Before anything else is said, it should be known that this edition is a prose translation, which does not retain most poetic characteristics of the original poem although for a modern English reader this is probably the best edition yet: fairly clear and still interesting in its own way. Orlando Furioso is a 16th century epic poem dealing with Charlamgne's wars against the "Saracens" who had (if we are to take the poem as historical fact) even reached the point of besieging the city of Paris. Of course,the book was not meant by its author to be historically accurate in any way, merely a parody of chivalric court legends as the book description says. Whoever reads this book and fails to sense irony on every page, even crude jokes in some parts clearly does not understand what he is reading in the least. But Orlando Furioso is not a parody of just chivalric court legends; it also pokes fun at the Illiad, popular tales and even common peasant stories. The heads (complete with helmets) sliced in two by a single sword blow are taken from The Illiad, in which Greek champions perform similar feats, although in Orlando Furioso, literally hundreds of men meet their end in this manner to the point of becoming amusing in a way. And I found it strange to notice a very clear similarity between the story told by an innkeeper in the book and the prologue to a translation of a 13th century version of the Arabian Nights (translated by Hussain Haddawy). Ariosto had no possible way to know of the existence of the Nights, but still it is interesting to see how truly close the two incidents are: In Orlando, two men who have given up on the possibility of women being chaste, take one woman and watch her day and night, yet she still deceives them in their own bed. In the Nights, a demon has locked his wife inside an impenetrable castle, yet she still deceives him as he sleeps right next to her in bed. The two events are described similarly, with the same irony (being meant as a joke which the author denies believing in in the least). The book is funny only in the way reading Candide is funny. This is simply another example of what makes the book enjoyable. During the reading of Orlando, somewhere about 3/4 of the way into the book, the reader may wish that it would end right there and that two characters; Bradamant and Ruggiero should get married and finish the story. But the continuation of their separation and further adventures is just another parody of common legends, exaggerated out of proportion. In the end, with all its jokes and its surprisingly individualistic narrative technique, its more serious scenes (the most touching of which is when a woman named Isabel is killed) forms into a large picture, with a great deal of good atmosphere, such that when it ends (although the reader may not have been touched very much during its reading) will want it to go on.

Ariosto was one of the giants of Renaissance literature, and this was his footprint. Grand, touching, funny, witty, stirring -- as Dryden said of Chaucer, here is the world's plenty. Some of the greatest poets of the next two centuries (Tasso, Spenser, Milton) explicitly attempted to overdo him, and only sometimes succeeded; Byron took as much from Ariosto as he did from Pulci.

But don't read this on that account. Read it because it's a delight from start to finish. War, love, and chivalry are the poet's themes, and they're here in all their forms.

I don't know Italian, but everyone I've asked who would know assures me Reynolds's translation captures not just the essence but the spirit of the original.

(Ignore the reviews that claim that this is a prose translation -- they are from another translation.)

Easy enough to refer to a prose translation as "appropriate for the masses," but the fact remains that when a translator is freed from the necessity of forcing a poem to conform to rhyme and meter in a second language, he has access to a broader range of vocabulary and is therefore more able to remain true to the spirit of the original (as Waldman deftly explains in his introduction). Is it any wonder that this work has received so little attention in America when past translations have been so hidebound and pedagogical? Orlando Furioso is anything but a sing-songy, staid old verse.

In Waldman's translation are to be found both the idealised virtues of chivalry and sometimes startlingly lowbrow humor, all wrapped up in an epic tale of adventure, romance and magic. By providing an unabridged translation (another shortcoming of more traditional editions), and by attempting to capture the true flavor of the work rather than slavishly abiding by the dictates of classical poetic rules, he has presented to English readers for the first time a tale that rivals the epics of Homer in its scope and aspiration. And for sheer entertainment value (coupled with the elitism of Ariosto's sly jabs at the very people for whom the work was composed), this work is all but impossible to beat-- his original audience, after all, was not the literati, but the idle rich.

