This is one of the most amazing motivational books i have ever read. IT WILL CHANGE YOUR LIFE! Most people with finish this book in 1 or 2 sittings because it is extremely interesting.

This is a great collection of short storys. But Alexander Scourby does a wonderful job reading them are helps bring the characters to life... a great tap to listen to on the way to work.

When I met Trocchi nearly on his death bed he mentioned this work to me. As he'd given time to reading my own manuscript I devoured his works but didn't find this essay until some months ago. It was his atttempt to visualise in form an alternative structure. As a leading figure in the underground movement of the 60's he established the anti university and the Invisible Inserrection of a Million Minds desribes the cirriculum of this university. It would work on the principle of being more in tune with the 'here and now' than the political structure; thus the system will collapse, not through revolution, but it will be outflanked by those whose grasp of the situation, through a new definition of time, will naturally and peacefully lead us to a more humane society. Here the disciplines of Art will become fused and creativity be non segregated and freedom elasticated .In a way this work was a manifesto of 'The Situationists', a group whose members discussed at length alternative structures at varying sites throughout london. Trocchi's experience of New York and his junkie friendship with Burrough's, Ginsberg, Heine and others made him a fulcrum of British psychedelia and his influence extends beyond the grave. It could be argued he was cleverly feeding his habit on an impressionable youth, but his writings will surely be long discussed as prejudice against the sixties movement subsides. When I left Trocchi's flat after meeting him he gave me a copy of 'Young Adam' and 'Man At Leisure'. As he opened the door he turned suddenly and took them back: "I'll just sign them. When I'm dead they'll be worth more money and you'll sell them for a fix." He winked. I said goodbye never to see him again although that invisible inserrection has never left my millionth of a mind. How about a reprint of his best work, a translation of the early life of the Dutch Beat Artist Jan Cramer and entitled: 'I, Jan Cramer!'

A collaboration of love - not only for Dr. MacKenzie but the essential history of the game of golf. Insightful, textured prose combined with correspondence, primary architectural renderings by Dr. MacKenzie and photographs, this work is the finest published on his life,and his life's work. This book comes with my highest recommendation and should be an integral
addition to every golf library.

Rhino success is one if not the best book written with the most "audaciuos" postive influence. It makes you really think about your own life and what you have to offer yourself and others. I reccomend this book for many reason...one being it makes you feel good. Put a $100 bill in your pocket...I dare you, you WILL feel powerful. I have shared this book with 30 or more people and they loved so will you. Enjoy! so Scott if you read this contact me, would love to share with you. Kelli Pettit (Alexander) akakelly@msn.com

If you were stranded in the jungle and only had one book to read, THIS WOULD HAVE TO BE IT.

Stop being a cow and just order it! You will never know or understand the true pleasures of life until you wake up one morning and discover that you are a 3 TON SNORTING, STOMPING, CHARING RHINO - ready to face the world - and LOVE IT!

KEEP CHARGING!

I can't explain it in terms for those of you who may be a cow yet, you need to get this to even comprhend the comments I have for this book. I now realize that I'm not alone. I always was a Rhino, till I was done with college and started my career and became a cow. This book was refreshing to my soul to bring the Rhino back to my two inch thick skin that was holding on to a cow as the book will explain. A must read for those who are in need of a spiritual refresher. I have read many books in my life, but this was the most inspiring book I've ever had the pleasure to read. It's also a very quick read. I read it and still keep going back to read it. Wendy Heinz

Scott deftly presents the vagabond Scottish Beat, exposing both his extraordinary gifts and appalling idiosyncrasies. Trocchi's lifestyle likely killed his creativity well before his wife, career, friendships and existence succumbed to his often monstrous excesses.

Andrew Murray Scott digs up a lot of great history on Alexander Trocchi's family history and his young formative years. Scott deftly captures the bizzare brilliance that was Alexander Trocchi's literary ability and also paints a sharp picture of Trocchi's personal shortcomings and strange lifestyle. I'd recommend this book for someone who wants to get to known a talented, yet little-known author.

Quentin Durward is good reading, right up (almost) to the very end. It's excellent historical fiction with very rich characterization, especially of Louis XI. Excellent, that is, except for the women. While two of the minor female characters are interesting, the female lead is as dull as dishwater. My real complaint is that the ending is bungled. After the tremendous buildup full of exciting action and convincing sets, you turn the page and...it's just over! Misses the crecendo and the denoument. Still, I enjoyed it, and recommend checking it out of the library, as I did.

I read this novel forty years ago in the Modern Library edition and I am amazed that it is out of print except in expensive library editions. It is one of Scott's finest novels, full of action and with a fine portrait of King Louis. It was the first novel to use a gypsy as a character. It was made into a movie in the 1950's. Scott of one of the most neglected geniuses in literature and the world is the poorer for it.

