I've been gaining a greater appreciation for classical music over the last year or two, so this book could not have come at a better time for me. I first heard of Tim Page back in September, when I heard his 1982 Glenn Gould interview on the bonus disc of the new "State of Wonder" CD, which brings together Gould's 1955 and 1981 recordings of Bach's "Goldberg Variations." While that interview sounded a bit awkward and overly pre-planned, it did reveal some wonderful things about Gould the performer and music fan. I decided to find out more about Mr. Page.

This book is what I discovered, and boy am I glad I did. I covers a variety of writings by Page, mostly about classical music, some of them essays, some concert reviews. I loved his chapter on Sibelius -- it made me drag out my hardly-ever-played copy of Symphony #4 and gain a huge appreciation for it. His chapter on Messiaen made me a Messiaen fan. His article on Kevin Oldham, the composer who contracted AIDS, was deeply moving. He may not have won any conservative classical fans with his candid observations about Vladimir Horowitz, but I for one appreciated the dissenting view. I loved the chapter "Radical Music That Will Remain That Way." With all the corny how-to guides to "accessible" classical music, it was nice to see somebody write about the hard stuff.

Page doesn't stop with just classical music. He also expresses a love for rock music, albeit the more daring and exciting of the genre. He writes about Captain Beefheart, Magnetic Fields, Frank Sinatra and the High Llamas, among others. In his mind (as it should be), non-classical music shouldn't be looked down on by classical fans -- unless it's the paint-by-numbers stuff that you hear so much on the radio. Page acknowledges true originals, regardless of their musical leanings.

I could go on and on. There's so much about this book to love. Anyone with a budding interest in classical music who would like to expand their horizons would gain much from reading this book.

Thank you, Tim Page.

Kapell's brief life and piano career are amply illustrated by documentary material, from his elementary school report card to contemporary reviews of performances. There is even a handwritten letter from his famous teacher, Olga Samaroff, filled with wise advice. The International Piano Archives and Tim Page deserve kudos for compiling this material.

After reading the Tiina Nunnally translations of Undset's Gunnar's Daughter, and Kristin Lavransdatter (all 3 vol.), I was more than hooked on Undset, I was obsessed. I ordered Jenny from the library and loved the immediacy and complete contemporariness of the book. I know contemporariness is not a word but heck, I can't think of the correct term. Sigrid Undset is a solid writer-- her characters are complex, intelligent, dynamic and they face interesting ethical and moral quetions. I give Gunnar's Daughter and Krisin Lavransdatter (which is an amazing trilogy) 5 stars. Jenny did not have the hefty power of these two (read the introductions!) but it is a very enjoyable story.

I have recently bought "The Unknown Sigrid Undset: Jenny and Other Works" published by Steerforth Press. This volume is the most carefully edited omnibus I have ever seen. It's clear that book lovers have done their work here, people who put love for books above everything else, including strictly commercial motivations. "Jenny" was out of print for what - 70 years? Perhaps more. The old translation from the 1920s apparently utilized the archaic English language, and thus Undset herself had decided to take it out of the circulation. You can also find an online interview with the translator, Tiina Nunnally, who translated it anew, and learn how difficult it is to bring old Scandinavian novels back to life, so that they are accessible to the XXI century reader, and yet do not lose anything of its original charm and style. It is a noble deed, really, in this day and age - to reprint the pearls of literature and in such careful way at that.

"Jenny" is a story of a young Norwegian lady, a painter and a spinster, who remained in that state despite the fact that she was both physically attractive, and very well liked, a young persona whose companionship was sought by her peers. A small group of artistically gifted young Scandinavian people spends their summers in Rome before World War I, to remain there for a long time, only occasionally coming back to the native soil. Her observations, the observations of a young traveling woman, are full of wisdom, full of realism so much unlike the sentimental, eerie otherworldliness and nonchalance of the contemporary characters, for you have to remember that "Jenny" was written in 1911, when the effects of the decadent new wave in literature and culture were still strong.

At moments I am reminded of the atmosphere in Maugham's "Of Human Bondage", the parts where Philip enters the bohemian world of the painters during his venture as an art student, but it's only a distant recollection, because Undset's novel is infinitely gentler, and the fact is, more fresh than Maugham's - and I find it much more to my personal liking than Maugham anyway. Undset is mercifully brief in her descriptions, which are devoid of ornaments, and I find that I get the picture in a much clearer way, I feel as if I were there, with them, assisting the characters from the position of a crow, sitting on a cold marble stone lion, observing everything in my omni cognitive way of a crow. Maybe it's just because I grew up in Europe, in those mossy old places, where earth gives life to small plants in-between the cracks of old carved stones and buildings, where the early old city morning is incomparable with anything you've seen or felt.

