yes, 2 stars, and i'm being too generous also.. that'll teach me to buy everything with a dragon on it, in the future. something like 90% of the stories are too damn laaaaame.
it's that boring and uninspired. try the 'doom brigade' instead. or any other dragonlance book! this one only has a nice cover. and not that nice when i got to take a closer look at it. my dragons are nicer :P hehe... next!

Some of the stories were stupendous, but some of the other stories were just depressingly boring. If your a diehard dler and a dragonlover go for it other wise hold off.

Here's a collection of Dragon stories. Some very good, some just so-so. Interesting pieces include "The Final Touch", "The Best", "Kaz and the Dragon's Children", "Dragon Breath", "The Middle of Nowhere." "The First Dragonarmy Bridge..." introduces us to the pitiful draconian brigade whom one will meet in greater detail in "The Doom Brigade". Some of the stories end abruptly ("Into the Light" is one) while I find "Honor..." a bit tiresome to read. The rest of the stories are worth reading. All in all, this is a good book to get acquainted with the most popular and most awesome creatures in Krynn - dragons.

Disliking an Oxford Press book makes me feel like a heretic. The majority of their Companion books are superb, remarkably concise yet thorough works of scholarship. The English Companion is an unfortunate and surprising exception.

The entry for 'New Criticism' is an efficient example of the book's shortcomings. For one thing, there's a laundry list of authors, dates, and books but very little is said of the IDEAS that characterize New Criticism. The entries are generally hamstringed by a focus on the sociopolitical and historical aspects of writers and works. The effort is laudable but inappropriate and uneconomical for a reference work. In its most extreme form, the historical emphasis goes into bizarre detail about an author's upbringing -- is it really necessary that we know where an author went to grade school and when? Entries love to entertain tales of writers' deaths and and of their insignificant travellings. I often felt as though I were reading minibiographies.

One will also notice, in the case of 'New Criticism', the absence of any mention of the 'organic'. This is ridiculous and indicative of the book's lack of attention to concepts as such. There is a non-cross-referenced mention of 'organic' under Coleridge, yet even there it is only mentioned as one of his ideas, not in terms of what the theory tried to say. I would compare it to someone's asking, 'What does X mean?' This book's reply: 'X was one of so-and-so's ideas'. Too often, the response ends there. Literary theory entries are usually on the thin side, though the deconstruction essay is solid. However, even in the longest lit theory essays there is more of an emphasis on people and movements -- far less on ideas.

Along with the lack of depth (or conceptual emphasis), there's little sense of the overall significance of ideas, works or characters (ironic given the attempts at a social-historical approach): Caliban is mentioned in the Tempest entry, and even gets his own paragraph elsewhere, but there's nothing about his character as it's been re-elaborated and re-invented by a long tradition of English writers (Auden, Browning, Joyce, and Wilde for starters). There's nothing about Caliban's portrayal in that tradition, nor mention of Caliban's mirror, etc. Under 'hubris' (which is found, in turn, under a terse account of 'the Poetics'), there's nothing about Icarus, nor is there anything about hubris as a specific theme in so many works.

Speaking of hubris, it's baffling to me that Drabble's entry is longer than either Hill's or Heaney's. The general editor would have been better off focusing more of her energy on other writers: that expansive babbling space could have been put to stronger use had a more thorough background been given on either of those poets, among others.

Readers seeking to understand why an author alludes in his work to a character or poet will be little helped by nebulous terms like 'icily poised' or 'sensuously textured', which are more suggestive of gastronomic, rather than literary, criticism. To my mind a reference's primary function should be to offer a quick source of the 'essentials' of a book or of a writer's ideas, an understanding of which would illuminate one's reading of the alluding work. While I appreciate that entries shy away from 'this or that' critiques or strict (canonical) interpretations, giving lists of facts does an injustice to the works themselves and to the way these works have been interpreted by others. (Believe it or not, people CAN come to their own conclusions even after being introduced to an opinion.)

The book's scope is appropriate to literature, as literature tends to allude to so many disparate disciplines. But if one were truly trying to give an encyclopedic account of literature, the book would have to be much bigger. In this case, specialization suffers. I would have preferred a much more focused account of 'literature' as such; I'd then supplement this with other references focused, for example, on English history. One gets the sense that too many entries end up attenuated in this book.

On the positive side the plot summaries are strong and more nuanced, though many entries are badly written (full of odd, obscuring, convoluted syntax). Again, good editorship would have recognized this.

The book primarily succeeds as an enervated survey. Nevertheless, readers will occasionally happen upon some interesting, well-summarized topics.

I'm going to check out the Cambridgean counterpart to the Oxford Companion, and I'm hoping it will give a more in-depth account of ideas and themes. The other Oxford Companions are, however, truly amazing works and deserve a close look.

