This book deserves a long review. But, briefly, the 'story' of John Bartram involves the reader in Bartram's family and the colonial world of London and Philadelphia. The genuine passion that Bartram had to learn about and discover new botanical plants gives the reader a unique outlook. Bartram's travels into Indian territory are a window into uncharted lands. Bartram's relationship with his son William is often disapointing to the father but show a sensitivity that is interesting to see.
This seems to be a solidly researched and approachable book.

Leon Edel said this about my biography: "A low-keyed narrative of the novelist and journalist from enfant terrible to grizzled sexagenarian designed to seek out the literary artist behind the mask of self-advertisement. Complete with domesticity--sweethearts, wives, progeny, and four-letter words. A very good read."

The collection has some new and some of my personal favorite oldies. Of course, the trilogy "Nearing the Millenium" is not to be missed. Any of those books will be on the hard to find list also. I would be lying if I were to say I'm not bias. My brother is a visionary and sees poetry while the rest of us see prose.

Edmund Crispin is not known as a writer who features animals in his mysteries. Yet in "Swan Song," he gave us the bald, pub parrot that recited Heine in the original German.

In "Love Lies Bleeding," Mr. Merrythought, the ancient, slovenly bloodhound thwarted a double murder.

"The Long Divorce" introduces Lavender, the cat who sees Martians. (Either you have a cat who sees Martians---there is one perched on my printer right now, staring off into what humans refer to as 'empty space'---or else you will have to take Mr. Crispin's word that such perceptive cats exist.) Lavender, the marmalade-colored tomcat with unusual visual powers is instrumental in the capture of a murderer.

Murder is really secondary to the story of a village plagued by an anonymous letter-writer. Some of the letters are merely obscene. Others are poisonously factual.

Gervase Fen, Professor of English Language and Literature in the University of Oxford is importuned by an old friend to expose the anonymous letter-writer. And so Fen, microscopically disguised under the name of 'Mr. Datchery' (borrowed from Charles Dickens's "The Mystery of Edmund Drood") takes himself off to his friend's bucolic village.

"To an obbligato of bird-song Mr Datchery marched beneath a bright sky towards Cotton Abbas. And he carolled lustily, to the distress of all animate nature, as he walked....The directions given him at Twelford had been explicit. But since he believed himself to possess an infallible bump of locality, he was soon tempted to modify them with a variety of short cuts, and after about three miles he discovered, much to his indignation, that he was lost."

Is that or is that not Fen to the life?

"The Long Divorce" (1952) is eighth in Crispin's series of mysteries starring his literate, cynical, sometimes bumptious amateur detective. It is also a comedy of rural, post-war England. The characters are dead-on: the army veteran who is trying to stop smoking; the female physician who is struggling to build a practice in a conservative backwater; the teenager who both loves and is ashamed of her obnoxious, money-grubbing father.

Many of the mystery writers of the 1940s and 1950s were guilty of creating one-dimensional female stereotypes, or going off on the occasional anti-feminist rant. Margery Allingham, Rex Stout, and John Dickson Carr come readily to mind as producing examples of this type of writing. Crispin also creates the occasional stereotype, especially in his early novels and some of his short stories, but the characters in "The Long Divorce" are fully and fascinatingly realized---especially the women (okay, okay---except for the innkeeper's wife and the sluttish barmaid. But they are very minor players).

Crispin also works in an ongoing and thoughtful dialogue on suicide, and there is a hair-raising scene where Fen just manages to prevent a young girl from killing herself.

"The Long Divorce" is a classical Golden-Age British mystery, a thoughtful essay on suicide, and a marvelous, occasionally hilarious study of the rural English character. I feel the same frustration that Fen felt, when at story's end he reveals his true name to a gathering of the book's characters---and very few of them have heard of him.

Why isn't Fen at least as well-known as Lord Peter or Miss Marple or Nero Wolfe? He certainly deserves to be.

As a Greek student, I can't say enough about how great this text is. The running vocabulary is immensely helpful, as is the running commentary. As anybody who's gotten frustrated by constantly going back and forth between the text and various commentaries can understand, it's very helpful to have it write there, underneath the text. The commentary provides much needed help for a beginning Greek student. Edmund Cueva knew just when to nudge student readers in the right direction with his notes, and when to give them a harder shove. A superb text.

