If you are a beginning gardener and don't know the difference between a shovel and a spade, or what to use them for, this book is immensely useful. It is certainly worth the price and the time it takes to browse through it to find and understand the exact tools you will need for your individual garden before you go out shopping. In addition to pages of full color pictures of each tool, it contains historic accounts regarding the tools and some nice quotes about gardening. After reading this book I felt like I understood garden tools, whereas prior to reading it, I just used tools in a haphazard way without understanding their purpose and how they could help me in the garden.

A piece of art, fits the coffee table and yet is packed with valuable information

For anyone who grew up in a small town, this book is wonderfully nostalgic. It is absolutely pure downeast flavor. Beautifully believable characters and wonderfully depicted Maine coastal scenes. This is a charming read!

This book was interesting and I couldn't put it down. Of course, this was written by Jules Verne and was filled with exciting moments. Philleas Fogg, an Englishman, bets 20,000 pounds that he can travel around the world in 80 days with his companion and sevant named Jean Passepartout. After betting this money at the reform club, he departs soon from London and travels all the way around the world. After arriving in many different countries by many different means of transportation, he lands in India and runs into a enchanting young princess who is about to be killed. Fogg and Passepartout come to the rescue and keep moving right along. And soon, they fell in love. But this whole time, there was trouble right behind him. Detective Fix thinks Fogg was a bank robber and this detective is following him everywhere so he can arrest him in London. Passepartout ends up thinking this man is a member of the reform club, and thinks he's trying to stop them from getting there. After many close calls through transportation and an arrest, Fogg arrives. But you'll have to read it yourself to find out what happens. It's a wonderful book and if you haven't read it, it's a good book to read.

I think this book is a superior book because it is full of action. This book is about a man named Mr. Phileas Fogg, and his faithful servant, Passepartout, that wager a bet that They can travel the whole world in eighty days stopping at Suez via Mont Cenis and Brindisi, then to Bombay, then Calcutta, Hong Kong, Japan (Yokohama), San Francisco, New York, back to London, all within eighty days, and by steamboats, and trains. However, a nosy detective, Detective Fix, tracks them down, and tries to arrest Mr. Fogg because he believes that Fogg stole fifty-five thousand pounds. As one may guess, this greatly detains Mr. Fogg, and it seems like he may not make the trip around the world after all. However, the Fix never seems to catch up with Fogg, and Fogg triumphs over most of the obstacles that come his way, like missing boats, missing trains, missing people, and Fogg even meets and rescues a beautiful Indian Princess called Aouda. However, Fix finally catches up to the detective, and everything seems lost for Fogg until Fix discovers that Fogg was not the robber, and Fogg is released. Even so, Fogg is one day late, and in doing so, misses the train that would have taken him to London precisely to win the bet. He ordered a special train, but even in doing so, still misses the bet...or so he thinks. The ending of the book is a very unexpected one. Read this book and find out!

Before there was any kind of high-speed travel an English gentleman named Phileas Fogg betted 20,000 pounds that he can travel around the world in 80 or less days. He starts his journey in London. On his way he meets a beautiful Indian Princess. Fogg also gets mistaken for a criminal. During his whole journey he has a detective following him trying to arrest him when the warrant arrives. In the book you follow Fogg's adventures through four continents when he is racing against time. The book is fast-paced, action-packed adventure with both romance and danger.

The characters in the story were introduced very well, especially Phileas Fogg. In the beginning of the book you get to know that Fogg is a very private gentleman. He never goes to any social places except the Reform Club. A remarkable thing about Fogg is that his life is centered around the clock. He is very precise and always on time. Every day he follows the exact same schedule. Phileas Fogg does not have a wife or any kids.

The setting of the book was very jumpy. Since Fogg travels through many continents and countries the setting changes all the time. You still feel you know a little bit about every place that he comes to, even if he only stays there for a couple of hours.

When I started reading the book I thought it would be a really good book and it really did meet my standards. I would recommend it to any one who likes adventure and action. Since it is written in so many different versions a person almost any age can read it.

I'm not sure why Jack Sullivan is listed as the editor of "Elegant Nightmares", since his book is an essay on the English ghost story from Sheridan Le Fanu to Algernon Blackwood, rather than an anthology. Sullivan concerns himself with the writers who can make you sick with horror, not sick to your stomach, and who accomplish their goal through indirection and suggestion, and brief glimpses of apparitions that will stay with you long after you've finished their stories.

Temporally speaking, Sullivan's chosen authors occupy the high ground between the decaying castles and mouldering crypts of the Gothic, and the gory surgeries of the modern horror tale. He spends most of his book with Le Fanu and M.R. James (as indeed, he must), but also makes room for L. P. Hartley ("The Travelling Grave"), H. R. Wakefield ("Old Man's Beard"), R. H. Malden ("The Thirteenth Tree"), and E. G. Swain ("The Stoneground Ghost Tales"), among others. M.R. James claimed to be a follower of Sheridan Le Fanu, and the authors who came after M.R. James claimed to be his follower, so there is a nice continuity to "Elegant Nightmares", and Sullivan exploits it to the fullest. Only his penultimate chapter on Algernon Blackwood strays a bit from the 'antiquarian' mold, but so did Blackwood's ghost stories.

