My mother read this book to me as a child, and I have read it many times myself as an older child and as an adult. It teaches the true values of life from the mind of a totally innocent child, who has never been exposed to all of the attitudes of the "real" world, but has been thrown into the real world by unfortunate circumstances. The sweetness, beauty and innocence of this child is so refreshing in this world. My mother also read it to my oldest child. They had regular Friday night reading sessions, and JUST DAVID was one of their favorites. This is one of his best memories of his grandma. She died when he was 9. I will have a first grade classroom next year, and plan to read this to my class. Would love to have another copy. My copy is a family treasure, and I hate to take it to school and risk losing it. Hoping for a reprint. Excellent and timeless book.

Just David was a steal for me. I bought it at a Garage Sale along with many other old books. I had it for over a year before I finally read it. It is by far my most favorite book. I love how David always brings out the best in people without actually realizing what he is doing. He is young and the most naive little boy ever. He reminds me a bit of my six year old daughter. She always sees the beauty of something...even bugs. This is the only book I ever recommend. It is a wonderful, delightful, and interesting book. A MUST READ FOR EVERYONE! I am so glad it is still in print. I have seen it in many local libraries as well. I have since read other books by Eleanor Porter, but find Just David to be my favorite to date. Most Libraries will loan out there copies...so if not on your library shelf, see if they can find a copy for you to read. Enjoy! Lori

I read this marvelous book when I was a fifth grader and absolutely loved it. My love for the book did not fade, as when I was in the eighth grade, I wrote a required book review and chose Just David as my book. My love of the book must have come through, as the teacher read it aloud to the class. She had never read anyone's book review aloud before--so the influence of this book is wide. A reprint would be so welcome to both today's young readers and to those of us who loved the book in the past. I hope to own Wendy Lawton's Just David doll someday.

Bill Mason's No Nonsense Guide To Fly Fishing In Idaho is a slender but invaluable compendium of useful, descriptive information on some of Idaho's best streams and lakes for fly fishing. With Mason's detailed, hand-drawn maps and annotations, anyone can plan their next Idaho bound fishing excursion with confidence. This superbly presented, "user friendly" guide covers the Salmon River, Silver Creek, Henry's Fork, The Teton, Kelly Creek, the Clearwater, the Big Wood, the South Fork of the Boise, the South Fork of the Snake, high mountain lakes, and more! If you are planning a fishing trip anywhere in Idaho, begin with Bill Mason's No Nonsense Guide To Fly Fishing In Idaho!

My favorite poems in "Buried Houses" is "The Nightingales of Andritsena." It is beautiful, unusual, and just a fine "story." Each character is real and very human as well as the relationships between them and this also goes for the other poems in "Buried Houses." Whether you are a poet, or just a fan of modern poetry, please pick up a copy of David Mason's books either at your local library or through amazon.com!

Mason's book is divided into two sections: 1 which contains the long narrative title poem and the 2nd which contains a handful of his other poems (including "Song of the Powers"). I think he might have done better to put "The Country I Remember" after the shorter poems. "The Country I Remember" was such a great poem, that the shorter poems (except "Song of the Powers") couldn't match up to. "The Country I Remember" is divided into twelve sections, each section told by an alternating point-of-view, between Lt. Mitchell, a Civil War veteran, and his daughter, both at the end of their lives. Mason's skill at the narrative poem is phenomenal. You forget that you are reading a 'long' poem because the story keeps the reader moving forward. Mason writes in both voices extremely well, and at no time are the two distinct and separate voices confused. For people who ask the question as to why there should be narrative poetry, this poem is the answer.

David Mason is one of the best Sci Fi writers I have encountered. Unfortunately, his publisher went out of business and books like "Kavin's World" and "The Sorcerer's Skull" etc. disapeared from the markets. How nice to see them in print again! Buy them all! "The Deep Gods" cover a time when man and the sea animals spoke together and shared the earth. I highly recommend David Mason's works!

Dr. Mason shows in his writing that he is a descendant of both whites and Indians in the massacre at Fort Mims on the Tensaw River in Mobile River Delta. He does not take sides, but shows how the participants were mostly related half-breeds on both sides and how the battle set the stage for Gen. Andrew Jackson's march on New Orleans. It is very readable, but the scalping description is too vivid for children.

