If you are looking for a direct translation(as I was) of the entire Ring, look no further. It is excellant and complete. If you are looking for commentary however, this is not the book for you . There is a brief intro that essentially discusses Wagner's life, philosophy, and musical approach(50 pgs). An 8 page b&w insert is also included. The text is printed side by side with the original German text. Well worth the money to those who have procured a recording of one or all of the operas but need a liberetto.

I have been a fan of Mr Howard for nearly 12 years now, which in my opinion, makes me a bit of a connoisseur, and frankly this book was a bit of a disappointment. Undoubtedly the contributing writers are well-respected and immensely able but their writing lacked the Howardian flavour I have come to love. Ghor's sudden personality shifts are hard to follow and the various ideas in the story lack sufficient depth. This book is not the way Mr Howard would have written it. Nevertheless, this should be read because the original idea belonged to the great REH.

Ghor is a nice blend of Conan and the Cthulhu Mythos together. Abandoned as a child because of a deformity, Ghor is adopted by a pack of wolves. Raised by them, he adopts the ways of the wolf, yet when he meets up with humanity joins them. Constantly struggling with his wolf upbringing and his human surroundings, Ghor becomes a mighty war hero wherever he goes.

This is an excellent adventure book that takes a Conan like hero and plots him against all sorts of evil (and good), including some Cthulhu creations as well.

Originally Ghor was an unfinished story by Conan creator Robert Howard. Upon finding this unfinished story, a magazine decided to finish it. What they did was have a different chapter every month written by a different top fantasy writer. It made the reading interesting.

While most of the chapters were great. Some were excellent. Unfortunately there were a couple chapters that I just wanted to get through to reach the next writers' chapter. Overall a really good read.

I WAS VERY SUPRISED ABOUT HOW WELL THIS STORY CAME OFF. THE VARIUOS WRITERS DID AN EXCELLENT JOB IN WRITING AN EXCITING BOOK THAT FLOWED SMOOTHLY. IT DID NOT COME OFF AS A SERIES OF SHORT STORIES. THIS IS AN EXCELLENT BOOK FOR ROBERT E. HOWARD FANS, AND FANS OF FANTASY IN GENERAL.

I am a true Wagnarian. Der Gotterdammerung is my favorute opera. The Rhine Madiens in this book where not described acuretly.

Professor Cord's book proved very useful to me when I attended the Ring cycle at the S.F. Opera in June 1999. I had watched the N.Y. Met video tapes, and read up on the four operas, but Cord's book gives extensive background information to help you understand the context in which the operas were created and first performed. The S.F. Opera was selling this handbook to its patrons and it turned out Professor Cord was sitting two rows ahead of us. His enthusiasm, love, respect and knowledge of Wagner are clear.You can read the book before attending or, if your prefer, after the experience to clarify questions and insights you have had. I recommend it as a wonderful starting point for anyone exploring Wagner's Ring.

I've just re-read this book, after first reviewing it over two years ago. I noted Gutman's unreliability then, but on re-reading I can only report that my opinion of Gutman has fallen further. I originally awarded it two stars; I now think that was generous.

This book is more careless of source material than any book has right to be, but it's not ordinary carelessness. All errors and misstatements happen to support Gutman's case for a proto-Nazi Wagner. When a book's errors all support one thesis, that pattern must raise questions not just of competence but also of integrity.

For example Gutman claims Wagner was "sympathetic" to proto-Nazi Bernhard Förster's attempted German community in Paraguay. But Cosima's Diaries show that Wagner held Förster in general and the South American project in particular in contempt. Why this "mistake"? Because it suits Gutman's thesis.

Or take Wagner's late essays. If you read the essays themselves rather than Gutman's profoundly dishonest exegesis, you find a man wrestling with his own racism.

In _Heroism and Christianity_, for example, Wagner does take it as a given that white people are superior to other "races". Wagner, like many other European and American artists, was the product of a racist culture and it is unhistorical to pretend otherwise. But then Wagner writes that although people find the idea of the commingling of all human "races" into "a uniform equality" distressing, this is because of their cultural blinkers. "It is only looking at it through the reek of our own civilisation and culture than makes this picture so repellant," he says.

Christianity, Wagner continues, is superior to other religions because it is aimed equally at all "races" while Judaism and Brahminism, for example, include noble ideas but are aimed at only one "race" or caste. Although (he writes) it is "natural" [meaning "likely to occur in nature"] for strong "races" to rule weaker "races", the rule of one "race" by another has led to "exploitation" and an "utterly immoral system". Wagner's answer is equality of all "races" under "a universal moral concord", something Wagner suggests that Christian doctrines could bring about. (Wagner was not a Christian, but in later life admired Christian rituals and doctrines.)

