As a movie lover, I was intrigued with the theme of this book -- how movies have shaped our culture, our thinking -- and was prepared for a heavy, textbook-like reading. As I read, though, I was overwhelmed with O'Briens style, his sterling craftsmanship in describing the feelings and emotions of the movies. I would literally stop after every few lines and shake my head in amazement. As a writer, I am jealous of his skill. As a reader, I am eager to read it again.

Steve Martin said (in L.A. STORY) that "a kiss may not be the truth, but it's what we wish was the truth." I do not know if O'Brien's book is THE truth about movies in the modern mind but, oh, how I hope that it is.

Don't be alarmed, just go to the movies. O'Brien, in this unforgettable, beautifully written book, has come up with an idea and a work so original and startling that it is difficult to describe. Essentially, he sees how movies [and he's seen hundreds of all kinds] have helped create the pyschology of the century. In one chapter, for example, he uses the melodramatic chestnut "The Four Feathers" to show how the movies displayed the customs and manners of a class and society different than ourselves, and thus taught us how to live in certain ways. And that's just scratching the surface of a book that seems to have a new and astonishing idea on every page. Neal Gabler published on this topic recently, but to a much inferior extent. Skip that and buy this. You will never, ever go to the movies the same way again.

This book is the most chillingly relevant commentary on our modern society of the spectacle that I have ever read. Although at times slightly alarmist in its portrayal of the totalitarian tendencies of contemporary cinema in forging the substance of our thoughts, these claims can not be taken lightly. O'Brien is convincing by virtue of the fact that he writes mostly in the second person. "You believed....You were shocked....You this...You that"...making the reader truly believe the shocking reality before him: That the overmind of the cinema is becoming the only reality in the 20th century. His memories are its memories and everyone else's too. O'Brien does a great service to point this out even if its too late to change it.

O'Brien very skillfully weaves an early history of paperback books together with literary criticism of the genre of hardboiled/detective "pulp" fiction. He spends a great deal of emphasis on the original cover art of these books, arguing that they formed an inseparable part of the reading experience (which all paperback collectors will agree with)...an experience completely lost in modern reprints with their "artistic"/"tasteful" bland covers. O'Brien is himself a highly expressive and engaging author, making this book a thoroughly enjoyable read.

Hardboiled America is a key book for both mystery fans and paperback collectors. As a collector I first purchased the book for its reproductions of classic paperback covers. Hardboiled America's strong point, though, is its provocative and detailed coverage of niche authors. I credit O'Brian for introducing me to many of my favorite books and writers.

When first published, few of the authors discussed in O'Brien's book were in print. Thankfully, with the resergence of interest in noir fiction in the past decade and a half, books by the likes of Jim Thompson, David Goodis, and many others are easy to find. This is a relief, as readers of Hardboiled America will be inspired to seek out the work of numerous authors discussed within.

I first read O'Brien's book several years ago (in an earlier edition) on the recommendation from a collector who is also a fan of Jim Thompson. O'Brien is insightful, informative, engaging and right on in his assessment of an era of paperbacks and pulp noir that will never be truly recreated. What a wonderful work of literary criticism, beautifully illustrated and classically rendered. A treasure for the noir lover! I have it right next to my first edition original of The Killer Inside Me.

I once had the great, albeit far too brief, pleasure of working for Geoffrey O'Brien. I say this not only to reveal subjectivity on my part, when it comes to his work, but to proclaim that, in addition to his being a keen critic, a lapidary-sublime-limpid writer of prose, an accomplished poet, and a man with more than encyclopedic knowledge of everything from Beach Boys lyrics to Shape-Note singers to the work of obscure naturalist painters, I know that he is, as F. Scott Fitzgerald would say, "fun on a party."

Paraphrasing the man himself on the subject of Preston Sturges, to find so immediately, in _Castaways of the Image Planet_, "yodeling, bubble dancers, corsets, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, 'My Indiana Home,' hypnotic catalepsy, and the remark 'in China they eat dogs," establishes that we are indeed in O'Brien territory. Since it is impossible to discuss his work without the use of eclectic compendia, allow me to add that only O'Brien could have penned this double-fistful of essays on topics as far-ranging as Japanese _Manga_, Orson Welles, the cinematography of Hong Kong and the PRC, Shakespeare, _Mad_, Brando, and the photography of Edward S. Curtis, and have the collective effort rise to such an exquisite acme above mere paean, homage, or pastiche.