I came across National Public Radio many years ago just tooling around the FM dial. I found "Fresh Air with Terry Gross" and was hooked by the interview at the time, with Clint Eastwood. The questions were ones I would want to ask him. I was intrigued by this voice I have never heard before on radio, sophisticated, smart, smooth, curious, and down to earth. No commercial radio hype, none of the exaggeration for a big news story, not a celebrity exclusive. I've since heard this audio compilation of the the comedians interviewed on "Fresh Air laughs" and loved it. This isn't just a side splitting laugh a minute tape, it also brings you a realization that these are real people. The Bill Murray interview is so unlike his performer identity we all know that you have to listen to it carefully, because Terry brings out his humanity with her interview style. We get to listen to conversation that has substance and not just style. This is a tape you can sink your teeth into, it's that thick.

Mason's work in Shadow is an excellent beginning to an author that possesses such a deep understanding of military manuvers, lingo, etc. The details are what captured me in this book, particularly the story of the team's sniper. I felt a little lost towards the middle of the book, but I suppose most book are that way. Overall, he is NO Clancy, however, his next book is still something I would like to take a look at.

GOOD JOB!

-Sunil James

Mason was good at making this premise work, even though he was working with the handicap that came with setting this a few years back. We know the history of the Gulf War aftermath, so where's the suspense in reading about this crack team headed to take Mr. Hussein down? It's there all right. Obviously this is the work of a sharp intelligence. If Mr. Mason were to write another novel, I'd be sure to at least take a look at it.

Shadow over Babylon was given to me by a friend, he said that the book was impossible to put down. I thought that this might be a bit of an exageration, so i decided to read it. I ended up reading the book in 4 days while during my summer holidays. I can honestly say that this is the best book that i have ever read. My favourite author may be Wilbur Smith but this book eclipses anything that he has ever written. David Mason's second book Little Brother is also worth reading.

Mason's collection of essays is a wide-ranging and overall pretty good collection of essays. The title essay is sort of a 'literary memoir', and while I expected it to be one of the better essays, it really isn't. But there are some excellent essays on Auden, Tennyson, Frost, Heaney, Louis Simpson, J.V. Cunningham, Anne Xexton, and Irish poetry. And then there are the essays meant to further the cause of the New Formalist movement. They almost sound like propoganda, but they are well written, enjoyable essays that make sense. And my favorite essay is "Other Lives: On Shorter Narrative Poems." Mason is a phenomenal narrative poet, and anyone with an interest in narrative poetry should read this essay.

