Newer books have been written based on more recently available sources, but this book stands the test of time. It is based on solid research, it doesn't spend entire chapters digressing into, for instance, the ins and outs of the Bowies' business dealings, and it keeps speculation on the motivations of Travis, Crockett, Bowie and Santa Anna to a couple of paragraphs each. Any speculation is just the author's guesswork, and I find Myers guesses to be kept more brief - and more to my personal taste - than, say, William C. Davis' in "Three Roads to the Alamo". It has been said that a revisionist is one who, lacking the notion of honor in his/her own character, cannot understand it when encountered in others. While Myers examines the actions of the three main personalities in a journalistic manner, the enormity of their patriotic sacrifice is never deprecated as is the fashion in modern, revisionist historical writing.

This book remains not only the best single volume on the siege, it provides a great introduction to the historic and social melieu of the era for those seeking to understand the background of the Mexican-American War. -

Mr. Myers wrote this book in 1948, and based it on careful research into the facts as they were known at the time. THE ALAMO is a story of heroic men, dedicated to the cause of freedom, sacrificing their lives willingly for that cause. Bowie, Crockett, Travis, and all the others with them, were the stuff of legends, and as such we should remember them. This is a story to rival THE ILLIAD in its nobility of character and cause. Sadly, later research has shown that these giants were, like the Trojans, at least partialy the product of myth, and their cause was not quite so noble. But this in no way detracts from the telling of a great tale, and, if the men of the Alamo were not quite as tall as we imagined them, they were still men deservant of our admiration. They died for what they believed in, and this is their story, from the first man who ever bothered to compile the whole thing in one place.

Although written in 1948, John Myers Myers "The Alamo", proves that he did his homework well way back then. As a result, the factual conclusions he arrived at the time of his writing, dovetail with those arrived at in later years by other Alamo authors, including Walter Lord. Myers writing presents the subject in a historicly accurate manor, but at the same time with the wit and insight of a newspaper editorial, bringing it to life on a human level.

To find this book of photographs by Ormerod - already several years old - at a bargain price was a happy event. The book is roughly evenly divided between colour and black and white work. The hair-sharp colour prints, like most colour photos, you feel you've seen before (Ormerod is somewhere between Eggleston and Misrach), but a handful of the black and whites stand out for their quiet interest in a world that is clearly foreign to the English-born photographer. Here is the photographer I would like to be - direct but unobtrusive. However, both critical essays included with the works in the book feel compelled to explain its relative lack of human figures (the cover image is uncharacteristic of most in this collection), as though this is an embarrassing oversight of the photographer: a weakness about which one must be exceedingly respectful and polite. One of the two writers actually atones for the missing persons by talking about 'the implied presence' of human beings in the pictures. Why can't people bear to contemplate photos in which some fragment of their own compulsive sociality is not reflected? There is a superb floating quality in these Ormerods that is completely deferential to the need of the viewer to travel into the picture and experience parts unknown without interference. Despite the tendency of all photographers to minimise distances and to destroy exoticism because they are always in reality debt and must go, like Muhammad, to the mountain, Ormerod's pictures tell me something exquisite about the largeness of the world, like graffiti on a public statue whose authors are utterly removed from oneself. Whole country towns seen from a hilly rise: you will never know them, never see them except through him. An intense, dreamy abstract romanticism operates here that neither critic seems to see at all; no, he is just a social commentator like the rest, that dull worthy animal. Whereas Ormerod tells his viewers clearly that people as such, people as characters, are of no interest to him at all, the critics respond in an absurdly tenacious way that Ormerod must be making oblique 'allusions' to political contingency, poverty, social unrest, a nation's failed dreams, and so on - idiotically personalising his lonely, lovely car wrecks with a broken radiator-grimace. You may of course agree with the critics that this collection is depressingly devoid of signs of human life. What is the basic difference between the critics and me? Why do we see Ormerod's collection so differently? Desire and isolation, exception, endless roaming are all the one thing to me. The 'implied presence' is always erotic to me. To others, eroticism inheres in people, in overflowing gatherings and exchanged glances; to me it inheres in people's deliciously frustrating absence, their reticence and refusals. If you have always viewed photographs as opportunities to travel while imagining the forms of human life that go on elsewhere, this collection will hold great appeal. Photographic representations of absence will make the average critic think there is something polemical in the artist's intentions (rusting ploughshares in superannuated fields lead to pieties of the 'throwaway society' sort). Lonely places make them think of the great, dry political themes - hardly a turn-on. They judge accordingly. I urge you to see for yourself whether these rather restricted criteria do Michael Ormerod justice.

I was reluctant to pick up this book because of it's title, but I decided to read it because I had it in my collection. I was somewhat entertained, and finished the book very quickly due to the short length. It is a tragedy in which almost all are killed in the end. I did not care much for the plot, which involves an incestuous relationship between brother and sister. After reading part of the book, it was rather easy to predict the ending. It is not a tremendously detailed and emotional story. I'm not sure if this is a title that would often come up in conversations between friends or colleagues, but avid readers might want to pick up the title to have read it.

This play is an excellent example of incest in the Renaissance. It's also fairly short and very readable. Bergetto is an interesting character and provides much needed comic relief in this play which is ultimately quite tragic. The title is misleading in many ways, but female sexuality is problematic throughout.

I chose to read this play because firstly, Anthony Burgess mentioned it in his book "English Literature" (1857) and secondly, because it was a short play. Or maybe even thirdly - the central theme [incest] it deals with is treated in an entirely different manner from other literary works. The nature of the incest is frank and horrifying. The intensity of the unlawful relationship is compromised by the coarsening of Giovanni's love for Annabella; their ethereal relationship gradually loses its innocence in the course of the play, culminating in Annabella's pregnancy and finally her death in Giovanni's hands.

While we certainly cannot put Ford in the ranks of Shakespeare, he deserves credit for a play whose themes of sexual jealousy, revenge, violence and incent intertwine in a most heartrending way.