Let me begin by saying that the rating I have given is not comparing Kennedy's volume to other kinds of works, but rather to the half-dozen or so popular textbooks that are similar and that anthologize many of the same works. All have particular strengths and weaknesses; they are all worthy anthologies.

For several years, I have been using the Kennedy anthology to teach the introduction to literature class to university students. I am reasonably satisfied with the current text, although the price seems rather high. I have had some reservations about the selections in poetry because Mr. Kennedy has insisted upon calling popular songs "poetry" and implied that a few of the pop songs by Run D.M.C., Paul Simon, Bessie Smith and Clarence Williams, and the Beatles are the equivalent of real poems. Sometimes a student will become angry because I will not accept a paper on a pop song.

This 60's kind of nonsense (like "The Poetry of Rock") should have remained in the 60's. Shamelessly, however, Mr. Kennedy and his publisher seem to pander to what is perceived as students' tastes. I note that at the back of the volume is a form soliciting students' opinions of the selections. There is no similar form for teachers.

I am especially disturbed by this new edition because the claim to "international and multicultural coverage" has evidently meant the deletion of a great short story, Leo Tolstoy's "The Death of Ivan Ilych." I guess, in the minds of the compiler and editors, the inclusion of additional "student essays" was more important than the inclusion of a great story. (Frankly,I--and I suspect many others--could do with fewer student essays and more essays by professionals.)

In a recent article in "The Chronicle of Higher Education" (Feb. 12, 1999), Professor James Shapiro (Columbia) laments, "When Brevity Rules the Syllabus, 'Ulysses' Is Lost." He goes on to say that because of the current demand for brevity, we can "forget about 'War and Peace'--'The Death of Ivan Ilyich' is fast becoming Tolstoy's representative work." If Kennedy's 7th edition of "Literature" is any indication, however, we can forget about Tolstoy altogether.

Maybe some caring people could get together and demand that Tolstoy be put back.

The Kennedy Anthology is a decent dependable sampler. I studied from it as an undergraduate and I now use it, as a grad student, to teach introductory lit classes (supplementing it, of course, with outside material)

I'm suprised, however, at the reviewer's comments above. Yes, Kennedy includes rock songs in the poetry section, but claims dismissing their inclusion are faulty for two reasons. 1)Rock lyrics, whether you're fond of them or not, do qualify as poetry (they are verse, after all and whether or not rock and roll lyrics stand as "good" poetry is a completely separate issue) and 2)Despite the fact that popular lyrics are included in the poetry section, the canonical giants are still well-represented (no need to fret, Whitman hasn't gone anywhere). In other words, if you dislike the rock lyrics, well, simply don't teach them.

More importantly, in a field as diverse and (usually) liberal as literature, I'm shocked that people still complain about multiculturalism and international literature "taking away" from established great texts. Isn't this PC debate over? Haven't we all now simply accepted the fact that including diverse texts isn't a PC issue but rather an issue of good old common sense? Does anyone really still question the validity of marginalized (yet talented) voices being heard? Hasn't liberal humanism (at least in its problematic manifestations) been successfully deconstructed? Frankly, I'm frightened to think how there are English instructors out there actually arguing AGAINST diversity. Then again, I'm also incredibly naive.

Lastly, I like lit textbooks that include examples of student essays. I employ a workshop method in my class and my students and I look at a variety of essays throughout the term--from established professionals, from students, and from me. Students are too often bombarded with "professional" examples of what they are expected to produce. Why not include examples of reasonable essays that are more or less within their rhetorical reach?

... First of all, it is massive and contains three books in one - fiction, poetry and drama. Each section includes a plethora of selections as well as longer works (like the full length plays of Hamlet and Macbeth). So one is really getting quite a library from this one book.

Even better, the sections are organized along themes in order to teach the student (or interested reader) how to appreciate the various forms. So the poetry section has sections on sound, figures of speech, rhythm, closed and open form, etc. I suppose this comes from it being a textbook for undergraduate courses - in any case, it pays off. I've learned a tremendous amount already. It's all in very easy to understand non-technical language, too.