"Jenny" is a grand love story, a tragic story of a young woman who did not seek carnal pleasures, the easy-come-easy-go type of relationship that people her age seemed to enjoy. Attractive and intelligent, she was lonely, very lonely, and when she finally subsided to the impulse, the whole life has changed. With her lover, she entered the morbid world of suppressed unhealthy emotions, which he carried from home like a burden of a graveyard stone on a chest, immovable and paralyzing. The insecure man drowned Jenny in his toxic love, for love is always toxic if the object is not the other person, but he who loves, or rather claims to love. Once the young Norwegians briefly return home, we realize why he behaved as he did, and so the tragic story begins, and for the next two hundred pages a reader will be spellbound by the powerful voice of Sigrid Undset.

"And the worst thing would be to share life with another person but deep inside feel just as lonely as before. Oh, no, no. To belong to a man, with all the subsequent types of intimacy, both physical and spiritual... and then one day to see that she had never known him, and he had never known her, and neither of them had ever understood a word the other person said...(...) So she had to try painting again. Presumably it would be an utter disaster, since she was walking around sick with love. She laughed. That's what was wrong with her. The object of her affection hadn't yet appeared, but the love was there."

This novel is a masterpiece of literature, and it's hard to believe that Undset was very young when she conceived this novel. Only from her letters to her longtime German pen-pal, we learn that she started writing as a very young girl, and that she devoted all her young life to writing, slaving away in an obscure office to be able to support her writing of "Kristin Lavransdatter", a historical trilogy for which much later, in 1928, Undset was awarded a Nobel Prize for literature. Don't be put off just because Undset is Norwegian, and now forgotten. Her writing is wonderful, and I wish people discovered this writer anew, because she deserves recognition, but even more she deserves modern readership. Try it - you won't be disappointed.

Besides "Jenny", the book contains also a novella, "Thjodolf", and a short story, "Simonsen". Both are rather depressing, to tell the truth. The latter is a story of unmet expectations and brutality of life in the turn-of-the-century urban Norway, while the former is a heartbreaking story of a woman and the adopted child. Written when Undset was just sixteen, "Thjodolf" is one of the best novellas I have ever read, and definitely powerful enough to shatter you to pieces. Sigrid Undset was a writer of unmatched class, and it's a pity that her works are not popular nowadays. Let us only hope that the current edition will alter that state.

This volume showcases some great early works by Sigrid Undset that give a foretaste of the Nobel Prize-winning books she would write 10-20 years later. The novel "Jenny," from 1911, tells the fate of a young woman painter during her years in Rome and later back home in Oslo. Undset's descriptions are as vivid as a painting themselves, and the characters of Jenny and her artist friends in Rome will remind you of people you know today. And isn't that one thing that makes great art universal? Undset's letters to her Swedish penpal reveal the desire of a young writer to escape her humdrum office-worker existence -- Undset worked for a German electrical company for 10 years! -- and have the time to do nothing but write; these letters are astoundingly mature for a 21-year-old. If you want to see where the celebrated author of "Kristin Lavransdatter" started out (and read it in the limpid prose of Tiina Nunnally's exquisitely rendered translation), this is the book for you!

Though I am mostly too young to remember much about the Vietnam conflict, this book evoked powerful emotions as I went through it. It is a powerful and haunting tribute to the men and women who died (on both sides) to record this war on film.

As one contributor put it, these images are often the last things these photographers saw before they died and that fact hovers nearby as you look at the pictures and read the stories of these brave men and women.

An exhibit of these photos will be showing at the Kentucky History Center in Frankfort, KY, USA from Oct. 1-Nov. 13, 1999. It is free and open to the public on Tuesdays-Sundays.