The essay is not enlightened by modern standards, but in its historical context it stands as Wagner's rejection of the proto-Nazi ideas of his own day. Gutman's systematic distortions are regrettable not just because they go beyond mere inaccuracy but also because they are much less interesting than the truth.

A passage recently cited as an example of Gutman's merits provides another example of Gutman's method:

"Monsalvat was Wagner's paranoiac concept of a small self-contained elite group, uniquely possessed of the truth, obsessed with its 'purity,' and struggling with an outside world it held worthless. Redemption was promised the hard-pressed knights, but, obviously, the Wagnerian redeemer was not to be found among Jewish craftsmen or lepers. Not by accident did Guernemanz almost immediately remark upon Parsifal's noble, highborn appearance. He knew what signs to read. Racial heredity and strict breeding, not natural selection, formed the new mechanism of salvation. Wagnerian eugenics had come into being; in his latest writing the composer had embraced the darker implications of Darwinism."

Problems? First, Gutman misses the way _Parsifal_ shows Montsalvat critically and ironically (our first glimpse is of its watchmen sleeping on the job), as a damaged community that fails to live up to its ideals. An example is the knights' and squires' rejection of Kundry as Outsider, a moral fault for which the saintly Gürnemantz, clearly Wagner's mouthpiece, reproves them.

Second, the reference to "Jewish craftsmen and lepers" is Gutman's invention. Neither are mentioned, let alone disparaged, in _Parsifal_.

Third, Gutman must know that the remark on the hero's "noble appearance" is standard in Wagner's source material, and referred not so much to race as to "gentle upbringing", meaning having "courtly" deportment as opposed to the gestures and manners of a peasant. Example? In Wagner main source, von Eschenbach's _Parzifal_, similar observations are made about Parzifal's half-brother Fierafiz, whose mother was black.

Fourth, the Montsalvat community is not "self-contained". Wagner's text mentions that Gawain is a member of the Montsalvat community, though that character is also a member of Arthur's court. And Gawain, like the other Montsalvat knights, spends as much or more time out in the world than at Montsalvat.

Fifth, Montsalvat's alleged "racial hereditary and strict breeding" is more Gutmanian invention. Not only does _Parsifal_ not contain any such idea, or anything remotely like it, but Wagner's text rules out the possibility. Gürnemantz tells us that Montsalvat was founded by Titurel, who has had one adult child and is still alive when the opera begins. Gürnemantz was also a founding Montsalvat member. "Breeding program"? When? Instead the Montsalvat community must have grown through that bugbear even of modern racists: immigration. Some of Montsalvat's knights and squires may be children of original members, but that's hardly a breeding program. (By the way, Wagner's Montsalvat is in Spain. Not Germany.)

Can a passage so densely inaccurate be the product of mere carelessness? I think not.

Actually Gutman misses an intriguing possibility about Parsifal's ancestry. Parsifal comes from "Arabia". His father Gamuret was probably Welsh or Cornish, but we are told that Herzeleide was pregnant with Parsifal when Gamuret was in "Arabia". Since knights didn't take wives with them on crusade, the implication is that Gamuret met Herzeleide in "Arabia". (Wagner's text concerning Herzeleide differs significantly from his sources.) It's amusing in this context to consider that Wagner's Parsifal may have been what the media is currently calling "of Mid-Eastern appearance", and quite ineligible for the Hitler Youth. Still, the Nazi thing is Gutman's obsession, not Wagner's. Oh, and far from loving _Parsifal_, as Gutman would have you believe, the truth is that the Nazis banned it.

In short, Gutman's "first casualty" wasn't Wagner, but truth. An irresponsibly unreliable book.

Cheers!

Laon

Occasionally in life one encounters a biography so insightful, so rich in detail and so beautifully written that it nearly transcends its subject and stands as a work of art unto itself. It is in this category that Gutman's masterpiece belongs. There is so much to learn from this historiographical account of the great composer's life that one scarecely knows where to begin praising it. Best of all, in the Ernest Newman tradition, Gutman shows us the real Wagner, warts and all, and traces the all-too-tangible line leading from the composer's pen to the Nazi nightmare. At times shocking, Gutman's work "opens the kimono" on the breeding ground of hatred and racism that Bayreuth became, and the composer's steadily increasing obsession with the Jews. He offers incontrovertible proof, now widely accepted and expounded on in the indispensable works of Rose and Weiner and Zelinsky, of how Wagner incorporated these racist ideal into his operas. At the same time, Gutman recognizes the incredible genius of his subject, and praises the works mightily. His account is always balanced, fair and backed by evidence. It is no wonder the Wagner apologists have criticized this book heavily, while the leading musical journals and book reviewers have blessed it with near-unanimous acclaim: Many simply cannot bear the fact that their favorite composer directly influenced Hitler and had a streak of true evil in him. Gutman bravely shatters myths and shows us Wagner for what he truly was: a composer of incomparable gifts and a human being of precious few qualities. If you haven't read this book yet, I strongly recommend you explore it now.