At the end of the book, there is even a brief section on various forms of literary criticism. The book contains numerous student essays, brief author biographies, reflections by the authors on their own works (this is really great), and it reflects a really broad range of genres and time periods (unfortunately the section on haiku is plagued by bad translations, and there aren't enough examples of Chinese and other Japanese poetry... oh well!). There is also an emphasis on getting the reader to practice (and write for him or herself) what is being taught. So if you want to be a writer, this is great.

If you're a beginner interested in getting into literature, this is really a great way to do it. Don't be put off by the massiveness of this book - it's really a resource. Just start in one small place (I started in 'poetry') and work your way around. It will definitely increase your appreciation for literature.

The photography in the book was wonderful and I've really enjoyed the pictures. Would have liked more history and text on each major manufacturer and for the book to be organized just by manufacturer; it is a little disjointed as it is currently organized. Glad to have it for the pics, but left me wanting a more comprehensive guide and more price info.

A fun book, AND informative. Doesnt look like it is intended to fill everyones needs, but to "add-to" your reference library, or just to leave out to enjoy!

an extremely usable book. gives a great history of marionettes in general and about more than 25 different companies who made marionettes. GREAT pictures. the different marionettes are clearly described and pictured with current 'values' assigned to each one pictured. contains information on how to date many characters. the character index is wonderful. if you collect string puppets or marionettes you need to own this book.

this text was required reading for an uper division Modern Art History course i have taken, which requires no prerequisites. the book, however, certainly assumes previous indepth knowledge of topic. overall, a very informative, technical book.

I just completed a college course with this book as the chosen Textbook. The writing was of a much more advanced nature and it actually seemed like it should have been for a more advanced course. Like the title of this review says, you get an advanced English lesson also. It's mainly an Education book, so it probably should be geared more to the Student-through-expert levels. Like most books on art, it is a shame that so many illustrations are in Black & White. It's a cost thing I suppose. The information and opinions were well balanced. The text also has very little unnecessary "Fluff" fillers. I would have no intention of selling the book or trading it away. It's a keeper.

Everybody knows the boring of reading introduction material about art. It's always more of the same. Because of that I suspected very much this book with its "open title"... No reason for that: Modern Art is a careful work about 20th century aesthetics, crossing an open and contextual perspective with closed analysis of key works. And best of all, the synthetic approach of painting, sculpture and architecture is very well balanced and justified. It's not a book, but a very good surprise as both an introduction as a very deep analysis of 20th century art.

This book is not meant as a precise historical account of the journeys of Lewis & Clark, but a study of the Missouri River and its surrounding areas as the explorers saw them, vs. how these areas have changed since then. Also, the portion of the Lewis & Clark journey west of the Rockies is not included, as the book sticks to the Missouri River. The most blatant changes in these ecosystems are the straightening and channelization of the river itself, which has led to massive environmental (and economic) damage for a pathetically small amount of barge traffic; plus the conversion of vast prairies to farmland which has led to serious losses of native flora and fauna. The book becomes a messy mixture of travelogue, as Botkin describes how to reach key areas of the river, and musings on the environmental health of these areas. While Botkin has had well-deserved success in environmentalist circles, his attempts to draw up naturalist ethics and morality significantly weaken this book. A lack of focus and the squishy writing of a college freshman are also damaging. Botkin is prone to god-awful metaphors, starting the main narrative awkwardly with "Rocks are nature's books; minerals are its words" and populating the rest of the book with more groaners like "Rocks Tell Stories and Soils are Nature's Braille" (subtitle of chapter 25). His attempts to wax philosophical on mankind's modern lack of connection with nature, while correct in spirit, are also unsuccessful in the writing department. See the awkward comparison of a pelican's spiraling flight path to society's shifting concerns for the environment in chapter 6, or the predictable comparison of prairie dog towns with an ideal human society in chapter 32. This book had the potential to be a real winner as both a travelogue with a historical twist and as a treatise on environmental philosophy. Unfortunately it merely flirts with those two strengths without really nailing them, and is sunk overall by weak writing.

This is a fantastic book for anyone visiting the Missouri river.

