This is a great book, covering a broad range of Art Nouveau styles & designers. If only it were available on CD!

"Brief Lives" has always been a delight, but it was Oliver Lawson Dick's scholarly editing that revealed Aubrey's genius. And Lawson Dick's Introduction, "The Life and Times of John Aubrey", is a miracle of synthesis and compression: certainly one of the finest biographical essays ever written. This Nonpareil Books edition is sumptuous - a joy to read in these days cheap, quickly produced paperbacks.

This is a truly inspiring book. It presents a way of understanding and expanding one's "autobiographical consciousness," and achieving optimum aging, through reminiscence about one's own life. Sherman presents an impressive, learned exposition of the relevant thinking of many great minds in his explanation of the meaning,elements and processes of aging and consciousness. He gives examples of ordinary people who are very much alive in their accounts of their lives and how they achieved an expanded and self-accepting autobiographical consciousness. This book made for a very helpful emotional and intellectual experience in self-examination of my own life.

I love to travel, both physically and mentally. This book is the ultimate scenic route through Britain. I've walked down some of those lanes and stood in front of some of those old town buildings. I've shopped in some of those quaint little old shops and I've stood on some of those cliffs and looked out over the English Channel.

I use this book now mainly as a reference for sketching, but also as a reminder of all those ancient and beautiful corners of England's green and pleasant land.

I cannot recommend this visually overwhelming resource highly enough!

Of all the composers Adorno has thought about intensely, writing essays which merged into book lengths on Mahler,Berg, or Wagner, as well as countless articles and essays on music, Beethoven seems to be a high special preserve within his body of work. This is a work of fragments, and notes,incomplete thoughts collected into notebooks throughout Adorno's life which never was able to solidify under one leaf,or merge into a completed work. But if you've read his brilliant and overwhelming intellectual discourses in his "Philosophy of Modern Music" or "Negative Dialectics" or lastly, his posthumous "Aesthetic Theory" this is more a threshold unto perhaps Adorno's working methods, unformed thoughts and frequent postponments of thoughts, concepts and directions to be takened up later,perhaps for the reader to fulfill. Beethoven was the consummate artist, one committed to the musical subject,the continuation of time, a composer who sought to break rules as well as follow them. And in following them there is a liberation for what this allows,sometimes new forms,a breakage of the tonal scheme or creating a piano sound almost provincial yet innovative,as the "Waldstein Sonata". Adorno frequently draws on Beethoven the craftman, the manipulator and purveyor of materials, on tonality,motives,variations, and form in a state of becoming, and makes us aware once again, that the process of music is a time-bound one, one of an incessant durational frame. Beethoven dealt with first and foremost with reprisals, with materials, themes and harmonic schemes we have heard and will hear again. He dealt with something which is already in the world, and his music simply deals with the inevitability of those moments and their fate redemption or demise. Late Beethoven as well we learn was not a state of increased polyphonic complexity, "Missa Solemnis" was a retrogressive act,not one of innovation as his "Piano Sonatas" frequently were. Adorno reminds us of the dimensions of Beethoven's art we seem to forget,as the simplified moments, the economy of means reduced to pure power as the "Ninth Symphony" or reduction of subjectivity as the late "Sonatas" proclaims. The Late Music "Spatstil" was a music of reduction of harmonic schemes beginning too soon as the late "Quartets" the "C# minor". The editor here Rolf Tiedemann long an Adorno executor trys to make the fragmentariness of this incomplete work cohere with copious notes placed at the end, even interjecting excerpts from completed essays and entire works, as "Aesthetic Theory". Although useful I found this distracting and not all that absorbing.It seems we've never understood Beethoven or that the dimensions of his creativity have been layered,Adorno returns him back to a composer status, a contemporary or visitor of the postmodern field as if the ink never dried.

For the student of politics and politcal philosophy this compilation is a wonderful 'must-read'. I was captured at times by the power of Burke's writing. Occasionally I was so taken with the majesty of his language and the power of his logic that I found myself reading aloud, savoring each word. For example, try rolling these phrases off your tongue: "Liberty...is a general principle, and the clear right of all subjects within the realm, or of none. Partial freedom seems to me a most invidious mode of slavery. But unfortunately, it is the kind of slavery most easily admitted....The true danger is when liberty is nibbled away, for expedients, and by parts." Burke's erudition and style are refreshing in a modern political landscape of mediocrity and mindless soundbites. Editor Peter Stanlis divides the book into eight roughly chronological sections from Burke's seminal writings in the mid-1700's through his celebrated expressions as a member of Parliament debating the American Revolution, Ireland and Catholic Emancipation, Economic Reforms, British misrule in India and the subsequent impeachment of Governor-General Hastings. The Book concludes with selections from Burke's exceptional observations on the French Revolution, thoughts which galvanized British opposition to the revolutionary regimes and gave the intellectual undergirding of the Napoleonic Wars. Stanlis also provides the reader with helpful prequels setting the stage for each of the selected writings or speeches, a chronological table of Burke's life, a handy selected bibliography and a concise indroduction to the whole work which is an excellent summary of what follows. This hardback edition is well bound on quality paper. It will survive the many re-readings and quick searches it deserves. The one flaw in this edition is the lack of a helpful appendix or index. Even though my copy is well underscored and highlighted with marginal notes to flag key thoughts or expressions, appendices would save time thumbing through nearly 700 pages to find a particular quote. The book is not a quick read, yet it is surprisingly relevant to today's headlines. Burke's brilliant insights into human nature and the practical workings of governments far outshine most modern pundits. This book is now a standard reference work in my personal library, sitting on a close-at-hand shelf for ready access.

This book helped with many of the incantations I wanted to know. Now I have no more questions about the unknown.

This book remains today one of these old books that contain essential ideas that have been forgoten, and therefore not researched. It is therefore one of these old books (most ideas date from the 1930s) that every young (and less young) psychologist should read. It contains crucial notions on how brain and muscles coordinate.

I was looking for a historical account of the US Constitution and picked this up from the library. This book chronoligically follows the events leading up to the writing of the Constitution (from 1776), the Articles of Confederation, the meetings of the Continental Congress, and the months of debate that lead to the creation of one of the greatest documents in the world. All amendments are discussed and summarized (even some that never made it). The major players (Madison, Washington, etc.) are mentioned and the parts they played are described in good detail. I highly recommend this book to all who want to learn a little bit more about the most important time in this nation's history.

This book made me a Edmond Jabes fan - I doubt that any other of his books would have for this is by far the most accessible. Jabes is an Egyptian Jew in exile in France writing primarily after the Holocaust. His writing style is a series of snippets - fiction, poetry, aphorisms - that explore the limits of language and the role of the blank, the silence, the desert, the unwritten. In The Books of Shares each of these snippets stands on its own - that is not true, for example, of the multi-volume Book of Questions. The result is a truly post-modern reflection on theology and philosophy - and post-modern without pretention.

When I read this book on a silent retreat, I found passage after passage that I wanted to hear, to memorize, to enter into my journal.

An example: "Out of the words of his language, a writer forges new words, not neologisms, but words irrigated with his blood. He founds a second language which, to be sure, is rooted in the first with all its fibers, but which henceforth, being his own - O paradox - is nobody's. Because the writer's language wants to be only of the book, of the instant and duration of a liberated word."

If you enjoy the Books of Shares, there are many wonderful volumes of Jabes to follow. If you do not enjoy this, you may safely assume that Jabes is not your reading choice.