This is an extraordinary book -- on a par with Maynard Solomon's Mozart -- but don't just take my word for it. The New York Times Book Review called it the "richest and best-accomplished single volume on Wagner in English." The late Paul Hume, himself no slouch as a musician, musicologist, and critic, called it "superb."

In 455 dense pages, Gutman, retired as a university professor and lecturer at Bayreuth, chronicles the comings and goings of Richard Wagner's life, probes the recesses of his often messy mind and his frequently strained relationships with other artists, lovers, thinkers, political figures, and hangers on, examines the development of his ever-changing esthetic, and analyzes the novelty of his music and, more importantly, the sometimes bourgeois, sometimes frightening sentiments of his words. As a reader, it helps to have some prior familiarity with the plots of Wagner's operas and with nineteenth-century European intellectual history.

Gutman's central thesis is that, as a composer of music, Wagner was a genius; as a poet, he was barely literate; and as a human being, he was egomaniacal, boorish, uneducated, greedy, opinionated in the extreme, and racist. In 1968, when Gutman first advanced this thesis, Wagner was enjoying a resurgence of critical acclaim as a poet. Otherwise there is nothing to be surprised by here. The composer's problems with patrons and creditors, his voracious sexual appetites, his meretricious relationship with King Ludwig II of Bavaria, the appeal of the composer's operas to Hitler and hence to the Third Reich, his involvement in the events of 1848, and his anti-semitism have long been well known.

In developing his thesis, Gutman displays an encyclopedic understanding, not only of letters, libretti, Wagner's own vague scribblings (whether in support of revolution or a diet of vegetables), and other primary sources for a biography, but also of the political and intellectual context in which Wagner's life was played out. Nietzsche, Lizst, Kaiser Wilhelm, Metternich, the mistresses of the Jockey Club, Goethe, and Ulysses S. Grant march, leap, and slide effortlessly through these pages. Gutman's writing is lucid, rich, and spiced with urbane humor.

Thus, for example, Gutman writes that the failure of the first Bayreuth festival of 1876 apparently turned Wagner -- previously a romantic rebel and always a staunch atheist -- away from a belief in inevitable advance toward higher forms just as he was composing what he knew would be his final opera, Parsifal. The result was profoundly unchristian. "Monsalvat was Wagner's paranoiac concept of a small self-contained elite group, uniquely possessed of the truth, obsessed with its 'purity,' and struggling with an outside world it held worthless. Redemption was promised the hard-pressed knights, but, obviously, the Wagnerian redeemer was not to be found among Jewish craftsmen or lepers. Not by accident did Guernemanz almost immediately remark upon Parsifal's noble, highborn appearance. He knew what signs to read. Racial heredity and strict breeding, not natural selection, formed the new mechanism of salvation. Wagnerian eugenics had come into being; in his latest writing the composer had embraced the darker implications of Darwinism."

This book has a well-supported point-of-view. It is a great read.

Once in a lifetime a book comes along ... that is so arm-wavingly silly that it's almost Pythonesque. This book, "Nietzsche and Wagner: a Study in Subjugation" is actually less reliable than Robert Gutman's or Marc Weiner's Wagner books, which were previously the record-holders. But Kohler beats them hollow. I'm sorry to say that this book has the scholarly merit of a UFO abduction memoir.

Kohler doesn't even bother to try to substantiate his various untrue and silly claims. One of these claims is that Nietzsche was homosexual, for which Kohler (as several critics have pointed out) adduces no evidence at all. Maybe Kohler thinks that Nietzsche calling a book "Die Froeliche Wissenschaft" (The Gay Science) makes Nietzsche "gay" in the current sense. (The meaning of "gay" seems to be changing again, but that's another story.) But we have plenty of evidence of Nietzsche's heterosexuality and no evidence at all of same-sex desire or practice. Nietzsche was a misogynist, hostile and contemptuous towards women, also clearly afraid of them, but that doesn't make him homosexual. Kohler seems to think that claiming something is the same as making it so.

Kohler also claims that after the Nietzsche-Wagner split Wagner conducted a relentless and vindictive campaign against Nietzsche on the grounds that he (Nietzsche) was homosexual. Again, Kohler doen't support this claim of a homophobic campaign by Wagner with any evidence. But then, how could he? There was no such campaign. Instead there was the famous letter from Wagner to Nietzsche's doctor, expressing concern for the health of "our young friend N."and suggesting that Nietzsche's nervous problems might be caused by excessive masturbation.