Book has handy maps, illustrations and reference points for the person making a modern day trip. Notes by Stephen Ambrose and Robert Redford at beginning and end of book commend book as well!

If you are only mildly interested in Lewis and Clark before reading this book - afterwards you'll be completely astounded by their feats!!

Nothing is as constant as change on the unfettered Missouri River. Few stretches of the Missouri remain as Lewis & Clark observed them. The river, as Botkin observes, is "nature's landscape painter". The canvas is continually changing in response to the forces of a river draining one-sixth of the U.S.

Botkin presents us with the story of the first navigation of the river by Lewis and Clarke, through the river's channalization by the Army Corp of Engineers, to present efforts to restore and interpret the river.

But, this book is more than an inventory of facts and issues. It contains vivid illustrations of nature's interrelationships and wry observations on the irony of man "improving" nature.

This is a very practical, pragmatic, yet poetic book.

The layperson may get more out of this than students and scholars as this commentary attempts to rewrite the text in "understandable" language. By reading the title it is apparent that he takes a firm stance on the fourth kingdom as Rome. He doesnt comment on any other kind of reading and makes statements about uncertainties within the text as if they were inalienable truths.

DANIEL AND THE REVELATION IS ONE OF THE MOST EXPLORATIVE AND IN DEPTH BOOKS I HAVE READ. THE BOOK GIVES THE READER A CLEAR UNDERSTANDING OF PROPHECY. I HAVE TESTED THIS BOOK AGAINST THE BIBLE, AND IT STANDS THE TEST OF TIME. I NO LONGER HAVE DANIEL AND THE REVELATION, AND CAN NOT FIND IT IN BOOKSTORES. IF YOU CAN SUGGEST A BOOKSTORE I WOULD APPRECIATE IT VERY MUCH.

The strength of this book is that it aligns history with scripture and they agree. Wonderful detailed explanations of the books of Daniel and Revelation. I would recommend to any serious student of the Bible.

Daniel Easterman is the Nom de Plume of Denis McEoin, professor at Univ. Newcastle-upon-Tyne, an embittered ex-Baha'i.

I recommend this book to anyone interested in the history of Jews and Palestinians, as well as some biblical entries as well. Daniel Easterman has written a masterpiece, and I think that it should be republished.

By a happy coincidence, I found myself reading this book while on my way to Haifa in Israel, where the opening chapters of the story take place. The author's vivid descriptions and plotlines made the place come so alive to me. And it keeps getting better and better. The twists and turns are nail-biting, and the scenes when the main character reaches the seventh sanctuary are nothing short of the work of a brilliant imagination. I loved it. What a terrific movie this could make if handled properly, though I don't think any movie would match the novel itself.

This unique book has it's good points. It attmepts to show how to use different types of statistical analyses work together and what order to use them in.

However, it is poorly written. The authors will start to use terms and ideas that may or may not be defined two or ten pages later, or maybe in a following chapter and you're never quite sure if something will be explained or whether this is something you should already know. This makes for a slow and aggrevating read to the neophyte. Sometimes it seems like a concise statement of the subjects it addresses, but maybe only after you already have mastered them.

If the authors reread the book with a fresh eye, it could be edited and rewritten into a real treasure. Excellent start

This is a great introductory statistics book, for students who are taking beginning level stats courses. The examples are cleary laid out and it's not too heavy on the theory.

This is a superb text for graduate students or advanced undergraduates. The case studies are excellent, and the approach is innovative. The strength of the book is its coverage of regression models (linear algebra not used - a weakness if you want to program in Matlab, but ok for SPSS). The examples are drawn from Ecology (esp. Island biogeography), Evolutionary biology, geochemistry, environmental policy, medicine and law. There is something of interest for even the most diverse audience.

I was somewhat disappointed with this book; anyone thinking of buying it should realize it seems to be an almost verbatim transcription of lectures for undergraduates and thus has a great deal of extra talkativeness as well as student problems that pad out the information. Really nothing too philosophical or even novel is presented here that hasn't been written well or better in the past at greater length. It's true he spends a great deal of time discussing the E-P-R paradox and the Aspect experiment but the 'metaphysical' so to speak consequences, or even just the weirdness resulting from nonlocal behavior, are just barely discussed.

