Hopcke and Carrington have edited a groundbreaking collection of articles exploring the vicissitudes of same sex love. This book dares to listen to marginalized voices, and presents this subject with subtle and poetic mastery. Anyone who has ever loved passionately with all their many selves will enjoy this book.

I did a web search on Barbour Publishing and this was the first result page.

I really liked this book, how could i not? It's Shakespeare. I liked Twelfth Night also because it doesn't end with happiness and laughter like most comedies, it ends with the fool's sad song. very good.

Machado de Assis used to publish his books weekly on newspapers abou a hundred years ago. His literary work is one of the best in Portuguese language - that he mastered as few did. Besides the perfect use of language, Machado is famous for the psicological insights on his characters. With these characteristics, Machado published "O Memorial de Aires" (Aires Journal) periodically and reached two levels of readers: those that were interested in an easy-reading story, with love affairs depicted in a simple plot, and those who wanted more than that - those who were seraching for the dephtness of human relationship and behavior. Along with that, his books bring a colourful image of Rio de Janeiro (and Brazil) of the XIX century. Not only captivating, his books are entertainig and delicious. Soap-operas, nowadays, would be as good as his books - if they had that second level only Machado could reach

This guide is a great companion for anyone seeking unique and clever discoveries in the mid-atlantic region. The book dives into nature, history, unique facts and unknown charms that most travel guides hardly touch.

This is the ultimate reference tool for the IT Professional required to work with NT Server. It covers the trickiest issues, and gives you simple solution options. A must have!

Robert the Bruce finished the job William Wallace started. There is a detailed and interesting account of the Battle of Bannock Burn, June 1314. The conflicting nuances of Scottish and English relationships are also set forth. A good book to have for gaining an understanding of Scot history.

Ronald McNair Scott in this work has given us a fast paced easy to read account of one of the greatest military leaders in history. Robert the Bruce is not always appreciated in America because he lacks the Hollywood image that Mel Gibson has lent to William Wallace. Wallace was no doubt a great hero of Scotland but it was Bruce who not only defeated the English but posed a very real threat to actually annex English territory.

Scott does have a tendency to state as fact that which is only theory or an educated guess but given the state of affairs in 13th and 14th century Scotland any other tact would have led to a huge and hard to read tome that would have added little to the general understanding of Bruce. By deciding to write in this style Scott brings this great hero of Scotland to life for the reader and lets us see the greatness that was Robert The Bruce.

Bruce's early decisions during the Wallace wars are explained by Scottish politics. Bruce's grandfather had laid claim to the Scottish throne but Edward I decided in favor of John Balliol, Lord of Galloway. Wallace always fought in the name of King John making it very hard for any of the Bruce faction to lend their full support to the cause. Once he established himself as King, Bruce faced the same problem from the Balliol faction. This divided state of affairs could very well have doomed Scotland had not Bruce taken action. He began with an action that seems to have haunted him for the rest of his life when he struck down the "Red" Comyn on the alter of Greyfriars church. Slowly the rest of the Balliol faction was subdued until Bruce was the unchallenged King of Scots.

Scott manages to go into some detail of Bruce's battles with the English without getting the reader lost. In fact, I was able to clearly understand what happened and as I was reading these accounts I could almost see what was going on. Scott's ability to describe events with words is his greatest asset. One feels as if he is actually there side by side with The Bruce.

This book is not the deep study of Robert The Bruce that some people may be looking for. It is however a good place for any reader to begin to understand the history of Scotland. After reading this book anyone who wishes to dig deeper will be ready for the challange. For someone who is simply after a quick and easy to understand history of Robert The Bruce I doubt you will find a better source.

The recent Mel Gibson film, "Braveheart" inspired many, including myself, with a newfound appreciation for Medieval history in general and Scottish history in particular. While the story of Wallace is certainly captivating, the movie did not do justice to the real hero of the period, Robert the Bruce.

The Bruce's legacy, so vividly illustrated in the book, of tremendous courage, resilience, leadership, and compassion is inspiring to any reader. Particularly moving was the Bruce's repeated displays of grace to his defeated enemies and political opponents. How rare in history to see such compassion from a victor in battle!