Requiem is at one, a compelling pictorial account of the conflict which ravaged Indo-China for so many years and also a fitting testament to the courage and the skill of the photographers who lost their lives there. The first series of photographs by the American, Everette Dixie Resse reveal a land of great beauty and startling serenity. There is gentleness and largesse in these early photographs which one feels is drawn not solely from the ambience and topography of the region itself but must have been present in the heart of the man who took them. Requiem chronicles the course of the war from its' inception in the 1950's to the end of American involvement in the 1970's. The book contains not only the photographs of the more famous photographers such as Robert Capa and Larry Burrows but also those whose names are barely known and whose fate sadly, remain unknown. Many of the latter were the North Vietnamese photographers and I feel that their work goes a long way to explain how this small undeveloped country was able to drive the greatest military machine the world has ever known into eventual submission. There is an energy and determination in the eyes and very demeanour of the Communist soldiers that is not apparent amongst their opponents, the French and the Americans. When one sees Luong Nghia Dung's dramatic pictures of the NVA artillery shelling ARVN positions it is as if the very sinews of the soldiers are propelling the shells to the intended target and ultimate victory. The book is not without its lighter moments, although in truth, these are few and far between. The Japanese photographer, Kyoichi Sawada is pictured presenting a print to a family of a photo that he had taken of them swimming across a river in a successful attempt to flee an American air strike. This was indeed a happy occasion to celebrate a lucky escape. Also there are pictures taken by Henri Huet which capture the good-humoured resilience of two Americans wounded in 1966. One might recall the cliché, "blooded but unbowed" or perhaps "grace under pressure". They do however, manage a smile for Huet's camera. The book contains some fascinating biographical information on the men and women who took these photographs. They are from diverse backgrounds, countries and cultures but regardless of who they were, we are left in no doubt that the quality of a photograph has little to do with the camera but so very much with the eye and soul of the person pressing the shutter.

This book is summarised for me by a quote from David Halberstam .. ' they could not, as we print people could, arrive a little late for the action, be briefed, and then, through the skilled use of interviews and journalism, re-create a scene with stunning accuracy, writing a marvelous you-are-there story that reeked of intimacy even though, in truth, we had missed it all. We could miss the fighting and still do our jobs. They could not.' To be a great combat photographer one had to get CLOSE to the action. That's why so many of them were killed. I spent a total of 15 months in Vietnam, from 1969 through 71. The grunt on the ground viewed reporters skeptically, suspecting that they got a lot of their stories in the bar of The Caravelle Hotel in Saigon. But not the photographers. They were regarded with awe. This book comes as close as can be done to evoking the feeling of the country and the war. My friends describe me as a little to the right of Gengis Khan; I think the book is superb. It has nothing to do with politics, just presenting the truth as best as can be done and honoring a bunch of brave men and women whose performance speaks for itself. If you buy only one book this year, this should be it

The story of two neurotic artist manqués living in the small Ohio town of Dell River, Come Back To Sorrento is a moderately enjoyable failure. In attempting to describe and bring to life her two inwardly desperate but outwardly shrill protagonists, Powell makes each so exaggeratedly pretentious, affected, and unlikable that the reader cannot sympathize or identify with them; it is also continually unclear how author Powell feels about them or what she intends the reader to feel.

Newcomer, music teacher and apparent closet homosexual Blaine Decker is so transparent, smarmy and brittle that Powell's portrayal of him is just short of caricature (Blaine makes a cult of his former companion's cast off linen underpants, wearing and laundering them year after year). Housewife and one-time ambitious vocal student Connie Benjamin is only slightly more two-dimensional. After meeting and becoming friends, Blaine, too predictably for a homosexual character, requires Connie become and remain a larger-than-life and slightly superior feminine embodiment of Art and Culture, while Connie, walled in on all sides by her own illusions, becomes dependent on Blaine to sit at her feet and support her madness.

By comparison to Blaine and Connie, next-door neighbor and 'gentlewoman who takes in laundry as a hobby' Mrs. Busch, the butt of their jokes, and the rest of the underdeveloped supporting cast, seems eminently likable. Connie's older daughter, Helen, appears on a few pages, makes a lot of noise, and, phantom-like, disappears again, like a character stepping in and out from another novel (Mildred Pierce). And what can the reader make of nebulous Laurie Neville, the book's catch-all Fifth Business and deus ex machina character?

There's a well-conceived scene late in the book that takes place on May Day morning in which Connie momentarily frees herself from her limiting neurotic shell and perceives a more expansive horizon. If Powell had approached the entire book in the same manner and with the same sensitivity as she did here, Come Back To Sorrento might have been equal to the wonderful novel that preceded it, Dance Night.

By making Blaine and Connie as written her main characters, Powell put extraordinary limits on what she could achieve. Powell also fails to provide a contrast to Connie and Blaine's perspective of the town, leaving the reader to wonder if their constricted vision is really Powell's own. Nothing in Dell River is portrayed as having self-evident value and meaning in and of itself; nature is beneath notice and the townspeople are petty, shortsighted, envious, coarse, or soft in the head. Since no one does as much harm to Blaine and Connie as they do to themselves, the real theme of Come Back To Sorrento is not the dampening effects of small town life on creative personalities, but the way in which people with dreams beyond imagining and corrupt values permanently disappoint and frustrate themselves.