In short, he present some basic quantum strangness, i.e., nonlocality and wave-particle duality, through simplistic experiments, but avoids the implications completely. Anyone with preexisting knowledge of quantum mechanics will find this very disappointing, since it's 'old hat.' Most disappointing of all is the omission of further discussion of the popular superstring or M-theory; it is only mentioned in passing very briefly.

So if you're not familiar at all with the strange world of quantum mechanics, this may be of interest, although you'll feel a little let down that the truly weird implications are not further elaborated on [e.g. the many worlds interpretation].

This little book explains the EPR-Paradox in perhaps the clearest presentation I have ever seen! It's a fun read, too... It makes a good companion to Feynman's "QED". I recommend it.

Imagine being raised all your life in an environment without gravity and then suddenly finding yourself on a planet with a strong gravitational field. Things would be really strange. Your intuition would be confused and confounded. Take the simple act of tossing a ball, for example. Your intuition tells you that the ball will go straight, but in this strange world the ball curves. To toss the ball to someone you must toss it up, so that it arcs over. Otherwise, if you toss it straight (like your intuition tells you to) it curves downward and hits the ground.

Strangeness, obviously, depends on our sense of intuition, and our sense of intuition depends upon the rules of engagement in the world in which we live. Most of us live in a world dominated by classical physics where objects have a definite position, velocity, mass, energy, etc. It is because of our intimate personal experience with this classical world that non-classical environments like the very fast and the very tiny seem counter intuitive.

Styer's book aims to help the reader understand the experiences of the quantum world. Though real quantum intuition cannot come from a book, Styer helps the reader gain a measure of intuition regarding what happens at the quantum level. Styer's book is one of the best I've seen for explaining quantum mechanics in a rigorously qualitative manner that's understandable by virtually anyone with the intellectual discipline to learn new ideas. [The other book I recommend in this area, and from which Styer uses as a frequent reference, is "QED, The Strange Theory of Light and Matter," by Richard Feynman. For someone just starting out in his or her study of quantum mechanics, I recommend Feynman's book followed by Styer's. Both are qualitative and have little mathematics. For an introduction to the mathematics of quantum mechanics (using mathematics at the freshman college level) I suggest Sam Treiman's "The Odd Quantum." These three books form an excellent basis for a course in study that tackles quantum physics at the quantitative level.]

The book has 15 chapters, but is only 150 pages long, so each chapter is rather short. The chapters are organized nicely, however, and each has a specific goal for the reader, with good illustrations throughout and thought-provoking questions at the end (numeric answers are in the back of the book, though many questions do not have a numeric answer). Unlike the questions found in some textbooks, Styer's questions are formulated specifically to build insight into the main issues presented in the chapters, and to extend upon them. I strongly suggest answering each question in detail, as it will greatly enrich the experience of reading this book.

Styer is a master at explaining the central concepts of quantum mechanics in an intuitive and visual manner (his style of presentation is similar to Feynman's). Unlike many other authors, Styer does not introduce quantum mechanics by using the double-slit experiment. Instead, Styer bases almost all his arguments on an idealized (portable and configurable) Stern-Gerlach analyzer, which measures the magnetic spin of quantum particles (he later uses a modified form to introduce quantum interference). Styer does all this, and masterfully, by using non-technical language that nevertheless maintains the integrity of the ideas embodied in quantum mechanics.

A brief introduction, some stuff on how classical magnetic needles behave in a magnetic field, a description of the Stern-Gerlach experiment, and the "conundrum of projections," or the quantization of quantum spin, take up the first four chapters. Chapter 5 is a primer on simple concepts in statistics and lays the groundwork for later chapters. Chapters 6 and 7 deal with the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen experiments, which I found to be among the simplest and most illuminating that I've found in an introductory text. Typical of Styer's book throughout, he shows that the "paradox" arises from false assumptions in which we try to project our intuition from the classical world into the quantum world.

