It is difficult to understand why the three major works of Mr. Osborn are out of print, or for that matter, why there are not more books from this fine author. Mr. Osborn's work should be required reading for anyone even remotely thinking of going to law school.

"Parents' Guide" offers parents an excellent resource for developing the spiritual life of our children. As a pastor and father, I'm glad for Trent & Osborne's research. If the foundation of a healthy society is found in the home, then the foundation of a healthy home is found in our spiritual life with God through Jesus Christ. For another book on Christian spiritual parenting, look into the recently published book, THE FAMILY CLOISTER: BENEDICTINE WISDOM FOR THE HOME, by David Robinson (New York, NY: Crossroad, 2000; 192pp., trade paperback). God bless you in your holy calling of raising spiritual children!

As a historian of the abolitionist period, and the raid at Harpers Ferry in particular, I strongly recommend the work of Osborn Perry Anderson. His work is the only surviving manuscript which gives the story from the perspective of the men who fought against slavery with John Brown -- not the confederacy or other biased versions. Anderson was also an African American, and thus further adds a missing perspective. I find it unacceptable to buy into the "academic" establishment's version of history in this regard, that Anderson, an African American, does not carry equal weight with the white writers of the time. If we acknowledge that racism was a bias in historical accounts, then Osborn Perry Anderson's account shares what it meant without the racist distortions, as he was part of a multiracial movement for emancipation. While the text covers some aspects of raid that may embarass some, the truth needs to be told. It should also be noted that Osborn Perry Anderson him self was given the special Sword that belonged to President George Washington, as one who would uplift the new nation of justice. Brown recognized him as a leader, and his leadership was well proven in his ability to escape at the end of the battle, and seek refuge in Canada. He saved the day with a more objective account, which was edited by Mary Shadd, and published in 1861. He seems to avoid mention of some details to protect comrades working against slavery, and their families. Finally, the book helps us to reflect on where we need to go from here, in order to achieve justice and equality. It is a great inspirational and yet factual book. It is excellent and highly recommended!

News Of The Great World. Oh believe it. To lay all these ghosts, the pond scum all above us. Halbgötterdämmerung. A British Braverman whose protagonist isn't dead but seated on plush red velvet. Probably the play of the fin de siècle.

This book is great. Jimmy Porter is a very complex character. By the end of the first act you will still be asking why his wife would want to be with him. Sensational!

You'll never meet a more unique character than Jimmy Porter, a 20-something British Archie Bunker. He's filled with rage at the absence of ... something ... and spews forth venom, sarcasm and utter misery relentlessly. Sounds horrible, right? Well, it's fascinating. I couldn't put it down, and I'd like to see the current revival of the play in NYC. I've seen a few people like Jimmy Porter, people who have so much potential, energy and creativity, yet for one reason or another it's all squandered. They fail to surround themselves with people of equal passion, and the result is that they hurt the ones around them, who are more at peace with themselves. The question is, how does someone so young get this way?

This play is one of the greatest of the 1900's. I've worked with the play for about three years (both as an actor and director) and I never get tired of it. Although Jimmy is a very difficult role, it is very rewarding to work with him and the other characters. It has actually changed my life! For the better!

It is just okay.

Being a big fan of the film version of The Paper Chase I was kind of expecting a 1940's book that would flesh out the character of Ford and add some depth to the story but what arrived from Amazon was copyright 1978 and had references to mini skirts, getting high, and a quote about Vietnam War protests.

I enjoyed reading it but it was not nearly as good as the movie. It didn't much new plot developments; maybe 15% of the book consists of new things that are not in the film version of The Paper Chase. For example Hart and Ford are at a diner when a guy runs in, snatches a hamburger from the plate of the people next to them at the counter, runs outside and stands there banging on the window and giving them "the finger". Hart, curious, goes out to talk to the fellow and ends up in a fistfight. One benefit was you could be inside Hart's head and know what he was thinking. Susan is much colder to Hart in the book too.

The movie was a masterpiece. The book (at least the 1978 edition that arrived at my house) will only satisfy true fans of the film, desperate, perhaps, to wring a few more drops out of this great story in the manner that a fan of Star Wars might read "A Splinter In the Mind's Eye" (featuring Luke Skywalker as a character).

