Price writes from the perspective of a faithful Christian of the liberal Protestant variety. Price writes of his own "revelations" of God's presence, his family's multidenominational Christian background, and other issues. He quotes and reflects on many biblical passages (both Old and New Testament) and also reflects on the lives and work of other writers: W.H. Auden, T.S. Eliot, John Milton, Wallace Stevens, and others. He also reflects a bit on the Bhagavad Gita, a key Hindu scripture.

Ultimately, Price has an inclusive and hopeful faith: "...I believe that God loves his creation...." His voice is earnest and his prose is beautifully written, but in the end I found the book oddly inert; I felt that I was left with no new insights into human suffering or the idea of deity. Still, a worthwhile book for both spiritual pilgrims and fans of well-written nonfiction prose.

Here he is presenting a letter of consolation and condolence to a man who is suffering from cancer and the ordeal of treatment. And Mr. Price knows something of what this man is experiencing due to his own experiences with cancer.

But, despite these circumstances and all the best intentions, there is little hope or help provided in the pages of this book.

For someone who is struggling with doubts about God -- or someone who is persuaded fully one way or another about the presence or absence of a divine being -- this book gives surprisingly little food for thought. Mr. Price tells the reader that he has occasionally had a peaceful feeling of harmony -- an "un-aloneness" -- which to him indicates that there must be a God.

What help is that to someone who needs reassurance?

I do believe in a caring God...but hoped to find in these pages some ideas to share with others who doubt. Unfortunately, Mr. Price has not provided those ideas.

No one in this life, however faithful, can be absolutely sure that he has THE answers. All anyone can truly have is a good guess about directions in which to look for those answers. I have found Mr. Price to be a good guide partly because he has traveled farther down that solitary road than most of us and has come back with the willingness to report his findings in the clearest voice that anyone can have under such circumstances.

But this book annoyed me as much as it impressed me. Narrator Boatner is the reason. He's by turns smug, whiney, and smitten. Smug in his reiterated insistence on his own talent as a painter, whiney in his incessant explication of how hard his father's death was on him (you're not the only person who lost a beloved father at 21, Boat), and smitten with 14 year old Rafe who is seldom permitted to be seen off his pedestal of perfect boy and thus never fully realized as a character. For example, Rafe can't be simply a splendidly talented interpreter of Indian dances; he's instead described thirty years later (this is a novel of remembrance) by Bridge as the finest male dancer he's ever seen including all the Russian ballet greats. I'm sorry, that's hyperbole and it undercuts the narrator's credibility. Or, on one hand, Bridge is insisting that he really hasn't thought all that much about Rafe in 30 years, or that he probably didn't spend more than an hour alone with him in the entire summer, and yet he meticulously recreates long dialogues with Rafe and recalls every detail of their contact. In the final pages he infuriated me by declining to own up to his crucial, though not directly causatory, role in what happens to Rafe.

Love the message, can't stand the messenger. It translates to three stars out of five in my book.

The story is of the chaste friendship between the art counselor and a charismatic, gifted boy with a traumatic past and a foreboding future. As the reluctant tutor seeks to channel the glint of promise he senses in his unpredictable, willful ward, he is forced to confront his own talent, feelings, and perspective. Unknowingly and subtly, ward becomes tutor, not in overt, controlling ways, but as mirror, spiritual twin, unwitting angel. This interaction constitutes the body of the work, and anchors the subtextual meditations about art, mysticism, generosity, and understanding with which the keen, sensitive mind of the then counselor would thereafter struggle, so as to become true to himself and one with life. These are no mere conceptual musings, but disquieting thoughts that question accepted values, the stirring of moral and aesthetic passions which revolt at what is false, at what contradicts the inner self, and demand action. For an artist it translates as the self-justified need to express in one way and not any other. The battleground is mundane: heart and mind engaged in the daily course of living, at summer camp or elsewhere.

Mr. Price lays all out soberly, with language that is never labored, precious or pretentious. The scope of the work remains intimate, the insights acute and immediately relevant. The counselor's interior struggle becomes our own as the narrative focuses on probing the self as it reaches out for love. Indeed a path begins to emerge as we witness, through the tale, the dynamics of healing: living, thinking about our lives, taking in and letting go, allowing the synergy to propel.