Most importantly, though, this collection goes beyond critique in that it strikes a blow for thinking audience members everywhere against the static presumptions of our existing meta-culture. As O'Brien remarks in "Free Spirits," a meditation on the work of film critic James Harvey and the Golden Age of Hollywood romantic comedy, "film books these days, with their emphasis on semiotic codes and quantitative analysis, tend to reduce moviegoing to a rather impersonal experience, as if we brought nothing to our encounters with the screen and emerged from the dark imprinted with precisely identical patterns."

O'Brien lets the light and the air and the sheer pleasure of surrender to the screen, the page, the image--the spectacle--come romping back into the equation. He makes reading about these phenomena as moving and profound an experience as imbibing them first-hand. He lets you know that not only does someone else sitting in a library wing-chair or a plush seat in the darkened post-modern arena get it, he gets it in an incredibly cool and funny and enlightening way. Having this book of essays is like having sixteen great late-night café conversations with an effervescently witty and erudite friend on tap. My advice? Buy 'em, collect 'em, trade 'em with your friends. Once again, O'Brien is kiss-the-hem-of-his-garment good.

I have owned this book for 13 years but ony recently prepared any of the recipes. It's been a glorious reference for table setting ideas but I considered the recipes too complex for my lifestyle. Get over it. They are divine and NOT difficult - Roger gives you so much information on preparation (remember the first time you read Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking)? Long recipes aren't difficult - they provide you with the principles you need to understand why you do certain things in food preparation. I have wowed many a guest with these delectable recipes - a true masterpiece.

This small novella from NYRB is a much-lauded work by Elizabeth Hardwick from the mid-Seventies; essentially plotless, it's a work of memory (both Proust and Tenessee Williams seem to haunt these pages... as does, oddly, Djuna Barnes) that encompasses autobiographical material from Hardwick's life growing up in Lexington, Kentucky, at Columbia as a graduate student in NYC, and in Boston as the partner of Robert Lowell (though he is never named in the narrative). The prose is often gorgeous (although there are times when it does get a bit NEW YORKER-precious in its sensory observations); the narrative passes much like a very vivid dream or a hallucination, so that though there is little to follow it will stay with you for months afterwards. This new NYRB edition comes with a spectacularly beautiful cover that suggests the hyperreal quality of the narrative, and a vacuous preface that tells you almost nothing about the book .

I can really only reiterate what the last reviewer stated. This is one of the three or four books I pull off the bookshelf constantly to reread. Hardwick is a remarkable stylist and can evoke in a few pages (if not lines!) what it would take other writers whole novels to achieve. The section on Billie Holliday is one of the most beautiful things I've ever read. This is the book that made me want to write.

Part fiction, part autobiography, part a collection of lovely pensees on literature and life, this exquisite short novel moves fluidly between the narrator's Kentucky past and her New York present, with stops along the way in Europe, Maine, Boston, and elswhere. Employing a spare, pared-down prose of great beauty and oringinality, Hardwick approaches her subject--memory and the transformations we work upon it, and it upon us--with great restraint, bringing the novel's people and places vividly to life with an odd, knotty phrase or unexpected choice of word. Rather than focus with gushing self-indulgence on her own experience in the manner of contemporary tell-all memoirs, the author is more often probing the lives of the ignored and downtrodden she has known--cleaning ladies and laborers, small-town prostitutes and impoverished radicals, failed writers and homeless piano teachers. Hardwick broods over these small, burdened, often overlooked lives with a wry, unsentimental tenderness and a gentle pessimism. I can't tell you how often I've picked up this book since I first read it just to savor a paragraph or two or its gorgeously austere prose.

Reader's Catalog is a large collection of entries, divided by subject, for books on a wide variety of subjects. The goal of the book is to be a reader's advisor. If you need a recommendation for a book on Islam, or Thai Cooking, or Geographical Place-Names, you can start here and get some titles, and, likely, some descriptions. Also ISBN's and publishers are given.

It is certainly nice to have such a comprehensive set of professional book reviews and comments.