I couldn't help but think that the story of Robert the Bruce, with his ultimate triumph of Scottich independence and peace for Scotland (relatively speaking) would have made for a great Hollywood movie - at least a sequel to "Braveheart." This has all the components of a great epic; heros, villains, love and romance, overcoming great odds to win ultimate victory, betrayal, international diplomacy, graphic battlefield scenes and individual combat vividly displayed that puts the reader alongside The Bruce at his "moments of truth".

Scott's use of quotes from the actual people involved makes for a time travel experience worth taking. Putting the story in historical persectives from his contemporaries (and the Bruce himself) makes the reader appreciate the social, political, and religious issues confronting Bruce throughout his life. Many times I found myself anxious for the outcome of Bruce's campaigns, or the latest feat of bravery from the "Black Douglas" and Bruce's loyal companions.

In short, a great book, not just from a historical perspective but from an engaging, vivid journey through the life of Robert the Bruce. I must caution the male reader, however, to use more discretion that I did in quoting some of the more graphic scenes to my wife - who wasn't able to appreciate the detail in the same way I did.

As an avid reader of The Onion, I found this book, a repackaging of old articles from the Onion, nothing special. A much larger, and much better, archive of old articles can be found by going to the website.

The only purpose of this book is to provide a quick follow-up on the heels of the highly successful "Our Dumb Century". However, where "Our Dumb Century" was tremendously thought out and very well executed satire, this slapdash affair of seemingly randomly chosen past articles is best left out of your bookcase. I was lured in by the possibilities of a new book by The Onion. You, however, need not make the same mistake. When satirists become the very same money-hungry media moguls they were put on earth to poke fun at, you can be pretty sure their humor is going to come out pretty stale.

This book is good for anybody who does not have access to a computer but enjoys ripping satire. I have no idea who those people would be but, if you are reading this, you are obviously not one of them. I recommend going to a bookstore, picking it off the shelf and paging through it. It won't take long to read the articles you enjoy. However, the chapter introductions by T. Herman Zweiber aside, you've read it all before.

If you're familiar with The Onion, you know what sort of mind-blowing, biting humor is in this book, and you know whether you like it or don't like it. If you're among the many who were given a copy of "Our Dumb Century" last holiday season, you have a pretty good idea of the absurdist social/cultural satire you can find in this book, and you might be interested in reading their take on more contemporary events. If you're looking for something that will make you laugh your head off, this book *might* be it.

I say "might be" because this book is not for the easily offended--there's course language and graphic sexual content that some may find objectionable. If that's not you, buy this book and, when you get it, go someplace where you can laugh out loud, because you certainly will, and I mean repeatedly.

Don't get me wrong--I'm not criticizing the content of the book. It's just not for the faint of heart, that's all.

Here's a review that is on the average star. If you don't read the Onion, consider this a five star review. If you do read The Onion it's a three star review. Why? It's just a bunch of rehashes of stories that were funny once, but don't hold up.

Also problematic are the editorials. They are amusing but they don't hit the laugh-out loud hilarity of the rest of the articles. The only consistantly funny part of the editorial portion are the "What do you think" which always hits the maddeningly inarticulate and useless statements of the "man on the street" interviews perfectly.

So buy it for someone that you know doesn't read The Onion, but if you want to read an Onion book, buy Our Dumb Century.

There are two important facts to remember about The Last Place on Earth. The first is that its author, Roland Huntford, comes to it with the clear agenda of debunking Scott and lionizing Amundsen. The second is that he has the benefit of more than fifty years of historical hindsight, which makes it easy for him to criticize Scott for apparent incompetence. He's also not above fabricating so-called "facts" if doing so helps him further his cause of tearing down the Scott legend (I'm thinking of his more or less unfounded allegations that Kathleen Scott had an affair with Nansen). The truth regarding Scott and Amundsen and their respective expeditions is naturally somewhat more complicated. The Last Place on Earth is not a bad book. It's not necessarily even bad history. But it is revisionist, and heavily skewed, written by a man with a clear agenda. If you want a more fair, balanced, and compassionate view, read Diana Preston's A First Rate Tragedy. Read the Scott chapters of Francis Spofford's I May Be Some Time. And read Scott's and Amundsen's own published records of the events. Because let's face it: nobody knows what really happened better than the men to whom it actually happened. And they left their own perfectly adequate accounts.

