This book examines Judaism in only one article out of ten, in which the author quotes only apocryphal texts and Philo, (all heavily hellenized texts which tend towards misogyny) and includes not a single article that examines or acknowledges the existence of rabbinic or Pharisaic Judaism at all. While the book deals extensively with later Christian theology, apparently Judaism stopped at the time of Jesus (or before, since the earliest rabbis were coeval with Jesus).

A finer example of Christian intellectual anti-Judaism could not be found. The fact that the rabbis insisted that men and women both participated in the image of God, whereas many church fathers thought exactly the opposite, was apparently too much to bear for the editor, who seems to be supercessionist (as implied by the term "Judaeo-Christian"). While "The Image of God" includes important analysis of Christian ideas about gender from the entire history of Christianity, anyone looking to learn more about Jewish ideas should avoid it. How in this day and age the editor could create such a narrow-minded work is beyond me.

This putative "biography" of Empress Elisabeth of Austria (1837-98) is a very strange book. It is usually filed in the biography section, but may just as well be listed as fiction. It gives us a few interesting insights into its subject, but is certainly not reliable as an actual biography.

Published anonymously in 1899, not long after the subject's assassination at the hands of an Italian radical, this book seems, in many ways, a standard biography of the Empress' life. Yet large portions of it describe the female author's first-person interactions with Her Majesty. These include time alone together in the Empress' private rooms in her various palaces, riding together across the plains of Hungary, an action-packed vacation in Brittany in which the Empress and the author resuscitate sailors shipwrecked in a storm, and many intimate and personal discussions. The latter include a moving scene following the wedding of Crown Prince Rudolf, when "Elizabeth, with a swift movement, came toward me, flung herself upon the floor, and, burying her proud head upon my knees, burst into an uncontrollable passion of tears" (p. 175).

Rudolf himself (according to these pages), tells the author she and he "have always been awful chums" (p. 195).

The problem is, there's no evidence any of these things actually happened.

The anonymous author, it's now known, was Marguerite Cunliffe-Owen, an American author who at the turn of the last century wrote a syndicated gossip column under the pseudonym, "Marquise de Fontenoy." Far from being an intimate friend of the Empress, Cunliffe-Owen's name appears in none of the more recent and reputable biographies of the Empress I've consulted, nor does this book appear in any of their bibliographies or indices. The highly dramatic (and, you would think, memorable) rescued-sailors scene also is no place to be found in any of the numerous printed or online biographies of the Empress that I've consulted.

If you already know something about the Empress's life and death, this book can be an entertaining (and/or infuriating) example of instant celebrity journalism at its worst. But if you're less familiar with the unfortunate "Sisi"'s story, steer away from this one.

The best thing about this book is the preface by Charles Rosen. The rest it hugely disappointing. It is amazing how a poet can be so non-descriptive! How can any writer has been friends with both Mozart and Casanova and yet have nothing to say about them? One gets no sense of what life was like during the end of the 18th century at all. Even Da Ponte's own thoughts and motives do not come across. All that is left are petty political games at an assortment of different opera houses. Da Ponte's story is less amusing than the description of a single flirtation in the truly interesting and picaresque memoirs of his friend Casanova.

Review Length: About 450 words.

This book has haunted me for years. Although I first read it in the mid-1980s, I promptly forgot its title and author. It has taken me YEARS to find it again. I am very glad I did.

Given that Andrew Innes, Marquess of Lyle, is handsome, haughty, and highhanded (all "cold eye and soft, acrid tongue"), a better title for this engaging chronicle of a Regency ingenue's first London Season is The Importance of Being Arrogant. (If this were a 1950s movie, HIS part would be played in all its smirking, scornful glory by that velvet sledgehammer James Mason!)

