I have read this book several times and often refer back to it to review specific topics . I have also purchased, 25 to 30 copies of this book as a gift to those where I see a need. I consider this book to be, a gift of life. I have also done multiple linear correlation tests on many of the data tables presented in the book. I have found a high degree of correlation with a reasonably low Stand Error.

My personal opinion of this book is as I said previously is that it is: A GIFT OF LIFE.

First of all, I was very happy to find a copy of My Method in the English language - which is a rarity - while there are many editions in the original French language which is mine. I am impressed by Emile Coue - the forefather of all inspirational authors and self-help writers - and a man with a rare sense of mind-body-spirit. So, at last I found the book - in a simple language but so enticing. Part of my mission is to make the work of Emile Coue better known in the world... I was also extremely happy to discover his American Impressions - his insightful comments about the power of the press in this country, his fascination for the American Spirit, his admiration for the New World --- and even his feeling that his method will have more success in the USA than in his country where he is a household name. I find the man simply mesmerizing and I was happy to find his writings --- modest and very effective as he was --- and I invite everybody to read his book and follow his method that really works ...

Zola's literary terrain was the victim with no voice, the laborers, those that made civilization run at great human cost. In "Pot- Bouille", (Boiling Pot), Zola has taken on the middle class residents of an apartment building and savages their collective pretensions of moral superiority. The stink of petty economies, money lust and aristocratic yearing is everywhere. His hero is Octave Mouret a young cloth merchant from the provinces who comes to 1860s Paris to make his fortune. In this residential building whose public areas are overdone with architectural garnish Mouret makes his home among an unhealthy bunch of souls. There are voracious mothers trying to marry off lackluster, shallow daughters, philandering husbands, besieged, toiling husbands, cold indifferent wives, callous mistresses. The servants are stored away for the night in their garret rooms after a day of being subjected to the customary regimen of abuse and bullying dished up by their employers. That the servants are a crude, ignorant crowd makes them no more worthy of respect than their masters. In the parallel world of house help slop bucket throwing, vulgar gossip, same sex seduction and infant death figures prominently. On the quest to conquer big, bad Paris Mouret helps himself heartily to all this messy stew offers whether neighbors' wives or solitary widows. He tastes whatever his manipulations bring his way. Women are a banquet fit for the taking if they can be emotionally and physically overpowered, so says the masculine imperative of the times. But then the female characters here have little to admire. The women represent a menu of every sort of female vice, wallowing in vanity, indolence and self-complacency served up in heaping portions. There is so much tragedy in this house that the horrors of greed and duplicity become almost farcical in Zola's hands. On these pages we live through a years worth of Jerry Springer moments top hats and crinoline hoop skirts flying in contentious free-for-all. "Pot- Bouille" is a feast of poisonous family values to be savored comfortably by the modern reader from the vantage point of a new (more humanist?) millennium.

This is the book I read and re-read to develop my hockey knowledge. As a teenager, who began to understand the nuances of playing the game, Mr. Francis provided me the first insights into the subtlies of playing your position. I credit this book with providing me the "head" game to grow my skills and allow me to play university hockey.

I am purchasing this book to give to my son so he can have the opportunity to learn a part of the game from a knowledgable source. As a USA Hockey coach I feel the techniques described in this book are still very applicable to today's youth hockey.

I am grateful to Mr. Francis for what he has contributed to hockey in general and to my personal game that I am still playing in my forties.

R.H.J.M Otten and L.P.P.P van Ginneken The Annealing Algorithm Kluwer Academic Publisher

This book, number five in the Rougon-Macquart saga and the sequel to "The Conquest Of Plassans", is really quite unique in French literature. In a way, you could say it's a forerunner of "Lady Chatterley's Lover" with the sexes reversed. A young and very devoted priest is nursed back to health after illness and has his sensual passions aroused in a big way by a teenage girl living virtually alone in a huge, century-old abandoned walled garden. Add to this a fire-and-brimstone friar, an intellectually-challenged younger sister, a kindly doctor of an uncle and the earthy animal spirits of southern French country life as a background to it all and you have something special, even if the final outcome of the love affair is unbelievable. Full of poetry, passion, symbolism and Zola's usual intoxicating powers of description, but not the book you'll find serialized in your local church magazine. Well worth reading as it shows that Zola's craft as a writer has fully matured but he has yet to find the subject to hit the big time sales-wise.

We have Cioran's image in our each mind. His books tell of himself too much. However, what's his real life and thought? This book leads us the truth of Cioran and we can see his real face.

I am a big fan of the author and this book is one of my favorites. I first read it 42 years ago and it is still appealing. I still enjoy reading it after all these years. It has great description and atmosphere.