Unlike most readers, I hated this book! I mean, come on, you knew these two were gonna get paired up! Even when they wern't a couple, they sure acted like one! I loved the book A Kiss Between Friends, and most of my friends thinks the two books were a lot alike, but I hated this one! A Kiss Between Friends had more meaning. I cried when I read that book, it was so good! I cried when I read this book, too, because I was so happy I was finally finished with it!

This book is a great read because it's what teens want to get out of a book. It starts out as Abby and Greg being best friends. Everyone knows that friendship is the basis of a good relationship so it's kind of predictable that they'll develope feelings for eachother. I'm not saying that that's bad because I love it when 2 people fall in love without even knowing it. This book has a lot of twists that you don't expect. Such as both Abby and Greg date different people before realizing what they had all along. I would recommend this book to anyone. It's one of my favorites out of the Love Stories collection!

Kiss and Tell was the best Love Stories book I've read! Although you could easily predict what would happen, the book was very easy to relate to. Abby and Greg's situation could have easily happened in real life. I highly recommend reading this book!

I haven't read Fitzgerald's 'The Great Gatsby' in almost two years. I picked it up again, to-day, though, and realized the truth of the notion that one learns something new each time one returns to a book. 'The Great Gatsby' just is a novel that must be returned to periodically to appreciate it properly.

While the characters in the novel remain ultimately unknowable at their indefinite cores, Fitzgerald does a great job tying his characters to their historical setting. The protagonist of the novel, to my mind, is Nick Carraway, the narrator. The hero of his story, which frames the novel, is the legendary Jay Gatsby - a legend in his own mind. Although Carraway's narration is often heavily biased and unreliable, what emerges are the stories of a set of aimless individuals, thrown together in the summer of 1922. Daisy Buchanan is the pin that holds the novel together - by various means, she ties Nick to Jordan Baker, Tom Buchanan to Jay Gatsby, and Gatsby to the Wilsons.

The novel itself deals with the shallow hypocrisies of fashionable New York society life in the early 1920's. It is almost as though Fitzgerald took the plot of Edith Wharton's 'The Age of Innocence' and updated it - in the process making the characters infinitely more detestable and depriving it of all hope. Extramarital affairs rage on with only the thinnest of veils to disguise them, the nouveau-riche rise on the back of scandal and corruption, and interpersonal relationships rarely signify anything permanent that doesn't reek of conspiracy. The novel's casual allusions to beginnings and histories often cause us to reflect on the novel's historical moment - when the American Dream and Benjamin Franklin's vision of the self-made man seem to coalesce in Jay Gatsby, a Franklinian who read too much Nietzsche.

No matter how you read it, 'The Great Gatsby' is worth re-reading. M.J. Bruccoli's short, but informative preface, and C. Scribner III's afterword are included in this edition, and both set excellent contexts, literary, personal, and historical, for this classic of American literature.

Although published seventy-five years ago, Fitzgerald's masterpiece remains as fresh as the day it appeared. It could have been written yesterday. It is as perfect a novel as one is likely to find in American literature; not a word is wrong or out of place. The choice of a second person narrator gives the reader wider and greater appreciation of the characters and events. At the center of it all, of course, is Jay Gatsby, bootlegger, liar, party-giver, doomed romantic. His love for Daisy Buchanan, his "incorruptible dream", is the only genuine emotion felt by any of the characters (excepting narrator Nick Carroway, whose loyalty to Gatsby is touching), all of whose superficiality is buried beneath the glitter and gaiety of the Jazz Age, the endless parties, the extramarital affairs, the endless-flowing booze, the accumulation of wealth and things.

This edition of the book features critical commentary and notes from Prof. Matthew Bruccoli, the world's foremost Fitzgerald scholar.

I am one of those "freaks" who makes sure to read this novel at least once a year. It brings me a sort of solace.
This is as close to a Salinger novel as one can get. Moral lessons spoken thru New York City in the early 1900's.
In this case we have the author and his 2nd cousin, a worldly woman who steals hearts and refuses to let go.
Gatsby accomplishes everything he can create in his mind, but he cannot compare to what Daisy demands. She is noy human it seems, and Gatsby cannot keep up, no matter how hard he tries.
This novel was required reading in high school, and thank God for that. Even after my 12th grade english teacher pounding into my head the symbolism of the eye-glasses on the billboard in the city of ashes. And also why Gatsby was a "heroic figure".
Basically, this novel ends the only way it can. Death is necessary and we all will perish. But sometimes we die a bit too soon.
No matter where I am in my life, this book always sets me straight. What will be...will be.
Gatsby could not have lived any other way. It's all good.