Wagner's letter is splendidly dotty, but it also brings Kohler's claims crashing to the ground. (1) Masturbation is not the same thing as homosexuality. Wagner did not think Nietzsche was homosexual; instead, prescient in so many things, Wagner was the first major thinker to call Nietzsche a wanker (just kidding, Nietzsche fans). (2) A kindly meant, if eccentric, letter to Nietzsche's doctor is not quite the same thing as persecution. It's clear from Cosima Wagner's Diaries that Wagner's private reaction to the split with Nietzsche was regret, a wish to have the breach healed, and an undoubtedly patronising pity for "that poor young man" Nietzsche. These are not the sort of feelings that lead to persecution or a campaign of vilification, as Kohler claims.

As well, Wagner's actual attitude to homosexuals (there were no gays in the 19th Century) is suggested in an earlier letter to a homosexual friend. Wagner suggests that his friend "try to cut down a little, on the pederasty"... The attitude is one of amused tolerance, which won't do now, but it was progressive and liberal by the standards of his time. Wagner wasn't a homophobe.

In fact Wagner didn't respond in public to Nietzsche's repeated attacks (except once, a very indirect reference in one of his essays, without mentioning Nietzsche's name); contra Kohler, the abuse was very much a one-way street, and not in the direction that Kohler suggests.

Kohler also presents a Nietzsche who wrote antisemitic passages in his works during the alliance with Wagner, but who stopped after the split. This is simply and flagrantly untrue. The post-Wagner Nietzsche attacked antisemites, but he also continued to attack and insult Jews. There are many, many antisemitic passages in Nietzsche's work - Nietzsche fans, like Kohler and the reviewer from Kirkus Review quoted above, like to overlook Nietzsche's antisemitism, but antisemites find Nietzsche a useful supporter and resource. You'll find plenty of antisemitic quotes from Nietzsche on proud display on the Web's neo-Nazi sites, and the vast majority of these antisemitic passages were written AFTER the split with Wagner.

And there's Nietzsche's attack on Wagner in which he claimed that Wagner had a Jewish father. There is irony, of course, in claiming an antisemite has Jewish parentage. But it reflects what Wagner himself seems to have believed, that the man who was almost certainly his real father, Ludwig Geyer, was Jewish. For this attack Nietzsche must have drawn on his private conversations with Wagner, in which Wagner poured out personal fears to a man he believed was his friend. The nastiness in Nietzsche's attack is in the betrayal of confidence, not in the claiming that Wagner had a Jewish parent.

I mention this attack by Nietzsche, couched in antisemitic terms and involving personal betrayal, because Kohler skips blithely over it. Imagine what he'd said if it had been the other way round; Wagner attacking Nietzsche in antisemitic terms while betraying an intimate confidence. But in fact there are suspiciously few quotes of any kind from Nietzsche in Kohler's book. Given the book's profound ignorance of the details of Nietzsche's or Wagner's life and philosophies, I suspect this is not so much because Kohler wants to keep it simple, but because he is not particularly familiar with his subjects' work. Given the sort of book he's written, he didn't need to be.

By the way, an earlier book by Kohler, that's only just been translated into English, "Wagner's Hitler", is now available. Friends who've read the German edition tell me that it's even more fanciful, nonsensical, dishonest and incoherent than this book. I'll look for it in a remainder bin.

Laon

NW is not the most academic of books in form, but readability and lack of footnotes do not make a book worthless. Köhler may not have enough evidence to convince the critical, but the material provided is well worth the read. Homosexuality/onanism/anti-semitism: these elements are simply not central to either individual (Wagner's anti-semitism may be the exception). Some of Köhler's conclusions may be questionable, but his observations are not what make the book. The content itself is very interesting, and the intelligent and familiar (with RW/FN) will come away with a great degree of insight. To anyone sincerely interested in either, it is requisite. Perhaps you will not agree with Köhler, so what? The book is simply worth the read. My opinions didn't change from the book, but I have a much richer picture of both men. (I am honesty surprised that anyone could find this book upsetting [see review below]. It's a fun little book, if you hate it, you really ought to relax a bit. Not for tyros: if you've only read a bit of FN or seen an opera, and you want a key to understanding either, forget it. But if you are deep into either, you skip it at your peril.

The author of _Zarathustra's secret_ takes us through the period encounter between Nietzsche and Wagner in a quite graphic tale of one of the first of the modern celebrity farces, that of Wagnerian ego and its hangers on. Although the account is well done, I should wonder if a clever cutpurse like Nietzsche was ever really subjugated and whether he didn't, despite an series of emotional shocks, achieve the net equivalent of going undercover as a Wagner disciple, to his profit or loss in unclear. For all the background music of the philosophic, more than musical, leitmotiv (Schopenhauer gave it away with fake hint, the 'will') this account of artistic overdrive twice over is a remarkable tale of psychological helplessness, in Wagner and Nietzsche. Anyway, worth reading.

As I see it Rose puts four main arguments. 1 German antisemitism in the 19th century is substantially different from other European strands of antisemitism. I'm not qualified to comment on that, except that Rose doesn't bring out much evidence.

