"Annoyingly" this page is devoted to the stories of Dylan Thomas; also"annoyingly", both the Publishers Weekly review as well as that of a disgrunted reader refer stories by Leslie Norris; Norris' book may be splendid; I don't know; I have read Dylan's stories and honor and love them (they are live things wearing incandescent prose -- believe me); perhaps Amazon could reassign the aforementioned reviews and those of us who -- on this page at least -- have (happily) written about the appropriate book will be left to bask unannoyed.

Annoyingly, both of the reviews already posted on this page for the "Collected Stories" of Welsh writer Leslie Norris refer to the "Collected Stories" of Welsh writer Dylan Thomas, which Leslie Norris designed but did not (obviously) write. This review, then, is an actual review of Leslie Norris' "Collected Stories"!

Leslie Norris's collected stories are a sort of bittersweet beauty very much in the Joycean tradition (think especially of "Dubliners"). They begin with some sort of pivotal moment at which confusion either enters into or peaks in the protagonist's young life, and they end with an epiphany that seems sweetly to keep the bitter at bay, but knows that the respite is at best only temporary.

Also a poet (see his "Collected Poems" as well), like fellow Welshman Thomas, Norris's language is simple but fresh, and sumptuous when necessary, a prose tone perfectly in step with the state of his protagonists. Often (if not always), they are young boys on the brink of a knowledge that will disillusion them and send them closer to the concerns of adulthood.

In "Sliding," an accident during an afternoon of sliding across a frozen pond upsets a group of boys, their first initiation into the idea of impermanence. In "Kingfisher," a boy, who has just been with his father to visit his dying grandmother, sees in the garden the dead body of a bird that he and his father had only that morning watched together; in a moment of suddenly adult consciousness, he takes it upon himself to conceal the bad news of mortality from his father. In "Shaving," one of my faves from the collection, an athlete in the full strength of youth returns triumphant from the rugby field to shave his ailing father, who, in the full fading of disease, is too weak to shave himself.

This volume collects Norris's previous two (unfortunately long out-of-print) books, "Sliding" and "The Girl from Cardigan," putting them together with a few new stories in book form for the first time.

Norris excels at awakening emotion, but is subtle enough and careful enough not to hit you over the head with the hammer of sentimentality. If you appreciate and enjoy fiction that looks at those moments that we all know, where we begin to feel ourselves a part of the knowledge that life ends up teaching everyone sooner or later, then this book is a terrific buy.

Was Dylan thomas the consummate craftsman? Indeed, he was; and took real delight in his gifts and his exercise of them; he was a Celtic bard in the truest sense of that role -- the lonely public/private man who carried within him the lyric history of his race, the love of his language and a very vocal sense of wonder over his role in life; that he had song, yes; that he was funny, loud, boisterous, cautious, selfish, rude, unforgettable -- all of that and more; he was the poet's poet and the singer for those who longed for lost boyhood, who raged at death and who marvelled at the all the world's words rediscovered in a dewdrop; his stories, like his poems, should be read aloud; there is an incantatory quality to them -- as if something profoundly old and grandfatherly were suddenly shared with the reader; Thomas himself was a great reader; to hear him is to savor him at his best and to feel deeply and sweetly the majesty and holy compulsion of our mother tongue; the stories, while less charged than the poems, nonetheless captivate and break into a kind of lyricism that gladdens the heart and restores the ear. If he wasn't the best of our poets, he was easily the most tuneful and spoke from a very deep place that only the purest of us can truly know.

Leslie Norris's book is excellent. I bought three copies... one for my nieces, one for my aunt, and one for myself! I was fortunate to hear Mr.Norris read the book, as well as read a rough draft he wrote that might soon be another Albert and Lucille story!! For anyone looking for the perfect holiday gift, Albert and the Angels is excellent! The writing is superb and the illustrations are fabulous. This book is HIGHLY recommended.

I have been waiting for this book to arrive for more than two years. Ever since I heard Leslie Norris read it along with his poetry I have waitied and waited for this book to be here so that I could read it at my family Christmas party. Unlike so many other things, my memory did not overshadow the real experience when the book finally arrived. After seeing the illustrations and reading the book for myself, I can forgive the publishers for the many delays I was made to endure. I read with renewed astonishment the wonderful prose of Leslie Norris telling the story of Albert trying to get his mother a special gift for Christmas. I fell in love with children's stories once again.