Whether Blaine or Connie have any genuine artistic talent is never completely made clear, and thus the question of what truly constitutes artistic success cannot be meditated upon by the reader in relation to the material. Powell seems to be uncertainly suggesting that artistic and worldly success are always the same thing; that only front-page achievement and name-in-lights notoriety in New York, London, Milan, or Paris matter. The value of personal goals, challenges, inspiration, and meaning in the creative process is only addressed briefly at the end, by likeable wallflower Louisa Murrell, who no one listens to or takes seriously.

Readers familiar with Powell's later comic novels will rightly suspect that Come Back To Sorrento was an unintentionally transitional novel; perhaps without consciously realizing it, Powell was already moving towards satire, as without being funny in fact, Sorrento reads like farce.

Dawn Powell's "Come Back to Sorrento", was published in 1932 under the title "The Tenth Moon" to little notice from critics or from the public. But this poignant, mostly understated novel set in a drab midwestern town called Dell River is a gem.

The two main characters in the book are Connie Benjamin and Blaine Decker. When we meet Connie as a housewife in her mid-thirties, she is leading a life she finds sterile and barren with her husband Gus, a cobbler, and her two adolescent daughters. As a young woman, Connie had visions of a career as an opera singer, even though this ambition seemed to be based on little more than a commendation of her voice by a famous teacher. Connie also has a past in which she ran off with a young man named Tony who did acrobatics with a circus. Tony aboandoned her, and Connie lives with dreams of a singing career that perhaps could have been and with faded memories of Tony.

Blaine Decker comes to Dell River as the high school music teacher. He rents a small apartment above Gus Decker's shoe repair shop. Decker is a pianist by training (with small hands) who likewise has never had the artistic success of which he dreams. He spent his early years in Europe during which time he was a friend of a writer, Starr Donnell, who had written, as far as Decker knows, one novel. Powell hints throughout the novel at Decker's repressed homosexuality.

The novel explores the relationship that develops between Connie and Blaine. With their shared love of music and their broken, and probably illusory dreams, they feel stifled by the small town of Dell River. They share confidences with each other and at the same time quarrel severely with each other over their respective failures to pursue their dreams. The relationship is at bottom frustrating and unconsummated. It never becomes sexual.

There are wonderful pictures in this book of music and its capacity to bring meaning to life. The seriousness with which Powell discusses the pursuit of classical music in this work contrasts markedly with her picture of frivolous people and activities in her subsequent satirical New York novels. Powell also shows how music can be a means by which people evade their own selves and their own reality. There are also good depictions in the book of life in a small town, particularly those people who teach in High Schools, and of many secondary characters.

As do Powell's latter works, this book contrasts life in a small town with life in the cosmopolitian city, here represented by Paris more than by New York. But there is a certain inward focus to this book which is not shared by her latter satirical pictures of New York. The characters here are limited by Dell River and its environs, but their problems and discontents lie within themselves, in their lack of self-knowledge, and in their failed dreams. The book lacks the sharp cynicism of the latter novels but features instead reflectiveness and sadness.

Powell's writing style in this novel is rather flatter than in her subsequent works but it fits the atmosphere of Dell River that she conveys. There are several moments in the novel or lyricism and intensity.

This probably is not a novel that will ever enjoy wide readership. But it is rare and a treasure.

What a haiku evokes beyond the language, a few words summon a large panorama, Dawn Powell did in this novella. With artful simplicity, the author relates a somewhat comic and somewhat cosmic fable of two lost souls that blend unrealized dreams into reality. Powell writes with the sensitivity of an empath. In the bearly visible twitch, the eye that cannot contact, the unconscious hesitations belie the character's pretense so that the secret is just between Powell and her reader. In the far less precise language of psychiatry, this is termed the "as if" self. This deceptively simple story succeeds as myth for within the doubling up of solitary dreams, their souls sweep the cosmos.