2 German political culture of the 19th century is inherently and ineluctably antisemitic. I'd accept "largely" antisemitic; but Rose wants to make an essentialist case, that you couldn't be a 19th century German radical without being antisemitic, and he fails to support that. Instead we get rhetoric, some of it as heated as Wagner's own.

3 Wagner was always antisemitic, even before 1850, when antisemitic references started to appear in his letters and articles. There it's safe to say that the evidence disproves Rose's case; see, for example, Jacob Katz's "Wagner: The Dark Side of Genius", a book which condemns Wagner's antisemitism on the basis of better research and less tenditiousness. Not only does Rose not actually make his case here, but he couldn't.

4 There is coded antisemitism in Wagner's operas. Here Rose abandons all pretence to academic standards and writes some very silly things. For example he argues that "Die Walku:re" is antisemitic because it depicts incest and adultery sympathetically; but adultery is against the Ten Commandments, and the Ten Commandments is a Jewish document. Wagner's, and "Die Walku:re"'s rejection of the 10 Commandments is therefore antisemitic. Where this leaves Mozart, Verdi, Puccini, and every other opera librettist, poet and dramatist in human history is not clear. By reasoning like this they must all be antisemites. In "Der Fliegende Hollander", Rose argues, Senta's entire village is an antisemitic depiction, because they value money over other values; therefore they must be meant as Jewish. When someone starts looking for antisemitic depictions, and comes up with the idea of a Jewish fishing village in the middle of the Norwegian fiords... when arguments like that are seriously put forward, we know two things. First, that the writer has lost the plot. Second, that the people who should have read the book before publication and got rid of embarrassing silliness like that, weren't doing their job.

I don't know much about the history of 19th century antisemitism in Europe; but Rose's material on Wagner is so hopelessly unreliable and ill-thought-out that it calls into question the reliability of his other material.

There's another comment on this book, apparently written by a believing Marxist, that claims that Wagner made a mistake in making his gods and Nibelungs, in the "Ring", morally equivalent. No, that wasn't a mistake; that was Wagner's _point_. Both the Nibelungs and the gods are involved in a struggle between the values of love and the desire for power. Both the gods and Nibelungs choose power, not love. Wagner was on the side of love, and that is why he makes both sides fall.

Even though Wagner was a flawed human being (but a human being, not a monster; he had a kind and considerate side as well as a selfish and manipulative side), the "Ring" is one of the greatest works of art ever created. And its message is pacifist, pro-love and anti-power, and (ironically, given Wagner's own racism) anti-racist, in showing the moral equivalence of all the different struggling peoples in the "Ring".

The writer of the other comment is right to say that Wagner was a shallow and inconsistent political thinker. But that means that not all of his ideas are bad. His antisemitism shames Wagner's memory as much as the antisemitism of Marx, Bakunin, Proudhon, Schubert, JS Bach, Schumann, Chopin, Mussorgsky, Dostoevsky, TS Eliot and so on and so on, shames theirs. But Wagner's defence of love over power, in the "Ring", strikes me as politically, as well as artistically, not without merit.

Rose makes a mistake in reading antisemitism into works that don't contain it, and another mistake in not recognising that Wagner's works have some moral merit which should not be thrown away.

Laon

I think this is an excellent book, contrary to the other reviews listed. It helped me understand several new concepts related to anti-semitism, particularly how Jews were thought of as being responsible for commercializing the German art world and bringing the bourgeois capitalist element to European culture. The book sheds much light on the development of anti-semitism relative to the increasing nationalist and revolutionary spirit in Germany during the first part of the 20th century. Wagner's general psychology and racist attitudes are conveyed very effectively, and his influence on future national socialist ideology is more than apparent. This book added a great deal to my understanding of the roots of European anti-semitism, and I thank the author for this.

