Marina Warner's multiple award winning "Lost Father" is nothing less than a minor classic. Beautifully romantic and lyrical in style and content, it recalls one of those magical realism tinged three generation family sagas so typical of Latin novelists of today. The narrator is Anna, daughter of Fantina and grandaughter of second generation patriach Davide Pittagora of Rupe, Italy. Once married to but now divorced from an Englishman, Anna lives in London but undertakes a personal project of tracing and writing her family's history by interviewing her own mother. Piecing together bits and pieces fitfully remembered and sometimes imagined by Fantina (Davide's youngest daughter), Anna's story takes us from the Pittagoras' hometown of Rupe, then briefly to their new immigrant home in New York before their final return to Italy in the 1920s. It is a colourful story, filled with memories of love, friendship, loyalty and honour but also treachery and deceipt which tainted the unrequited love affair of Rosa and her brother Davide's best friend Tommasso, and spawned the mythological duel fought between Davide and Tommasso in defence of Rosa's honour. All this is told in grandiosely sweeping style against a backdrop of political upheaval as Italy enters its Fascist period under an unnamed "Leader" with ambitions to dominate the world. The flow of words from Warner's pen is unmatched in the incandescent beauty it produces. "Lost Father" positively shimmers. Jumbled up, its poetic and dreamy sequences resemble fragments snatched from the recesses of fading memory. It is a tour de force and should not be allowed to languish on old bookshelves. Go buy yourself a copy and read it.

A fabulous and profoundly insightful book that answers some very significant (and perhaps unconscious) questions: Why are we compelled to scare our children? And why do children delight in being terrified? An absolute must for both parents and students of folklore.

This is an excellent book which I highly reccomend. Carter has collected folk tales from a wide variety of sources and cultures which have strong female characters in them. She uses the more orally based tales, rather than literary creations, which gives the stories some real zest. Instead of a collection of didatic stories about good feminist heroines, this is a collection of stories about strong women, both good and bad. Their craftiness may save their home or allow them to cheat their way to glory. I adore this collection, and reccomend highly to parents who want to give their children something to read that doesn't have namby pamby princesses who wait around to be rescued, or adults who loved fairy tales as a child.

Marina Warner's _From the Beast to the Blonde_ is a wonderful and engaging work concerning the cultural history of fairy tales. Warner explores the "stock characters" and stories of traditional tales, and in the process creates an excellent work of scholarship and criticism in an area of literature that has been relegated to the nursery, but didn't start there.

If you love fairy tales and their backgrounds, buy this book. It's worth the read. Warner is an excellent author, and she makes a very good point regarding the role of women in the passing along of fairy tales to the next generation. This is a terrific book on fairy tales, and folklore in general.

Why do people pass on fairy tales from generation to generation? The tales are violent and seem sexist to modern eyes. Warner's book sets the truth about fairy tales into an historical perspective.

This contrasts with Bruno Bettelheim's "The Uses of Enchantment" which suggests that there is an opportunity for psychological exploration within each fairy tale if we identify with the various characters. In other words, there is a wicked stepmother, a forlorn orphan and a powerful prince etc within each of us. I found his ideas enjoyable and useful but I think Warner's historical analysis is more realistic.

She tackles such contentious issues as that of the wicked stepmother, pointing out the complex situation that was created for a woman marrying a widow who already had children. The temptation to treat those children badly in favour of her own children was quite real because of her financial dependence on her new husband. Hence the need for tales that warned against women behaving like that. There is a lot of other fascinating material in the book, such as the development of the image of St Anne (reputed to be Jesus' grandmother) into the image of dear Nan, from which we get the name Nana for grandmothers and for nannies as well. I didn't agree with Warner's analysis of the little mermaid and have posted my own one on the Amazon site for Hans Anderson's Fairy Stories.

Those interested in this kind of book might also like to read A.D. Hope's book " A Midsummer Eve's Dream". It is surprising how few fairies and elves there are in regular fairy stories - a case of art imitating life perhaps! But there are some, and Hope's book helps us to understand how the idea of fairies developed in England. It seems that it was the suppression of gods and goddesses by Christianity that gave rise to miniaturised images of them in the form of fairies. Hope regrets this but, from the number of descriptions he gives of midnight cavorts around fairy mounds, followed by sexual excesses of various sorts, I think the fairies were probably doing a lot to promote sexually transmitted diseases!

A book that I've lost but was invaluable was Catherine Brigges? Bigge? "A Dictionary of Fairies". It told you everything you needed to know about the subject. Should you thank a fairy? Not if you ever wanted to see it again. What is glamor? It's one thing with film stars and another with fairies. Planning a visit to fairy land? It's a more dangerous place than most realise. However if you love to wander in the fairyland of our collective imagination, then consider Warner's book or any of the other books that I've mentioned. They are useful guides to help you find your way around.