Barefoot Gen: The Day After is volume two of a four part series. It tells the story of the day after the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima as seen through the eyes of seven year old Gen Nakaoka. Based on the real-life experiences of the author, Gen, his mother, and his newborn sister face the horrors of the day after the bomb. They have no food or shelter and are surrounded by the dead and dying. Even the soldiers sent in to gather and burn the dead bodies are succumbing to the radiation sickness and dying. No one understands what is happening and there is no one to turn to. Gen goes in search of food for his mother whose breast milk has dried up from malnutrition. Alone he faces the horror of the devastation and the destitution of the people of Hiroshima. This the hardest of the four books to read because the carnage of the day after the bomb is almost beyond belief. Gen's compassion, humanity, and determination makes this an inspiring book about the strength of the human spirit. Although the graphic scenes may turn some people off, this is still an important book for its message on the dangers of nuclear war.

The work has been wonderfully translated from the Japanese original: Hadashi no Gen. It was originally published in serial form in 1972 and 1973 in Shukan Shonen Jampu, the largest weekly comic magazine in Japan, with a circulation of over two million. The drawings are all in black and white. This US edition was published as part of a movement to translate the book into other languages and spread its message. It is a wonderful testimony to the strength of the human spirit and the horrors of nuclear war. There are a few introductory essays at the front of the book that help to put this book into perspective. It is a powerful and tragic story that I highly recommend for anyone interested in the topic.

I stumbled across this graphic novel in a used bookstore, not having any idea the impression it would make on me. This is an incredibly powerful story, very effectively told through the medium of comic art. It is an affirmation of the power of visual media, and an example of how comics can be used for much more than funnies and fantasies. It is also probably the most effective anti-nuclear material I have ever come across.

Yes, they can. This is the tale of Gen, a young boy, and his family during the bombing of Hiroshima. The tale begins with his day to day life, and then through the bombings. The illustrations of his brother and pregnant mother dying and in pain are upsetting and fully illustrate the horrors of war.

An amazing look at the life of this incredible Christian woman! This book dives into the depths of her mind and her life. No secret or interesting fact is spared in this delightful biography. I recommend it to anyone interested in the life of this fascinating visionary.

Dorothy L. Sayers did more in her life than just create the aristocratic detective Lord Peter Wimsey. In addition to writing the Wimsey novels and short stories, she was one of the first female graduates of Oxford, a translator of Dante, a poet and a Christian apologist whose reputation at the time rivaled that of C.S. Lewis.

Her longtime friend, Barbara Reynolds, draws on her memories of the woman as well as her voluminous correspondence and has written a lively account of Sayers' life.

Those who admire the Wimsey novels will find their enjoyment heightened after reading this book. As I found in researching the "Annotating Dorothy L. Sayers"..., Sayers flooded her work with literary, historical and social references that represented the best of her education as well as her interests in the murderous and the macabre: Shakespeare, John Donne, Greek mythology, contemporary English music-hall acts, Gilbert & Sullivan, notorious 19th-century murders and snippets of classical Greek and Latin. To write "The Nine Tailors," which featured a church and its bell-ringers, Sayers spent two years studying campanology, and had to endure, she wrote, "incalculable hours spent in writing out sheets and sheets of changes, until I could do any method accurately in my head. Also, I had to visualize, from the pages of instructions to ringers, both what it looked like and what it felt like to handle a bell and to acquire rope-sight.'" After the novel was published, she thought she had been caught out on only three small technical errors, but did well enough to be asked to serve as vice-president of the Campanological Society of Great Britain.

But the books also contain much of Sayers herself. Obviously, Sayers' alter ego was expressed in the character of Harriet Vane, the mystery writer she put on trial for murder in "Strong Poison," who was romanced by Peter in "Gaudy Night," and who married him in "Busman's Honeymoon." But Sayers also drew on her life experiences and her interests. "Gaudy Night" reflected her experiences at Oxford, her desire to live the scholarly life and the importance of intellectual achievement, while the parsonage she vividly recreated in "The Nine Tailors" was drawn from her childhood memories, and the gentle churchly Rev. Thomas Venables was modeled on her parson father.