An excellent resource of information about English works of art

This is one of the most practical reference books in my home library. I turn to it again and again for plot summaries and information about authors. I also find it useful for pre- (and post-) theater reading. And of course it's a real boon for solving the Sunday Times crossword puzzle.

A must-have for anyone who considers themself a reader.

WPA is a book that makes a horrible contradiction, it asks professionals working in related fields to the AIDS pandemic to examine certain kinds of structural violence regarding gender and poverty, which the authors correctly claim have been mostly overlooked - that is, poor women forms one of the groups most brutally hit by AIDS. No help, no medicine, no programs, no interest from academics, public health institutions, etc results in brutal and lethal suffering for poor women and their families. On the other hand, by the language they use to talk about prostitution systems, WPA authors practice and perpetuate serious forms of structural violence against poor women and children.

The book is divided into 3 parts: 1) "Rethinking AIDS" tries to take a global look at the AIDS pandemic specially regarding poor women; 2) "Rereading AIDS," examines problems with social science, public health, and clinical medicine on AIDS and poor women; and 3) profiles organizations who offer services to people with AIDS with a sensitive framework towards poverty and women.

Throughout the book, where the issue of prostitution regularly appears, the authors adopt the trend to refer to women and children in prostitution as "sex workers." They do alternatively use "prostitute," but the emphasis is "sex worker," "sex tourism," "sex industry," words which serve to hide any form of violence, crime, and torture in prostitution systems. Even in their own vignette of Lata, a prostituted teenager, which is such a typical case in prostitution or the rape tourism industry, which exemplifies so many of the forms of violence suffered by prostituted children and women, the authors use mostly a falsely non-violent language that serves to make invisible and push away from conscience the very violence the authors are describing. Lata is an Indian girl who is "sold" by her parents to a pimp, she is raped, kidnapped, and sexually and psychologically abused into a prostitution system, and after all of that, while still in captivity, while still being coerced to have sex with men (i.e. being systematically raped), she is called by the authors a "sex worker." It is particularly disgusting to see authors who write a book asking people to take into account structural forms of violence against women - in particular, the brutal consequences of poverty: lack of safety, human rights, medical care, care for their children, economic survival, psychological well being- and who at the same time use a vocabulary and language that serves to hide so many forms of violence perpetrated against these very women and children in prostitution systems. I don't see using "sex worker" as a step forward from "prostitute." If the word "prostitute" carries a stigma, the problem won't be resolved by using a language that serves to hide the violence involved in the system. Authors can come up with something less irresponsible than that.

The term "sex worker" is so comfortable, so nifty, so postmodern-chic, so trendy-but so disgustingly violent, so corrupt in its insensitivity to the suffering and trauma perpetrated against defenseless children and women in prostitution, and so in collusion with every single person who would like to erase from the public eye, and consequently from accountability and punishment, the great violations of various human rights involved in systems of prostitution and the rape tourism industry. This is particularly problematic in a book that has subtitles such as " the use of culture and construction of denial to explain this or that," "making it explicit: women, poverty, AIDS," "exaggeration of poor women's agency," and not least, "lack of accountability." It's Orwellian.

Authors such as those from WPA usually justify their practice of the above violence by saying that "sex worker, et al" is a vocabulary that does not stigmatize those in prostitution. But the compounded horrendous forms of violence (specially structural ones) in prostitution are much worse than the processes of stigmatization. So why, when there is so much violence in prostitution, have academics adopted such a camouflaged, deceptive wording? How privileged, dehumanized, and lacking in accountability regarding a language that erases real violence from conscience in prostitution systems are these and other authors?

The answer, unfortunately, is "very." Albeit WPA provides some very important information, plus heartbreaking profiles of diverse women, nationally and internationally brutalized by AIDS, plus the discussion of various serious problems regarding poor women and AIDS, it felt, in my view, like two steps backwards, one step forward. Purporting to raise issues of the violence of poverty towards women and their families - of which prostitution is a significant destroyer of human rights-the authors end up caught up in the same problem they are trying to denounce.