Around my neck of the woods, in eastern Massachusetts, on any Saturday morning except in winter, you can visit an endless number of yard sales. At malls or in specialty shops, you know what you are going to find---in fact you select a particular store to get what you need. Yard sales are different. You never know what you will find; you rummage around and maybe come up with a treasure. At least you can see what weird and wonderful items people have accumulated over a lifetime. Mildred Cable's book on the Gobi Desert reminded me of a yard sale---and I like yard sales.

After many years as missionaries in Shansi province, where they learned fluent Chinese and absorbed the majority culture, Cable and her two female companions, all three Englishwomen, received permission to venture into the deserts of northwestern Kansu and eastern Xinjiang, then still known as Chinese Turkestan. They spent around 13 years, from 1923 to 1936, wandering up and down the rutted desert tracks of this remote area, spreading Bibles and the word of God as known to Christians (and were not excessively denominational about it either). THE GOBI DESERT then, does not exactly cover the whole Gobi Desert, for most of that vast area lies in Mongolia, where the ladies never set foot. It is about the ancient civilizations and mixed ethnic groups (Chinese, Hui, Mongol, Kazakh, Uighur, Manchu, Russian) found in the territory between Suzhou and Urumchi, a breadth of country some 600 miles long, but much narrower due to the lack of water in most of it. The "yard sale" quality of the book lies in the fact that everything is mixed together, but it's all interesting. There are many photographs, but I must say that in my edition (Virago paperback), they were mostly of poor quality. From the history of Hsüan Tsang, who brought the Buddhist scriptures from India to China in the 7th century, to the art of hiring a proper carter, from the fantastic cavesful of Buddhist art at Dunhwang to a detailed description of the Muslim rebellion of 1930, it's all here. The ladies fought scorpions, heat, duststorms, thirst, and exhaustion. They met innkeepers, bandits, deserters, Muslim generals, abbots, princes, Russian refugees, nomads, lamas, and prostitutes. They visited the many fertile oases, remote valleys, mountain strongholds, and salt lakes of a region that has changed dramatically since those days. Though a committed missionary, Cable keeps preaching to a minimum in her book, which is a grab bag of impressions, adventures, and information that will keep your interest to the end. THE GOBI DESERT is the kind of travel book not often seen anymore. It is not an account of a "trip", but rather the winnowed result of thirteen years continuous travel in a particular region. Most of all it is an account of a now-vanished world, a world erased by roads, wars, Communism, and massive Chinese immigration. Read it.

A serious and very readable account of the travels of two very observant (missionary) ladies in the early part of this century in the Gobi region. This book, illustrated by some fine photos in its early 1940s editions (to which I refer), pays extraordinary and quite sensitive attention to the practices, customs, people and places of this (even now) little known region and it is most creditably written, especially as the writers are Christian missionaries. It is hard to believe that the language and style of this book is over 60 years old. As a (Buddhist) traveller in Central Asia and reader of several books on the region, I would wholeheartedly reccommend this book to anyone interested in this fascinating part of the world.

While I would've loved to LOVE this book...I just couldn't. Marina Warner has barely scraped the surface of all there is to be said about myth and legend in connection with societal thinking in this little book (originally six essays for BBC radio). Each chapter undertakes a different aspect of society from women, to cannibalism, to our idealization of childhood. In all honesty, each one could've been a book in itself if expanded and pondered over. Due to the fact that each essay was relatively short it felt as if Warner's points were rushed and ill-researched. While I would put this book above some others that connect modern examples with myth, I still think that Warner could've done a more in-depth job and added more focus to individual chapters. They each seem to skip around a bit and lack effective organization.

Don't get me wrong, there are a number of gems in the pages of this work. Warner draws interesting parallels between myth and folklore and how it continues to resurface in modern times whether it be film, writing, television, etc. She also cites numerous outside sources that sound fascinating and that inspired her work. In a way, this work is a jumping-off point into a throng of directions into cultural criticism.

I loved Marina Warner's _Monuments and Maidens: The Allegory of the Female Form_, so when I saw this book, I had to have it. I have to say that I'm a little bit disappointed after _Monuments and Maidens_. I expected a more in-depth study. Instead, these six essays barely seem to scratch the surface of the topics. These essays are basically transcripts of six lectures Warner gave for BBC radio, which explains their brevity, but it's a shame she didn't expand upon them when she decided to publish them in print.