Christianity played a great role in Sayers' life from the start, and the success of the Wimsey novels enabled her to shelve the detective and turn to writing plays and books that expounded the doctrine of the Church of England in laymen's terms. In this, she was enormously successful, and even sparked a ruckus when one of her plays featured the disciples talking in modern slang, predating the uproar over "Jesus Christ Superstar" by three decades.

Reynolds also tells the story of the illegitimate child Sayers bore. While it would be easy to condemn her for turning the boy over to a cousin to raise, Reynolds also made clear that Sayers did it to protect her parents, who she thought would be terribly hurt by her misjudgment. Considering that she visited and paid for his upkeep and education, and told him the whole story when he was an adult, it seems to have been the best of all possible choices.

The pleasure of meeting Miss Sayers can only be increased by looking into her letters, which have been published in several volumes. From the first, Sayers seems to have been bright, precocious and determined to make her own way, and it's a pleasure to see in Reynolds' biography that she did so splendidly.

I found this book an excellent and easy to follow book. Very well illustrated and to the point. I benefitted from it in preparing my lectures for a Medical Laboratory course.

As Baroness P. D. James states in her preface to this engrossing book, "we have what is in effect an epistolary autobiography" of the young Dorothy L. Sayers, from age five to forty-three, when the author became the household word that she is today. (Later letters comprise volume two.)

The earliest letters are sprinkled with references to poems, plays or short stories that she had written, in any-or all-of the four languages at her command (English, French, German and Latin.) She fell madly in love with the theatre, not to mention the leading men of the era. Before she reached the age of thirteen, she had read (in the original French) The Three Musketeers, and from that time on, referred to her familiy and assorted locations by their assigned names from the book. She took for herself the identity of Athos. At eighteen, her headmistress announced that Dorothy had come top in all England in the Cambridge Higher Local Examinations with distinction in French and spoken German. The following year she entered Somerville College at Oxford.

Men as men didn't enter her life until she had completed Oxford. She fell in love only once, but they couldn't marry due to multiple differences in values. Subsequently, she had a short-lived affair with another man, who was the father of her only child, a son raised by Dorothy's cousin. Their roles were reversed in the boy's life; the cousin was his 'Mum' and Dorothy his aunt. Not until after her death did the truth come out.

These letters bring to vivid life the enigma who was known world-wide as the creator of Lord Peter Wimsey, the perfect foil. She couldn't afford a luxurious flat, a Daimler, or an Axminster carpet; she could, however, provide them for Lord Peter. She made him and his family and his possessions incredibly real for her millions of readers.

Any devotee of Lord Peter Wimsey will be exceedingly grateful to Barbara Reynolds for her years of loving care in sorting through and editing these letters of one of the world's great novelists. We can but wait-patiently-for volume two, in order to learn how Dorothy wore her hard-earned and well-deserved fame.

Dorothy L Sayers was much more than a writer of detective novels. From the late 1930's until her death, she was also in great demand as a writer and speaker on religious issues. She wrote a series of radio plays on the life of Christ called "The man born to be king", and the sensation caused by these made her into an instant "expert" on religion in the eyes of the public and the media of the day. The letters dealing with the writing and production of the plays are fascinating. The uproar caused by an actor portraying Jesus was unbelievable (Christ hadn't been portrayed on stage since Oliver Cromwell's time), and Sayers was accused of blasphemy because she used everyday language instead of only the words of the Bible. There's very little about her detective novels in this volume of letters, but I still found them full of interesting insights into the life of a writer. Sayers' very distinctive voice comes through, and her letters to friends are lots of fun. Her joy at receiving a lemon as a present during the war (unobtainable due to rationing) is wonderful, as are her discussions with her husband on the best way to use this treasure. A fascinating collection of letters from one of my favourite writers.

This book tell what life was like in Hiroshima in the four months before the atomic bomb. It is actually the first of a series on the effects of war and the atomic bomb on the lives of one family as seen through the eyes of a 6 year old boy, Gen Nakaoka. Based on the real-life experiences of the author, this volume opens in April 1945 and tells of the hardships of war on the people of Japan.