"The Age of Alexander" was not the original title of this book. Instead the editors have taken liberty with the title for marketing purposes. "The Age of Alexander" is actually a biography of 9 famous kings and generals from Agesilaus to Pyrrhus with Alexander as one of the nine. This isn't an attack on the title or this or this work, but it is a more honest description.

In addition to the people I have already mentioned, this book also talks about the lives of Pelopidas, Dion, Demosthenes, Phocion, and Demetrius. I had heard many of these names for years, but I had no idea of what they had done. Others I never knew. It is interesting how history classes often have such narrow focuses. Why do we study the Peloponnesian War, but not its outcome?

Here, students of history will have the chance to examine parts and people of the past, rarely discussed in other places. The writing style is a little tough. Remember, this is an English translation of a Roman work examining Greek citizen who lived three hundred or more years before it was written. However, if you can get past the writing, you can learn alot.

The rough history of who killed who and which state thrived while others died were not very interesting to me. It is hard to get excited about a civilation that was wiped out 3000 years ago. What I enjoyed more were the personal stories and the glimpse into Greek life. I will give three examples.

Pelopidas had a mortal enemy, Alexander. He was considered a tyrant and a murderer. Alexander had his enemies stripped naked and forced them to rare animal skins. He then would release hunting dogs on them as a form of fun/execution.

In Persia, citizens would make a gesture of respect to their King. In Greece, they would only make this gesture to the Gods. Thus Alexander the Great, if he wanted to be considered the "legitimate" ruler of the Persian would have to have them do something, this gesture, which made him look like he believed he was a God, to the Greeks.

"On noble subjects all men speak well." A quote found in this book. It was ascribed to Euripides but was quoted by Alexander when talking to Callisthenes, an advisor who eventually was put to death.

If you like insights and stories like this, "The Age of Alexander" is a great source. The editors do a very good job of discribing the customs and morals of the time. For me, actually, part of this was not necessary. I enjoyed this book, in part, because I could see how humans, in many ways have not changed. Perhaps, in part, that is why a book popular 2000 thousand years ago, can still be enjoyed today. Not a page turner, it is interesting if you have to time to study it.

The book helps you to put in perspective the ancient Greece with its intense activity and warefare. These are not parallel lives that compares the greek versus the roman characters. Rather the authors gives the secuential lives from Agesylaus to Pyrrhus and in that secuence Alexander surges as a climatic "live". It helps in building an idea of secuential relationships. War, violence, ambition, superstition are encountered in almost all of these protrait "lives".

Plutarch was a Greek scholar living in the Roman Empire. He was not a historian, per se, but rather a biographer who used the lives of famous Greeks and Romans to illustrate strengths and weaknesses of character, how they impacted events, and how events impacted them. He wrote his biographies in pairs, matching a Greek and Roman whose lives, in his view, exemplified common traits or themes. His pairings being generally rather superficial, Penguin has chosen to publish the individual "Lives" in chronological groupings. The nine presented in "The Age Of Alexander" include Plutarch's biography of Alexander the Great along with those of eight famous Greeks from the same period.

Writing during the reigns of Trajan and Hadrian, Plutarch was already dealing with people from hundreds of years in his past. Fortunately for us, as his writing shows, he still had a lot of evidence to draw on. Frequently mentioned are contemporary accounts and, in the case of Alexander, letters written by Alexander himself, which apparently still existed in Plututarch's time. Sometimes he cites more than one source in cases where accounts disagree. The richness of Plutarch's sources is valuable because so much of that ancient source material is now lost.

Plutarch is at his best in describing dramatic events and when commenting on the strengths and weaknesses of his subjects. As reading material, this book could hardly be called a "page-turner" in the contemporary sense of that term, but you don't have to be a student of history to appreciate the dramatic, and often violent, nature of the times and of the lives of the men covered in this collection. Only one of them died in bed. Life was often violent and short, and the violence was gratuitous. A man whose deeds were out of favor might well be treated to the sight of his family being executed before being dispatched himself.

Personally, I'm more a fan of Roman history than the Greeks (although Alexander is certainly a fascinating character), and the Greeks covered in this book are generally much less familiar to me than those of the Romans contained in other volumes. Nevertheless, this is classic literature of a high order. Plutarch is a great storyteller, and his insightful and anecdotal style is never dull. Further, his work is one of those rare examples of ancient writing and scholarship that have survived, and in that sense alone his "Lives" are a treasure. "The Age Of Alexander" isn't the easiest reading you'll find, but it is both interesting and rewarding. It's probably not everyone's cup of tea, but give it a try. You may just find it as enjoyable as I do.