Still, there are some very interesting things here. I would definitely recommend it if you're interested in folklore and are just starting your studies. For the advanced student, the book just leaves you wanting more.

I really love reading Warner's work. Her analyses are sometimes surprising and often brilliant, the writing beautiful. I use this book in teaching Gender Psychology and when I wrote The Secret Lives of Girls (Free Press, 2002).

Marina Warner is an amazing scholar and teacher. In this book, she begins with the Metamorphoses of Ovid, and continues with other changes in the human spirit, in both literary and natural history. The chapter on zombies is particularly relevant to her novel Indigo; the explication of the Greek psyche is familiar ground, but well done. The only flaw in this brilliant work is the continual return to Hieronymus Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights as an allegory of life. Her enthusiasm for the painting does not match her vast knowledge of classical and popular literature. However, I recommend this book highly as a helpful tool to any student of the humanities.

The book tackles the idea of metamorphoses as a theme in art and literature. Stirred into the mix are mythology, encounters between Europeans and tribal peoples in the New World and how those encounters affected art and literature produced in the Western tradition, meanwhile relating all these to the idea of personal identity. Among the works discussed in detail are Ovid's Metamorphoses, Apuleis' The Golden Ass, Hieronymous Bosch's painting The Garden of Earthly Delights, some Renaissance-era graphic sexual depictions of Leda and the Swan, Maria Merian's late 17th century natural history studies of butterflies, and then onto a discussion of zombies, Coleridge, Jean Rhys, Kafka, Nabokov, photography, Lewis Carroll and more. This may all sound like heavy going, but Warner writes for the layperson, and you need not have read the primary sources to follow her reasoning. (But her discussion and excerpts made me want to check out a copy of Ovid and read it for myself!) The artwork is illustrated by plates, some in color.

The book is an ambitious attempt to raise issues more than come to sweeping conclusions, with chapters titled Mutating, Hatching, Splitting, Doubling. Those interested in Joseph Campbell, Carl Jung, and other writers on comparative mythology should find it interesting. The chapters on Mutating and Hatching were more compelling to me as someone with a special interest in art and mythology. Fans of 19th century literature, especially Gothic literature, may prefer Splitting and Doubling. And it is blessedly free of any type of academic jargon. Indeed, Warner also conveys the sheer enjoyment of reading or looking at the material she discusses.

_Wonder Tales_ is a small and expensive collection of French courtly fairy tales, most written by upper-class women. Their themes seem frivolous now, but the stories were actually quite subversive for their time; in them, the authors promoted female autonomy, true love, and marriage by choice rather than by arrangement. (The authors themselves often were the victims of terrible arranged marriages. In these stories they dream of a better world.)

The stories are not the succinct tales we are used to; they can be byzantine and winding. Just when you think it's time for "happily ever after", in comes another twist. But the tales are for the most part both funny and romantic, and I enjoyed them.

This might even be considered essential reading, if you're reading _From the Beast to the Blonde_. As I read Warner's scholarly study, I kept wishing I had access to the obscure stories she was constantly quoting. When I found this, it helped a great deal; I only wish _Wonder Tales_was sold in paperback as a companion volume to Beast/Blonde.

As one of the editorial reviewers comments, this book is intended for gift-giving. It is a charming, diminutive hardcover containing six French fairy tales from the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, translated by some prestigious modern writers and translators, with an introduction, biographical notes, and bibliography by Marina Warner. These tales (and those in future volumes which Warner says she hopes to bring out) are especially interesting to read after Warner's From the Beast to the Blonde, which examines the French salon society and its members (mostly women) who used the writing of these tales as a form of social protest as well as entertainment and even escape. But three of these six tales, as well as a number of others from the same milieu, appear in translations by Jack Zipes in his inexpensive paperback "Beauty and the Beast and Other Classic French Fairy Tales." If you are interested in a broad selection of these tales, including some famous ones like "Little Red Riding Hood" and "The Sleeping Beauty" (complete with Perrault's violent episodes that are often left out in children's versions), Zipes is a good choice. The texts are there, along with some scholarly introductions and biographies of the authors of the tales in a mass-market format.

Warner's book is more aesthetically pleasing. Its elegant, whimsical design and first-class literary translations invite the reader to escape into stories that are part magical fantasy and part social commentary. These tales are longer than the usual children's fairy stories, and they tend to have more elaborate adventures and quite worldly descriptions of clothing, decoration, and other amenities of aristocratic life. Most of the plots resolve themselves through the intervention of fairies, whose actions may seem unmotivated (deciding not to help a heroine on one page and then suddenly turning up to save her from being eaten by an ogre a couple pages later). I personally find this easier to take in this charming little hardcover than in the no-nonsense mass-market format of the Zipes collection.