Still another in a great series of Classic Horror Filmscripts. Fully detailed and full of lavish photos, this book goes into censorship problems of that time and gives, in the script, an alternative destruction for Count Dracula. If you loved the movie or collect items on the Universal Monsters then this is a must have. Get this, and others in the Universal Filmscript Series, while you can!

This is an excellent translation of some of Meister Eckhart's finest works and is highly recommended as is McGinn's in this series. Eckhart is one of the greatest apothatic Christian mystics and both Eckhart titles in 'Classics of Western Spirituality Series' are a great place to start to read His works. If you want all of His sermons then buy O'C Walshe's 'Sermons and treaties'. For a study of Eckhart's mysticism buy 'Mystical Thought' by Bernard McGinn.

Clowney gives a straightforward and helpful exposition of this significant epistle. This series is highly readable, and Clowney's contribution on I Peter is no different. He has clearly thought long and hard about most of what he says, even if some of the argumentation for his views is left out of the book.

For a more serious exegetical commentary, look to Paul Achtemeier's Hermeneia volume, J. Ramsay Michaels' work in the Word Biblical Commentary series, or Peter Davids' NIC volume. For a more expository commentary, this book stands with I. Howard Marshall's IVP New Testament Commentary as the best you can find.

Marshall has more of a scholarly bent, and his footnotes contain much information that Clowney either leaves out or works into the text, which makes Clowney's work a little more uneven. Sometimes he devotes much attention to an issue (e.g. his excellent treatment of the spirits in prison passage, encapsulating some of the material and arguments Wayne Grudem presents in his excellent appendix on the topic in his Tyndale commentary, but Clowney does so in a more shorter and more readable manner).

Other subjects get shorter shrift, and you would need a more in-depth commentary to get more background on those. Marshall seems to give a little more depth to more issues with some exegetical help in the footnotes and for that reason may be more helpful to someone who asks questions about that sort of thing. But I enjoyed Clowney more out of the two and got more out of his work personally. As straightforward exposition, this is great work.

A theme of the late Adorno was the "organic" connection of linked terms: for the late Adorno, philosophy had the musical task of balancing claims at opposite ends of these organic polarities.

In Plato, Adorno shows, there is no conception of the reality of matter as opposed to Form; in Platonism, matter is merely Maya and illusion. Aristotle's insight was that the Form implies that we have to take an interest in matter because Form is always a Form-of with a material content. A square is in this picture filled with matter of some color; the perfect man has a material biography including encounters with the material (such as the Wedding Feast at Cana: marriage's sanctity is this transit of Venus.)

Nor, in Aristotle-Adorno, would the Form be at all improved by removing, in a Platonic spirit, as much matter as possible in a retreat from the world in search of "pure" form. Most mystics in the Hellenist period were consciously or unconsciously, Platonists who sought through reduction in contact with the material access to a mystical. As the twentieth century Islamic philosopher Sayyid Qutb has shown, this creates a cleavage or schizophrenia in Western thought: a divorce.

Western mental reservations about the goodness of the received, material, world result from the fact that (as Adorno shows) Aristotle quite straighforwardly prized the Form over the Content, preserving the Platonic value structure. Adorno shows that Aristotle did so because ancient philosophers had no clear conception of the dialectic.

Now, this is a claim of the sort that Adorno's very critics hunt for in the thicket of his prose like Indiana Jones, and, once they find this fool's gold, they fail to read on; for is it not the case that dialectic comes from the Greek?

Dialectic did come from the Greek but Continental philosophers don't mean by "dialectic" its root meaning of conversation, instead something more like talking to oneself in which the philosopher is literally sundered by the overpowering structure of his thought at the point where he realizes that as a part of the historical world he must self-apply his philosophy, treating himself as Other.

It is at this point that contradictions emerge which point the way not to collapse but to a new structure.

Adorno's dialectic, which he found absent in Aristotle, was one in which the Concept makes its own demands upon the thinker who winds up, not compromising with the World Spirit but in wholehearted agreement with its necessity.

We have to cultivate Adorno's remarkable ability to think in three dimensions here and historically; for thanks to Orwell, the very phrase, "wholeheartedly in agreement with the necessity of the World Spirit" becomes Winston Smith at the end of 1984. In fact, Adorno, despite the simple-minded demonology of the American right, was not at all wholeheartedly in agreement with the NOWS after the Holocaust and his negativity, also a matter of paradoxical scorn in American circles, generated his thought after 1945.

