The "score" rating is an unwelcome feature of the page. This reviewer does not "score" books.

This small volume is a treasure. In hardcover, the pages are silver, the dark blue typography is a beautiful old-style Roman, perhaps Garamond or Times, good-sized and leaded out for easy readability. And the illustrations are unsurpassed.

First, the illustrator: Gustave Dore was born in 1832, sixty years after the birth of Coleridge. He died in 1883. Coleridge preceded him in death by 49 years. Coleridge was born in 1772 and died in 1834. Dore was born in Strasbourg, and was a renowned illustrator who was doing lithographs at the age of thirteen.

The fact that Dore was a near contemporary of Coleridge is important because we can be assured that the characters' costumes in his illustrations reflect the actual dress of the time Coleridge was describing. The ships also are correctly drawn and beautifully detailed.

To say that his illustrations complement this classic epic poem is an understatement.

As to the poet, some wag said once of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, that "a half-great poet had a wholly great day." I have also heard that Coleridge is supposed to have written his epic in one sitting, in a great burst of inspiration. I can't vouch for that, but it is truly a masterpiece--of that there can be no doubt.

I recall trying to memorize it when I was in high school, about sixty years ago. I loved it then, and I still do now.

For the price, this book is an absolute steal. No library is complete without this poem, and of all the renditions I've seen of it, this is by far the most beautiful.

Estragon and Godot really have no sense of who, where, and when they are, as becomes clear in their interactions with the wealthy passerby Pozzo and Lucky, his personal servant who is as much a trained mule as he is a man. Lucky can "think," though, and you'd better grab a seat and hold on when he gets started. After the first night comes, Estragon and Vladimir return to the same spot to once again wait on Godot, and once again Pozzo, now suddenly blind, and Lucky return. No one seems to remember anything much about the others or of the previous day with the exception of Vladimir, and the interaction between the four major characters certainly introduces some comedy, albeit of a tragic, resigned sort. The comedy actually makes the drama more tragic, so its classification as a tragicomedy in two acts is pretty apt. I don't see a lot of hope revealed here, although others seem to. Life is simply meaningless is the message I get most clearly out of it, so the only hope I perceive comes in the form of waiting for something that may or may not happen while doing nothing yourself to make anything happen. We are all waiting for something, I suppose, but such a vivid portrayal of the utter futility of such behavior strikes me as more depressing than inspiring. This drama really deserves multiple reads in order for its true essence to work its way closer to the surface; it may well be, I freely admit, that I have yet to spot whatever essence the play intends to reveal to me. I won't deny Waiting For Godot is a landmark drama, and I fear this review has done it very little justice, but I consider the act of writing it a victory of sorts over the useless practice of waiting for Godot to come and explain everything to me and take care of all my questions and troubles.

Some humans find this play perplexing. To us dogs, much of the hidden meaning of "Waiting for Godot" is as clear as the odor of day-old road kill. The lead characters, Didi and Gogo, laze around by the side of a country road, waiting for whatever, yipping and yapping about whatever comes to mind, gnawing on chicken bones, and sniffing boots. Didi and Gogo are boonie dogs, like us! The enslaved character Lucky is a domestic "pet", housebroken and "fixed" (i.e., broken). Pozzo is a parody of a not atypical pompous human self-proclaimed "pet owner". The remaining character, the boy, may represent the quintessential, but often somewhat clueless, noncanine animal companion of primate derivation, Lassie's Timmy. The sole prop in the play's scenery, a tree, has obvious uses and significance for canines.

Godot could be God, or an alpha mail who will lead a raid on a restaurant dumpster, a bitch in heat, a human bearing Milk Bones, or a noisy truck to be chased. Godot represents all of the things that we wait for when we hang out by the roadside.

Once the reader understands the true meaning of "Waiting for Godot", it is clear that this play was written by a dog. Just as women used to publish under male pseudonyms, and blacklisted screenwriters used fronts, so the anonymous canine who wrote this play had to put a human playwright's name on his or her work in order to have it staged and accepted. We believe that plays should be seen, heard and smelled, rather than read. However, until "Waiting for Godot" is properly staged with a canine cast, it can perhaps best be enjoyed by reading the script.

Dogs have already produced classic poetry, such as Skipper's "Complacencies of the Fenced Yard", published in "Unleashed: Poems by Writers' Dogs". Now we know a dog has written "Waiting for Godot", a classic play. This only heightens our aniticipation as we await the coming of the great canine novel.

I like the examples from real research findings and the design techniques that the author provided but the material is a little dated now.

This book does give you a good emphasis on design for those who are up to speed.

Furthermore, the Samuels systemmatically misrepresent the arguments of those authors who disagree with them. Having read other analyses of the explosion of the Maine, I found that the Samuels ignore the most telling and cogent arguments made in favor of an accidental explosion.

Having attempted to kneecap their intellectual opposites, the Samuels descend into the depths of absurdity by trotting out the obscure account of one Walter Mitty-ish figure, James Brice, who claimed in 1911 to have been told of a plot to destroy the Maine. They never explain why their unlikely Deep Throat kept silent long after the deaths of McKinley, Fitzhugh Lee or John Long, or why no corroborating evidence of Mr. Brice's claim has ever emerged from either Washington or Madrid - particularly when Mr. Brice claimed that Madrid knew of the plot and that he had told McKinley a week after the blast.

Clearly they were grasping at straws when writing the final chapter. Having written a needlessly vituperative hatchet job, they needed to forego the better, more cautious instincts of historians and write a conclusion that went for the jugular and theatrically unveiled the true culprit. Somewhere along the way, they forgot that they were historians.

The only fact truly revealed by their conclusion, however is that their book should not have been written at all.