"Lucid, smart, passionate, and compassionate, Women, Poverty & AIDS puts the calss back into class analysis. Through a diversity of voices, experiences, geographies and disciplines, the contributors argue that poverty as a factor in the global HIV epidemic is pervasive, neglected, and urgent. Povery is inescapably linked to gender. Acall to arms on behalf of health and social justice for poor women, its impact is searing." --Paula Treichler, University of Illinois, Urbana, editor of The Feminist Dictionary

"Exceedingly well-written, this book shows that AIDS is a wake-up call--we must be about the business of transforming our world, if for no other reason than to prevent the creation of a worse epidemic, which could be the inevitable sequel to our failure to contain this one. A compelling presentation of people, programs and ideas, Women, Poverty & AIDS has an important message of hope." --Robert Fullilove and Mindy Fullilove, M.D., Columbia School of Public Health

"Moving beyond a simple biomedical model, this book compels us to view AIDS in women in a wholly new way, as an inescapable event in lives devalued by the forces of poverty, racism, and sexism. This extraordinary multidisciplinary effort should serve as the guidebook for those who want to understand how AIDS could become a leading killer of young women in a mere decade." --Deborah Cotton, M.D., Massachusetts General Hospital, editor of The Medical Management of AIDS in Women

"Women, Poverty & AIDS makes a major contribution by staying always close to the lived realities of real people in real places, and refusing the old, empty, pat answers to difficult questions. A hard-nosed, real-life analysis--an antidote to status quo thinking--this should be required reading for all who care about AIDS--or public health." --Jonathan Mann, M.D., Director of the International AIDS Center, and the François-Xavier Bagnoud Center for Health and Human Rights at the Harvard School of Public Health

"Doctor Glas" (1905), by Hjalmar Soderberg (1869-1941), is the philosophically conflicted diary of Tyko Glas, a young medical doctor in Stockholm, Sweden's largest city, in the form of his personal written diary. He tells us he is just thirty years old and looking for adventure, a progressive and aesthetic intellectual in a conservative city. He disdains the many requests he receives for abortions, invariably turning them away, not of his own beliefs, but because he fears Sweden's hypocritical society would ostracize him.

One day a young lady named Helga provides his life a twist, coming to his examination room, pleading for him to declare she has an "infection of the womb", so her husband of six years, Pastor Gregorius, will not touch her sexually. In truth, she has another man in mind. Glas knows Gregorius personally, and despises him for his own reasons, but after some moral agonizing, the young doctor takes the bull by the horns, "diagnosing" Gregorius with a "weak heart", telling him sex could kill him. This medically-enforced chastity drives Gregorius mad, and he "rapes" his wife out of frustration one night. To diffuse the elevating tension, Gregorius takes a brief trip to another town, during which his wife openly appears in public with her lover back home on Stockholm's streets. Glas, the first-person narrator of this book, reflects on the meaning of life, recalling the young girls he knew earlier in life, admitting he has never held a female in an embrace, and finding himself falling in love with Helga himself.

In his diary, Glas wonders if abortion and murder are not similar, in the sense that both relieve a burden of life. Glas wonders if Gregorius could justifiably be killed to relieve the "burden" upon his wife Helga. He reflects on morality, love, sex, and religion, his thoughts become increasingly feverish. He debates the issue through his diary, turning through various twists of logic, trying to find a relative position which is simultaneously moral and expedient. He even goes so far as to prepare two tablets of potassium cyanide, one for the pastor, and one for himself, should his plan go badly. He clearly loses mental clarity with his obsession over this issue.

Will he actually try to kill Gregorius? Will he woo Helga for himself? Will he drop the entire issue, and snap back to reality? Will he accomplish the impossible reconciliation between morality and his impulses? The resolution will be an interesting one, but Glas will offer only one insight: "Life, I do not understand you."

The book itself is nicely written, the prose lovely of description, polite, high-toned, and at times romantic, and the subject matter frank, from schoolboy wonderment and embarrassment, to "husband's rights" and the moral place of abortion, euthanasia, murder, love, sex, infidelity, and unrequited love in society. The narration is elegant, and this brief novel (150pp) is actually surprisingly substantial. The tone is thoughtful throughout, and an interesting book to read.

(Note: Some readers might have some fun knowing there is a very interesting website, created by a fan, which features this book's various Stockholm locales posted in photos.)

This book puts you in a direct line for recovery from abuse and addicion issues. It's intensive and requires a sincere willingness to grow emotionally and spiritually. If you are looking for practical steps that will move you into a deeper relationship with self toward healing, this book will take you there. It's the next best thing to actually taking the Inner Bonding seminar.

This volume, an update of an earlier work by the late Peter Bebblewaite, is little more than an obsolete exercise in wishful thinking by the Catholic radical left. For the book to be at all relevant, it needs to be updated again, to reflect the changes in the College of Cardinals (fairly significant in the last few years). Even such an update would do little to further recommend it, as there are other, more recent and less biased works on the same subject.

Give this one a miss.

The most interesting part of the book for me was the first half where past conclaves in history are discussed. Some of the history is really fascinating. Although the tone of the book optimistically predicts a less severe papacy next time around, there is little evidence presented to back this up. The criticisms of John Paul II, while quite accurate, do little to help us understand who we might expect as the next pope. It is a well written book and very readable, but as time continues to go by and the current pope continues to live, the latter section on potential popes becomes less and less relevant due to the age restriction and deaths. Still, there is enough here to recommend a read.