Rose uncovers things we've always known about Richard Wagner, his virulent antisemiticism. He situates Wagner usefully in the philosophic mileau of the 19th Century and revolutionary thinking.However writers like Proudhon,Bauer,The Young Hegelians,and Fichte were relatively insignificant compared to Marx and the impact his thinking had of the ideologies of the 19th Century. Rose should have compared Wagner to Marx to define consummately what the term "revolution" really means. Also all these thinkers save Marx,were reactionary, which is why they appealed to Wagner. Rose's discussion of anarchist Bakunin, Wagner's Dresden Rebellion Days friend is even more problematic since Bakunin was ultimately a political opportunist, who would sell-out to save himself as he did countless times.Wagner was first and foremost a composer of music dramas,operas and his creative philosophic thinking remained energized toward that pursuit,which is why his fascination with 19th Century philosophic thought changed over his life. It actually became more conservative. Despite his early Dresden Days, Wagner was a political imbecile. He couldn't distinguish parties,nor collective wills. Given Wagner's unquestionable dominance in the world of Opera today, the crux of Rose's argument, Wagner's antisemiticism, is indeed a profoundly important one. But I doubt if this discussion will lead toward the banning of his music. The problem of racism in art is perhaps the most important issue facing all those who involve themselves in art. For art deals with communication, one human being speaking to another. One emotion projected outward to humanity. And if this expression emanates from a diseased mind, a racist one, well how can art reflect the highest thought man/woman is capable. Rose's discussion of Wagner's "Ring" was not thorough enough,for Wagner contradicts himself. Wotan is ever bit as self-serving as Alberich, the dwarf who Wagner had earmarked as the representational Jew. Brunhilde as well for all her humanity in saving Siegmund and Sieglinde,plots with the evil Hagen to kill Siegfried, her beloved. No character in the "Ring" is beyond redemption ,all are self-serving opportunists. Rose seems to focus on Alberich as Other, as representative of the lower class, the "lumpen" in contrast to the gods and immortals, when such reference is not important. Instead a discussion of how Wagner projects characterization, or doesn't. That his inhumanity prevented him from projecting a convincing character would have served Rose's argument.

Here is good evidence why Indiana is not a mecca of fine wines. Mr. Vine needs to take a few classes at U.C. Davis or read any of Amerine's books. The faults are too many but he did do a good job by inserting Government Regs and a lot of tables that would be hard for him to screw-up.

This book touches on all parts of the winemaking business from vineyard costs to winery costs and designs to marketing your wines. It has a good section on analytical testing procedures and 50 pages of charts, tables and conversions that come in handy.

The section on vineyard costs details year by year expenses from start-up through year 7. I also found the feasibility and finance section very helpful in starting up my own winery. The section on government regulations was very helpful in warning any prospective winery owners of what the ATF and state regulators expect. There are plenty of examples of good record keeping that various governments expect you to keep on hand at all times.

Of course this book also has 117 pages of good winemaking details along with good sections on microbiology, winery equipment, barrels and label designs. If this book has any obvious fault it would be that it does not go deep enough into some of these subjects, but then it would be thousands of pages long instead of the 440 pages it is.

An all around great book on winemaking and the rest of the business that goes with a winery and it's operation. This book has lots of good business information in it that I have not seen in any other winemaking book. I recommend it for anyone who not only wants to make great wine but also is serious about starting his own commercial winery.

As a wine 'amateur' (French meaning - no French person would ever say they were a 'connossieur' of wine, as one can never know it), this book was great in teaching more of the nuts and bolts of the wine biz. Grab this online somewhere - hopefully Amazon.com's out-of-print service - but grab it - it is very interesting.

Joachim Köhler argues that Adolf Hitler was merely a puppet of dead composer Richard Wagner. The destruction of democracy, the German conquest of most of Europe in pursuit of a dream of world domination, the mass murders of European Jews, the whole Third Reich: all Wagner's idea.

Really? Let's see. Overthrow of democracy? Wagner supported constitutional monarchy, with political parties of "men with equal rights"; the monarch to stay above politics and ensure stability. His essay _State and religion_ is clear enough.

German conquest of Europe, and world domination? Wagner's _What is German?_ specifically condemns German attempts at military conquest, saying that German culture and polity never prospers when Germans rule other peoples.

The Holocaust? Wagner's most antisemitic essay, _Jewishness in Music_, calls on German Jews to abandon their separate culture and assimilate into German culture. That's racist, but did it influence Hitler? Since Hitler preferred racial segregation followed by extermination, it would seem not. Nor could Hitler have been comfortable with Wagner's opposition to the rule of one "race" by another, nor his suggestion that Europeans get used to racial intermingling (_Heroism and Christianity_). Meantime Köhler ignores the mainstream antisemites of Wagner's day, who really did influence Nazi racial policies.

(Wagner privately made some loathsome antisemitic remarks to Cosima Wagner, who duly recorded them in her diaries for Köhler to make the most of. But they weren't published till after Hitler's death, and for other reasons can't have been an influence.)

Look up "Wagner" in the indexes of Hitler's books and speeches, and accounts of his conversation by Speer and other eyewitnesses, and you find, despite Köhler's picture of an "obsessed" Hitler, that Hitler hardly ever mentioned Wagner. Köhler even admits this, but claims - seriously - that it's part of a conspiracy to hide Wagner's posthumous puppet-mastery. But Hitler never once referred to Wagner's ideas or essays, only to music. Hitler didn't even find Wagner's antisemitism interesting or important enough to mention.

It's clear that Wagner's influence on Hitler is essentially the same, that is, emotionally intense with without intellectual content, as his influence on Theodor Herzl, the founder of Zionism. Both men were passionate Wagnerians. Herzl loved Wagner's music, regularly attending Wagner operas and concerts for inspiration and renewal while he wrote Zionism's founding texts. But that doesn't make Wagner the founder of Israel. Hitler likewise loved the music but showed little interest in Wagner's ideas.

