Hopkins is one of those poets hidden from so many because of his subject matter, yet is considered one of the most influential Victorian poets for his use of word combinations, meter and image.

Added to the delicious and poignant poetry is the contemplative nature of his prose and poetry. In it, you'll read about his humility and submission to God, his genuine faith, his desire that his poetry exalt God and not Hopkins himself.

Most his work was published posthumously, as late as 1920 or so, and immediately influenced the likes of T.S. Elliot (AKA, the guy who wrote the poem "Cats" is based on and "Wasteland") and his contemporaries.

While Whitman and Wilde were exalting in themselves, and just after Emerson and Thoreau were helping us see creation, Hopkins demonstrated prowess in pointing readers to see the Creator in the creation.

Atheists won't agree with him, of course, but he says it so well, they will at least go, "Hmm... if I believed, I could see that... yeah, wow, well put." The Catholics will cheer him on, "Atta boy... yep, that guy's a Jesuit!" Not undone are the Protestants who will be so impressed in agreement they'll be happy he was a Christian.

Check out this snippet from "Pied Beauty" "Glory be to God for dappled things--/For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;/For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;/Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches wings;/Landscape plotted and pieced--fold, fallow, and plough;/And 'all tra'des, their gear and tackle and trim." Those accents are in the original.

Delicious to say aloud? You should hear the second verse. His others are as tasty.

I fully recommend this book.

Anthony Trendl

The key to "Hotel Harbor View" is that it is about emptiness, not fulfillment. The story is a masterwork of despair and death, and tries to comprehend whether or not death is anything more than a moment. Is the act of dying important, or merely the final page?

"Hotel Harbor View" is not for everyone. It's definitely more adult manga (i.e. Japanese comics) with both nudity and violence, but it's time the American audience start understanding comics aren't just for kids.

If you're looking for noir-ish fiction that evokes those hopeless stories of the 1940's, this is a great piece of work to get.

Gerard Houarner is not only a writer, but an artist. He paints a literary landscape with his words, in a way that will leave you begging for more. The stories in I Love You... attest to that. Try The Oddist, or The Answer Man for a true taste of what this fine writer is all about.

I had to work with this book in my studies in Italian language and it was a great pleasure for me to know this author. He describes brillantly the relations in the big family, where nobody owes to say a word about the big bosses and the crimes, which have happened. This silence, omertá, causes the power of the mafia. Regarding this system the officer gets frustrated, because there's no chance for him to arrest the big boss, which is evidently not innocent. My comment about this book is very positive and I could tell everybody to read it, too.

This book is the most up-to-date collection of immunoglobulin nomeclature, genes, loci and structures currently available outside the primary literature. I consider it an essential reference for anyone working with any of the immunoglobulin loci. The book is based upon the information found within the ImMunoGeneTics database curated by the same authors, which I have found similarly essential. This book would be most useful to primary investigators, postdocs and grad students actively involved in immunoglobulin research, as opposed to undergraduate or graduate students taking immunology courses.

This book is by far the best of its kind! It is very well written, extremely well oragnized and has all of the information that you are looking for such as take-off weights, capacity, speeds, production and a brief history of each aircraft. There is no other book that is as well organized and easy to use as this. Also includes a summary of fleet totals for pretty much every airline there is.

This is a very, very difficult subject to grasp, but the author writes in such a way that I was able to grasp the content. The chapter on the Death of Jesus was the best Christological explanation I have ever read. If you are serious about Christology, READ THIS BOOK!

In this commentary on the gospel of John Sloyan focuses on the reconciling nature of Jesus'ministry. Chapter 4 was a highlight for me as he talked about the woman at the well narrative being more about two peoples being brought together rather than an accounht of one outcast woman. This national reconciling/ecumenical theme is carried throughout the commentary. If we could learn the lessons here perhaps we would not be on the brink of war, perhaps there is learning here for Israel and Palestine of today! I use this book for preparing sermons and not a week goes by that I don't hear, "I never thought about the text that way before!" Sloyan makes you think again about passages that long ago became rote in too many ways.

Smith brings you back to the War years, and gives them life. Whether or not you were alive, you feel like you lived them. The characters are rich and well developed. I didn't want the book to end. Looking forward to the sequel.

I'm sure that it's a fairly select demographic that buys books by this guy, or has ever heard of him for that matter. He's not necessarily one of those authors that's going to win over a lot of people nowadays even if they do "rediscover" him. Oprah's not going to feature Gerard de Nerval in her little book club. He is just simply too bizarre, too occult and obscure, too "rococo" for the average reader, and I guess he always was. But for those very reasons, there are certain people who will think he's the best thing before or since sliced bread.

Evidently fond of exotic locales, customs, women, drugs, etc, it only follows that this nineteenth-century Frenchman would find himself magnetically drawn to the "Orient," to the fabled meccas of Beirut, Cairo, and of course the "font of drug-taking" itself, Constantinople, where he could liberally sample the world-renowned hashish and slave-girls without fear of reprimand from neurotic Europeans obsessed with "propriety." (Indeed his descriptions of such phenomena are just as offensive to the ultra-PC postmodernist of today as they were to his bourgeois contemporaries - and for essentially identical reasons.) He is very much the chauvinist white guy who feels entitled to indulge when among "inferiors."

The pedantic intricacy of his descriptions is surely a literary reflection of the action of the drug. "Journey to the Orient" is no ordinary travel-journal; it may be doubted whether half the events recounted ever actually transpired; but the details are consistently rendered with hallucinogenic clarity. In fact, only a few fragments of the original massive tome are included in this translation, but the entire second portion consists of a tale supposedly overheard in a Constantinopolitan coffee-and-hash house, a re-telling, with florid embellishments, of the Masonic legend of the building of Soliman's (Solomon's) Temple and the murder of the architect Adoniram (Hiram Abiff) - yet the narrative never looses the conviction of first-hand experience. I picked the following passage at random - it gives an idea of the baroque style of the book:

"Darkness suddenly falls and the sky is muffled by black specks which grow bigger as they approach; flocks of birds tumble into the temple, divide into groups, form circles, jostle together, arranging themselves finally into a sumptuous, shimmering foliage; while their wings unfold into opulent bouquets of green, scarlet, jet-black and azure."

It's easy to see why Gerard de Nerval was such an icon for Surrealists like Joseph Cornell. One can open the book to any page and find such immediately visceral passages; the context is almost unimportant. Life is a dream, a sequence of fantastic images, and the best literature can do is to embody the existential experience. If this sounds like your cup of hashish-paste, then dig in.