"The Next Pope", though quite out of date now, is a very good and comprehensive study of the Catholic Church and how Popes are elected, and an attempt to give an idea of who the next Pope will in fact be.

It covers, very well and in quite clear language, a history of the papacy from the time of Pius VIII (1829 to 1830) up to John Paul II's historically crucial letter "Ordinatio Sacerdotalis". Each conclave in that period is discussed very well and with quite reasonable language that I have found very helpful in gaining an understanding of where the papacy has travelled in recent centuries.

The next part of the book looks at John Paull II and explains his thought. It does an easy-to-understand job that could, I feel, give a better understanding of his Polish nature.

The last part written before Peter's death deals with "Ordinatio Sacerdotalis" and the reaction to it, however it fails unfortunately to reach the notes of Ratzinger about the infallibility of the document and to explain in simple, if for many harsh, language what this will mean for the next centuries of the Catholic Church.

Margaret's article is a very detailed (compared to her late husband's) analysis of the College Of Cardinals as it was comprised in 2000.

Though this is now completely out-of-date, contrary to what others have said about Margaret's writings, I find her very balanced in her exceedingly sensible admission that the next Pope can only be just as conservative as Wojtyla. She is very willing to face and accept the fact that many cardinal want an even more conservative papacy in the future, and looks at such cardinals as Dario Castrillon Hoyos and Rouco Vadela as possibilities for the next Pope.

My main criticism of Margaret is that her language is so unclear and that she seem incomplete - it is as if one would need a detailed analysis of those cardinals who nobody, outside or inside the Vatican, would consider as possibilities for the papacy.

Though out of date, this contains some useful information.

For one of the first times, I am forced to absolutely agree with the review atop this one. Although this book could have been an excellent engrossing story, the author, Boston Globe reporter Eileen McNamara tries too hard to make it into a scholarly book and a cautionary tale- and does not truly make either characters come alive, or the reader understand the true nature of the relationship between Paul Lozando and his psychiatrist. The first chapters are almost exclusively based on excerpts from the court documents- and are quite boring. She doesn't know which is the relevant information to include and which could be left out- and the book is not even that long. So in other words, she does not get to the heart of the matter quick enough before the reader loses interest- I have read hundreds of true crime books- and for the first time, I lost interest enough to skim over boring section discussing the psychiatric profession at large. I did not want detailed descriptions of the medical board and its procedure- only the basic information so that I Could understand what was happening- and the truth was, that (maybe out of boredom) I couldn't figure it all out, because all of the information on the aftermath of the tragedy, in other words, everything that happened after Paul's death, is condensed into the last chapters. In short, not a particularly fulfilling read. I wonder if "Obsession", the other book on this case is better.

Alarming story of how a noted psychiatrist (who was obviously very sick herself, read the notes she kept on the case) was able to turn her own demons lose on an already disturbed patient. The psychiatrist was obviously baby obsessed and serverly neurotic after nine miscarriages in four years. Her treatment of the patient reads like something from the journal of a madwoman, in my opinion. the only complaint i have (i took this book out of the library) is the pacing is way too slow, the author painstakingly goes over the patients childhood and his sister's conversations etc etc, and the final outcome is only dealt with in the last few chapters or so. i think the writer could have written a much more engrossing story if she had paced it better and gotten to the heart of the matter quicker, after all the doctors' notes are the basis of the treatment. anyway i think the story itself worked well, and i enjoyed reading it.

In purchasing this book, I was expecting to find something similar to the second volume of the Norton Anthology of American Literature. Unfortunately, I found this book to be far inferior. It has works by some of America's most highly commended authors, and has some great short stories. However, the excerpts from authors' longer works seem to be lacking; there should either be longer excerpts or more poingnat scenes should have been chosen. The anthology spends far too much time describing eras, and not enough in inserting major works. Some of the breakdowns/characterizations of the peices included are awkward, and tends to underrate the authors by putting them in sectionss that degrade their work.

This book is just terrible. I bought it as a reference and to so that I wouldn't have to write down everything from dance class. But upon reading it I find almost every dance is presented in ways I have never been taught or seen practiced in any of the clubs here in San Antonio. I think maybe the Salsa step was the same and some the rumba but all the other dances just look wrong. Also the dance frames shown are the type of holds I have been taught as wrong. ( hand on the poor girls kidney instead of higher up.) In terms of the step being taught the diagrams and descriptions are not clear and many times they will use a term like Ball-Flat without defining the term anywhere in the book.

Overall a very poor effort- I wish I had not spent the money on it.