This book is a fascinating combination of detailed analysis of the two men, Scott and Amundsen and the wildly different tactics used to reach the Southernmost point on Earth. Although certain sections of the book drag with perhaps too much in-depth analysis (such as a detailed discussion of Amundsen's housekeeper's influence on his life) it moves along well overall.

The final days of Scott's party are laid out in a plain and factual way, but the terror that must have crept over them when they finally realized that there was no way they could reach their main base alive comes through remarkably well. You begin to feel the deep chill of the Antarctic wind and the crushing disappointment when a food depot is missed.

In contrast, the absolute ease of Amundsen's journey is shocking. His men used dogs to pull their sledges to the pole and then killed the weaker dogs on the return trip to feed the remaining team. Detailed planning for the journey, including learning to live in high latitudes from the experts, the Inuit, led to his success. Their skis carried them upwards of 20 miles per day with ease, despite the harsh environment. The team literally had a holiday while "boxing" the pole with flags during the several days used to confirm their position and ensure their place in history.

The pictures reproduced in the book do a good job of filling in the stark images the text roughs out for the reader. The amount of research required to produce this book is simply overwhelming and it should be considered the definitive text on this last great geographic race.

That is the theme of this gripping recreation/analysis of the great Scott/Amundson race to the South Pole. For decades Scott's fatal trek bestowed a posthumous immortality on him, while Amundson became a footnote, even though he was the winner. This book corrects this historical misjudgment. Basically Huntford states that Scott deserved to die--this is not his personal verdict but the verdict that the Pole itself cast upon Scott. He was poorly organized, his plans were vague,he was rigid in his views--he learned nothing from his first visit nor from the memoirs of those who also had made the visit, he was a poor leader of men and highly self-defensive. While Amundsen planned his campaign like Hitchcock made one of his movies: the whole thing was fully conceptualized in his mind down to the smallest detail before the first frame was taken; the journey itself was simply the materialization of the mind's idea. It is hard to feel much sympathy for Scott, and the author perhaps lets his disgust at his incompetence and the waste of life it caused color his presentation, but so well argued is this book that Scott is unlikely to rise again from the ashes Huntford has made of his reputation. This book is a classic, resurrecting one reputation and burying another, full of shrewd insights on men, leadership, climate and struggle. And it is a gripping, compelling page-turner to boot.

If you are looking for tragedy and a dark bloody drama then I recommend Macbeth with no reservations whatsoever. On a scale of 1-5, I fell this book deserves a 4.5. Written by the greatest literary figure of all time, Shakespeare mesmorizes the reader with suspense and irony. The Scottish Thane Macbeth is approachd by three witches who attempt and succeed at paying with his head. They tell him he will become king, which he does, alog with the aide of his ambitious wife. Macbeth's honor and integrity is destroyed with the deceit and murders he commits. As the novel progresses, Macbeth's conscience tortures him and makes him weak minded. Clearly the saying "what goes around comes around," is put to use since Macbeth's doom was similar to how he acquired his status of kingship. He kills Duncan, the king of Scottland and chops the head off the Thane of Cawdor, therefore the Thane of Fife, Macduff, does the same thing to him. I feel anyone who decides to read this extraordinary book will not be disatisfied and find himself to become an audience to Shakespearean tragedies.

William Shakespeare's tragedies are universal. We know that the tragedy will be chalk-full of blood, murder, vengeance, madness and human frailty. It is, in fact, the uncorrectable flaws of the hero that bring his death or demise. Usually, the hero's better nature is wickedly corrupted. That was the case in Hamlet, whose desire to avenge his father's death consumed him to the point of no return and ended disastrously in the deaths of nearly all the main characters. At the end of Richard III, all the characters are lying dead on the stage. In King Lear, the once wise, effective ruler goes insane through the manipulations of his younger family members. But there is something deeply dark and disturbing about Shakespeare's darkest drama- Macbeth. It is, without a question, Gothic drama. The supernatural mingles as if everyday occurence with the lives of the people, the weather is foul, the landscape is eerie and haunting, the castles are cold and the dungeons pitch-black. And then there are the three witches, who are always by a cauldron and worship the nocturnal goddess Hecate. It is these three witches who prophetize a crown on the head of Macbeth. Driven by the prophecy, and spurred on by the ambitious, egotistic and Machiavellian Lady Macbeth (Shakespeare's strongest female character), Macbeth murders the king Duncan and assumes the throne of Scotland. The roles of Macbeth and Lady Macbeth are tour de force performances for virtuosic actors. A wicked couple, a power-hungry couple, albeit a regal, intellectual pair, who can be taken into any form- Mafia lord and Mafia princess, for example, as in the case of a recent movie with a modern re-telling of Macbeth.

