Henry Morris, founder of Institute for Creation Research, is amply qualified to comment on any portion of the Bible, and his commentary on Solomon is a real treat. The wisest and richest man who ever lived is recorded in God's Word as explaining the "vanity" of pursuits beyond what God has called us to do. It is a book which every parent should read, to put perspective on what values, exactly, they should be conveying to their children. It is a book for those without children to reinforce the direction in their lives, as they try to reach those who may not have a close relationship with God. Finally, it is a book for anyone who is yearning to make their relationship with God a closer one.

This book is so profound and thought-provoking that I could only read a portion of a chapter at a time. Morris breaks down groups of verses to be commented upon, and in each section there is ample food for thought to keep one's mind and heart busy for an evening.

Enjoy turning the pages slowly in this treasure of a book.

"King Solomon's Mines" was published in 1885, when the interior of Africa was still an unexplored, "dark" continent; thus, it was the first book to present the possibility of adventure in Africa to the European reading public. Riding on the tails of Robert Louis Stevenson's "Treasure Island," "King Solomon's Mines" made H. Rider Haggard famous. Much of what Haggard writes is based on his personal experience and observations in South Africa, where, unusual among the British colonizers, he learned Zulu, which gave him an insight lacking in his colleagues and contemporaries.

Although on the surface an adventure story for young boys, "King Solomon's Mines" raises interesting questions about the role of the colonists and their relationship with the African people on the eve of the great European scramble for Africa. Like the elephants that Quatermain and his group hunt and shoot down simply because they are there for the picking, so Africa and its riches presented itself to the Europeans as rich for exploitation. The question of "What is a gentleman?" runs throughout the narrative, leaving the European reader to discern whether Africans possessed a nobility and dignity comparable to the ancient Greeks and Biblical Hebrews. Haggard depicts the Zulu language as comparable to the richly metaphoric Old and Middle English languages.

"King Solomon's Mines" gives us a glimpse into a way of life that was shortly to disappear with the arrival of the Europeans.

I really enjoyed reading King Solomon's Mines. I really love those swashbuckling adventure stories like The Prisoner of Zenda, Scaramouche, and The Scarlet Pimpernel, but it's really difficult to find books like those which have managed to age really well. Fortunately, I have now happened onto another which I can return to.

King Solomon's Mines is the story of Sir Henry Curtis, Captain John Good and the narrator, Allan Quatermain. Curtis's younger brother has recently disappeared in Southern Africa in search of King Solomon's legendary mines. He is very worried, and he engages Good and Quatermain, a hunter, to help him find his brother. The three hire an African, Umbopa, to travel with them and they set out. What follows is there always exciting adventure in which they confront an tyrant king and an evil, sort-of-immortal woman (that will make sense after reading). The novel has just about everything - adventure, women, evil villains, humor, mixed identities, treasure, and an exotic local. It's entertaining stuff.

There's not much to complain about in King Solomon's Mines. The pace is quick. There is a lot of action and humor. I was very pleasantly surprised to find that it wasn't dated. The language isn't archaic and the jokes are still funny. The novel, first published in 1885, won't even offend by being overtly politically incorrect like many novels of that time. Really, this is a totally worthy read for anyone who likes a good adventure.

I was required to read King Solomon's Mines at school (about three thousand years ago), and was delighted to see that there's a new edition in the Oxford World's Classics series. And indeed this is a true classic adventure, somewhere between Treasure Island and Around The World in Eighty Days. Though some of the language may now seem a little stereotyped and cliched, it was certainly not that way when it was written over 100 years ago, and the real cliches are resident with modern imitations, like Indiana Jones. However, since imitation is the most sincere form of flattery, I guess we shouldn't complain.

Sir Henry Rider Haggard (1856-1925) is best known for his African adventure novels, notably King Solomon's Mines and She (1886). Their strengths are that they are not only undeniably amongst the most exciting and thrilling adventures ever written, but that they capture the very essence of the colonial empires - an attitude that is stubbornly maintained today by American imperialism - of treating the natives fondly, but with a certain superiority and disdain.

