As a child I remember growing up in Las Vegas, knowing the real truth behind som eof the more notorious figures in town. I remember finding a copy of Green Felt and was enthralled by the truth as I knew it. I grew up in the casino business and some of the people mentioned in the book were like family (remember until recently Las Vegas was truly a small town). If only someone would produce this into a "A" movie. With the interest in "mobs" and "gangsters" I feel the public would love it, if done right. Of course as with the movie Casino, the political leaders would dismiss its authenticity and publicly deny anything ever happened. I highly recommend this book to those interested in how the casino industry gre in Las Vegas, its roots, its founders and how it got where its at today ......

I recommend this interesting book for everyone who is intersted in the "classical Greek & Roman world". However, I prefer to read it in the original Greek texts. And if you don't read the ancient Greek language well, I suggest you to read a volume(no.225) of the Loeb Classical Library.

This is one of the most extraordinary books I have ever read. Ransmayr received the highest european literature price for the "Last World" together with Salman Rushdie in 1992. Fiction and reality come together. The borders between the past and the present do not count any more in his world. To imagine how Ovids life at the Black Sea must have been, to read this beautiful dark and poetic language, to come into the world of roman and greek mythologie, that is the wonder that Ransmayr did with his story. He is a wonderful storyteller but as the book was forbidden to be published in Romania before 1989, it shows that there is more "between" the lines. All his other books are very recommandable too.

This is truly a fantastic book, and one which is a joy to read no matter what your level of proficiency with Latin is (though you should have the basics down first, i.e., first-year college Latin or the equivalent). Dr. Lafleur gives you the ultimate in easy-to-use formats: it has running vocabulary and notes on the opposite page from the Latin as well as underneathe it. It also has a Latin glossary in the back, thus making it very, very easy to use. The notes include great comments on grammar, sytlistic points, and rhetorical figures as well as on the sound of the Latin poetry itself (Dr. Lafleur really wants you to pay attention to the auricular beauty of the poetry). This is truly the way Latin texts ought to be taught to students. Too often teachers give students editions of Latin texts without any vocabulary and very little commentary and then wonder why kids lose interest and/or cannot get very far. A possible--and sad--outgrowth of this seems to be that some teachers include a lot of "Latin in translation" in their Latin classes, perhaps out of frustration with students not being able to read enough during the semester? Well, whatever the reason, that wouldn't be necessary if we had more editions like this one. Quite simply, rather than sitting there with grammar books and dictionaries and notes lieing on your desk trying to pick through a Latin text like a mathematical problem (the horror!), you can just lie back with this edition and enjoy Ovid in the original, leaving the translation to the vulgar!

I read this book as a part of a review of Roman Literature. I have to say, of almost all I have, Ovid's "The Art Of Love" gives the most insight into life in ancient Rome. It is also extremely funny, with jokes that still make you laugh after all these years. Of course the advice given is hardly usable today, but it is so well written, it deserves to be read by anyone interested in the art of love.

Ovid may be the perfect poet for this type of treatment (a collection of selections from his works in English translation by [give or take a few] 75 translators ranging from Arthur Golding - who inspired Shakespeare - to Rolfe Humphries [the translator probably seen most frequently on the shelves of bookstores and used bookstores in recent decades, and who's work is highly regarded by the editors of this volume...) The ability to draw out separate stories (from the Metamorphoses) or speeches, etc. from his other works allowed the editors to present each translator in a more or less complete extract... (I was going to include selected lines from some of the translations I found charming, but they lose too much out of context...but if you're interested in lyric poetry - Elizabethan on up (though there are selections from before that) - it's a very enjoyable read...) Each of the translators has a little something written about him as-well-as having his work sort of rated in relation to all his peers over time... These intro's are as interesting to read as the selections themselves. This is a wonderful book if you have an interest in Ovid as well as a desire to read, say, Francis Beaumont's translation of Salmacis and Hermaphroditus from the Metamophoses or a Henry Fielding translation from the Art of Love... (There are 32 pages of selections from the hard-to-find Golding translation alone...)

Just in time for Valentine's Day comes the timeless gift of Ovid's handbook on love. The ways of man and maid have not changed in the intervening two millennia, and Guy Lee makes that clear with this light, witty, and appropriately naughty version of these love poems. And his loyalty to the original Latin is beyond reproach. As the translator of Ovid's Heroides (Dutton, 1972), I can attest to the difficulty of the task, but Lee carries it off without apparent effort. The illustrations add a vivacious charm and remind the reader that these poems are classics in both the popular and the traditional sense of the term. If you haven't time to brush up your Latin, or you never had any, this book is the answer!