Without Mr. Price's disciplined execution, this work could have been an inflated horror. Which is to say: the basic dramatic situation is recognizably stock. But Mr. Price's art, like truth, is great, and resides in the modifiers. As one reads, the novel keeps surprising by being "better" than somehow one anticipates; it builds to genuine exhilaration. The humor is serious, the tone that of a thoughtful man looking back so as to keep moving safely forward. There is tragedy, perhaps self-fulfilling, but of the sort that anoints. Paradoxically, it feels less than total: part of its finality is to keep on nurturing. "What might have been" is shown to be truly irrelevant. To the extent that there is such a thing as destiny, one is satisfied that each character has fulfilled his own. There has been no sacrifice. Fulfillment is a gift for all. "The Tongues of Angels" continues to haunt, serenely, long after it has been read.

This was the first Reynolds Price novel I ever read. It was a serendipitous find. It occupies a special place in my reading life. Iâ''ve read since several of his other novels and some of his poetry. All of them reward. Mr. Price is indeed a national treasure.

There were many allusions to the spiritual world; Noble has several strange visions throughout the course of the story that the reader is left to decipher-is he psychic? Or just clinically depressed? Then, there is his "worship" of women. He really, really wants to devour their, uh, "essence." Of course, this must be related to his strange relationship with his batty mother, who has been institutionalized but still plays a pivotal role in Noble's life. She makes many cryptic remarks about Noble's destiny throughout the book, but they remain cryptic. In fact, the latter is a good word to sum up this book. The book, like all books, had to end, but it just felt so unfinished. It felt like Price had meandered too much off track and didn't know how to get back on again, so he just hurried up and slapped together an ending. Noble was an interesting character, and so were many of the "fine women he had the pleasure to know," (he talks a lot like this throughout the novel), but overall, there was no real cohesiveness. My reaction, upon turning the last page, was "Huh? What was that all about?" But an interesting muddle, overall.

For instance, Stross spends an entire chapter devoted to a glowing review of Sun Microsystems. This is arguably in order to have some sort of contrast with NeXT. No small part of the chapter is devoted to a description of the new low-cost SparcStation, which he describes in order to provide a counterexample to Job's overpriced machines. He re-iterates this point on several other occasions thoughout the book.

Missing fact #1: the SparcStation cost MORE than the NeXTcube. This vitally important point is not mentioned even once.

Want another example? He continually talks about how NeXT was non-standard and thus doomed, whereas Sun's standards-based machines were much better off that NeXT, or even other non-standard machines like the Apollo. It's so OBVIOUS that you have to be standards based, it's not even worth talking about! I mean duh, who would question that?!

Missing fact #2: all three were originally based on the same hardware (680x0 CPUs) and similar software (Unix versions). If anything it was Sun that went "non-standard" when they switched their CPU and OS.

The whole book is like this. I don't mean in a small way, I mean it in the largest possible way. I disagreed with almost every point he made, whether it be the "realities" of the computer market as he saw it, or practically any technical detail he attempted to describe. Stross seemed to be incapable of understanding any issue, no matter how large, small, technical or non-technical. It left me gasping.

Ignore the technical innaccuracies though, because they appear to be a side-story to the book's "real point". The "real point" seems to be that Jobs is incompetant at everything, egotistical, and mean. The book is filled with little anecdotes and Steve doing this (something stupid) or that (something mean), painting a very nasty picture of a man Stross implies has only a single quality: being in the right place at the right time.

Hey, he might be right, but I'll never know. I was so turned off by the continual negative vibe of this book that after a few chapters in I basically didn't trust a word he said. This isn't a history, or even a "cautionary tale". It's character assasination.

1. Don't invest in someone just because they're cool, or at least cooler than you. Alpha-Nerd Perot sees a TV special on Steve Jobs, and exclaims how Jobs is "Mr. Excitement" or some such superlative. He promptly plunks down huge money to invest in the "Next" computer, which is portrayed as revolutionary hardware. But no one really knows up front what they're investing in. So what, it makes Ross feel like he can transform some of that hard-scrabble, uptight crew-cutness of his into hip, long hair, do-drugs California investing.

2. Watch the press releases. The big bomb that's hidden in a press release discloses that Next has dropped it's hardware business, and will now be developing innovative software. Which bombed. So Ross went in investing in one thing, and came out investing in something else.