The essence of the story is the adventure of an elephant hunter as his safari heads into the interior of South Africa in search of a fabled diamond mine, and to rescue the missing brother of an English gentleman who accompanies him. They are aided by an enigmatic native guide who is more than he seems. As they stumble into Zulu territory, they are drawn into the local politics and discover that their European methods are less effective here, and that they need to learn new tricks. Quickly, they find themselves in deadly peril from a merciless king and a malevolence sorceress who conspires against them.

In the end, King Solomon's Mines is more than just the sum of all its parts because Haggard's intelligent and observant characterizations give him the opportunity to put together a revealing social commentary about race and class, while still telling a captivating story. Against the conventional wisdom of the time, Haggard treats his black characters sympathetically, and even dares to suggest that English society might be less than perfect (an audacious heresy in Victoria's reign). So, like Gulliver's Travels, King Solomon's Mines not only tells a great adventure story, it leaves the reader with something more robust to think about.

If you are a fan of Wharton and Forster, then you will apprciate this wonderful novel. The misadventures represented in "Bertram Cope's Year" are truly inspired, especially as this volume was written in 1919. This is a comedy of manners. The author has taken great pains to expose his character's never-to-be-discussed nature. Clues are plentiful. However, the ladies keep falling in love and in line. Even his benefactress is smitten. A refined bit of drollery. An early gay classic.

Fuller's neglected, glistening novel poses the question, "Who of any of us is worth the bother other people make of us?" This novel's characters--all of them--are hungry for companionship, for mirrors to reflect back images of themselves, for romanatic alternatives to prosaic lives. They might have wandered out of a T.S. Eliot poem, but instead they are the flesh and blood of 20th century Evanston/Churchton, Illinois, moving spectral-like through their lives, essentially impenetrable to each other. It is a gay novel--and one of the best I've encountered--but it offers an extremely perceptive account of the straight world, too, as that world intersects--or blindly collides with--with the gay. To Fuller's credit, both worlds are fully developed here.

Fuller's wit is amazingly sharp; his writing is concise and unornamented, yet there are also beautiful moments--lyrical descriptions of the changing seasons, the Indiana dunes, and the Churchton landscape. In his afterword to the novel, Andrew Solomon rightly calls the book "a gentle tragedy," but I emerged from it recognizing that life for all of these characters does go on, repetitively and unfulfillingly at times, wildly romantic and full of possibilities at others. Although Bertram Cope's circle of friends ages throughout the pages of this book, the characters are even fresher and sharper at the end of the novel than they were at the beginning. A wise, intelligent book, full of insights and memorable characters.

I can't imagine why anyone would find this charming novel's depiction of of gay men to be "chilly." If there's a "chill" to be felt in this subtle comedy of manners it would stem from its depiction of women who persist in imagining that men with no sexual or romantic interest in them still "want" them in some way. Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose, as Arianna Huffington has so spectacularly demonstrated. In any event Fuller's book testifies to the fact that we all still have an enormous lot to learn about gay life before Stonewall. It wasn't always lived in "the closet" -- as "Betram Cope's Year" shows with style, taste and enormous wit.

One of the most complete general works on African Art and well worth purchasing for detailed information on the variation in art form, tribe, country and art style in Africa. Almost full tribal location information and regionalised art details makes this book a must for the serious collector and student on the subject. From early Egyptian to more recent times, it is a book you have to read several times to understand that no one can ever know the true depth and complexity within the African Art world. A good all round reference book on a much missunderstood and underated art form.

Mark Farley

By its nature, what's most obvious can easily escape our attention, so it may be worth noting that Beethoven's era is beyond the recall of any living person. Theoretically, there might now be some living centenarian whose grandfather could have known him, or at least been in his presence and spoken with him - but this is conceptual, and though conjecture is fruitless it's still fascinating. We can't talk with Beethoven or his intimates, none of whom lived into the 20th century - but here one of them operatively speaks to us, if not literally then surely effectively.

Edited by Maynard Solomon and translated for the first time from the original German by him and Henry Mins, the book FROM THE HOUSE OF THE BLACK SPANIARD - REMEMBRANCES OF BEETHOVEN FROM MY YOUTH was authored by Dr. Gerhard von Breuning and first published in Vienna in 1874.

