Peter Levi is an English poet, and for the most part he writes lively if occasionally sloppy prose. It's hard to tell who this biography of John Milton, the great Puritan poet, has been written for, however. Scholars will shun it for its total lack of documentation and its spotty detail. Average readers, wanting to know more about Milton and his times, will find it both condescending at times and frustratingly abstruse at others. Levi's greatest strength are his openly judgmental evaluations of the poems; perhaps he should have published those judgments on their own as a brief "appreciation" of Milton.

I thought this book would reveal how John himself played these songs. Especially I hoped to learn the authentic intros to songs like Country Roads or Poems, Prayers & Promises. What you get is an easy guitar book that anyone can play. The arrangements are mostly just picking standard chords. It's not much more than most players could figure out from words and chords without tabs. Annie's Song has the most authentic arrangement. This book is worthwhile if you are beginning to learn guitar and to read tabs. However, I can hardly call it "authentic" if you want to learn John Denver's style.

Let the buyer beware! I should have recalled this adage and examined my purchase more carefully.

I am now the owner of writings by the new John Milton, a politically correct John Milton, a John Milton that rejects manhood for adulthood and rejects man for person. This new Milton embraces the humanist pronouns hu and hus and hum, non-sexist third person pronouns. He, his and him and she, her and hers are no more.

Milton's quotation of Euripides is likewise changed. Euripides now says' "And hu who can and will, deserves high praise". Euripides stands corrected.

Milton's use of archaic English has also been modernized. Milton has cast aside much of his seventeenth century English. This Bandanna Books version of John Milton is no longer John Milton, but an altered, censored revision.

Ironically, in the essay Areopagitica John Milton is arguing to the Parliament of England for freedom of the press, specifically for the liberty of unlicensed printing. Would John Milton have approved this modern, secular, nonsexist version of his essay?

Milton would have agreed that Bandanna Books had a right to publish, but I suspect that he would have argued that that Bandanna Books had a moral obligation to label the book cover to indicate that Milton's essay had been significantly altered to fit a peculiar nonsexist standard.

Bandanna Books in Santa Barbara, California offers other humanist works including Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass, Plato's Apology and Crito, and commentaries by Confucius. Unless you find comfort in hu, hus, and hum, I suggest that the traditional Whitman, Plato, and Confucius might be adequate and that you look elsewhere. Let the buyer beware!

"Hu", "hus", "hum"? Ho hum.

John Leonar

Prospective buyers of this edition should be aware that it is edited; some of Milton's words have been changed, either to modernize or to "humanize" (that is, eliminate sexist usages by the replacement of he/she, him/her, etc. with bizarre "hu", "hum," etc. This is not a worthy edition of Milton's great text!

Anyone who justifies the mutilation of bodies, the wearing of women's body parts as hat ornaments, the smashing of children's heads as they beg for their lives, is a very sick person. People who would justify this would justify the holocaust.

This book advertises itself as an against the grain, theoretically sophisticated, radical re-reading of Milton. It talks the talk but doesn't walk the walk. Some of the contributors (Kendrick)cannot write a grammatical sentence.