It gives a great deal of background information on public life during the times of the Bible. It gets into somewhat on how what gave Moses symbolizes what a Christian should do in his/ her life.

Merrill is known for his technical brilliance, even rescuing lost verse forms from obscurity. He has been accused of arch intellectualism, and many readers detect a certain lack of emotion between the lines, but while these criticisms are likely true, lovers of formalist poetry should take the time to read him, for he is marvellous, witty, and urbane. Fans of Stevens, Moore, Ashbery and Bishop will most likely warm to Merrill.

"Charles on Fire" is a good place to start, but "Lost in Translation", which appears in the collection "Divine Comedies" is my favorite. I have read this poem dozens of times, and will likely never tire of it.

And if you're ready for more, by all means, take on "The Changing Light at Sandover", his magnum opus, an eccentric, occult masterpiece.

This is an extremely well written, detailed unit history of Merrill's Marauders that I highly recommend. Both the author and the collaborator were members of the unit and bring great authenticity to the book. The author was the battalion surgeon for the 3rd Bn and the collaborator was an intelligence officer. Their sources include first hand accounts, unit records ( what little there were ), and official documents and publications. The book covers the entire time period that the 5307th Composite Unit ( Provisional ) was on active status and encompasses recruitment, training and combat. One of the best sections of the book is the description of the siege of Nphum Ga. The authors descripted, detailed, day by day and unit by unit account of this little known horrific battle is the best I've ever read. The author also gives an excellant record of the medical support ( or lack of ),for the unit, ( which is to be expected considering the source ). He discusses the various health concerns the Marauders had to deal with, such as scrub typhus, malaria, dysentery and of course getting shot at. All in all this is a great book that not only informs but does it in a way that keeps you interested. This book is well worth the read.

God and Goddess. Grace and Justice. Priest and Priestess. Right or Wrong? Mormonism, perhaps more than any other Christian sect, is replete with paradox and seeming contradictions. These paradoxes lead to inevitable questioning by those Latter-day Saints who study their religion deeply and passionately. Margaret and Paul Toscano endeavor to examine these paradoxes and provide some "religious ideas" along the seeker's path to exaltation that may help them find the dynamic median between spiritual extremes. Their book not only endeavors to discuss questions that have perplexed theologians for centuries, but applies this study to our modern experiences as Mormons and asks powerful questions about what these paradoxes mean for us as individuals and as a Church. This book is absolutely the most profound text I have ever read on Mormonism outside of the scriptures themselves, and has helped me find my own answers to the many problems I've encountered in my experience as a Latter-day Saint. It asks such questions as "What is the role of Heavenly Mother in the Godhead?" and "Do Mormon women hold the priesthood?" without glossing them over with pat answers as many in the Church do, or taking an argumentative, polarized stance on the issue as many outside the Church have done. Count on this book to present a thorough, profound examination of the issues which concern all faithful members of the LDS Church, and many that concern theologians and feminists in the greater Christian community.

Contents:

Introduction
Part I: First Principles
Chapter 1: Cornerstones
Chapter 2: Keystones
Part II: Godhead
Chapter 3: Holiness to the Lord
Chapter 4: The God of Flesh and Glory
Chapter 5: The Divine Mother
Chapter 6: Jesus Christ and the Mormon Pantheon
Chapter 7: Beyond Matriarchy, Beyond Patriarchy
Chapter 8: The Marriage of Time and Eternity
Part III: Redemption
Chapter 9: Divinity and Humanity
Chapter 10: Bringing Good Out of Evil

Chapter 11: The Case for Grace
Chapter 12: Metaphors of Salvation
Part IV: Priesthood
Chapter 13: The Nature and Purpose of Priesthood
Chapter 14: Priesthood in the Book of Mormon
Chapter 15: Women and Priesthood in the Bible
Chapter 16: A Kingdom of Priestesses
Chapter 17: The Oath and Covenant of the Priesthood
Chapter 18: Women, Ordination, and Hierarchy
Chapter 19: Zion: Vision or Mirage
Part V: Sex Roles, Marriage Patterns, and the Temple
Chapter 20: Sex Roles
Chapter 21: Monogamy, Polygamy, and Humility
Chapter 22: Rending the Veil
Chapter 23: The Mormon Endowment
Bibliography

Weighing in at almost 900 pages, this book holds just about all the Merrill you'll ever need outside of "Sandover." Merrill wrote exactly the kind of poems I used to think of as "real" poetry--stately, measured, clever & bittersweet, with lots of exquisite images to savor along the way. So why does this writing feel so stuffy and distant to me now? Reading a Merrill poem is somewhere between doing a crossword and shopping for antiques--you exercise the brain and always find something curious to enjoy, but even the most intimate ones left me strangely unmoved. I know Merrill has a legion of fans, and I can see why--these poems are among the best of their kind. But somehow they reminded me of the good chairs in my mom's living room--you could admire them, but you couldn't sit down. Still, the editors have done an excellent job and you'll enjoy going through this handsome book to make up your own mind.