Nothing and no one intimidates Macbeth. He murders all who oppose him, including Banquo, who had been a close friend. But the witches predict doom, for Macbeth, there will be no heirs and his authority over Scotland will come to an end. Slowly as the play progresses, we discover that Macbeth's time is running up. True to the classic stylings of Shakespeare tragedy, Lady Macbeth goes insane, sleepwalking at night and ranting about bloodstained hands. For Macbeth, the honor of being a king comes with a price for his murder. He sees Banquo's ghost at a dinner and breaks down in hysteria in front of his guests, he associates with three witches who broil "eye of newt and tongue of worm", and who conjure ghotsly images among them of a bloody child. Macbeth is Shakespeare's darkest drama, tinged with foreboding, mystery and Gothic suspense. But, nevertheless, it is full of great lines, among them the soliloquy of Macbeth, "Out, out, brief candle" in which he contemplates the brevity of human life, confronting his own mortality. Macbeth has been made into films, the most striking being Roman Polansky's horrific, gruesome, R-rated movie in which Lady Macbeth sleepwalks in the nude and the three witches are dried-up, grey-haired naked women, and Macbeth's head is devilishly beheaded and stuck at the end of a pole. But even more striking in the film is that at the end, the victor, Malcolm, who has defeated Macbeth, sees the witches for advise. This says something: the cycle of murder and violenc will begin again, which is what Macbeth's grim drama seems to be saying about powerhungry men who stop at nothing to get what they want.

While I was basically familiar with Shakespeare's Tragedy of Macbeth, I have only recently actually read the bard's brilliant play. The drama is quite dark and moody, but this atmosphere serves Shakespeare's purposes well. In Macbeth, we delve deeply into the heart of a true fiend, a man who would betray the king, who showers honors upon him, in a vainglorious snatch at power. Yet Macbeth is not 100% evil, nor is he a truly brave soul. He waxes and wanes over the execution of his nefarious plans, and he thereafter finds himself haunted by the blood on his own hands and by the ethereal spirits of the innocent men he has had murdered. On his own, Macbeth is much too cowardly to act so traitorously to his kind and his country. The source of true evil in these pages is the cold and calculating Lady Macbeth; it is she who plots the ultimate betrayal, forcefully pushes her husband to perform the dreadful acts, and cleans up after him when he loses his nerve. This extraordinary woman is the lynchpin of man's eternal fascination with this drama. I find her behavior a little hard to account for in the closing act, but she looms over every single male character we meet here, be he king, loyalist, nobleman, courtier, or soldier. Lady Macbeth is one of the most complicated, fascinating, unforgettable female characters in all of literature.

The plot does not seem to move along as well as Shakespeare's other most popular dramas, but I believe this is a result of the writer's intense focus on the human heart rather than the secondary activity that surrounds the related royal events. It is fascinating if sometimes rather disjointed reading. One problem I had with this play in particular was one of keeping up with each of the many characters that appear in the tale; the English of Shakespeare's time makes it difficult for me to form lasting impressions of the secondary characters, of whom there are many. Overall, though, Macbeth has just about everything a great drama needs: evil deeds, betrayal, murder, fighting, ghosts, omens, cowardice, heroism, love, and, as a delightful bonus, mysterious witches. Very many of Shakespeare's more famous quotes are also to be found in these pages, making it an important cultural resource for literary types. The play doesn't grab your attention and absorb you into its world the way Hamlet or Romeo and Juliet does, but this voyage deep into the heart of evil, jealousy, selfishness, and pride forces you to consider the state of your own deep-seated wishes and dreams, and for that reason there are as many interpretations of the essence of the tragedy as there are readers of this Shakespearean masterpiece. No man's fall can rival that of Macbeth's, and there is a great object lesson to be found in this drama. You cannot analyze Macbeth without analyzing yourself to some degree, and that goes a long way toward accounting for the Tragedy of Macbeth's literary importance and longevity.