"L'assommoir" is undoubtedly a powerful and moving book, yet, as a non French speaker who has just finished reading the Penquin translation by Leonard Tancock, I'm left feeling slightly frustrated. Anyone who has read the extraordinary "Germinal" cannot blame Zola for this; afterall, "L'assommoir is considererd to be one of the finest of the Rougon-Macquart cycle. No, it is to this English translator that we must turn to for answers. How is it that a book famous for it's uncompromising and brutal dialogue, is here, almost bereft of the very language that Zola thought so essential? This emasculated and dishonest translation made in 1970 may well suit those who are squeamish, or, of a nervous disposition, but, if you are hoping to catch the real voice of Gervaise and the voices of those with whom she shares her tragic life, it may well be advisable to listen elsewhere.

Zola was an amazingly prolific writer - he wrote about thirty novels, and all of them were solidly on the "long" side. Moreover, each was a huge self-contained universe, and a gritty, harrowing epic to boot. In many ways, L'Assommoir is the central novel in his famed 20-novel Rougon/Macquart cycle, as many of the subsequent books have a direct connection to it (Gervaise's daughter is the "star" of Nana; her son is the star of Germinal, and her other son the star of The Masterpiece; etc. etc.). It's an extremely difficult book for the modern man to read - at the time, the novel's crude language and filth shocked readers; as the translator astutely notes, this is unlikely to happen now. Moreover, it's a damningly hard book to translate - not only is it filled with the most complex, specific 19th century French slang there was (even Zola's contemporaries had trouble deciphering it), it has a very peculiar narration style. Zola, usually a fan of a dispassionate sort of narration, adopts a very jerky, repetitive, slangy form here - it's almost as if it's told from Gervaise's perspective, although the story is clearly third-person-omniscient. This is fascinating, though the seemingly endless "Now then"s and "Lord!"s and "Let me tell you"s and so on do tend to grate after a while.

But this is all piffle seeing as the story is so amazingly powerful. Zola's one accomplishment here is this - he makes Gervaise such a believable human being that you will genuinely want her to rise above the poverty and find success and happiness. In fact, this does occur in the course of three chapters. Alas, this state does not last, and for another six chapters or so, Gervaise is more and more degraded until we come to the almost unspeakably horrible conclusion. The horrible circumstances of this end, the degradation and humiliation she suffers are undeniably harrowing, and is made worse by this - a lot of her troubles do not come from "the rich," but from her fellow poor, who delight at pounding her into the dirt.

The novel is filled with remarkable characters - Gervaise herself comes first and foremost, but there's also the striking character of Lalie, the execrable shallowness of the Lorilleux (whom I guarantee the reader will blindly hate with an almost silly passion), and above all the melancholy figure of the blacksmith Goujet. Best of all, Zola never preaches, allowing the characters to speak for themselves. It's not even necessarily a profound social statement (though it is) as much as a character study. The author presents you with the facts - now it's up to you to figure out your resulting opinions. This is truly an unforgettable piece here, certainly on par with other 19th century French titans as Hugo's Les Miserables and Balzac's Pere Goriot. Not light reading by any means, but really an incredible novel.

When Zola wrote this novel, he was some 16 years into his project of writing _Les Rougon-Macquart_, an enormous, beautifully written series describing French society. It's comparable to Balzac's _La Comédie Humaine_ (which you should also read). This particular novel received a lot of flak from Zola's contemporaries when he published it in 1876, because he dared to portray lower-class French society in all its gritty, realistic detail.

"I don't apologise," Zola replied in his preface. "It's morality in action." He had set out to describe the wide-reaching history of the Rougon-Macquart family, which speaks so well to French society's problems at that time (and as one reviewer said, rest assured it holds true now). In this case, a particular problem was passed down, in Jungian fashion, alcohol abuse. This memory resurfaces not just in _Nana_, but in _La Bête humaine_ which shows how someone in a more respectable position in society still wrestles with this inherited demon.

One of Zola's great achievements here was to reproduce the language of Gervaise, Coupeau, and their milieu, for the purposes of realism. This is exactly what got him into trouble -- besides portraying the loose morals of so many downtrodden characters. I can hardly imagine how a translator could do him justice -- by having everyone speak as Southern American rednecks? by transposing the slang into cockney? That may work for our personal versions of the story as we hit the "club" (which is pretty-much what the title, l'Assommoir, literally means) to see folks knock their workaday troubles into oblivion. (Absinthe is now illegal because it is dangerously addictive, but pastis is a tasty substitute.) But I am truly sorry for those of you who must buy this in English, unless the dissapointment of reading it convinces you to learn French. You'll never regret the years it takes to get to the level at which you'll enjoy this, and you'll get to read great books like this along the way.

