I love cooking. I love history. I love the Aubrey-Maturin novels. Hmm. Maybe that explians why I like this book.

One of the great things about O'Brian's books is that there is not only battle, but details of day to day life, including music, clothing, and games. Above all, however, there is FOOD. This book fills in the gap for the would-be Killick to set the table for the captain. Be forewarned -- this is not The Joy of Cooking. This is a cook book for people who already know how to do more than heat-n-eat.

Much like Cosman's Fabulous Feasts, this book gives you something on table manners, habits of cooking, lore of food, and, of course, the recipes (or at least as close as we can guess to them). The recipes are neatly divided into sections, as with most such books, and care is given to preparing authentic food. Some of the ingedients are obscure and some of the tastes will be ... acquired. Personally, I was fascinated that there was even a recipe for ships biscuits (and a few less savoury items) right along side the haute cuisine of the day.

If you would really like to know the flavours behind Jack's 20 stone, read this book; better yet COOK from this book.

Which I've just got it for you here, ain't I?

If you are a fan of the Aubrey/Maturin naval fiction novels of Patrick O'Brian, there is one theme underscoring the appearance of Captain Jack Aubrey RN, and that is food, whether it be the weevilly sea biscuit and salt horse of the midshipmans' berth or the prodigious dishes served in the great cabin aft.

They are wonderful dishes with wonderful names. drowned baby is a dessert. Sea pie contains no fish. Spotted dog is not a dalmation. We are given tantalising glimpses into their nature, but recipes are not to be had. Patrick O'Brian was a wizard with words, but no cook.

The deficiency is rectified in this invaluable companion to the canon. Every dish is tracked down and recreated. The authors not only give the recipe, but tell you precisely how to do it for those unfamiliar with the utensils and methods (and ingredients) of a bygone age.

I cannot recommend this book too highly, but I must issue a hearty warning. Do not partake of the dishes described without at least a dozen mates to help you eat them! Or you will wind up as stout as Captain Jack.

And mind you lay in a good stock of madeira, sillery and port for atmosphere.

A glass of wine with you, dear reader!

I once knew a lady who had a vast collection of cookbooks. She read them, too, even if she indulged in little adventurous cooking. I often wondered how one could find entertainment reading recipes - was the recreation as adventurous as poring over the instructions for assembling a barbecue pit one was not going to assemble?

Perhaps if I had peeked into her cookbooks I would have discovered some enchanting prose among the recipes, as I have in "Lobscouse & Spotted Dog". Open the book anywhere ... Aah, here on page 92 is the recipe for drowned baby, also called boiled baby, introduced by this passage from "The Nutmeg of Consolation":

"The gunroom feast for the Captain was if anything more copious than that of the day before. The gunroom cook, by means known to himself alone, had conserved the makings of a superb suet pudding of the kind called boiled baby in the service, known to be Jack Aubrey's favourite form of food, and it came in on a scrubbed scuttle-cover to the sound of cheering."

Sure, I read this passage during my several reads of "Nutmeg", but standing here alone it seems to sparkle with more clarity. Now I clearly see the pudding, gliding in on a scrubbed wooden hatch cover (to the surprise of no one there) and I thrill to the sound of cheering.

Here, once again, the perfect team has stepped forward to contribute an enchanting and tantalizing contribution to the Aubrey/Maturin series. A daunting task it must have been for this multi-talented mother and daughter (sailboaters, too, they are), to unearth and translate into modern terms the scores of recipes found in this book, to translate the contemporary equivalents of their ingredients.

And, in addition to its being seasoned with exquisite excerpts from the novels, we are served a selection of the songs encountered in the stories - words and music.

While you are satisfying your literary and musical appetites, you can sample some of these recipes. I found I could actually create the ones I've tried. To think that now I've figuratively dined with Aubrey and Maturin ("There you are, Doctor. Good morning."), Tom Pullings, William Babbington, Mowett ...

What is it about Patrick O'Brian's writing that so challenges and inspires readers of such fine tastes and writing ability of their own? First, it was A.E. Cunningham, who edited "Patrick O'Brian: Critical Essays and a Bibliography", a wonderfully enlightening collection of articles published not too long after the O'Brian wave swept ashore.

Then came Dean King with "A Sea of Words", his splendid glossary of everything we couldn't fathom in O'Brian's sea stories. With John B. Hattendorf, King followed with "Harbors & High Seas," a desperately needed atlas and geographical guide to the stories. And right on the heels of those came this beautiful work of art, a cookbook like no other. Happily, I have not observed evidence of an opportunist at work among those contributing to O'Brian's legacy.

"Lobscouse & Spotted Dog" is another brilliant achievement, infinitely worthy of standing at muster alongside the O'Brian stories and the other contributions to them. Authors Anne Chotzinoff Grossman and Lisa Grossman Thomas have labored mightily to assemble these recipes, and to season them with such delicate care. That much is evident even to the meanest understanding. Patrick O'Brian himself recognized the quality of this work and provided its apt foreword. Not surprisingly, publisher W.W. Norton put it all together very nicely.