Köhler deals with these intractable realities in five ways:

1 Make stuff up
Here's Köhler describing Hitler in the bunker, 1945: "As the outside world disintegrated, it was to his inner world ... that Hitler turned ... Like a film projected onto the screen of his consciousness, he was suddenly gripped by a vision". Köhler then describes Hitler's "vision", which turns out to be about Wagner and to support Köhler's thesis. But no source mentions this "vision". Köhler seems to have invented it because the historical record wouldn't give him what he needed. There are many other examples.

2 Footnote fakery
Though the book is festooned with footnotes, they only add credibility if you don't look them up. For example that "vision" passage is footnoted, but follow it up and you won't find a source. Instead it says that an irrelevant phrase Köhler threw into the passage echoes words Hitler used in 1936. Soon after, Köhler describes a 1944 meeting between Hitler and Wagner's grandson Wieland, with Hitler dismissing Wieland's claim to Wagner's manuscript scores "over supper". Follow up the footnote and you find that no meeting took place. A little further Köhler alleges that Hitler's words "The people will not tolerate any act of clemency", in relation to the murders after the Reichstag fire, are "taken almost literally from _Rienzi_". The footnote directs you, rather vaguely, to Act II, which I have just checked in vain for those words or anything like them. And so on.

3 Twisting words
Köhler's quotes from Wagner tend to give only two to perhaps ten words at a time, wrenched from context and ascribed sinister meanings. Thus Köhler describes Hitler's "orgies of killings in dark, secret places ... 'in the bosom of darkness and death', as Wagner once put it." But check "in the bosom of darkness and death" back to the source and you nothing whatsoever to do with "orgies of killing": Wagner meant "caves". This is no occasional slip-up; it is systematic. Almost all Köhler's Wagner quotes are twisted in this way.

4 Irrelevancy
Köhler's deceptiveness on that non-meeting between Wieland and Hitler is odd, because Wagner's grandson's access or non-access to Hitler in 1944 is irrelevant. Some of Wagner's descendants and their partners supported the Nazis, some went along, and some defied them. Köhler spends much of the book showing that some Wagner descendants were contemptible, but the Wagner Köhler wants to arraign was then long dead and gone.

5 The big lie
Sometimes Köhler just lets rip, and it's breath-taking. Try this, about the _Ring_: "The gods in Valhalla had ordained that the destruction of their 'deadly enemy' must precede the age of the 'master race'." That would certainly be damning, if true, but instead it's bizarre nonsense. Other claims, especially about the operas, are similarly fantastic.

There's much more, shonky chronology, dodgy sources, etc, but I'm out of space. Of course there's much to condemn about Wagner, but that's no excuse for fabrication. This is a bad book, partly for untruth concerning a flawed man, mainly for its evasion of the actual historical persons and forces that led to Nazism, the Holocaust and attendant horrors. Neither the far-right political parties, unions and associations, nor the antisemitic Christian right groups, nor the opportunistic business backers, nor the street thugs behind Nazism and neo-Nazism cared then, nor care now, a hoot about opera.

Misdirection like Köhler's not only tries to cede to Nazis a cultural treasure that they do not deserve, but by obscuring the actual historical origins of Nazism it gives comfort to those who deserve none.

Cheers!

