including the suffering of his lover and, of course, political and social problems. The book is called "The guiltless" because no one assumes themselves as responsible for the dangerous path Germany was following in those years. However, "A" will pay a price for his indifference.

This novel is, then, a reflection on the social environment that led to Nazism. Broch is a dense but good writer, and I think this novel is recommended to any serious lovers of literature, but also for those interested in observing a recreation and a meditation on Germany in those three crucial decades for the world.

Arguably Broch's best novel. Not as overwrought as 'Death of Virgil', nor as tangential as 'The Sleepwalkers'. Here he finally cuts deep into the German mind tha lead to the horrors of WWII with lessons for all mankind. Brilliant.

Louis Ferdinand Celine was one of the greatest novelists of the twentieth century. Louis Ferdinand Celine was a caring doctor and a man with a deep vein of compassion. Louis Ferdinand Celine was an almost insanely vicious racist and anti-semite, calling for the extermination of the Jews in three infamous and untranslated pamphlets and raving about miscegenation and the coming extinction of the white race. These are all facts and trying to explain the contradictions between them deserves a lot more attention than has so far been given.

In the meantime, read Rigadoon. It is not in a class with Journey to the End of Night or Death on the Installment Plan, since its focus is narrower. Celine's racism is more clearly in evidence, and even admirers will find the first thirty pages or so very trying. Celine was not a collaborator, at least not in a legal sense, but on hearing him rave about race suicide or hurling abuse at the resistance, who understandably hated him, one thinks that he should have been grateful he wasn't shot. After that, we get to the novel proper, which is a lightly fictionalized version of the last months of the war. Time, and much else is rather hallucinatory. At one point, Celine says it is May, at another point he is told about Rommel's funeral, which would have been eight months or so earlier. Rigadoon consists of his nightmarish account of Celine's ultimately successful attempt to flee, with his wife and cat, from Germany into Denmark as the war ends. As he is doing so Germany is being systematically pounded into rubble and Celine provides some horrifying passages about painfully slow trains that could be doused at any minute with phosphorous. At one point Celine suffers from a concussion. Along the way Celine and his party meet 17 mentally retarded children, and despite much abuse of these pathetic children, Celine manages to see them safely into Denmark. It is rather revealing though that he never mentions that the Nazis tried to slaughter precisely these children. Through it all we see the trademark Celine style, the famously obscene vernacular, the pages dotted with ellipses, a style which looks so easy, and yet Celine worked so hard on. Obviously, this is a novel which should be better known.

This is one of the best books I have ever read go out and buy it now

I found this play, although interesting, to fully satisfy the alienation that Brecht intended to place upon his audience. It was somehow very difficult to feel any really emotion except disdain, and perhaps hatred, towards Mother Courage herself, and this was not helped by her continual hipocracy and mecurial nature. I would have prefered something perhaps slightly more aimed at providing a satisfying read (or show) for the audience, and somehow found "Mother Courage" rather depressing and horrid. She is a symbol for everything wrong with the world and I hope that I never come across anyone of similar moral or ethical values.

Brecht doesn't want emotion because that is Brechtian theater. He thought that in order for a play to invoke social change, it needed to be clear to the audience, that the audience needed to learn something. Emotions, Brecht felt, clog the mind and only feed the brain sentiment, not rational thought. Mother Courage and Her Children is, quite obviously, an anti-war play. Brecht wants you to see that war makes criminals out of everyone, even mothers. He wants you to love Mother Courage while you hate her so that the emotion is cancelled out and you are only left with the thoughts of her actions and why they were wrong. If you want a play to read or perform that is challenging, amazing, and intellectual all at once, this is the way to go. I performed this and I was forever changed.

Saying that Brecht didn't want his plays to evoke an emotional response is an extreme oversimplification of his theories. He just didn't want the emotional response to overwhelm the intellectual response and remove the audience's capacity to judge the work objectively. In this play, we have a heroine who is not a heroine. We understand her, but we never empathize with her. Consequently, the interdependence of war and economy is illuminated without making the reader wallow in excessive emotion. Yes, we do feel strongly when Kattrin is beathing her drum, but that feeling is not what the audience leaves with at the end of the play.

This second installment of the Danzig Trilogy was an overall disappointment. While Gunter Grass's flair for story-telling is all here, Cat and Mouse does not stretch into the varied themes touched by Tin Drum (..the first book of the trilogy). Cat and Mouse reads more like an early John Irving novel (..with a German/Polish twist) rather than profound literature (with all due respect to Mr. Irving, who has written some wonderful stuff in recent years).

Cat and Mouse is a story growing up (..mostly high school years) in German occupied Poland during WW II. The characters are quirky (..especially the boy with a protruding Adam's apple) and amusing. But this coming-of-age tale has been told better elsewhere.

Bottom line: read Tin Drum. Cat and Mouse will seem stale (and hastily written) by comparison, but fans of Gunter Grass probably won't complain much.

It is true that Grass is always a sweet read and this book is no exception. Do not be confused by the incorrect synopsis which is about a cheap American thriller. Grass has not lowed his high standards. He has written a moving, informative tale of youth in war-time Poland. The story is short, but powerful. Well worth a couple hours of your time.