His sudden ward (now THERE'S a good title) is the orphan Sydney Archer, whose "finishing" he undertakes in keeping with his promise as her father's friend and commanding officer. He is happy to help, but Miss Archer turns out to be a bookish country miss with the soul of Artemis, no comparison to Drew's almost fiancee Lady Romney, an elegant work of art he always expected to marry despite his inexplicable failure to propose. He dislikes the lass on sight.

The reclusive Lyle sequesters himself in his country-house-turned-seminary, stalking out of his study occasionally to measure Miss Archer's progress, leaving her instruction entirely to Lady Romney's sweet but foppish brother Cedric Maitland, whose main difficulty is getting the outspoken ward to contain her temper, and stop hugging everyone. Then Lyle's timid aunt Prue arrives with her shy daughter, and the lessons intensify to meet the rigorous demands of the social whirl for which they must soon depart. His Grace can hardly wait! He wants these ladies GONE so his peace can come back; yet weeks after they leave for Grosvenor Square, Lyle is on the highroad barreling so eagerly for the city he loathes, it completely slips his crowded mind to stop in at Lady Romney's Chiswick estate.

I would not call this book flat or dull (it is jammed with details of where the Ton meet, mingle, shop, frolic, and scratch their intellectual itch), but there IS an odd stillness about it. Like the eerie quiet before a storm. It is not....vivid. The only flash and sparkle finally surfaces with the troublemaker of the piece (he's not menacing enough to be an actual villain), and you'll laugh when you read his name. What I WOULD call this book is annoying (for the same reason I gnashed my teeth reading Lady Leprechaun and The Mischievous Miss Murphy): I hated the peer.

As I wrote regarding A Difficult Disguise, I am up to HERE with proud aristocrats' taking wicked glee in causing an innocent girl rough pain. At least the wit and mischief of THAT author's book partly made up for the offensive lord; however, there's no such consolation here. This is not romance. This is abuse masquerading as courtship! The delicious comeuppance of the nobleman, humbled and reformed by the beleaguered gentlewoman from whom he is chagrined to discover he cannot, or will not, disentangle himself is what makes this genre work. It is a scene that makes 170 pages of wincing worthwhile----when there IS such a scene. When there is NOT such a scene, we readers are left wondering what the lady sees in the smug, insufferably disdainful nobleman who never speaks to her except to sneer or goad. For all Miss Archer's wit and warrior spirit, I expected better taste! Still, I couldn't get this couple out of my mind.

If you are purchasing this tape/book combo in hopes that you will be able to communicate in Japanese on your vacation to Tokyo, it might work if you are good at learning from context. Every week you are supposed to study a dialog (which has been transliterated into English). If you want to learn the language, then you should take a class. I just wanted to improve my pronunciation, but the audio tape is hard to take.

Some of the speakers on the tape are not native speakers and the acting is terrible. After the first 30 minutes of listening to the tape I had to turn it off. If this doesn't bother you, then you may be able to learn something from it.

I purchased this book when I bought Visio and regret it. In a hurry, I glanced through the table of contents and it looked complete. I also skimmed through the pages, and the layout looked clear and well done. All of this was on quick inspection. Once I started reading the book, I couldn't believe I got snookered into buying it from these things. This author can't write her way out of a wet paper bag, and I seriously doubt that she can even use Visio. I took the book back. Don't make my mistake.

This book contains massive typographical errors. Many of the illustrations don't match the text. A lot of the operational instructions do not match the menu and tool options in the actual software.
I purchased the book to learn how to create a new shape. Chapter 9 has a paragraph entitled "Creating an Entirely New Shape" but only tells you how to modify an existing shape. At no time does it explain how to create a new shape from scratch.

There are simply too many mistakes in this book for it to be of the academic standard it aspires to. Zizek, Bal, Kristeva, Butler... too many of those people have found this book "feminist", which it is not, or "breathtaking"; too many people are too easily convinced nowadays by such lousy arguments and are heading forward to what you could call a hysterical delirium or "Hegelioglobalisation" or the euphoria of the wildest dialectical syntheses (did Zizek start the fire? hard to tell...). The mistakes contain formost her remarks on Nietzsche (he was the Super-Hysteric! not one among others!), not to speak of the Wagner-Kundry-Hytericization, the reference on Deleuze in a footnote that refers to a book which does not (!) contain the notion of the "rhizome" she quotes (she probably did not care to read Deleuze, for the rhizome is rather the contrary of her "Omphalos") etc. etc.

