Founding Editor of Cape Editions and the Cape Goliard Press, Nathaniel Tarn has published more than twenty-five books and his writings have ben translated into over a dozen languages. Selected Poems: 1950-2000 is a 347 page retrospective compilation of his verse drawing from his Random House, Penguin, New Directions, and Black Sparrow anthologies and collections, as well as from more limited and small press editions which are mostly out of print. A major innovator in American poetry and ethnopoetics, Selected Poems: 1950-2000 documents Nathaniel Tarn as a major American poet and a welcome addition to any personal or academic poetry collection. The Curtains: The leaves are coming down/the walls of my life/are not more solid//I hear the leaves coming down/at night they make the noise of footsteps/or the kisses of children/they fall like a curtain/between the leaves/bits of a sky we try to remember//"There was in that man/had he been left unshaken by his stars/a happy disposition"//On the other side of the curtain/the fathomless country lies about us/the farms/sitting like loaves among the fields/the animals/at home in their own breaths/needing no byres/and birds never a roost//We have seen it/we know it by heart/men of no season//I shall build on nothing/on nothing build my house/out of the iron nail remorselessly/hammered into the ground of this dead year//the nail so bald so cold/out of humiliation and the grinding feet/on nothing build my house/and when the leaves are fallen/and hammering is done/the curtains of the house will have been hung//Through which we glimpse/the place we shall inhabit/full void that memory

I usually dont like stuff like this and when my english teacher passed out this book to the class I was definatly not looking forward to reading it. but then she assigned us one of the stories out of of the book to read for homework that night. It was "Rappiccini's Daughter" if I recall. I fell in love with it. That is now one of my favorite stories. We read about 5 of them and I loved them all. This book was hardly boring. Every time I started to read a new story from it I could barely put it down. Nathaniel Hawthorne was a great writer and i definatly recomend this book!

Set in 1814 after Napoleon has abdicated as Emperor of the French, Richard Woodman's, The Shadow Of The Eagle, is a superbly written historical novel filled with intrigue and ruthless politics , from the Russian Tsar's delusions of grandeur to the naval forces of Great Britain pressing relentless war against America. A single man, Captain Nathaniel Drinkwater attending King Louis, learns of a deadly threat to peace that he must personally risk life and limb to combat. The Shadow Of The Eagle is a very compelling, entertaining, action/adventure read from first page to last.

Written by those who fear them, those who study them and those who hunt them - May lets you see the shark from many perspectives. It would have been easy to just compile as many accounts of gristly attacks as possible, but May had taken a higher road. Rodney Fox explains how an attack victim forces himself back into the surf, the model for Jaws' shark-hunter Quint tells how he got into the business. The book is not just about sharks, but about the people who try to share their world. And of course, just to make sure you stay on the beach this summer, there are some dramatic accounts of attacks - not all of which were survivable. The selections are well-chosen and pretty much closed-ended so you don't feel cheated, although the excerpt of Caldwell's solo Pacific crossing may have you searching for the rest of his story. This is light and interesting reading - fast paced - perfect for summer.

"Siege" is the story, as told by the American ambassador to Kuwait, of the four-month ordeal that he and his colleagues faced in staying at their posts despite Saddam Hussein's order that they leave. They were effectively isolated from the rest of the world save for the tenuous radio link they maintained with Washington, and the sporadic visits of unofficial emissaries (e.g. Jesse Jackson, as seen on the cover) and Iraqi officials. Also housed on this compound was a hastily-collected group of American and other western civilians, who were NOT free to leave--for which reason the Embassy refused to close: these civilians had been gathered in as opportunity allowed, to save their being used as human shields in Iraq's defense of the occupation of Kuwait.

"Siege" is also an anthropological analysis of the interactions within this de facto community, an examination of how people come together and cooperate in the face of external threat. The physical discomforts they endured were manifold: heat, insects, montonous diet, finite supplies. But the worst danger was the psychological toll that their uncertain situation COULD have exacted, had the Embassy staff's leadership faltered.