Shards of memories, are picked from the realities that defeated them and together they build a palace of dignity that not only holds at bay, their individual sufferings, but becomes wide enough to bring a muted sort of redemption to others, afflicted with similar destinies.
Through music and desire, (platonic, alone) a middle aged housewife, and a odd and tattered music teacher shake off fate and taste, if briefly, what they had been denied. Woven in the tale, is the past of childhood trauma and rejection, abandonment and 'making do,' that the odd duo become nothing less than extraordinary people who choose happiness and get it. In this it is a morality tale, par excellance.
Anyone who has ever reached out of despair with a rebound of delight, who has taken an old piece of cloth and thrown it in some transforming wrap over their head, or around their waist, as Connie does, remembers that triumph, so rare, but perfect brilliant touch. Suddenly, an old dress, has color and shape, bohemians, they are beyond the ordinary in fashion and finance.

There are no authorial statements here, Powell has her own transformative power, whereby sentences do indeed show, voluminously what she composed sparingly. Her genious for showing human instincts is beyond any of her peers. Perhaps the most stunning is her instinct for understanding that ancient animal survival rule whereby we must hide our wounds and primal sufferings or risk in discovery- annihilation. There is none of the confessional self-absorption that was the legacy of the psychoanalytic fever, that was in its American childhood at the time she wrote the novel.


Anyone who has suffered and not hurt others, is rare indeed. The sublime experience between the two does not rely on inflicting pain upon others, a far more common means of elevating conditions of esteem.
The message, if I may, is in the true artistic gift that they benefitted from, but if spoken, would have broken the spell. They saw the Touilleries in an unweeded garden, the Volga in a brown shallow river, and in the unattractive, uncultured, midwestern town, they found a quaint village to delight in.

The physical conditions of life bore down upon their paradise and yet Connie and Blaine, prevailed, looking we are told through colored pains of glass, bringing the grey, unsympathetic world into prismmatic shimmering color.

It is a love poem to the artistic process that is a gift for life as much as technique with a brush or an instrument or a sentence. This contrasts effectively with her more cynical tales of the corrupted artist and the exploited audience.

A glorious book.

There is a touch of the melodramatic to Powell's first important work and least well-received, a novel set in turn-of-the-century rural Ohio - but the darkness is sparked with Powell's unmistakeable genius. True, some passages are florid and the prose rather purple, but there is absolutely no other way to tell so perfectly a tale of deception, betrayal, and fates shortcircuited and lives barely endured. The Truelove family is almost gothic in Powell's portrayal, what with their supressed desires and outward conformity to time and place, and inward turmoils worthy of any grand opera. Powell's strength lies in her many detailed characterizations, the main ones of which are an elderly woman at the end of her days, a middle aged housewife suffering with a secret threatening to destroy her, Vera, a precocious young girl with a wisdom beyond her years, Sophie, the young bride of the title who battles her loves for two men, and Anna, Sophie's antithesis, who upheaves the well-guarded secrets that eventually destroy the family. The twists and turns of the plot kept me reading late into the night, and Powell's descriptions of time and place are provocative and weave a lasting spell. This book would be a tremendous introduction to Powell's ouvre, and is likely the truest to life of her many works, written, as it was, while the married Powell was involved with playwright John Howard Lawson.

The Fales Library and the Department of English at New York University cordially invite you to attend the annual Fales Lecture in English Literature. Tim Page, author of Dawn Powell: A Biography will present "Dawn Powell: Bringing Back an American Writer" on Tuesday, April 20, 1999 at 6:30 PM in the Fales Library, 70 Washington Square South, 3rd Floor, New York City.

This book is a British take on the American involvement in Vietnam. Originally serialized (much like the History of the Second World War series of the '70s), this work is distinguished by a large number of excellent photos, numerous sidebars detailing the major weapons used by both sides, explanations of tactics, and many eye-witness accounts from participants on both sides.

Perhaps because this is a British work, there is greater attention given to the non-American allies fighting in Vietnam, especially the Koreans and Australians. In addition, there are several articles written by members of the Vietcong and North Vietnamese Army, providing an unusual perspective on the fighting. The history takes you from the first landings of U.S. Marines at Da Nang in 1964 through the fall of Saigon in 1975, the Vietnamese/Cambodian wars, and a brief overview of Vietnam in the mid-1980s.

The general slant of the text is somewhat defeatist -- the editors (who are Americans) clearly believe the American enterprise in Southeast Asia was doomed from the start -- and the tone may disturb many who do not share this particular point of view.

More useful are the hundreds of pictures, a very complete index, detailed diagrams, maps and drawings illustrating strategy and tactics, and the liberal use of explanitory sidebars.