Once every now and then, a book comes along that you are just dying to share with your friends and family. This is such a book. Norris has a beautiful ear for the way children speak and an amazing imagination to see things the way children must. I say this because it is remarkable how close his words come to the way my own son speaks and plays.

Albert and the Angels makes you believe in a world of magic and inspiration. The words and the illustrations make for a wonderful evening with your children. I cannot praise this book enough, so you will have to see for yourself what I am talking about.

Rilke's "Duino Elegies" form one of the most perfect collections of lyric poetry you can ever hope to get your hands on. Unfortunately for the David Young translation, however, there is much less Rilke than there ought to be; a series of strange decisions on Young's part casts a shadow over even the brighter moments of his rendering of this masterpiece.

For example, Rilke was a genius at enjambment; that is, he was a master at placing his most important words at the very end or very beginning of a line, in order to highlight them. Think of the first line, which ends with "Engel," splitting it from the first word of the next line, "Ordnungen." (Young merely gives these words together, as "angelic orders," at the end of the third line.) By divorcing the angels from their orders in the poem's very first line, Rilke sets the tone that not all is right in the heavens.

And Rilke's line breaks are even more important than those of other poets, because they are few and far between, since his lines are nice and fat, often more than 13 syllables. Young's lines, on the other hand, are broken up into tiny 2- to 8-syllable, bite-sized chunks. This changes not only the rhythm of Rilke's verse--which obviously would have changed anyway, in translation--but its compositional emphases, as the structure of the most important lines is simply whisked away. And that is a tragedy.

Young's excuse for this unfortunate decision? He happened, while he was working on the translation, "to re-read some of William Carlos Williams' late poetry," and he liked Williams' stubbier, tri-partite lines. Rilke, however, is not William Carlos Williams, and Young's rendering of Rilke as Williams suffers because of this incongruity. (Oddly enough, though, Williams is another poet for whom every line break bears an awful lot of weight; too bad Young didn't carry that respect for enjambment into his work on the "Duino Elegies.")

Those interested in Rilke should do themselves a favor and pick up Mitchell's translation. I simply can't recommend this edition. It gets three stars because, despite the muddle, there are SOME beautifully rendered lines, and some of the power of Rilke manages to squeeze through. And that's always a wonderful thing.

For me, at least, Rainer Maria Rilke's Duino Elegies are the very epitome of poetry. I know others who, even though they admire Rilke above all other poets, prefer other "Rilke" poems, such as "Evening." For me, however, it has always been, and always will be, the Elegies. Certainly they are the most extravagant and elusive of Rilke's poems, even for those who count others among their favorites.

Rilke, who longed for a place of solitude in the country, arrived at the fortress-like Castle Duino, high above the Adriatic, near Trieste, in December 1911. His hostess was Princess Marie von Thurn und Taxis-Hohenlohe, who had invited Rilke to translate Dante's Vita Nuova with her. Princess Marie, however, soon left for more sociable climes and Rilke was left alone on the stormy, wind-swept cliffs of Duino. Rilke, at this time of his life, was known to commit himself to a strict regimen of work. Nevertheless, his poems, he has written, always seemed to burst upon him suddenly, like a thunderstorm on a hot summer's afternoon. And, one afternoon at Duino, the opening line of the first elegy burst upon Rilke like a flash of lightening.

There is no problem with the Duino Elegies...if one reads and comprehends German. If one doesn't, however, the problems of translation can be enormous. Translation, always a fragile task, becomes even more so when it involves poetry, and reaches its zenith with a work as sublime as Rilke's Duino Elegies. So many versions of these gorgeous poems exist (at least twenty), that the Elegies are certainly suffering from a case of "translation overkill."

In the original German, the Duino Elegies are the most sublime expressions of awe, of terror, of love, of splendor, of Life, that have ever been set down by the hand of man. In hands other than Rilke's, however, they can seem clumsy and more than a bit melodramatic. Rilke wrote delicately-calibrated poetry, without excess words and, the dread of all translators, the hyphenated word. But, all that aside, reading the Elegies in translation, any translation, is better than not reading them at all.

