This collection is a travesty indeed. Great poems no doubt, but abysmally read. Furthermore they should have put all the introductions together separate and apart from the poems. It's nice to hear intros the first time around. But who wants to hear the intros everytime you listen to the poems? Sometimes I want to hear just a stream of poetry without any interuptions and this format makes that impossible. It's incredible that such a great concept could be so terribly executed.

I could not get this back to the store for a refund quickly enough. While the poem selection is great and the poem introductions are narrated well, the choice to use "modern poets" as the readers made this compilation utterly unlistenable. The only one that I found acceptable was Anthony Hect--the others were notably bad. In particular, I found Jorie Graham's "readings" to be abysmal. She reads each poem as if it were simply a string of unconnected words, giving equal stress to each, with halting pauses between them, never breaking out of a drowsy monotone. Other readers were not much better.

There are three major flaws in the readings:

1) The readers are no better than the average untrained person, and often much worse. (You've just got to hear them for yourself to appreciate how bad they are.)

2) Successive poems by the same poet are read by different "readers." It's jarring to hear 3 or 4 poems from Poet X, each in a wildly different voice.

3) No regard is given to matching the sex of the poet and reader. In general, it is really annoying to hear your favorite poet read by the wrong sex. In particular, making this mistake on "gender specific" poems (like having a woman read Poe's "Annabel Lee") is unforgivable.

Why is this all so upsetting? Because it is practically impossible to find poetry collections on CD, making this a serious waste of limited resources. If you are looking for a good collection on CD, buy "81 Famous Poems CD" by Audio Partners (ISBN 0-945353-82-0). It's a good collection on two CDs and is read by professionals: Alexander Scourby, Bramwell Fletcher, and Nancy Wickwire. In the meantime, we can only hope that the producers of this collection will eventually come to their senses and re-record the poems with the services of trained professionals.

If you are prepping for the GRE in literature or are trying to gain a basic understanding of literary periods and poets, this audio-collection is a must. It features a brief introduction about each poet's life. It also includes a brief introduction about the theme of each poem. The fact that you have to listen to these introductions before listening to the poem inculcate the poem and aids retention. If literature has turned into a cumbersome and overwhelming task, this collection will not only provide you with a sense of direction but will also make literature far more pleasurable.

While an interesting beginning for a novice collector the author spans too great a time period to adequately cover any series of Winchester firearms. Winchester collectors are quite attracted to styles or types of firearms. This book barely answers even the most rudimentary of questions and as such is an overall disappointment. Secondly, the book would be greatly enhanced by more detailed and clear photography. This would assist the new collector in appreciating the marvel of these firearms - while providing a much better overview for future study.

I've not been well pleased by this book. Though some of its insights are valuable, and though it is somewhat well researched and fairly comprehensive, it's a chore to read. The author has a style that borders on the incomprehensible -- one feels that he is one of these people who uses tortuous turns of phrase in the mistaken belief that they'll make him seem sophisticated. As a result, the text is disjointed and difficult, its arguments meandering and ill-defined. Williamson has some good ideas, and probably knows what he means, but doesn't get his points across clearly -- it's almost as though he's trying to emulate Eliot's style (or to merely restate the poetry as prose) and, frankly, one often feels as though Williamson has ideas above his station.

In short, this has all of the hallmarks of high school essay-writing -- perhaps the author has spent too long in the company of his students. Using 'difficult' language is neither big nor clever if it serves only to obfuscate meaning; here, the wealth of double-negatives, run-on sentences and unexplained, bewildering conjecture is simply not helpful to the reader of an already difficult poet. If the reader works at it, he or she will gleam some benefit from this book - but there are far better, and better written, works out there. If in doubt, take a look at the excerpts on this site -- it may be that the rather purple prose will appeal to some readers; but I regret that where I had hoped for intelligent discourse, I instead found awkwardly adolescent writing that thought itself more clever than it actually was.