I know my hometown library lists, in their online catalog, a 1940 edition of the Paper Chase so surely there's an older version floating around. The one I got from Amazon, with it's references to the 1960's, seems like a modern rewrite of the novel, made expressly for fans of the movie.

It's a good book. "...law is rational, people are not." Without getting into the experience of the tradition, one would never know how much fun is to become part of it. One would only know "...how difficult is to extent the tradition." Enjoy!

The TV series based on this book was well done and I would very much like to read the book itself. Being a retired legal secretary, the series depicted many events in the life of a law student, as told to me by attorneys for whom I worked.

Though it's rather slow to get going in the initial chapters, Oscar Wilde's "Picture of Dorian Gray" builds up into a splendidly effective piece, written in highly polished prose. Dorian Gray, who is suggestively described as "charming" and "beautiful" ... is painted by his friend and admirer, Basil Hallward. Dorian, a self-centered social luminary whose character is reminiscent of Narcissus, makes a bizarre sub-Faustian wish which tragically comes true: that his beautiful portrait may age, while he retains his youthful looks. The conclusion is disastrous, the culmination of a narrative containing elements of murder, suicide, blackmail, a confrontation in a grimy alley and an episode in an opium den. The characters are very well sketched out, particularly the triad of Dorian, Basil and the intellectual cynic, Lord Henry, Dorian's mentor and the mouthpiece of some of Wilde's most cutting amoral opinions. The style is, typically, marvellous, characterised by brilliant exchanges and aphoristic gaiety. Wilde lacerates English bourgeois culture, the conceptions of sin and virtue and the attitudes towards art of his time with tremendous aplomb. Some of his quips are patently snide, sometimes mysogynistic, as in: "Woman represents the triumph of matter over mind, while man represents the triumph of mind over morals." Oh, isn't that just despicable?! I love it!

Oscar Wilde is a man who is obsessed by appearances. In this particular novel, he follows from the moment Dorian Gray sells his soul to the devil named beauty and youth, pleasure and enjoyment, to his death and he describes how someone who looks perfect, perfectly young, intelligent, brilliant, beautiful, moral and healthy is in fact nothing but a monster decaying in all possible immoral actions, deeds and ways just under the surface. It is a very strong criticism of victorian society that considers appearances as more important than real ethics and morality. He exposes the hypocrisy of such a society where a whole class of people are nothing but perambulating pictures of perfection hiding the mire and mud of crime and evil. We can also feel another dilemma in this book. Oscar Wilde's own dilemma who has to keep up appearances, the appearances of a well behaved, well educated and perfectly integrated man in this aristocratic society of his, and who yet lives a passion and a whole basket of desires and impulses that are absolutely rejected as crimes by victorian society. We know he will not be able to hide this deeper nature forever. But the book shows that no one can evade one's being exposed and rejected, condemned and sentenced to some punishment forever. There always comes a moment when one will be exposed and rejected. This shows how deeply Oscar Wilde must have suffered in his life. The painting is nothing but a mirror of the deeper self of Dorian Gray, but a mirror who will become one day his accuser.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University of Perpignan.

The Picture of Dorian Gray, a story of morals, psychology and poetic justice, has furnished Oscar Wilde with the status of a classical writer. It takes place in 19th-century England, and tells of a man in the bloom of his youth who will remain forever young.

Basil Hallward is a merely average painter until he meets Dorian Gray and becomes his friend. But Dorian, who is blessed with an angelic beauty, inspires Hallward to create his ultimate masterpiece. Awed by the perfection of this rendering, he utters the wish to be able to retain the good looks of his youth while the picture were the one to deteriorate with age. But when Dorian discovers the painting cruelly altered and realizes that his wish has been fulfilled, he ponders changing his hedonistic approach.

Dorian Gray's sharp social criticism has provoked audible controversy and protest upon the book's 1890 publication, and only years later was it to rise to classical status. Written in the style of a Greek tragedy, it is popularly interpreted as an analogy to Wilde's own tragic life. Despite this, the book is laced with the right amounts of the author's perpetual jaunty wit.