No matter how "angelic" these poems may seem, never doubt that they are expression of life in the here and now. As Rilke, himself, tells us, "the world exists nowhere but within us." These gorgeous poems are about the difficulties of living in this world, of not being heard by the angels, and of the tragedy that can so easily befall us. They are about Rilke's desire for solitude and his desire to escape it, i.e., the need and the utter impossibility of understanding and being understood completely in this life.

Although many of the translations are flawed, as translation by its very nature must be, the Duino Elegies remain the epitome of poetry. They are a cry of terror, of awe, of joy, of splendor at the lonely and solitary condition of man.

"For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror we can just barely endure, and we admire it so because it calmly disdains to destroy us. Every angel is terrible." - Rainer Maria Rilke, First Elegy

The Duino Elegies are quite possibly the greatest work of Rainer Maria Rilke, himself one of the greatest poets, German language or otherwise, of all time. The elegies, writen in the cold vast chambers of Duino Castle, deal with all the greatest issues of human existence: love, death, tragedy, God, and life's very meaning. Their language reflects their origin: like the Castle's empty stone hallways, the words are perfectly formed; they are fragile and beautiful; weightless and profound. Rilke's first elegy begins with a reflection on the awesome, terrifying power of beauty. He longs to experience it, but knows that it would destroy him. As he writes on, the reader grows to understand and feel not only Rilke's longing, but his fear. The terrible beauty, looming behind all the elegies, is present in the text. The poems inspire wonder, raise profound quetions with ineffable answers, and fills us with awe as it calmly disdains to destroy us.

The German text is perfect, but MacIntyre's translation is splendid and best conveys the work's haunting and desolate undertones. While it seems to me that everyone should own and cherish the Duino Elegies, it is an absolute requirement for anyone seeking to construct a serious collection of great poetry.

This biography fills a significant gap in the historical record: behind the incredible scientific and engineering triumph of the Manhattan Project, there was a master administrator. Leslie Groves is that administrator, the take-charge guy who knew how to inspire, find competent people to whom he delegated tasks, cajole and bully his way into the historical achievement of the first working atomic bomb. In this bio, you get to know who he was, how he operated, and what he did. There is no doubt he was a great and talented, if somewhat unsung, man.

Nonetheless, Groves' life and methods are not exactly something that would inspire a lay reader about the epoch. There are far better books for that, such as Rhodes' Making of the Atomic Bomb, which is the most readable and best reported and researched of the whole shelf of books on the subject in my opinion. No, this is a book of value principally for specialists in scientific and military history and for atom-bomb buffs. There was info I needed in it and could only find there, so it was most useful for a scholarly purpose. But it was not a fun read about a rich time.

Afterall, when contrasted to great politicians or scientists or adventurers, there is a reason why very, very few bureaucrats find a narrative niche: they are simply not as interesting or as comprehensible. Norris even says as much, when he admits there were not many layers to Grove: he was a competent and arrogant man, who when given extraordinary authority during the war was capable of achieving extraordinary things. At the end of the war, he refused to change along with the army and instead retired to a corporate position and as a curmugeon who corrected in excruciating detail the innumerable accounts that kept appearing.

I do not mean to diminish Norris' achievement here, only to put it into perspective for prospective readers. The prose is clear, if a bit lackluster. But this is very good scholarship and a useful addition.

Recommended for specialists only.

As biographer Robert Norris himself concedes, there have been many accounts of the Manhattan Project since World War II, several biographies of Leslie Groves, and even Paul Newman's memorable depiction of Groves in the film "Fat Man and Little Boy." Norris hoped to achieve the academically definitive biography, and no one can accuse him of failing at that. He is thorough. In fact, there is unintended humor in the "racing" title: as late as page 214 the search for real estate for Hanford and Oak Ridge is just getting underway. Groves's bomb has a long fuse.

Leslie R. Groves entered West Point on the eve of World War I. When the United States entered the war, the Academy's curriculum was compressed into a two year matriculation in the belief that many new officers would be needed quickly on the European front. As timing would have it, neither Groves nor many of his fellow cadets saw action. What resulted, however, was a glut of peacetime officers, an undesirable situation for ambitious career officers like Groves. Eventually Groves's accomplishments would outrun his rank, a major political liability. In the end, however, Groves himself was his own worst enemy. Intelligent and self-motivated, Groves became an accomplished engineer at the Academy, though it would seem that as a cadet he acquired the skills without the polish. As an officer in the Corps of Engineers he was brusque and dogged, except with those who could advance his career. Superiors tolerated his rudeness and obesity because he could kick behinds and deliver the goods. In peacetime he might have been shuffled out; but as the Nazi shadow extended closer to home, a man of Groves's productivity would be annually disciplined for his interpersonal shortcomings and "punished" with greater responsibilities. It was thus that Groves became a major force in the construction of the Pentagon, and ultimately a secret weapons project based in the New York District of the Army Corps of Engineers, the so-called Manhattan Project.