Merrill requires no introduction. This is a splendid and comprehensive volume. It is a monolith, which commemorates the work of one of America's outstanding contemporary poets.

This collection includes some truly marvelous work: "The Drowning Poet," "Entrance From Sleep," "Poem in Spring," "Willow," "Walking At Night," "An Urban Convalescence," "The World and the Child," and "My Father's Irish Setters," to name a few.

I enthusiastically recommend this anthology. It serves as a means to remember that poetry of the Western hemisphere is capable of transcendent vision--that the Muses can still sing to twentieth century scribes.

Though occassionally less perfect, these poems scratch the edges of brilliance with every sweep of the pen. They are immaculate, dense, allusive, elusive, and always beautiful. Spend two days with "Charles on Fire" alone and you'll understand why Merrill was--no, IS --so widely admired. You should own this book.

After attending a reading of Richard Kenney at Bennington in 1985 I fell in love with his work and poetry. He was a gentleman with a rural air who moved the crowd but like Al Gore had a distance that was slightly cold. He delves deep into science and history in his poems. In my instruction manual on poetry I have a section under processes; by describing processes poets enrich their lines and can allude to their own work with more force than usual. Processes stir the mind more than most descriptions. Think of the process of beauty aging; the movie that deals with that theme would not be glam, it would have substance.

Richard Kenney's poems are rich in processes of the universe and of the organic world. There are many unwritten works that he should write. Imagine finding out how a brewery makes beer while following around a brewery drunken romantics who stare into the stars and see what's going on in the cosmos as they kiss. Richard Kenney would be the poet to write that book. This book, however, tends to be too scientific, there is too much of the mind, not enough of the more mysterious working of the heart. That's probably why this book is out of print. With an editor or a sensual collaborator Richard Kenney could write the work of the century.

This is a great read anyway, especially for poets who are temporarily tired of the 20th century masters. Just surf the web while being dazzled by his poetic creations and the book will pay for itself in the process of revelation.

This book is obviously a platform Brady uses to draw sympathy from readers so that she might further her anti-Second Amendment, or anti-freedom, campaign in D.C. Life is full of hardships for everyone, from childhood to adulthood. Just because a maniac used a gun to commit a violent crime doesn't mean we should feel sorry for her and rally behind her cause. What happened to her husband was inexcusable, but the man who committed that crime is being punished for it. Any intelligent human being should let it end there.

While it is admirable for anyone to fight for what they believe in nomatter how difficult I cannot aplaud this woman on her political stance as she operates more on emotion rather than on facts. There is constant bashing of the NRA, yet will not argue facts done on gun ownership and concealed carry. She merely dismisses it as extreme right wing liberal bashing or lies by the NRA, never once coming forward to give conclusive proof on her arguments. You can find plenty of books argueing against gun control with indisputable facts that can easily be confirmed. Such as the fact that states that have the least amount of gun control laws have the lowest crime rate, and is consistant throughout all 50 states.
Her actions in Handgun Control Inc. or now the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence is very unamerican. The NRA does not try to push people to own guns merely to protect a law abiding citizens right to own a gun. Sarah Brady and her orginization however continuously try to force her views on everyone else, to make it into law through use of the government. If her argument is so good there should be no trouble convincing people, whether through debatesor printed out fact sheets that have ALL information present. Something to think for people who want facts on issues like this rather than emotion.

Great book. The NRA folks need to come to the realization that there is no 2nd amendment right for individuals to own guns. Only one Appeals Court has said that there may be such a right and it has limited jurisdiction. The 2nd amendment is protecting the right of militias to own weapons. And guess what...there isn't a need for militias in this day and time. The amendment is now essentially useless.

Thanks, Ms. Brady, for a wonderful story that brings a common sense message to the debate. Get this book today!

I did not receive the tape cassettes. I am very disappointed and would like my money back.

What am I supposed to do with a tape? Does anyone still own one of those archaic 8-track machines of the 80's?!? If it still works can I please borrow it!!