If you treasure the 'old fashioned' ghost story, you should read Jack Sullivan's elegant book on the best (male) authors in this difficult genre. I subtracted one star from my rating only because he neglects the woman who were contemporaries of Le Fanu and Blackwood, and who populated the ghostly kingdom with very haunting stories of their own.

The book purportedly tells the story of classical music in America, how Old World traditions were transformed and revitalized, and how concert music came to interact with popular trends. I flipped to the chapter on film music, and to his credit the author makes some very defensible claims for the genre, at it's best, as being the equivalent of incidental music written for plays, or even singspiel music composed by Purcell, Telemann, Mozart and others. (Opera would be a little more of a stretch, since the film composer cannot ordinarily manipulate the "libretto" -- in this case, the screenplay -- where he would be able to, in the case of the genuine article.)

However, despite these commonsensical claims and pleas for critical tolerance, the author doesn't seem to know very much about his subject matter. He's got the "sense" right, but his facts are all wrong. I read maybe a dozen pages and, over the course, found at least four factual errors. He claims that Erich Wolfgang Korngold quotes thematic material from his score to the "Sea Wolf" in the slow movement of his String Quartet No. 2 (when, in reality, it is the Quartet No. 3); he claims the same composer's Symphony in F#, while reminiscent of his film music, is comprised solely of original material (when, in fact, the melody of the slow movement was lifted from his score for "The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex;" and the finale uses a motif associated with the Maria Ouspenskaya character in "Kings Row" -- something I have never seen mentioned by any annotator); and that Dimitri Tiomkin wrote the score for Alfred Hitchcock's "Spellbound" (it was actually Miklos Rozsa, who won an Oscar!). On top of it, I suspected his claim that Victor Herbert wrote the score for D.W. Griffith's "Birth of a Nation" was equally false, but THAT I had to double-check. The score is mostly a hodgepodge of pre-existing classics, like "Ride of the Valkyries," anyway. As it turns out, I was right -- it was written by Karl Breil. In any case, it's not my job to research these things. You'd think Yale University Press would hire a fact-checker.

Breil aside, I could have written the chapter off the top of my head, virtually complete, right down to the historical dates, and not made so many errors. I don't know if it was sloppy note-taking or faulty memory, but the book never should have gone to publication in this state. What if someone comes across this thing in a university library somewhere and takes it as fact? We'll have all these theses on film music that reiterate the heinous error that Dimitri Tiomkin wrote "Spellbound!"

For a good general survey of American music, you might try Wilfred Meller's now-classic "Music in a Newfound Land," or even H. Wiley Hitchcock's "Music in the United States." However, film music is a weak link in both studies. For that, I would refer you to "Film Score: the Art and Craft of Movie Music," by Tony Thomas. Thomas highlights most of the major composers, and many of them contribute in their own words. It's an interesting read, and you learn a lot about the unique challenges faced by the composer in Hollywood.

The influence of American culture on European composers has been extensive, shaping the course of music history. Author Jack Sullivan, a faculty member of Rider University in New Jersey (of which the famed Westminster Choir College is a part), has traced this connection in an illuminating book which should give Americans pause when considering their own cultural history. Though Sullivan's point of view is one of exploring how Europeans drew on American sources, what becomes increasingly clear to the astute reader is the lack of enthusiasm Americans had and continue to have for their own creative history.

In a first chapter, which is alone worth the price of the book, he traces the route of African-American sorrow songs from the Black experience back to Europe through Dvorák and Delius to Debussy and to the Afro-British composer Samuel Coleridge Taylor, who was considered by most Americans to be the greatest composer alive a century ago.

We learn that many of the ideas of W. E. B. DuBois grew from Dvorák's defenses of his assertion that the basis of American music should be Black Spirituals. The Czech composer's letter to the New York Herald were often quoted by DuBois (sometimes credited, sometimes not) and are here quoted by Sullivan.

We also learn the impact on Delius of hearing songs from the African-American shanty towns in Florida's orange plantations as they drifted on the air to the porch of his house. Simple though it is, the photograph of the house where Delius lived in Florida carries with it a sense of the space in which he could hear songs from afar.

Other chapters elucidate the effect on European composers of Poe, Whitman, the landscape, cities, and jazz and pop music. Sullivan's research is strong, his ability to connect disparate facts is engaging, and his writing is clear and lucid. Wonderful anecdotes occur throughout the book.

For anyone who (like Sullivan) writes program notes or is interested in the roots of much 20th century European music, this book is a must. I found it difficult to put down and refer to it often as I write articles and reviews.

Paul Somers
Editor
Classical New Jersey Society Journal
classicnj@home.com