Stephen Sandy's BLACK BOX is a stunning book, just a wonderful collection. It's comic and serious by turns; intelligent and passionate too. I totally agree with John Ashbery's comment. Ashbery writes: "There is a new wonder at the delight and desolation of everything in Stephen Sandy's BLACK BOX, and how it's all being rolled up together provides us with a sustaining space to pass our lives in. Humor, joy, accurately-dosed pinches of pity and terror make this new living arrangement a strange treasure." And that wonderful Southern writer Kelly Cherry, too. She wrote, "Black Box is completely terrific. Wonderfully intelligent, unpredictable, and most of all, passionate." How can anyone get ready for Y2K without this book?

This well-conceived book truly reminds us that political cartooning has held a giant role in our nation's history -- and perhaps more than it has ever been given credit for. The authors make a stong case of cartooning's political vitality, past and present. The book is a very engaging and fun read not only because of its generous use of cartooning, but also because the authors take effort to put each cartoon they use into a fitting historical context. The reader is also on a guided tour of cartooning's historical phases, starting from the 18th century. The authors suggest that some six different phases (eras) of American political cartooning can be traced.

Blake asserted, "I know that This World Is a World of Imagination"; and his contemporary Wordsworth affirmed, "What nobler marvels than the mind / May in life's daily prospect find, / May find or there create?" Blake and Wordsworth of course saw the world with rather different eyes, but as poets their goal was closely similar: to reveal that the interrelationships of consciousness, the senses, and the world--however complex and often troubling or worse--are, in the basic sense of the word, wonderful.
My own eyes, which have been helping me for several decades to study, teach, and write about those two poets and their peers, see Sandy's "Surface Impressions" taking an important place in the tradition of Wordsworth's masterpiece "The Prelude," which, although on its surface an "autobiographical poem," is fundamentally a revelation of how one moment of consciousness unfolds the next, and how those moments cumulatively unfold our time and space and the texture of our experience, in patterns that continually break and re-form into new shapes what is varyingly familiar and mysterious, reassuring and frightening, shared and unique to ourselves--but is always, when recognized well enough, a wonderful living presence. Sandy works his fascinating transformances of apparently autobiographical moments in verse that seems always to be taking the shape of short poems that seem always to be becoming other short poems that almost before we notice have become a long poem so much alive that it seems not to end when the words do.

I was enchanted by these poems. I also enjoyed reading the comments of others about them which appear on the dust jacket: "A body of work full of distinctiveness and sustained vigor." --Richard Wilbur; "A poet confident of his craft's resources and his heart's determined fidelity to what it knows and loves."--Robert Creeley; "How timely this splendid showing of Sandy's invaluable work! Now, after praise here by Merrill, there by Clampitt, this poet of intelligent wonder can be savored in full, as we say, by further readers ready to disciver such dark winnings, such luminous wounds."--Richard Howard Then I saw in Publishers Weekly a great review including the comment, "Sandy writes sometimes dense, sometimes narrative poems that are colloquial yet steeped in a love of attaining the grander sweep of poetic utterance." I agree with all of these observations!

Once you start reading this book filled with underwater non-sense and highjinx you won't want to stop. The book follows the show from which it was based very well. After this book, you'll want to join Spongebob and patrick in all their crazy mis-adventures.

This is a wacky book that is totally cool and doesn't get boring at all. Get it and you won't be disapointed! Get them all you person you.

I picked up the Slavitt translation of Aeschylus Oresteia off a publisher's overstock rack at a bookstore. I have enjoyed reading these plays, however, Slavitt's translation leaves me wanting.

Some have complained that Slavitt is too modern and a bit too, well, guteral. My greek is admittedly weak, but the Greeks were certainly not prudes and often this aspect is covered up in our translations.

After seeing a few complaints on the web, I tried comparing a few other translations at the local library. In almost all cases I found Ted Hughes's version to be both more interesting and also clearer. Hughes, like Slavitt is not the most "literal" translation, but he makes it a great read.

I am not enough of a Greek Scholar to recomend a more literal version, but it looks like people have good things to say about Fagles's version.

Ancient Greece is a topic that once bored me, but after I read this book, I suddenly became interested in the Ancient World and the great many achievements of the Greeks. I know many people may not read books on Ancient topics, but this one is definately not one to pass by

A bit uneven in spots, the translation is overall easy to read and highly recommended for highschool or lower level university classes. Students unfamiliar with this material need modern diction and syntax, despite what the reviewer from Japan opines, and this translation provides them.