Styer describes the double-slit experiment, but he saves it till chapters 8 and 9 and explains it not just in terms of photons but also in terms of atoms as well. The discussion of quantal interference leads naturally to a further expansion of the concept of amplitudes and probability in quantum mechanics. The book ends with a chapter on quantum cryptography, a chapter on the quantum-mechanical behavior of a quantum ball, and a chapter that has a brief introduction of wavefunction.

There are also three excellent apprentices (these should be read with the same commitment as reading all the chapters in the book) and an adequate index. Styer also has a very nice list of other reading material on quantum mechanics, as well as some biting editorial statements about errors in popular books on the subject. Styer's approach is no nonsense. Rather than waxing philosophical about the dual particle-wave nature of matter, Styer correctly helps the reader realize that to understand quantum mechanics we must do so by understanding the behavior of quanta and not try to force our classical perceptions. As Styer says: "In fact an atom is no more a small hard marble [or a classical wave] than an atom's magnetic needle is a pointy stick. These classical ideas are simply wrong when applied to very small objects."

Very well written in an engaging, no-nonsense style that cuts straight to the heart of the issue, this is simply one of the best introductory (qualitative and without mathematics) books I've read on the subject. Whether you are reading about quantum mechanics for the very first time, or simply trying to increase your intuitive feel for the subject, I highly recommend it.

I am a long-time reader of Georgette Heyer and, unfortunately, this is one of her few books that completely failed to draw me in. Perhaps it was because I was expecting a Regency and ended up with a mystery novel, but the book failed to evoke my interest, much less, perhaps, than some of her other mysteries, and I never managed to finish it. Some people will like the idea of a Regency/mystery, but I prefer them separated- it's something to keep in mind before purchasing this book.

I am an unabashed "Heyer" fan and own almost everything she has ever written but I believe that this is one of her best as far as humor and wit are concerned. These "characters" all grab your heart, make you both laugh and cry ... sometimes all at once! One of my favorites that I have read and re-read many times over. Enjoy!

Georgette Heyer is noted as a writer of Regency romances (she established the genre) and of murder mysteries. In this book she integrates the two into a seamless whole, producing an mystery that is inseparable from a romance (and which is set during the Regency). This sounds an unlikely juxtaposition, but Heyer pulls it off without a jarring note.

Captain John Staple, at a loose end now that the war against Napoleon is over, stumbles across an anomaly: an unattended tollgate. He takes shelter for the night, and in the morning finds a reason to stay in the area: Miss Stornaway. The two turn out connected, which is not to the Captain's liking, and he finds it necessary to disentangle them before he can let justice take its course.

As a Catholic seeking a more complete understanding of the "tough issues" for which critics bash our Church, this book is disappointing. Weighing in at only 83 pages, this book leaves much to be desired. Most "chapters" consist of only a review of an issue's history followed by a series of questions about it, in a food-for-thought manner.

To be fair, the book seems like it is intended for religious education classes or other discussion groups. For the individual reader, however, I would look into George Weigel's book, "The Truth of Catholicism," Peter Kreeft's "Catholic Christianity," or Alan Schreck's "Catholic and Christian."

I give the Most Reverend Pilarczyk credit for doing what many Archbishops should be doing--which is seeking to better educate the laity about Church teachings--but this book, unfortunately, just isn't substantive.

I teach Confirmation class to tenth graders. At this age, they are struggling to form their own opinions on tough issues, but still want to be informed on what the "authorities" think. This book is tailor-made for the "sound-bite generation." Each of the 12 tough issues is covered in about 4-7 pages of easy-to-read text. I passed the book around and offered to buy a copy for each of them - they all wanted one!

Ever wonder why the Catholic Church teaches what it does, especially on controversial issues like abortion and capital punishment? If so, this book is for you.

Archbishop Pilarczyk writes in an accessible, easy-to-understand manner. No theology degree required. He also writes in a compassionate manner, acknowledging that these are, after all, tough issues. At the same time, he puts forth the Church's position in a clear, concise manner.

Designed to increase the understanding of Catholics and anyone interested in these issues, this book is a plus to have on your bookshelf.