You won't want to use this as your only reference for the history of the Vietnam War, but it is an excellent way to understand how the fighters on both sides did their jobs and how they used their tools of war

A very well balanced book (a rare thing indeed) which seeks to outline and present in both graphic and written senses the real truth behind the war. Particularly relevant was the perspective given by contributors from all sides - the press, the VC, the NVA, the MPs. Excellent photographs which capture the real sense of the conflict.

The book could have benefited perhaps a little more by expounding on the history behind the causes and the political reasonings of the war.

Tim Page's sketchy Dawn Powell: A Biography has been written and published before its time. Page has clearly gathered and woven together a great amount of information about Powell, but too often the reader comes to a "little is known at present about _____ at this time" text line in fact or attitude. This dearth of information pertains not only to Powell herself but to intimate friends, general relationships, her relationship with her autistic son, important decisions, her creative process, etc. When Powell arrives in New York City as a young woman, Page generally traces her relationships in the following manner: "She did sleep with _______," "She may have slept with _______," "She probably never slept with ______." This would-be literary gossip serves neither Powell's nor Page's reputation.

Page's approach would be reasonably acceptable if he otherwise wrote about Powell with depth and broad understanding, which he does not. In fact, from the selections taken from her novels letters, and diaries, which Page clearly finds definitive, insightful and fascinating, Powell seems relatively untalented and dull, which she was not. His descriptions of and discussions about her novels are inadequate in many cases. For a Powell scholar, the key elements of a novel as good and as succinct as 'Dance Night,' those that make it highly readable, should be easy to identify. Page approaches his subject ardently but superficially, and so perhaps inadvertently portrays Powell as superficial in turn. He writes with immense enthusiasm about her 'incredible' diary, which spanned decades, but fails to mention that he was the editor of the esteemed tome when it was published.

Powell arrives in New York, and in an incredibly short time has become a published writer and knows everyone in the arts (including artists of great fame, such as Hemingway, whose picture is hilariously included in the photo section) and high society. How did she accomplish this? Since the period described was one of New York's golden ages, especially in the arts, this part of Powell's life should have been recorded meticulously. Powell was not a pretty woman, as the photographs included reveal; she was an esteemed wit, but can wit alone be responsible for her ascent, in a city full, then and now, of witty, clever people? Especially when her early work sold poorly and went largely unreviewed? Page's attitude towards this period of Powell's life is ho-hum at best, leaving the reader with a score of spontaneous questions begging to be answered. Did she know Maya Deren, Anais Nin, or Marguerite Young, who were all both prominent Greenwich Village characters and struggling, creative women living only blocks away?

Worse, Powell seems, at book's end, to be somewhat of a fool, merely another sweaty Greenwich Village libertine who lives to excess, spends money with extreme carelessness, makes no provision for the future, and finds herself at the end of her life alone, destitute, hungry, and dependent. Is this who Powell was? Is this the impression Page intended to leave with the reader?

Page seems most comfortable writing about the grotesque angles of Powell's life and death, of which there were apparently many. The reader is treated to lengthy sections on the subject of the disposal of Powell's human remains; these eventually, after many twists, turns, and travel, made their way to the New York City pauper's cemetery, where what was left of Powell's body was thrown into a mass grave and bulldozed over. Bravo.

Page also writes extensively about Powell's famous teratoma, or dermoid tumor, which was lodged and growing in her chest for most of her adult life. Advised by her doctors early on to have it surgically removed, Powell refused, year after year. Finally unable to breathe, and in severe pain, Powell had the tumor extracted, at which time it is identified as a teratoma. While teratomas are not nearly as rare as Page believes, most of his information here is correct. Composed of some combination of blood, hair, teeth, bone tissue, cartilage, and the occasional eye, teratomas make for fascinating, repulsive reading. Powell believed her tumor (which was, predictably, about 'the size of a grapefruit') to be a thwarted or stunted twin of some kind, which in fact it was not. However, it's not difficult to understand how a person in physical and emotional distress, and in a state of revulsion towards his or her body, could draw such a conclusion or figurative understanding.

Page excels whenever his material concerns Jojo, Powell's tragically autistic, occasionally violent and eventually institutionalized son. With what seems like almost emotional involvement, Page writes with a broader range and depth whenever Jojo is his subject. Page's discussion and research concerning Jojo's early life and diagnosis, and the author's general discussion about autism and related illnesses, is excellent.