If you're looking for an easy reading abridgement of the Institutes, this is an excellent choice. I enjoyed getting an overview of Calvin's work during devotions and before bed without having to think too hard about "translating the translation" which is so often the case with older translations. The fact of the matter is that there are other abridgements that may do the trick also, but this one does just fine for me. I'll read it again and again. So, if you want a overview of Calvin's Institutes without having to deal with the "intricate" details, think about this one... if you want an exhaustive history/biography of his life and works, obviously this won't do it for you.

This book is an abridgement of Calvin's much larger "Institutes." Tony Lane has paraphrased sections of Battles' translation into crisper, more idiomatic English so as to make Calvin's writing accessible to the contemporary reader. I first read this book as a 16 year old and I found no difficulty in understanding it! The guiding principle of Lane's abridgement is that Calvin's positive theological statements and arguments are, more or less, left in tact, while the (sometimes vindictive) polemics that Calvin indulged in are removed. I personally like this feature, because it enables one to see more clearly how edifying and pastoral Calvin's theology is. Calvin's extensive polemics, in this respect, can have the influence of making the modern reader lose sight of this. Lane follows the standard referencing system for the "Institutes" used in the Battles' translation. This is extremely useful, because when Lane indicates that he has abridged Calvin in a certain chapter or section, one can then go to the Battles' version to see what he has left out! Lane gives the reader enough of the "Institutes" so that one can grasp the flow of Calvin's arguments and penetrate to the centre of his theology. After reading this, I got the impression that I hadn't read a disjointed series of abstracts but a COHERENT arguement. It's Lane's ability to maintain the structure of Calvin's overall argument that makes this abridgement especially good. This book serves as an excellent entry into Calvin for the general (or busy) reader. It's short enough so that the attention span is not strained. As a text for a seminary or college course on Calvin's theology, it's a book that students could realistically read through in a semester. This book, taken together with the abridgements of many of Calvin's commentaries in the Crossway Classic Commentaries series, would provide an accessible (and relatively comprehensive) grasp of Calvin's theology and exegesis for the interested pastor or layperson.

This is the hard core of the much longer Institutes. The translation of the title is slightly different than the Ford Lewis Battles full-bore 2-Vol. set, which goes by "Institutes of The Christian Religion." Perhaps that's refreshing for hard-core students of the Battles version.

I was describing this abridgement to a friend as "pretty much the core of the 15% to 20% of what's left of the Insitutes when when you cut out all Calvin's footnotes ranting against the Catholics and accusing his foes of being dogs returning to their vomit." The friend's reply: "But those are the best parts." However, for those readers who would be put off by the hand-to-hand combat found in Calvin's profusion of footnotes (or more properly, in Dr. Battles's vast multiplication of explanatory footnotes), this volume is helpful. Here we have simply Calvin cut loose from his scholastic bickering conflicts.

It only seems less Calvinistic to read through this so easily.

Having read A better Class of Person, of course I had to buy Almost a Gentleman. This picks up the story of John Osborne's life from 1955 and continues through 1966. The book was written a couple of years before Osborne's death in 1993, and he may or may not have planned to write a concluding volume. The writing is very good, although the subject matter may pall at times for someone who wasn't in England during the "Ban the Bomb" years. Osborne's love life is a different story, and gives the lie to all the tales of the sexually repressed Englishman. He flits from one wife to another with no satisfactory explanation other than "things weren't going too well": evidently he was sexually attracted to the next one and simply dumped the previous one. As Dr. Johnson said, "a triumph of hope over experience". He has little bad to say about his former wives, other than some amusing sarcasm for Penelope Gilliat, until we reach a postscript. This consists of some of the richest vituperation in literature, directed at Jill Bennett. It's the work of a cad, of course, as it was written on the occasion of Ms. Bennett's death, but it's nonetheless a gem.

John Osborne was among the first of the generation of "angry young men" to reach fame as a playwright in the 1950's. The title of the first part of his autobiography reflects the petty snobbery and attitudes prevalent of England before and after the second world war. This is a thoroughly readable book about a highly intelligent young man growing up in a dysfunctional, working-class family. There are many gems of descriptive writing, such as his description of his boyhood friend, Mickey Walls and the excerpt from his book about Max Miller. There is also a vivid evocation of life on tour with seedy theatrical companies and staying in "digs". The references to characters mentioned earlier become confusing after a while, but the book rarely palls.