I first read Cat and Mouse without the benefit of having read The Tin Drum beforehand, and I missed a lot. Cat and Mouse is the second book in Grass' Danzig Trilogy, three books that look at life in Danzig under the Nazi regime from three different points of view (the tales are told concurrently, and time can be fixed by seeing the same event from different points of view; for example, the picnic taken by the jazz trio and Schmuh in Book III of The Tin Drum shows up towards the end of Cat and Mouse, and Matern, one of the main characters of Dog Years, shows up in The Onion Cellar, where Oskar's jazz band is retained, in The Tin Drum).

Cat and Mouse is actually a novella, originally a part of Dog Years that broke off and took on a life of its own; on the surface it is the tale of Joachim Mahlke, a high school student with a protruding adam's apple (the Mouse of the title), and his fascination with a sunken Polish minesweeper after he learns to swim at the age of thirteen. It is also the story of Pilenz, the narrator and Mahlke's best friend. The two spend their high school years in wartime Poland, reacting to various things, and that's about as much plot as this little slice of life needs.

The interesting thing about Cat and Mouse is its complete difference in tone from the other two novels. Both The Tin Drum and (what I've read so far of) Dog Years have the same high-pitched, almost hysterical humor combined with a profound sense of teleology (not surprising given the apocalyptic nature of life in Danzig under the Nazis); Grass attempts to confront the horror with over-the-top slapstick, because only through that kind of comparison is it possible to make the reader understand. But while Cat and Mouse has its moments of the same kind of ribald humor, it is more dignified, in a sense, and closer to reality; enough so, at least, that when the book reaches its inevitable climax and denoument, one feels more genuine, or more human, reactions to the fates of Pilenz and Mahlke than one does to Oskar, the hero of The Tin Drum. Perhaps that is why it was segmented off from Dog Years; perhaps there was another reason. Whatever the case, it stands on its own and as an integral part of Grass' magnum opus.

In Rosshalde, Hesse draws on his own life experience to describe the feelings of resigned loneliness surrounding the loveless marriage of painter Johann Veraguth and his wife, Adele. The famous painter lives alone in his studio on the same grounds as the house harboring his wife and son. This estate, Rosshalde, becomes the serene backdrop for the melancholy tale of a man whose love for his son has kept him in a stagnant state of resignation. A visit from an old friend finally stirs the emotions that have long been lurking inside of Veraguth, granting him the insight he will need to be free of his own self-made prison. Lyrical and deeply sad, Rosshalde is not Hesse's best work, but it may indeed be his most emotionally sincere.

The book is as beautiful as it is sad. Set in beauty amongst the lime tree garden with its flowers and strawberries, the lake, the painters studio, the big beautiful house with a dear boy, a beautiful wife and the famous painter himself. Still nothing is as it should be. Then there is the travelling friend and the longing for something else. In Rosshalde Hermann Hesse constructed a very pleasant novel. A sad one, but with all the beautiful ingredients of art, nature, people, feelings and Hesse's language and art of story telling.

I've read most Hesse's work, and after long and hard deliberation(not really) I have found Rosshalde to just barely beat out The Steppenwolf. We know Hesse as being a very mystical writer, but this book is vibrantly real, and moving. If you want to understand Hesse as a person, and not as a writer, this is the book to read- it is similar to events that occured in his life. The question is then asked, should the artist(and this I mean writers, musicians, etc.) have a typical family? This is a question that will never be answered with a yes or no, but this book is accurate in exposing both sides of the battle.

One of the most profound books I have read. An original and thought provoking book. Perhaps only Corbin can do justice in introducing a man like Mr. Arabi to the west. I would gladly read any book written by Henry Corbin.

One of the best books on esoteric Persian thought I've ever read; immensely scholarly and yet largely readable, though very rich and thick with insight in places you'll want to slow down and really absorb. (A newcomer to Ibn 'Arabi's writings, I'm reviewing this book from a depth-psychological point of view.)

If you've read my other reviews you know I'm a relentless critic of unreadable writing, much of which is symptomatic of a narcissistic unavailability better dealt with in therapy than through a publisher or fan club. Corbin is not easy to follow in places, but it's the concentration of the material that makes for more careful study--and makes more careful study worthwhile.

I was particularly moved by the image of the saddened God breathing out a sigh at being unknown, a sigh that made space for humans to reflect God back to God and thereby become the "secret treasure." Corbin's criticism of "becoming one with God" mirrors Buber's of "doctrines of absorption": both praise a dialog between person and the Divine rather than a reduction of one to the other.

Note to students of James Hillman: while many of Hillman's ideas can be found here (the heart as an organ of soulful perception, for instance), Ibn 'Arabi makes a clear, non-Hillmanic distinction between Forms (Images) of God and the ineffable true God that shines through the Forms like light through stained glass. This distinction does not exist for archetypal psychology, which collapses the archetypal image into the archetype itself and regards extra-psychic activities as outside its purview.

If anyone wants to read a great book and learn how a true scholar approaches and analyses a theme, this book by Henry Corbin is a good guide. He penetrates deep into the subject and never looses his objectivity and is not, unlike most of the so called scholars, a voice for a particular politics or religion. He takes us where ever the facts may lead. As for Mr. Ibn' Arabi's personal taste for religion ( shia or Sunni), it seems to me that Corbin is going beyond the tabloids. If he considers Arabi, or any other Sufi for that matter, a "Shia" he is referring to the " spirit" of the religion and is not, like many others, too worried about nominalism.