Horace Gregory's Ovid has been my Ovid since high school in the fifties. I'm on my third or fourth paperback copy, and the one I'm using now is held together by shipping tape in place of a spine. In my view no English translator of Ovid since the days of Golding and Marlowe has been half the poet Gregory is. His may not be the most accurate version for minutae, but it's sheer, transfixing poetry from end to end, fully living up to the Romans' own term for epic--perpetuum carmen, or "unending song." Here's a taste. Jove has just decided to end the world with a flood (partly because he fears the potency of his own thunderbolts):

...Auster he released, its dark

Wings over earth, the Nubian darkness

Deeper than midnight, beard and long grey hair

In fall of rain, black forehead in wild clouds,

Its great clapping hands thunder in the dark.

Gregory's Medea grows wicked before your eyes. His Perseus is as clueless as Dudley DoRight. He makes a rousing, enveloping success of the battle of the centaurs and Lapiths, punctuated with the story of the utterly charming centaur filly Hylonome:

Twice a day she washed her face and hands

In a bright waterfall that dropped from high green places

Above Pagasa, then for further beauty

(And twice a day) she bathed in that same water.

She had fine taste in dress, and draped a shoulder

Or a pointed breast with ermine, mink or fox.

Gregory's Ovid can be mildly or uproariously funny, or utterly romantic. Here's Pygmalion, wonderstruck as his beloved statue comes alive. Surely Ovid's and maybe Gregory's feelings about their art are involved here as well:

[He} kissed the sleeping lips, now soft, now warm,

Then touched her breasts and cupped them in his hands;

They were as though ivory had turned to wax

And wax to life, yielding, yet quick with breath.

Pygmalion, half-dazed, lost in his raptures,

And half in doubt, afraid his senses failed him,

Touched her again and felt his hopes come true,

The pulse-beat stirring where he moved his hands.

Then, as if words could never say enough,

He poured a flood of praise to smiling Venus.

He kissed the girl until she woke beneath him.

Her eyes were shy; she flushed; yet her first look

Saw at one glance his face and Heaven above it.

This is not just my favorite translation of the Metamorphoses. It's one of my favorite translations of anything, a great poem in its own right. Buy it.

The top writer in one of the most powerful empires the world has ever known was mysteriously banished from the capital city by the mighty emperor Augustus himself for scandalous reasons ordered to be kept secret by Augustus and still secret to this day. This wonderful book contains the voice of this great exiled poet as he laments and expresses his personal feelings on his fate, never revealing the "secret", but offering us tantalizing clues as if he longs for someone someday to discover the forbidden truth of the Emperor's wrath. These two works, "Tristia," and "Letters from the Black Sea," have been largely ignored through the ages, left standing in the shadows of the famous "Metamorphoses" and Ovid's love poems. For those who wish to read the personal poetry, the "diary," of an exiled poet, this book is an absolute treasure. After reading this book, the reader can not help but feel as if he or she has now come to know Ovid on a friendly, intimate level. This book is a must for the serious lover of great literature.

I have been taking an intensive second year latin course, and we have used quite a few book during the class. This is by far the best for enabling you to learn to read latin that hasn't been made up specifically for students.

Each page contains 4-8 lines of latin, which are numbered every 5 lines. This takes about a third of the page. The rest of each page is left for extensive notes on the latin. The notes include unusual vocabulary, historical notes, translation of unusual phrases, and explainations of constructs used. For example it points out instances of chiasmus, which are arrangments of words in an ABBA pattern. This kind of thing is very useful because it allows you to get used to the unusual but regular word ordering that is found in latin poetry. One other thing I especially liked about the notes is that they always gave a full dictionary entry when saying what a word means (so you can then determine by the morphology what role the word is playing).

The book also has several other sections. First is a question and answers section which is a good place to check when anything is confusing you. It will point show what selected words and clauses are doing in a sentance, what they're modifying, disambiguate cases, etc. There are sections on different uses and terms related to meter, as well as figures of speech common in poetry. The final feature is one of the most useful....a dictionary with every single word used throughout the book. It is much faster to look a word up here rather than in a complete dictionary, and it provides the meaning that is most likely to be used in the context of the poems.

Overall, this is a great book.