Warner's book is also significant in that, in addition to the three tales that overlap with Zipes, it contains some genuine rarities in the genre. According to Warner's introduction, two of the six Wonder Tales, "Bearskin" and "Starlite", have never been translated into English before, and Charles Perrault's tale, "The Counterfeit Marquise," has never been included in previous Perrault collections (perhaps because, having no supernatural characters, and taking cross-dressing as its theme, it would not be considered appropriate for the juvenile audience that these collections have historically targeted).

Regarding the translations themselves, I compared at random some paragraphs in the stories that appear in both books. The quality of the prose is not miles apart, since both books strive for accuracy in translation. Nevertheless, if you admire the writing of John Ashbery, Gilbert Adair, Terence Cave, Ranjit Bolt, and/or A. S. Byatt, that could be another reason to choose this book.

Notice that if you have an encounter with the Virgin Mary. . . and write about it you are biased. If you have a feminist axe to grind and write from the point of view of philosophic naturalism, you are scholarly.

This is political correctness applied to Mary.

Yawn.

JMNR

The fact remains that this book offers a very solid and accurately researched survey of the development of the "phenomenon" of devotion to Mary, the mother of Jesus. It is not exhaustive by any means, but traces all the major strains of development from at least the third century. What the book fails to do adequately is critically delve into the real roots of Marian themes as found in the New Testament records. Indeed, what we see in the very first century of the Christian/Biblical era is a rather rapid (and radical) development of attitudes about the Mother of Jesus, a shift from early indifference and ignorance of Mary's role (the Marcan Gospel, Pauline letters) to an outright "lifting up" of Mary as the Ideal Christian, the First True Disciple, worthy of loud praise (Luke), and even iconic status as Eve-Israel 'Mother of believers'(John) and glorified symbol of the Church itself (Revelation). I wish Werner had spent more time drawing attention to how swift and startling these developments in the understanding of Mary were when the New Testament writings were being composed. Also, how did these "arcs of thought" regarding Mary take root geographically in the 2nd century church? Werner could have noted that it was no coincidence that Gospel communities giving great prominence to the figure of Mary(Luke's Antioch, the Johannine churches) in the first century continued to preserve these emphases in the 2nd (Ignatius of Anioch, Irenaeus-Justin, etc). Otherwise, Werner gives a solid depiction of how formative ecclesiastical motives (asceticism, Christological controversy) rattled the chains of Mary's rather flexible image in the patristic age, and how her mystique lent itself so readily to mythical, legendary rumblings about her death, intercessory powers, etc. A fascinating handbook and not even remotely [a] feminist manifesto ... It seems that some would have a hard time handling the reality that much of what Mary represents was a complex combination of iconic mythologizing that began in Scriptural/Apostolic times and only grew in succeeding centuries according to the demands of the age and normal human piety.

This was a fabulous resource for understanding the evolution of the Marian cult. The one weakness of this book is that it did not deal with the pre-Christian origins of the Marian cult. Other resources, however, cover the evolution of the Anatolian fertility cult of Cybele into the Roman Magna Mater and later into the so-called "BVM". The author does a good job of showing the origins of various aspects of Mariology and contrasting these developments with Christianity in the West. The author has done a great service to those who wish to more fully understand the syncretic process which blended Christianity with various pagan religions and medeival political structures to create the Roman Catholic Church.

Any book which purports to use information having been supplied by the well known liar Sir Edmund Backhouse, is just the same old rehash of lying and deceit that so called "China scholars" have used for far too long. There is nothing new here to shed new light to an old mistake. Tzu Hsi was not the trerrible ogre that both Western and Eastern scholars to have been. Do we really need to keep up with the relentless stream of Tzu Shi bashing? If you want the same ill informed nonsense please read this book but if you want to learn something new you would do well to look elsewhere.

I was doing my report my Tz'u Hsi and this book has a lot of information, probably more information than people need. Half of the time, it tells about war and China's situation at the time instead of Tz'u Hsi herself. For me I'm very interested in Chinese history and this book really satiated my thirst for it. This book can be a bit boring at times, but for the most part, it's interesting. It gives people an insight about chinese traditions and of course, the empress dowager herself. I recommend reading it!

The best-written and most accurate biography of the Empress-dowager Tz'u-hsi. Although Marina Warner never studied Chinese, her account almost always tallies with the vernacular sources. She offers a shrewd, plausible and perceptive analysis of Tz'u-hsi's character. Her appraisal of the period has more insight and balance than Sterling Seagrave's jaundiced politically correct approach. An excellent introduction to the late Ch'ing dynasty.