To the uninformed, Groves's contribution to the production of the atomic bomb was as scoutmaster for a collection of scientific mad monk geniuses in the desert of New Mexico. In fact, Norris leaves the impression that Groves was more of an absentee landlord at Los Alamos. The real action was going on elsewhere, primarily in massive industrial complexes at Hanford, Washington, and Oak Ridge, Tennessee. In some respects the building of these two industrial facilities was as impressive as the making of the bomb. That Groves was able to build not one but two mammoth atomic factories in roughly eighteen months is staggering.

As Norris tells the story, Groves enjoyed a decent relationship with Robert Oppenheimer and most of the scientists working for him. He did not totally understand the intricacies of atomic physics; in truth, the entire project was a foray into the unknown. Where he excelled was in translating theoretical problems into practical management components which he executed against incredible odds: shortages of rare substances and wartime civilian labor, secrecy and security, political and military infighting, and concern over the German nuclear program, to cite a few. When his scientists were divided over opposing theories and techniques, Groves's favorite stratagem was simply to test both possibilities in laboratory situations and select the one that worked.

Which raises the question of costs and accountability. The funding of this massive secret project is probably a good subject for a separate work. Suffice to say that Groves drew his funding from an extraordinarily large but innocuously named account, and that funding was one problem he did not have to face, at least until after the war. Conveniently, there was in fact no one-certainly not his [many] senior officers-who could question the wisdom of Groves's expenditures and management techniques. He answered, nominally at least, to a civilian board appointed by Roosevelt, which included James Conant, President of Harvard. But from this narrative the board's primary relationship with Groves appeared to be running interference.

After Japan's surrender, Groves exercised a proprietorship over the newly confirmed nuclear technology, and he would parcel it out sparingly and reluctantly. He advocated an American hegemony of nuclear weaponry-no international control of atomic bombs, no sharing of technology with allies-and even within America he embargoed information to most government agencies, including the White House. Groves protected the stockpile, and since the weapons were stored as component parts, Groves could obfuscate the true strategic strength of the American arsenal as political needs dictated. Norris contends that Groves forged much of this nation's current nuclear philosophy during and immediately after the Manhattan Project.

New technology notwithstanding, the old politics would eventually derail Groves. In 1948, during his annual fitness review, Groves was told by Dwight Eisenhower to his face that his maverick days were over and that he would not be appointed chief of engineers. Eisenhower, who regarded Groves as a loose cannon, made it clear that too many officers had been rubbed the wrong way by his arrogance. No fool, Groves submitted his resignation and spent several years with Remington Rand in the early years of computer development.

Norris depicts Groves's role in the atomic espionage trials of the 1950's in a benign light, [Gregg Herken's new work depicts the General's involvement in a darker light] and I suspect that the author's closeness to his subject made him somewhat less critical of Groves's tactics and style. Overall, this is an extremely valuable work for several reasons. "Racing for the Bomb" is a commentary on the pros and cons of national crisis management, the dilemma of giving someone enough power to get the job done without creating a dictator. There is also a message here about contemporary nuclear proliferation. Have India, Pakistan, Iraq, and North Korea mastered their own Manhattan Projects, or is nuclear proliferation simply a matter of espionage and horse-trading? One can almost hear Groves saying, "I told you so."

The book is definitive, scholarly, yet dramatic and exciting. Indispensable for understanding how the atomic bomb came about. A necessary counterpoise to the prevailing scientist-based story of the development. Additionally Norris's description (meticulously documented by a vast quantity of letters and interviews) of Grove's childhood and professional years before WWII recreates a lost era when society's leaders and doers were on a higher plane than they are today.

Although it has been several years since I read this collection, it went on my short list of about twenty books I'd like to own and purchase copies for family members. Nicely paced, imaginative, enjoyable stories. Paint a vivid picture of a time and place.