Gen's father is a craftsman in Hiroshima who makes wooden sandles to try to feed his five children and his pregnant wife. He is labelled a traitor by his neighbors because he is opposed to the war. We see the cruelties and hardships of their daily lives through the eyes of young Gen who can't understand why he and his family are despised. The close family values of his home life are in sharp contrast to the rabid patriotic chauvenism of his community. This volume ends with the events of August 6, the day of the atomic bomb. The story of how Gen survives is told in the subsequent volumes.

The work has been well translated from the Japanese original: Hadashi no Gen. It was originally published in serial form in 1972 and 1973 in Shukan Shonen Jampu, the largest weekly comic magazine in Japan, with a circulation of over two million. The drawings are all in black and white. This US edition was published as part of a movement to translate the book into other languages and spread around the world its message of the threat of nuclear war. It is a wonderful testimony to the strength of the human spirit and the horrors of nuclear war. There are a few introductory essays at the front of the book and a publisher's note at the end that help to put this book into perspective. It is a powerful and tragic story that I highly recommend for anyone interested in the topic.

Nakazawa Keiji's "Hadashi no Gen", or "Barefoot Gen" as we read it, is a stark portrayal of the artist's experience before and after the bombing of Hiroshima. In Japan, in most if not all junior high schools, manga and toys are banned even today as distractions from study. Yet, Barefoot Gen won the praise of Educators in Japan immediately after it was published. This is perhaps the only manga, or graphic novel, which can be consitantly found on the shelves of school libraries in Japan.

It is not an "oh, woe is me" tale of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but rather a sharp and critical statement about both nuclear war and the Japanese expansionist empire in the first part of this century. Packed with fine details of Japanese life which are still obvious today, simple illustrations and direct text hold nothing back. What many readers may find awkward humour rattled with panic is scattered through the story, but that is a very accurate depiction of the Japanese social response mechanism to impossible situations.

The book is also a unique pop-culture portrayal of Japanese attitudes to 'gaijin', or foreigners living in Japan at the time, particularly Korean. Koreans were left without assistance by Japanese who considered them third class, and this book is unique to include that aspect in a text for youth. It is also sharply critical of an Empire's treatment of her people, while this empire still shadows Japanese life today. A truly remarkable book which should find a space on the shelves of youth and community libraries everywhere.

The simple language and graphics also make this book an excellent source for ESL readers.

Do yourself and your teenagers a favour and find copies of Barefoot Gen and the other books by Nakazawa which have been translated in this series (search Amazon.com for "The Day After", "Out of the Ashes" and others), then share them.

Defying anyone who would call a graphic novel simply a comic book, the Barefoot Gen series is a great work of art at many levels. Together with "Maus," these series immortalize mistakes that can never again be allowed to be repeated.

I am the author of the book and I still have some copies on hand. It is good read for young people who want to a quick read on 50 African-American role models. I talked to all of them while I was an editor at USA TODAY. A few, such as journalist Carl Rowan and Ethel Payne and Arthur Ashe have died. Some of those interviewed included Maya Angelou, Oprah Winfrey, Ray Charles, Bill Cosby, Martin Luther King Sr. and Martin Luther King III and Guion Bluford, the first African American astronaunt in space. Basically, it provides background and question and answer formats dealing with their successes amd failures. If you want the book you can get it from me. Reynew@aol.com

This is the only paperback Italian-English dictionary with outstanding grammar help for the English speaker. It includes accents, which many others lack, but it's strongest point is the help it gives on irregular plurals, irregular verbs, and auxiliary verbs. Originally published in 1975, however, it is simply out of date. Italy is a dynamic, modern country, and the language is changing. Also, this dictionary is VERY British--sometimes I can't understand the "English" definitions!

Try instead the Italian-English dictionary from Oxford's Color Dictionary series. It's not nearly as helpful grammar-wise, but it is modern, has quite a few Americanisms, and is printed on much better paper.

Barbara Reynolds caught hell when she published this book. It was the first to expose several "facts" about the Jesse Jackson myth as false. The assasination story, the growing up in a shack story, the curious finances of Operation Breadbasket and Jackson's personal life were all exposed. Reynolds eventually had to leave Chicago and the book although widely read was rarely mentioned in public. Today Keith Timmerman's book Shakedown is on the bestseller lists. It turns out that Barbara was right all along.