This book is a collection of essays and reviews by poet David Mason, who thinks that contemporary poetry and its professional readers have neglected "nonacademic readers" like "the educated common reader." Through a critical style that incorporates the anecdote and that admires Louis Simpson's "refreshingly personal criticism," "as if we were hearing after-dinner opinions," Mason's text follows the goal of his Preface: "I have in mind that audience of grown-ups arguing about books even while they discuss . . . the latest political tremors or a new movie coming to town." Mason's taste for life in poetry criticism, whether communicated through autobiographical or biographical techniques, doesn't mean that he remains uncritical of self-absorbed forms of art. In the title essay, for instance, Mason acknowledges "the useful legacy of Eliot's ideas" in support of "the self so distanced from itself." Of the book's sixteen sections, five open with personal anecdotes. These anecdotes quickly become relevant to their subject matter (whether regionalism, self-indulgence, sentimentality, Tennyson, or Yeats). Given Mason's opposition to self-indulgence, one might argue that Mason develops contradictory attitudes toward forms of expression, or that he is critical of the personal in art, but then makes self-absorbed statements like, "Nowadays close reading often bores me," or, "I have sometimes felt that I was part of a story, and that I had a sacred duty to transcribe as much of it as I could." Yet such personal statements have relevancy to the larger poetics/rhetoric of the essays. Besides, wouldn't it seem odd--and bad writing at that--to claim that "poetry helps us live our lives" without then providing here and there a few examples from life when it has? Mason claims, "People do quote poetry, or refer to it--some do, anyway--and they connect it to their lives." He then supports this claim with the example of when his mother once remembered six potent lines by Yeats. Yet Mason's theory about why "people remember poems or songs or key phrases at surprising moments in life" is questionable. He says that "the best forms of expression are often those we most want to remember." But he suggests that these best forms of expression are those that are so large, so universal, so full of matter, that they "convey 'a general truth'." "Universality is suspect in some quarters, I suppose, but I submit," Mason says, "that we cannot have great art without it." When Mason then quotes from W.H. Auden's New Year Letter, he means to show how such poetry that conveys truth makes things happen because, as Auden once said, it survives--in the memory, among other places--as a way of happening, a mouth." Yet the section he quotes, like so many Auden lines, might seem to some less like a memorable poem and more like lineated philosophical text. What are the best forms of expression for poetry? This is an important question for Mason. On the one hand, there is the often difficult poetry of magnitude, and on the other, that of locality, which is less difficult. Mason proposes that the former is usually formal, whereas the latter is typically free verse. He worries that the latter is generally practiced by poets who "ought to hold themselves to higher standards than they sometimes do." These standards are the focus of Mason's important essay "Louis Simpson's Singular Charm." A New Formalist and one of the editors of the anthology Rebel Angels: 25 Poets of the New Formalism, Mason believes that meter "is . . . a kind of compression that, in the right hands, lends language a supercharged memorability." He finds that Simpson, with his rejection of meter, "has courted danger, choosing a slighter technical range that often highlights his lackadaisical diction." Mason's essay is good at providing us with passages--from articles by and interviews with Simpson--about this Jamaican-born poet's reasons for this rejection. The reasons involve Simpson wanting his poetry to be more accessible and direct for an audience like the one Mason advocates. Simpson believes free verse better lends this accessibility and directness. Mason disagrees, making some convincing arguments; one is that Simpson "comes to that tired solecism that meter is un-American." Readers need only digest what is arguably the most important essay in The Poetry of Life, "American Poetry in the Nineteenth Century," to be reminded of the great American poets who worked sometimes accessibly and gorgeously in traditional forms. But in arguing that Simpson's stylistic change toward accessibility and directness "leaves disturbing implications for the art," a change which sometimes lends Simpson's poetry what Mason calls "deliberate banality," Mason may not be true to his aversion to the Twentieth-century critics who have prized difficulty in poems. Perhaps Mason, who from time to time in this book reminds readers of his career as an English professor, is more on the side of J.D. McClatchy, "accustomed . . . to respect the authority of difficulty," than he is on the side of Dana Gioia, to whom Mason devotes a chapter, desiring neither anti-intellectualism nor a ban of difficulty in art, but, instead, a popular audience for poetry? Accessibility, difficulty, formality, memorability, popularity, universality--these are the interesting buzzwords of The Poetry of Life. They are perhaps defined and discussed with the most clarity and precision in Mason's superb "Robert Frost, Seamus Heaney, and the Wellsprings of Poetry." Though this essay has as its primary concern a comparison of Frost and Heaney, it draws this definition and discussion in, and in very enlightening ways. Though different in many ways, both poets, Mason asserts, "have made use of colloquial speech in their poetry" and "refreshing rhythm and idiom with materials that are at least partly extra-literary." Mason demonstrates this use, rhythm, and idiom through focusing attentions on and drawing connections between each poet's images of work, play, and water. No doubt, these images are universal. And Mason knows precisely when and from what poem to quote, showing that Frost and Heaney often image the world without either that magnitudinous air of Auden and Eliot or that more banal, informal language of Simpson.

Mason is a rarity in this day and age--a poet-critic who writes in a public idiom. He is clear in his aesthetic criteria, but not so dogmatic that his work lacks room for surprise (I was surprised to see him so enthusastic about John Haines, for instance). What is most important about his writing, though, is that it is elegant as well as insightful; these essays are as much a pleasure to read as the poets he discusses. My own efforts at poetry criticism lack the warmth and elegance that allow Mason to wear his erudition lightly. The elegance, direct tone, intelligence, and accessibility of these essays give me hope that poetry criticism outside the university is not in critical condition. Cheers to Story Line Press for supporting this important poet's work.

I keep this book on my shelf as a reference to poetry techniques. It is the best book I have found on the art of writing poetry. The examples are great.

I can't go on enough about how great a poetry manual this is. It's not stuffy, and it is fun to read. Especially chapters 7 and 8, which are on sound in the English language. And they should be read out loud. Also pay special attention to chapter 13 which discusses making sense in poetry. The examples and exercises are helpful. This is the best poetry introduction I've seen. The anthology carries Mason's flair, but you could supplement this manual with R.S. Gwynn's Longman anthology.

Can a book about writing poetry be instructive AND poetic?? A few months ago I wouldn't have known quite how to answer since my experience with poetry manuals had been more in the vein of "this is good for my craft therefore I...must...continue...reading." It seems poetry and books about writing poetry often chafe on each other. Western Wind has proven the antidote to that outlook. It's the most accessible and deeply dug volume on poem-making I've found. I enjoyed it like a good novel and my work is clearly better for it.

P.S. The book "In The Palm of Your Hand" fits up against this one nicely.