The title is fitting. As a 12-year-old, the author (whose father was a close friend of the composer) was privy to Beethoven's inner circle and played a small but important role in the composer's daily existence during the last year and a half of his life. He helped him in various ways by assisting with his correspondence, running special errands, helping him keep order in his dwelling, and doing what he could during Beethoven's last illness. The boy eventually developed for the composer a feeling approaching worship. Beethoven reciprocated this devotion by guiding some of the boy's musical education. When the young Gerhard eventually asked the older man's permission to address him with the familiar Du (rather than the formal Sie), the boy was overjoyed when Beethoven consented.

Dr. Solomon says in the book's introduction, "Like many children, Gerhard was a keen observer of small details..." This boy, who became a respected Viennese physician, evidently was the early 19th-century counterpart of today's "kid who doesn't miss a thing" (even pinpointing in his book such details as the exact location and number of windows of Beethoven's street-facing top floor apartment). His precision was fortunate and significant for posterity: it extended even to the minutest specifics about Beethoven's dwelling, personality and character, mood swings, daily conversations about his circumstances, personal preferences and other matters now irretrievably beyond our reach and forever lost. Often even the smallest details, about any subject, can be keys to opening large doors behind which are answers to some important questions. Beethoven's life was dramatic enough without the need for embellishment a-la-Hollywood, and von Breuning illuminates his subject from the real-world viewpoint.

His book takes its name from the building, the Schwarzspanierhaus (House of the Black Spaniard) - Beethoven's last residence, and where he died on Monday, March 26, 1827. In Vienna today, the site of the house (demolished ca.1904) is Schwarzspanierstrasse 15, marked with a memorial plaque and the characteristic red and white Austrian banner. In his day the address was 200 Alsergrund am Glacis. Because of its Beethoven connection the street was later renamed Schwarzspanierstrasse: the composer's swarthy complexion in his youth prompted some to call him The Black Spaniard - which in turn might have been what induced a few revisionist claims in our day that the composer was negro.

When Gerhard von Breuning died in 1892 he was the last survivor of those who had personally known Beethoven. Though his accounts were written late in life, he was there to witness the events of the composer's last years. This gives us not only a more immediate picture, but perhaps more importantly, bottom-line details which shed a bright light on what transpired more than a century and a half ago. This proximity gives special value to accounts like these.

Among the book's photographs are Beethoven's desk, the entrance hall and main door to the very apartment he occupied in the Schwarzspanierhaus, the building's exterior, an intriguiging floor plan of the actual dwelling, and Gerhard von Breuning himself in old age.

Perhaps the most compelling illustration is a superb photograph of Beethoven's life-mask, made by Franz Klein in 1812. It's compelling because it offers a literal glimpse into the past: Beethoven lived before the advent of photography, but this life mask represents him effectively as he looked at 42 and gives us the most accurate rendering we have of his physical features. Artists might disagree - but this illustration, by its very immediacy, seems to enlarge and strengthen the links in the chain that binds us to our own musical history.

Von Breuning's reports range from the humorous and fascinating - about Beethoven's fondness for puns and sarcasm - to the exasperating and even heartbreaking: Gerhard was devastated when as a young adult the numerous handwritten notes he had received from Beethoven were inadvertently discarded by a servant who thought they were trash.

This book is for those who want to know about Beethoven from someone who truly knew him. Historians compile and present an amalgam of data; author von Breuning via editor Solomon takes us into a courtroom and displays primary evidence unsullied by the traditional legendary gloss, the ghosts of myth, and the passage of more than 17 decades. Though no-one's memory is infallible, he still places before us, devoid of cosmetic veneer, the raw material from which we can experience our own reactions, form our own opinions, and draw our own conclusions.

The editor of this work has prepared a book that can be read and enjoyed by both reader and scholar. It's content is authentic, not synthetic - a treasury of material taken from a primary source: someone who literally knew Beethoven and who reports from this distinctive perspective. There are few if any substitutes for accounts like these, and a more superlative book of this type would be hard to imagine.

There's no other book quite like it so its singularity makes it quite special. About Beethoven there are countless tomes, perhaps more than about any other composer, but this book provides something rather unique, which adds to its value: a compendium of fascinating details that would be difficult, if not altogether impossible, to find in any other single volume. The book is, in a word, superb and for both the reader and researcher can be enjoyable, even fascinating and, perhaps more importantly, enlightening reading.

JEFFREY DANE