This is a very detailed analysis of various artists and films etc. Bronfen has done an exhaustive anlysis of Hitchcock's Marnie which seems inaccurate. It is very doubtful that Marnie fulfills the diagnosis of being an hysteric. Marnie would appear to have narcissistic wounds;a narcissitic personality disorder;PTSD, and a quite sever disorder of the Self. . And anyway one wonders how usefu this is as a way of viewing the film or book. although the book is very intersting, its basic tennent is unconvincing.

A year and a half ago, I spent far too long perusing this book in a sort of half-horrified, half-entertained disbelief. I was writing a paper on Saadawi, a feminist activist and fiction writer I admire greatly. Tarabishi's book perfectly encapsulates much of what Saadawi rails against: sexist, fundamentalist thinking, and a simplistic, unexamined reliance on nationalism (its political, classist, religious, militaristic as well as sexist aspects). In proper sexist form, he winds up blaming Saadawi, via her feminism, for airing the so-called "dirty laundry" of Arab Egypt, when any even cursory reading of a *few* of her works of fiction and nonfiction would be enough to convince one that she is so dedicated to ending injustices that she will not refrain from critically enganging any person or institution if she thinks it is harming people. Tarabishi relies on tired and simplistic Freudian analysis to critique Saadawi, and depending on your mood, that might be pathetic or hilarious. The edition I read included a reaction essay by Saadawi; it is the best part of the book. There was, when I did my paper, a lack of critical work on Saadawi, but there is some. Fedwa Malti-Douglas' book is, to my knowledge, the best material out there. It is vastly more sophisticated, the analysis is deeper and more incisive, and the author has a better grasp of both Saadawi's writing and the worlds she inhabits. I would also suggest reading Saadawi directly: there is a wonderful reader of collected essays, and The Fall of Imam, Woman at Point Zero, Death of an Ex-Minister, and Love in the Kingdom of Oil are some of my favourite works of fiction she's produced. She has also written two volumes of autobiography and a remarkable memoir of her time in prison. Her striking, path-breaking analysis of Arab women, The Hidden Face of Eve, is also in print again--hopefully more of her stuff will be back in print soon. She is an incredible and challenging thinker.

I bought this book as the title interested me and because I find the work of many contempoary Arab writers fascinating. However, this book is very distressisng as it is merely an attack on the goals and values of a leading woman reformer,

Although the list of recipes is varied, the actual recipes are poorly written, inaccurate in measurements, and confusing. Many sentences are cut-off and end abruptly. The book badly needs an editor who actually reads the contents of the work.

For starters, the very well-known publishers should have made sure that the text was properly checked - there are quite a few typing errors.

But more importantly, this is a dull children's story. The author does not seem to remember what it was like to be a child -unlike Mr. Dahl or Miss Rowling.

The story is about a family (mum, dad, Emily and Edward) who's summer holiday to a British 'holiday camp' is cancelled at the last minute, and then they take up the offer of spending 2 weeks in an old fort on an island in the English Channel. They also take along their aging next-door neighbour, Gran Jones. She is the understanding and open-minded parent that the two children seem to be missing in their boring parents, who argue the whole time, and who retain their London-bound superiority complex among the locals ["Don't talk to strangers", "This is private property!"]. Actually we are kept more in the world of Gran Jones and the parents than the children, who remain thinly described characters. The surprise ending - that there really ARE ghosts in the castle - had been advertised on the front cover.. so what was all this about? There is no moral to the story, beyond don't expect too much from your parents. I can't think how this book was ever accepted for publication! Pity I can't give it no stars