Ultimately, Dawn Powell: A Biography reads like three-fifths of a completed work. The section devoted to Powell's family and early childhood begins well, but quickly thins. The information concerning the unpleasant involvement in Powell's life of perverse, fanatical stepmother Sabra is spotty and insubstantial. Sabra seems almost falsely accused: hard, persuasive facts are simply not presented. The reader consistently gets the impression that Page is anxious to make something more transcendent out of the clay of Powell's earth-bound life, while simultaneously missing the essential. Page has made something of a cottage industry out of Powell's life and work, and the literary world has recognized his hard work, research, court battles, and perseverance in reviving her reputation and assisting in bringing her work back into publication. However, Dawn Powell: A Biography can only be relied upon as a rough breakdown of Powell's life; even if extroverted, a novelist of Powell's sensitivity must have had an inner life of some kind. Page's text reveals other important, perhaps critical, weaknesses in his understanding of his subject. It's time for Page to pass the crown, and all that goes with it, at least temporarily, to other authors, biographers, and interested parties so new and different interpretations of Powell's life and work can be made available.

Dawn Powell comes vividly to life in this affectionate, well-reasoned and meticulously fair biography. Tim Page has been nothing less than heroic in the service of this once-forgotten American writer -- and it seems to me that he understands her very well indeed.

I had a very different response than one earlier reader to Page's occasional admissions that he didn't know what happened at this or that point in Powell's life. It struck me as refreshingly honest. Very few biographers have the courage to confess that they aren't omniscient and that certain facts will simply get lost over the course of 100 years. And I was very glad that he didn't pad the book with all the Greenwich Village 101 stuff that you find in biographies of practically everybody who ever lived below 14th Street.

Certain people don't "get" Powell, and they probably won't get Page either. For the rest of us, this book has been, and will continue to be, a revelation.

I fell in love with Dawn Powell after reading this biography! I recommend reading it highly, as well as looking into some of Powell's own works. My only complaint is the lack of photographs of Powell during her best writing (and flirting) years. After reading this book I thought about how many worth while authors are forgotten and lost to us, and how fine and generous Mr. Page has been in exhuming this wonderful woman's reputation and career for a new generation that perhaps has finally caught up with her.

The novels of Dawn Powell (1896-1965)have an autobigraphical tone. Powell grew up in Mt. Gilead, Ohio, but left this small midwestern town to seek her career in New York City. She wrote "The Wicked City" in 1938, and the novel captures both the allure and the disappointment of fast-paced sophisticated New York. Although the satire is sharp and biting, Powell shows considerable ambivalence for both the small town she left and the cosmopolitanism she adopted.

"The Happy Island" opens with its protagonist, Jefferson Abbott, arriving in the New York City bus terminal from Silver City, Ohio to make his career as a budding playwright. Jefferson is serious, stodgy in character and is taken aback by what he sees as the frivolity and shallowness of the New York cultural and entertainment community on which he hopes to make his mark. In New York, he meets another transplant from Silver City and an old flame, Prudence Bly. Prudence has survived the and mastered New York show business to a degree. She is a successful nightclub singer with many contacts. As adolescents in Silver City, (16 years before the story begins) Jefferson and Prudence had a teenage romance. When the pair was caught necking behind the railroad, Prudence received the sobriquet "Tracks" from the mocking young men of Silver City. In New York, Jefferson remains attracted to Prudence but dismayed by the life she is leading as a nightclub singer and socialite.

The plot of "The Happy Island" centers around the relationship between Jefferson and Prudence and in the contrast between New York City, New York and Silver City, Ohio. But as elsewhere in Powell, the plot of the book is the least of its attractions. The value of the book lies in its depiction of the places and people of New York City, in Powell's writing style, and in her sharp, caustic one-liners. There is an underlying sense of morality lost.

The book features a plethora of characters from the New York entertainment and literary scene. In particular, this book is somewhat unusual because several of the characters in the book are gay or bisexual, and Powell presents these characters without any particular moralizing. The moral tone of the book, though, is sharp and critical. In general, the characters in the book exhibit the morals of the barnyard. Infidelity, promiscuity, and double-crossing are the rules of the day. Together with the sexual double and triple dealing, Powell emphasizes parties and alcohol. She is good at describing party scenes and even better at emphasizing the dependence of her characters on booze. One can sympathize with some of Jefferson Abbott's reaction to this environment.

With all its sharpness, irony and satire, New York City is presented with a certain magic and allure. It is the dream of a new life and of opportunity, for Powell and for many others. Inflated hopes and ideals too often lead to cynicism, as I think this book and other books by Powell suggest. In the introduction to this book, Tim Page concludes that "The Happy Island" is a relatively minor novel of Dawn Powell. That may be, but there is still much in the book to reward the reader.