The book is large, and the paper is very thin. After normal wear, it will not stand up on a shelf unless supported by other books. If it sounds like a good addition to your collection, you might want to make sure you've got a good spot atop the bookshelf to lay this paperback tome.

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I really can't imagine what might have encouraged those reviews above. I found it exhausting to get through this--not particularly because the anecdotes O'Brien tells are boring but instead because O'Brien's tone itself is so off-putting, so agonizingly pretentious, that it actually ends up ruining what I think could be a very fascinating read. I can't recommend this book. Sorry.

Books are a potential delight to all of our senses and many dimensions of our minds. It is entirely too simple and limiting to think of books as their physical embodiment of paper, ink and binding. Yet, if you are like me, you haven't exactly thought about them as potential magic carpets, strolling minstrels, and companions against the night. That's where you have stalled thinking. Mr. O'Brien's wonderful perception is about to take you outside the box (and the book) to consider what your real relationship is to these wonderful repositories of humanity.

This is one of the most imaginative and fun books that I have ever read! Mr. O'Brien takes books and turns them into metaphorical extensions of ourselves and our lives, and then connects it all back together in a beautiful stream of stories. You'll feel like you've suddenly become part of some modern Divine Comedy as you move through this fascinating book.

If we were in ancient Green times, we would think of this book as a philosophical treatment of what a book is and what bookness is, as well. Fortunately, we are in modern times, because the author can use vivid language and visions to entrance us . . . not unlike a series of tales out of the Arabian nights!

I especially enjoyed the continuing theme of whether the books are with us or not, and our connection to them.

You will never think about a book in the same way again after you read this work, and you'll be the better for your self-transformation.

There is a lot of good information in this book, but as an earlier review said, it is far too rambling and quite frankly poorly edited.

Take this example from p. 265:

"You can base a recordset on a SQL string only when creating recordsets based on a database object (as opposed to other uses of OpenRecordset, which can be based on tables, queries, or other recordsets). Attempting to do so will get you a run-time error."

OK, hold on here. First, aren't tables and queries database objects? And what's with "Attempting to do so will get you a run-time error"? They just told us we CAN do this in the previous sentence.

I know, I know, if you're familiar enough with the topic you can decipher all this gibberish, but a reader shouldn't have to do that. That why we turn to these books, to make things clearer, not muddier.

Much of the book suffers from these spaghetti-like paragraphs and bad editing.

A rambling style keeps this book from getting my highest praise; otherwise, I find the material to be clearly explained and "step-by-step" enough to facilitate do-it-yourself work

I had one evening to learn what Data Access Objects were and implement them in a project I was working on. I had tried previously to learn about them unsuccessfully. This book was my last chance. The information clicked for me. It took me no time at all to bang out the code I needed. Understanding higher level material is not easy. One author's way of writing may not make sense to you while another author's explanation will. This books works for me.

The use of language is intoxicating, like inhaling the fumes of paint thinner. The best of this collection reminds me of Stevens. In fact, some of it is Stevens, just slightly off. As if someone had taken a fuzzy polaroid of a pond and hung it in a gallery--yes, in some ways it resembles a Monet, but in many ways it does not. I liked that this book was being called poetry. It'll mystify your friends who try to read it as if it's poetry. That's why I give it a star.

...or very perceptive. Such as the reviewer below who gave Mr. O'Brien's book such a thrashing. Yes, we are all entitled to our own point of view. Yes, the dustwrap on the book says that O'Brien is influenced by Stevens. No, his poems aren't incomprehensible. Yes, they require effort (goodness forbid). One might keep in mind that sometimes when book and reader's head meet, it isn't the book that is lacking. Give Guns and Flags the time it warrants and never, read reviews.

Unique concept, but is that all there is? I read it in Borders bookstore in 20 minutes!!! Additionally, the book is supposed to be celebrating the sleeze era of Times Square, yet it seems to be more interested in generating a noir movie myth than looking at the reality.

The Amazon.com description is accurate. The writing is on the mark and reads like every detective novel you ever read combined with a be-bop rythym of New York as it really was. Beautifully designed and thoughtfully paced, this is a perfect marriage of word, image and design. The most original book I've seen in years. You simply can't put it down.