A lovely tape which will simply pull the listener out of the hustle and bustle of this world, and show you perspective and enlightenment, as well as soothing comfort. The tape is read by the author's wife who speaks soothingly and pleasantly in very slow, deliberate tones with very soft music in the background. Each side is about 25 minutes (with an intro from the author on Side 1) and contains one meditation per side, relating to two of the Celestine Prophecies.

As much as I have enjoyed this tape, I fully expected to also enjoy the audio of the book - an abridgement that was insultingly simplistic and poorly abridged - Spirituality for Dummies? The Celestine Meditations is in a different league altogether - I highly recommend this tape, which is pretty close to perfect.

The story is strongest when she is most generous to her characters and most fully shares her own story within theirs. At times, she writes out of her anger at those who hurt her friends, at them for not staying true to love and beauty, and at the world for its unhappiness. She doesn't have nearly enough distance from JM's spaghetti western svengali and DJ's young black hustlers to write about them for publication.

How could two so full of love have come to such a sad end? The answer, it seems at times, is that gay marriage in our world doesn't have the structuring social context to do the work we expect from marriage. But we need to know more about her, her own loves, her children and her novels in order to speak honestly with her about the long haul.

The ouija board saves the marriage by holding it together under the burden of professional success and failure. And it destroys them both. It ruins JM as a poet -- he writes a beautiful "Book of Ephraim," then two more fat, quick and unreflective books of spirit-writing, then not much else. It draws them away from friends and life into a compelling fantasy they only partly believe in, are afraid of, and that becomes gradually coarser and uglier. As she sees it, James dies bewildered and ruined, while David loses his mind and soul to the devils.

She paints beautiful, vivid portraits of her friends in their youth.

Alison Lurie celebrates friendship in her memoir of James Merrill, poet, and David Jackson. Her account covers the career trajectories of the two men. She describes their adventures with unknown spirits and the subsequent work product in the Sandover poems. Her description of the lives of the two and the houses they occupied in Key West are particularly alluring. She makes the outcomes of drug and alcohol abuse and an interest in the rough trade on the one hand, and an increasing diffidence and squeamishness on the part of Merrill on the other hand comprehensible and not at all unusual in that individual characters do undergo changes in the course of a span of life.

A memoir is not a biography, as Lurie reminds us at the beginning of her book. One should be grateful for the revelations that are given, and there are many. Perhaps one should be cheered by seeing the sort of defensiveness a beloved author can arouse, but if the reviewers picked up the book they presumably wanted to "get inside," and that is where Lurie takes us. Who wants the sugar-coated anyway? Lurie opens a door on a rather Gothic menage, a very energized and energizing union, which dilapidated all too predictably into disunion and the cliched gay search for May-December love on the Greek travel plan. She writes with candor, but acknowledges the many missing spaces, temporal and informational lacunae, in her decades of friendship with these fellow authors. Her critical exegesis of the poetry is quite good for a novelist unpracticed in such analysis, and she raises some fair, troubling questions about the content of "Sandover." The Ouija board seemingly acted as a tap for the unconscious thoughts and wishes of its authors, and we find some of these messages, not all of which are palatable, give one insight into the infrastructure of creative sensibility. Ugliness and egotism are part and parcel. Overall, Merrill and Jackson are depicted as serious, generous artists who immeasurably enriched the lives of those around them. Of course, there are faults too, some of them egregious. Several reviewers acknowledge--rather ungraciously--the veracity of Lurie's claim that Merrill's "The Changing Light at Sandover" was produced jointly by Merrill and Jackson, via their rather Dantean peregrinations on the Ouija board. I would ask the Merrill idolators this: if J.M. himself could acknowledge David Jackson as co-creator of "Sandover" in subsequent interviews, why could he not put his lifelong lover's name on the spine of the Pulitzer-winning volume? The charges in other reviews that Lurie is magnifying her own reputation through her friendship with Merrill are shallow and spurious; there is not a single self-aggrandizing sentence in the entire volume, and that is a first for the many memoirs I have read. If anything, Lurie is self-deprecating and respectful of the rigors and liabilities of the artistic life. This book is not the typical memoir but a serious and respectful study of two artistic souls locked in a Narcissus-embrace which ended--as it must--with the mirror permanently distorted.

I just received this book and I have not gotten to the real content of the book yet but already have a firm recommendation: Never buy a I-Series book from McGraw Hill.
The physical structure of the book is terrible -- it is just a fat magazine with thicker cover page. 8.5x11 pages that flop over. It has stupid trivia questions in it. A good percentage of the front pages introduce you to the book series and basics on microsoft office.