Laon

Overall,I found Herr Kohler's book quite interesting. The workwas well researched and the "connection" between thesubjects certainly established. The Wagner-Hitler relation to history has been expounded upon in many works but I don't know of any complete volume other than this one, so I would call this the definative work on the subject. Kohler as a writer can be a bit emotional at times as he makes his case. I don't agree that Wagner can be "blamed" for the atrocities committed 50-60 years after his death(he died in 1883-Hitler came to power in 1933). No doubt, Wagner had a tremendous influence on Hitler, especially when he was a lonely youth in Linz and Vienna Austria in the early 1900's. It is interesting to me that Hitler's favorite opera was "Rienzi", a work of Wagner's that is rarely shown today, hardly touched upon in studies of his operas, and extremely in tradition of grand opera. Wagner composed this opera with the "guidance" or should I say the "influence" of the Jewish composer Giacommo Meyerbeer. It has even been suggested Wagner copied certain styles of Meyerbeer's when writing the music for this piece. Knowing what I know about Wagner and the contradictory nature of his personality, his witty although sometimes assinine prose writings, and certain facts concerning his life, there is more of a Wagner-Jewish connection than that with Hitler. Wagner envied the Jews and secretly deferred to them. To be sure, Wagner attacked them in the press and in his essay "Judaism in Music" but all his life he continued to associate with Jews and in his final years most of his retinue at Wahnfried consisted of Jews like the set painter Paul von Joukovsky and his "Parsifal" conductor Hermann Levi. His former favorite conductor Hans von Bulow stated that in order to be successful at Bayreuth it was necessary to be circumcised. Wagner had evidentally refused to sign an anti-semitic petition presented to him which Bulow had signed, much to his embarrassment. Many forget that Hitler had another favorite musician in the composer Anton Bruckner. He spoke mostly about the music of Rienzi or Bruckner, not about the 'ideas' of Wagner. "Parsifal" was not a favorite and was actually banned during the Third Reich. The quote from Hitler that "from 'Parsifal'I shall make my religion" comes from Hermann Rauschning's "Hitler Speaks" a dubious book of which it's authenticity has certainly been questioned. The Nazis themselves were not enthusiastic about Wagner either. They tolerated Bayreuth but for Hitler. You can "read" the Third Reich in the "Ring of the Nibelung" with it's Nordic heroism,the Aryan 'savior'Siegfried, the lust for power and final cataclysmic destruction, but for all that, Wagner shouldn't be made responsible for Hitler, any more than the Beatles can be held accountable for Charles Manson. There is also no proof that Hitler ever read any of Wagner's prose works(I don't think Hitler read a book cover to cover in his life. He read only to confirm his own outlook on the world. Most of his reading consisted of newspapers and periodical scribblings)which contain all of his ideas on art,race,and humanity that can be contradicted in his thousands of letters as well as by his life's actions upheld by the people who knew him. I believe the only writing of Wagner's Hitler read was the scores to the operas which he did seem to know pretty well, as many of his secretaries and associates confirm. The book is fascinating but the reader should bear in mind that it is only another interpretation of a very contraversial and contradictory "connection".

In Wagner's Hitler: The Prophet And His Disciple, Joachim Kohler, scholar of philosophy and German literature, persuasively argues that Wagner's influences played a vital role in shaping the cultural context in which Nazism developed. Kohler begins by tracing the legacy of the German romantic tradition and the irrational, egocentric, nationalistic, and intolerantly utopian features which Wagner and Adolph Hitler shared. Kohler goes on to trace Wagner's influence on Hitler from his days as a young and failed Austrian artist, to his triumphant days as dictator enacting megalomanic Wagnerian visions of a Germany that would rule the world. Also shown is how Wagner's family in Bayreuth supported Hitler from the beginning of his political career, and aided his introduction into highly influential social and political circles. Wagner's Hitler is insightful, provocative, engaging, challenging, and at times controversial, but always fascinating reading and recommended for students of Germany history in general, and the Nazis influences on German culture in particular.

It seems the reaper is back in gotham, but we learn right away that it's the son of joe chill, the man who murdered bruce's parents. not only must bruce confront him, but his greatest fears too.

heros: batman, robin, James gordan, leslie thompkins.

villans: {flashbacks} joker, two-face, penguin.

When I bought this book I thought that It could be an excellent story, because I have read Batman year two and I think It's one of the most amazing strories I've ever read. However, This time the book has'nt got the same "power" and It's just a simple story with some bored topics. I think that the writer didn't Know how to extract all the power of the incredible characters.

This text is poorly put together and laden with typoes. White tries too hard to be witty, as are most of the other writers of the series, and loses focus in the meantime. White completely omits the first act of Twilight of the Gods as well in his overview. Only the experienced Wagner fan can go back and use this as a nice reference piece.

There are three unavoidable truths about Wagner: that he was one of the most repellent men who ever lived; that he was one of the greatest geniuses that ever lived; and that people either love him or hate him.

Michael White's highly entertaining introduction to this horrifying figure concentrates mostly on the first 'fact' - it is, after all, easier to list someone's biographical failures than explain why the closing symphony of the Gotterdammerung sounds both like the terrible end of the world and the unaccountable essence of sublimity (I'm afraid he gets you talking this way).

And so, amusingly, we are told about Wagner's cruelties, caprices, infidelities, and, of course, his anti-Semitism; and given an interesting guide to some of the more sensible influences (eg Schopenhauer, Proudhon) on Wagner's loony philosophies, and a sound cultural and political background.

This proper emphasis on the man rather neglects the artist, and while White quite rightly argues the impossibility of separating both, you don't get much sense of the sheer magnitude of Wagner's achievement (using the odd big word isn't enough), or what it means for us, the listener, to be entranced by the works of such an ogre.

That said, the sheer readability and cheek of this book, as with all others in this series, is great fun, even if it doesn't achieve its aim (to make you master of the subject) as the book on Post-Modernism did.

The chief joy of this series, however, is the illustration, and Kevin Scott keeps up the remarkably high standard, fusing dada, colage, pop art, with some astonishing pastiche and cartoon work, which means every page, even if you are dissatisfied with its contents, is a pleasure to read.