The canard of the American right is that European intellectuals of the 1950s like Adorno somehow manufactured the Stalinism of the 1930s (sic.: if you're going to lie, lie big: it is unexplained how the future influenced the past.)

Another canard of the American right is the attempt to pin responsibility for the Holocaust, ahistorically, on European intellectuals, and Adorno is usually in the round-up of the usual suspects. The Hegelian belief in the reality of moral progress is portrayed as generating schemes, for social improvement, which generate schemes, for mass murder, as if privatized schemes do not also have their own potential, almost by default.

For Adorno, there was no empirically attainable way to attain redemption after the death camps. For the Anglo-American philosopher, who Adorno represents in this book as the deracinated Wittgenstein, "die Welt ist alles, was der Fall ist" (the world is what happens), the Holocaust as a fact therefore closes the matter: we find an echo of this in the facticity of interviews, on horror, of The Guy in the Bar...s seen, for example, in Claude Lanzmann's Shoah.

The Guy says "get over it,... don't bring it up, Die Welt ist alles, was der Fall ist." Adorno's nemesis (like the Guy on the Weimar street-car who yelled at young Ted for his pretentious speech, pretentious speech being close to the language of redemption: like the knucklehead on the El who yelled at my kid for reading a book), the Guy is unconsciously influenced by Positivism and concludes from the empirical horror of Stalinism and the Holocaust that there is no "redemption", only revenge, only Tony Soprano, bada-bing.

The Guy in the Bar, an irresponsible philosopher in the sense that this clown witlessly inherits philosophy without examination, is, in his schizophrenic willingness to divorce form from content, in charge of modern American media...in which the form of facticity and polls drive what passes for political thought. Die Welt ist Alles, was Herr Gallup sprachen.

Adorno's ghost is needed to exorcise Guys in Bars, including those with tenure.

Adorno realized that form and content exist in an organic unity. Language that witlessly forgets this is the sort of political language that takes upon a favored form such as "freedom" without bothering to fill the form with content such as free men and women, and instead, in the Name of the Form, fills America's jails.

Half-educated, half-indoctrinated bien pensants are then systematically gulled into support for crime following the empty signifier of the Form. This has in my experience reduced and brutalized smart people to Guys in Bars.

Metaphysics is not palmistry, nor theology, nor the posit of supernatural entities. Nor is it restricted by any known law to the mulish rejection of an excess over der Fall. It is instead an ongoing critique of the very attempt to grope beyond and this critique itself is evidence for the Unseen: it is a rumor of redemption, and that is all we need: that is all we deserve.

Edmund Gurney (1847-1888) was a man this reviewer would have liked to have met. A brilliant man who lived in London, Mr. Gurney was a writer of articles about philosophy, psychology, religion, education, literature and the arts. Additionally, he was schooled in music (his passion), medicine and law and was a champion of both social justice and animal rights.

Gordon Epperson, author, professor emeritus of music at the University of Arizona and famed concert cellist has given us an insightful look at this man in his book, The Mind of Edmund Gurney. More than a biography, much more, The Mind of Edmund Gurney offers the reader an in-depth view of a man who was way ahead of his time. He was a friend to George Eliot, Samuel Butler, Henry Sedgwick, Leslie Stephen and William James, with whom Mr. Gurney had an extensive correspondence. It was through these letters that Professor Epperson was able to fashion a detailed and scholarly look at this complex and charismatic individual.

The Mind of Edmund Gurney presents a vivid picture of a dynamic person of extraordinary accomplishment. Even though he died at the early age of 41, he was able to study and write about hypnosis, psychic research, musical criticism---even poetry, in addition to everything else. He collaborated with F. W. H. Myers, author of Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death, in the first significant studies of hypnosis to appear in England, providing convincing evidence of telepathy. And all of this in a rather providential time in history. Professor Epperson writes, "His personality was powerful, his character complex. He had the capacity to enter into the thoughts and feelings of others, and he made a strong impression...on whomever he had to do with."

The only way we have to meet Edmund Gurney is vicariously, through a well documented, thoughtful and provocative book entitled, The Mind of Edmund Gurney. Gordon Epperson has illuminated a life that might otherwise have been lost to history!