This novel captures the time when CAfe Society ruled the Greenwich Village scene. Ms Powell captures the nuances and slang of that time marvelously. As always, her wit and style shine through every sentence.

For every person who comes to New York from a small town or suburb and makes it in their chosen profession, there are a thousand others who don't. What happens to them? What are they like? Dawn Powell describes them all. This book is a wonderful literary read and a fine corrective to the notion that every transplanted provincial is either interesting or deserving of sympathy. Powell's characters are wonderfully drawn and fleshed out with fine prose: here's the business wife "bragging in a dozen beds of her perhaps old-fashioned chastity." Here's the "new society reporter from the largest and worst newspaper in New York." Here's a young playwrite freshly arrived from the sticks mortifying a seedy arty-professional crowd and their "shrill insistence on fun" by exclaiming, "New York, eh? What a dump!" And her is the (not so) young kept woman who "with considerable care placed her head in her hands as if it were a very fine melon." Powell is a treat; there are memorable lines on every page. Her novels came out between the 30's and the 60's and all the New York books are very fine, literary reads. She is considerably more on the mark in terms of wit and irony and quality of prose than her well-meaning editor, Tim Page (actually a music reviwer by profession) seems to realize, and in satire can hold her own with Saul Bellow, Gore Vidal, Sinclair Lewis, Joan Didion, etc. Check out Vidal's essays on her (they're much better, less aenemic, than Page's comments, I felt, after reading her books). Angels On Toast, The Wicked Pavillion, The Golden Spur, The Locusts Have No King, And A Time to Be Born are all also very fine, sharp witty novels of New York; both its fascinating side and in all the balderdash of its aspiring provincials.

With all due respect to Peter Caldwell, I think this book has a lot of value for all Americans, including Vietnam veterans. There are some photos which are propaganda, but they are labelled as such and as the author explains they are part of a larger story. All wars come with propaganda, even our own present war in Afghanistan (remember the US Special Forces soldiers riding horses with the Northern Alliance guys?) The other photos in this handsome book are stunning, especially a very wide panorama of a terribly defoliated Ho Chi Minh Trail. Very touching portraits elsewhere as well as dramatic battle scenes, in addition to the brief histories of the Vietnamese war photographers (in their own words) make this a very valuable and important book. There is something inside for everyone, just dig a little deeper past your first reaction...

This is a tough book to sum up in a few words, since many people will use their background to judge it. If you felt we should have won the war, you will hate it. I was forced to serve in VietNam and I found the pictures very interesting. More than just the US era in VietNam, the photos go back to WWII. There are pictures of the Ho Chi Mih trail which vividly show the difficulty in shutting off that supply line. There are pictures of what the US now calls 'collateral damage' from the bombing in the North. There are some propaganga photos, but they are so stated. But far and away there are photos showing the everyday life of those involved in combat, and for that it is a very valuable book. It is a documentation from the other side. Considering how our drill instructors were wont to describe the other side as a bunch of pj'ed peasants, the quality of the photos is first rate. I can not begin to imagine the conditions under which many of the photos were taken, let alone survived to be developed. If you have an open mind about the war, you will enjoy the book. If you already have decided about the war and felt we were suppsoed to have won 'if only....', then I am sure there are lots of gung ho war movies and books for sale on Amazon.com that will better suit your mindset.

As a former Marine Corps combat photographer and recipient of the Purple Heart and Bronze Star with Combat "V," (I Corps, Khe Sahn, Con Thein, Dong Ha, Vietnam), Peter Caldwell missed the point about the book. The book was not produced to glorify the NVA or the politics (which enough has been written), but simply to add another piece to a broad visual mozaic. Dr. Caldwell would certainly be hard pressed to attend the International Assn of Combat Photographers. Its membership include former Nazi photographers. In our world as combat photographers, then as now, our role was to document war, to present images however controversal or appealing, to the public. Sometimes these images can be bitter medicine for both sides...just like the images of My Lai.

Tim Page did an excellent job compiling a visual treasure of the North Vietnamese photographers. And as a former combat photographer, I was stunned to view their work. Other distinguished photographers and correspondents like Larry Burrows, Bernard Falls, Henry Huet, Sean Flynn, Dana Stone -- to name a few who I had the pleasure to meet and work with and all were killed in Southeast Asia, they would hold this book in high regard. After all, as combat correspondents we did not judge but observed. And that's what this book is all about.

SSgt. F. Lee
Combat Photographer ('66-67)