The Ambassador is modest in his self-appraisal & generous in that of his fellows (both Embassy staff and civilian); he certainly did not ask to be besieged, but when the situation was thrust upon him he accepted on-site responsibility for all. The story, as he recounts it, makes me hope that were I ever to find myself in similar straits, that my companions and my leadership would be cut from the same cloth. Besides learning what actually happened in the Embassy compound during Desert Shield (the media afforded only short glimpses & that story was soon eclipsed by Desert Storm), I was left with a new appreciation of human versatility & spirit.

My only complaint about the book is the small number of pictures; then again, they were under SIEGE, for crying out loud!

This book summarizes the major theories and findings on sleep function and pathology from antiquity to 1962. It contains over 4,300 references. The author and his graduate student, Eugene Aserinsky, discovered the state of REM sleep in 1953. Kleitman did some of the first studies of 24 hour (circadian) rhythms in humans, using the isolated confines of Mammoth cave as his laboratory. All current work in sleep and sleep disorders has Kleitman's book as its foundation. This book is "a must" for all those with a serious interest in sleep function and sleep disorders. Kleitman is now (1999) 104 years old.

Some kids books you just love to read over and over, relishing every word and image. More often than not, your child loves these same ones. For us, this is one of those books. Kiesler perfectly captures the wintery scenes and the text is just right - straightforwardly describing the wonders of the first big snow of the winter on a small boy without any selfconsciousness. Captures the imagination. Love it.

People of any religious background will find value in these suggestions for carrying out the Jewish tradition of leaving, in addition to a will that bequeaths material possessions, "a letter or will that attempts to sum up what parents have learned, what they want most for, and from, their loved ones."

The examples are from a wide range of people in various times - immigrants to America, Holocaust victims, novelists, rabbis, ordinary men and women. They are poems, letters, legal-sounding documents, rambling notes often amended - some examples eloquent, some prosaic.

Some parents give them as children are growing up, at marriage, or some other milestone in the life of the parents or the children, and then again at the parent's death. Some were written on a battlefield or in a concentration camp, with death imminent and little likelihood that the writing would get to the person addressed. The value of writing this kind of will is probably as much in the thought that goes into it and the changes that makes to one's life as in the benefit to those who read later.

The Bible study group to which I talked about this idea were struck by the rabbi's saying that some people are reluctant to put these things on paper because thinking about the values they want to "bequeath" makes people aware of how far they have fallen short of what they wanted to be. How distressing it would be to have the children say, "I didn't realize that was important to him..." instead of "That's what I would have expected, since he said it all his life and we saw him live it." It's worthwhile, if painful, to think about this while there is time to do something about it.

Many of the examples quoted scriptural reasons for the writing, such as David's charge to Solomon: "I go the way of all the earth; be thou strong therefore, and show thyself a man; and keep the charge of the Lord thy God, to walk in his ways, to keep His statutes...." Then the writer gives his own charge to his children.

Their suggestions for topics are useful: formative events, background, important lessons I've learned, people who influenced me, stories behind possessions I value, Scriptural passages, causes that mean most to me, my definition of success, what I regret, how much I love you.

Although the book would be most meaningful to someone with a Jewish background, it has value for anyone who is serious about passing one's values to the next generation, and is probably most useful for people to consider before a time of crisis arises.

Another good book with similar intent is "Put Your Heart on Paper; Staying Connected in a Loose-Ends World" by Henriette Anne Klauser.

Song Of The City: An Intimate History Of The American Urban Landscape by Philadelphia planner and activist Nathaniel Popkin, is a highly recommended, anecdotal history of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in the second half of the twentieth century. Using varied stories drawn from the lives of individual people to accurately reflect and bring to life this urban American community during its years of late 20th Century evolution, Song Of The City embodies the quintessential human experience which, taken as a whole, comprise the "soul" of the city.

Aldiss is a master of short fiction.
ST&N is no different.
Many stories are connected (in many of his short-story books, not just this one), and create very colorfull and thought-provoking future-histories.
This collection was his first publication and created a mini-havoc in the british sci-fi society, and rightly so.
Excellent.