3. Cool people scream a lot when things get uncool. The rest of the book is the typical tantrum about Jobs acting hard-to-manage.

Stross' sources are impeccable, which isn't all that surprising since he's a historian. Despite the fact that he was prevented from interviewing Steve Jobs, and presumably a number of other higher ups in the NeXT management, the book doesn't really suffer from the absence. Stross appears to have gone through each and every document related to NeXT's finances to compile a staggering testament to the various untruths NeXT, as a corporate entity, appears to have told its customers, the media and everybody else willing to listen. At the same time, it's a scathing critique of Steve Job's attitude, he can only be described as an enfant terrible. Stross goes to great lengths to illustrate his judgement of Jobs as a mean-spirited, perhaps "greatly insane", person with numerous anecdotes.

None of this should come as a surprise to anyone who has read about Steve Jobs. We all know he's notorious for pushing people to their limits, the stories of people leaving Jobs' projects in a state of physical and mental fatigue are well known. What comes as a surprise is Jobs' capacity for deceitfullness and disloyalty and his utter disregard for the people working for and with him. Stross marvelously brings out Jobs' ego in all its filthy manifestations. The book is really an intriguing history of Steve Jobs at NeXT, complete with the gory financial details, the stories about mismanagement, Jobs' fetish for perfection in little things he latched on, the hype around NeXT and the failure. Still, the book lacks a sense of the things NeXT let its customer accomplish, from developing the Web (Tim Berners-Lee) and creating Quake, to WebObjects and cryptography (NSA and CIA).

That said, it is probably a good idea to read this book along with, or after reading Steven Levy's Insanely Great. Insanely Great is a more balanced book, Stross at times seems to detest Jobs passionately (which is certainly not surprising), Levy presents a much more considerate view of Jobs. Of course this has to be balanced ! with the fact that Levy is writing about the successful Macintosh project, and Stross is writing about the comparative failure that was NeXT.

What Stross' book could do with is a little more knowledge of NeXT's products (especially the later slabs and cubes) and some sense of the palpable advances NeXT made. There was technology in the NeXT that was not fully realized (Optical media and the DSP for instance), but this was true of the Macintosh as well (who had heard of 3.5" disks). We cannot dismiss NeXT simply on the grounds of the technology being new, untested, and expensive. As a NeXT user, it seems to me that Stross greatly underestimated the conceptual leaps made by NeXT, in designing Interface Builder and tying the software to Object Oriented Programming (OOP), using Display Postscript, the Installer application, the NetInfo server, successfully creating a multi user machine which a single Unix novice user could operate and run. I know people who have owned NeXTs for years and have never used the Unix command prompt.

Stross praises Sun for its strategy of pushing the speed envelope, and parceling out manufacturing, but SunOS and Solaris still have to attain the elegance of NeXT, and there were certainly far fewer software based advances at Sun than at NeXT. Stross has a reasonably firm grasp on the technology, there are no glaring problems with his analysis of some of the more complex pieces of NeXTStep and the NeXT computers, but at times one notices him stepping gingerly around something that is very involved, which is as it should be because the book isn't really about NeXT or technology, it's about Steve Jobs. Still, one wishes Stross would give more credit to NeXT's technology, after all NeXTStep continues to be miles ahead of all other Unix based operating systems in terms of a Desktop/Development platform. One big mistake is Stross' claim that NeXTStep is "closed", that NeXTs were not meant to work with other computers in a networked environment. This really cann! ot be substantiated.

After reading the book, one cringes at the thought of what melodramas Jobs is currently creating at Apple, and one hopes the port of NeXTStep to the PowerPC (Rhapsody) will not be bogged down with the sort of problems that NeXT had. The future for Apple/NeXT seems bright, though there's a lot of catching up to do before Apple can seriously challenge WinTel again. True, the PowerPC architecture is way ahead of Intel, and NeXTStep is far further along the development path than NT, but it's still frightening when one sees Jobs closing the doors to hardware competitors again. One hopes Jobs has learned from his mistakes and that Apple will concentrate on software development (Rhapsody can become a serious challenge to Windows 95/98 if priced appropriately). There's hope for Apple yet, NeXTStep/OpenStep is a great Operating System, it's certainly much better at internetworking than anything Microsoft has to offer (after all the Web was created on a NeXT). All the same, Jobs can still make or break Apple.