This little book was very interesting, but it lacked depth. Merton lets us in on some very surprising information, for example, he was planning to take a Tibetan guru to learn Tibetan Buddhist Tantric meditation techniques. he comments on Sufiem, Zen, Taoism, Hindooism, and Buddhism with great eloquence, although his style is a bit dull. Even so, it is a wonder that he wasn't excommunicated for his ecumenicism. Few Christians that I know of would be so willing to look with an open heart and mind into the world of eastern mystical practices without being superior or condemning. He looks upon these practices with reverence and respect. Still, it is hard to get much out of such a small book, and little is really said, either about his own personal struggles or the religions in question. A nice addition includes his interviews with Llamo Thondup, the 14th Dalai Llama. If you're into Merton, this is a nice book, but it is not really for everyone.

This book is one of the worst text books I have ever used! It is not worth the space it takes up let alone the trees which were ruthlessly massacred to create its pages. In fact, I would like to see the book converted to pure energy in some giant nuclear explosion and fed slowly to a black hole. The following adjectives may be used to describe this book: boring, unreadable, inaccurate, illogical, non-user-friendly, unorganized, and mind-numbing. The sample programs are rediculous and do nothing to show you things you need to know. The eternal typewritten mumblings of the author drone on and on for eternity, and I would rather watch concrete cure than read this book. (Although my brain did feel like concrete when I had finished it [Not strong concrete, just an ugly gray mass of brittle defective stone]) In addition, the author continuously makes references to pipe organs and volvos, for no necessary reason, both of which I deeply despise.

I had this book for an undergrad data structures course. It is possibly the worst textbook I've ever had the misfortune of buying. The writing style is pompous. Most of the sample code wouldn't compile on our compiler (we were using gnu's). At least half of the time I spent on each programming assignment in this class, I spent trying to get the book's sample code to work, before I could even start building my stuff on it. In a lot of cases, I finally gave up and based my stuff on the data structures from Deitel's _C++ How to Program_, which we had used for our introductory courses, instead. Aside from the content, the design was also terrible. The figures almost never appeared on the same page with the text that referred to them. Even the proportions of the book itself, the paper, and the type faces are unpleasant. In short, this book was bad in every way I can think of.

This was my text book in CSE310 at Arizona State tought be Candan at the time. That class was a disaster. I was doing well but most of my friends did'nt. The problem is that the book uses ADT's in its implementations. as Junior students we are not comfortable enough with C++ to delve right in all the funky ways the ADT's are implemented. So basically we get lost and waste so much time just getting our programs to compile so we dont get to focus on the abstract aspects as the real purpose of using ADT's is supposed to be. If you are an instructor this is a bad choice for you as a text book. Your students will dislike you! We hated the book.

This is not a good book. However, I must admit that it really isn't that bad. The examples are clear, and the solutions are given, with decent explanations.

The bad thing about Calculus with this Study Guide isn't that it's poorly written, the bad thing is that it's practically useless. The problems are of the same type as those found in Calculus with Analytic Geometry, and they are explained in the same dry way. In other words, the Calculus with Analytic Geometry Study Guide doesn't really help to clear up any confusion, nor does it serve as a "guide" of some sort--it's simply more textbook problems!

If you are having trouble with Calculus with Analytic Geometry, the Study Guide will do you no good. There is a book, The Calculus with Analytic Geometry Student Solutions Manual that explains problems from the textbook. Buy the solutions manual.

Despite having an accurate title and being the most recent biography of George H. Thomas this book was the pits. The author relies too much on primary sources and battle reports and thus takes the exciting story of a Virginian who fought for the Union during the Civil War into an unreadable mess. I am glad to see books written on Thomas, however this one is a major disappointment.

The book is educational if you're looking for an informative book about Merry-Go-Rounds. The pictures were black and white and not very attractive, not a very fun picture book for children. The history of Merry-Go-Rounds is given in good detail which had their beginning in Arabia more than nine hundred years ago.