As the back cover of the book says, Nana by Emile Zola is the story of a woman of very low birth who uses her beauty to conquer the high society men of Paris on her way to becoming a courtesan of immense power and attraction. Nana takes place during the final days of the Second Empire of Napoleon III and actually ends with the event that would herald the downfall of the empire: the declaration of war against Prussia.

Zola is considered the leading member of the naturalist group of writers. Naturalists are concerned with real worldliness. They wish to portray a sense of what life is really like for their characters. They tend more to concentrate on the type of character that they are writing about instead of the character's uniqueness. As such, Nana becomes a story more about courtesans from lowly births than it is about Nana.

Naturalist writing also tends to lend itself to subjects of societal ills and debauchery. Naturalists seek to show the world in all its filth and depravity. To do this they must go where one finds this stuff: in the gutters.

Unfortunately, in his attempt to portray the character types one finds in the company of someone like Nana, Zola has created more caricatures than characters. Few of the characters in Nana where credible participants. Nana herself is unlike anyone you would find in sane society and seems more like an amalgam of various real world influences than a person of one mind.

The male characters of Nana were particularly egregious examples of overzealousness by Zola. The Comte Muffat is Nana's primary benefactor throughout the story. He withstands great hardships and torments from Nana with nary a protest. This may have been believeable if only Muffat had been the victim of Nana's capriciousness; but, she strings along many more men in this manner, robbing them of their dignity and fortunes without so much as a whimper from them.

Nana is compared to a golden fly who rises from the dung heap to taint the high society Parisian world that she invades with her low birth debauchery and sin. Nana may be a metaphor for the overall breakdown of French society which preceded the collapse of the Second Empire; but, Zola would have done better to lay it on less thick. Nana could have been an excellent statement on the necessity of retaining a moral backbone to maintain the fabric of society. Instead, it reads like a cheap nineteenth century soap opera played out with exaggerated, unreal characters.

No drugs, no rock 'n' roll but plenty of sex. Great entertainment in itself, this book is best read as a sequel to "L'Assommoir" whose tragic downtrodden heroine can be said, in a way, to have got her revenge on society through her daughter, Nana. You might say it's a case of the underclass striking back and one wonders how today's acting and modelling scene compares with Second Empire Paris. Someone once said that every woman is sitting on a gold mine and Nana certainly proves it. Trouble is, she also proves the old saying "easy come, easy go". What would have happened if she'd been inoculated against smallpox?

Emile Zola is credited to have written the first "modern" French novels, that is to say, novels about contemporary subject matter and society, written in a natural style, which is why he is called a Naturalist writer. He was a very observant man, with an eye for detail and realistic dialogue and scenarios. He was a friend of the Impressionist artist Edgar Degas, who himself was considered to be a modern artist for his photographic style of paintings. Emile Zola's greatest novel has got to be Nana.

Far from the sugary and innocent Gigi story by Gabrielle Colette which would come later, Nana takes place as the French Second Empire comes to a close. From 1852 to 1870, France became a capitalistic Gilded Age, a time in which men and women would stop at nothing to make it into high society. The decadence of the period is captured, as well as the poverty and decaying morals. It would not be long before Emperor Louis Napoleon III lost the Franco Prussian War (1870-1871) and the empire collapsed. Nana is the daughter of a poor laundress- a washer woman from the country. She becomes a courtesan, a high class prostitute with many wealthy and powerful clients. These include financiers and even a count. Nana has an influence over all the men she becomes involved with, and they are smitten by her, offering her homes and material benefits from her ... favors. In the end, Nana becomes a symbol for the ... society of Emile Zola's time. This novel is a good read for fans of Zola's Naturalistic style and should be read prior to his "The Debacle" which deals with the Franco Prussian War.

Nana became the subject for a Manet painting. The book and the painting shocked the stuffy Salon society of Paris, especially because Nana is so blatant in her ...feminine powers over men. But the novel is excellent, a masterpiece of French literature, a critique on the ridiculous level of poverty at the time. Mothers were willing to sell their daughters into prostitution. Nana, however much a hold she has over the men, cannot get the one thing she truly wants- a place in decent French society. She was always seen as a courtesan with no real ladylike qualities. They were wrong. Nana is a great character, and Emile Zola takes us to that time with such precison and power that we are as if in a time machine transported to those French streets and to those brothel bedrooms. He writes without any hold bars. His novels should be made into films. I suggest this reading material for any fan of French writers. If you like Honore De Balzac, Gustav Flaubert and the time period of the Second French Empire, this is your book.