A glass of wine with you, my dears. And let us also raise a toast to my Amazon.com friend who knew, just KNEW, that I would love your book.

This book is only 160 pages and filled with illustrasions but it is very good. I think that this book would be good for eighth grade and up because sometimes it is hard to understand and follow. It also has wonderful illustrations and a summery of each one.

This book is small in size but beautifully illustrated. It is ideal for the person who wants a taste of both Arthurian legend and scholarship and delights in richly colorful reproductions of great masterpieces of art that have been inspired by the legend. It deals with sources for the legend, including reproductions of some documents, themes, main characters, major works, etc.

In this story of courage, struggle and the eternal optimism of youth, Christine Morgan describes the years when she and her husband, a young Hungarian Unitarian minister, worked to improve the standing of the Hungarian Unitarian minority in Romania. Together they contended with political oppression, social upheaval, poverty, and religious opposition in 1930s Transylvania. More than an account of Unitarian history between the wars and Transylvanian agrarian village life, ALABASTER VILLAGE is a personal story of a young woman's extraordinary struggle to hold together a marriage and start a family in the face of tremendous hardship and strain. ALABASTER VILLAGE is an autobiographical work based on the life and letters of the late Christine Morgan. In addition to her work in Transylvania, Morgan had a long career in social activism and civil rights in the United States. She served as Dean of Women at Rollins College in Winter Park, Florida, and organized the Human Relations Commission in Appleton, Wisconsin. For many years, Christine's letters about her life could not be published, for fear of reprisals from the Romanian government. Now, more than a half century later, her moving story is at last told to inform a new generation of Unitarians who are seeking religious and civil freedom. "Even when my eyes were overflowing with tears, I could not stop reading for a moment. This is a bittersweet remembrance of disease, poverty, the early end of Christine's first pregnancy, separation from her husband, conflicting ideals, triumphs in the village in simple and universal ways, reconciliation work between ethnic groups, and, most of all, of the love of a mother for her child. It is a must read." Dr. Judith Gell, co-director, Center for Free Religion, Chico, California, and General Secretary, Partner Church Council, UUA.

While the 20th century audience may recognize William Makepeace Thackeray as one of the 19th century's most interesting authors, very few know of his daughter. Winifred Gerin is the only biographer so far to recognize Anne Thackeray Ritchie as an author in her own right. The 1981 biography offers an in-depth and up-close look at Thackeray's world, including many familiar faces such as Tennyson, Dickens, Carlyle, Ruskin, George Eliot, Charlotte Bronte, Charles Darwin, Virginia Woolf (Anne's niece), and even an eyewitness account of Chopin's last days in Paris. Anne Thackeray was the eyes and ears of Victorian London, and through Gerin's thorough research and plentiful use of letters and recorded conversations, the average reader comes that much closer to getting a true glimpse of the literary and art scene of Victorian Britain.

A graduate thesis that is easy to read and follows the travels of Welshmen into PA and OH and the communities they founded. Why would someone buy land as poor as what they left behind? Why settle in the middle of America? Why leave all that is familiar behind? Not uncommon questions for anyone studying their ancestors, but the Welsh reasons, while often similar to other groups, are still refreshing in this work. Ms Knowles has helped the genealogist greatly with this work.

"Pagen" [sic] is misspelled in the Beowulf introduction. Henry II is described in the introduction as having ruled from 1154 to 1177, when in actuality, he ruled until his death in 1189. The more I read, the less I trust what I'm reading. I recommend M. H. Abrams' Norton anthology instead.

otherwise its a great collection of texts. 3 books too.

This is an excellent anthology, with generous selections, lively introductions, and beautifully reproduced color plates. Though published on "bible paper," there is very little bleed-through. It is an splendid alternative to the Norton Anthology, not only for its ample contexts sections and for its loving attention to both canonical and new writers (especially women writers of the Renaissance), but also for its favoring of complete works--More's Utopia, Sidney's Apology, etc. I've been using IB this semester, and though there are, as the (I think excessively) negative reviewer notes below, occasional errors, these are not unusual in massive endeavors. An old game in the 1950s used to be to send grad students in search of errors and typos in the standard literary critical books of the day. I'm sure these will be cleaned up. For now the book works especially well for "survey" courses and for upper-level, specialized courses, when supplemented by another paperback or two, or course packets.

THIS WAS WRITTEN IN THE 1970S AT A TIME WHEN SCHOLARSHIP IN THE MENIPPEA WAS NOT AT ITS BEST... IT SUFFERS FROM COMING TOO SOON, PARTICULARLY WITH REGARD TO KIRK'S NOW FAMOUS BIBLIOGRAPHY. ONE OF MANY INTERESTING POINTS IS HER FORMULATION OF THE IDEA OF "MENIPPEAN TRAGEDY" OF WHICH THE EXEMPLAR IS HAMLET. WORK ON BOETHIUS IS NOT TOO BAD, BUT USEFUL FOR A DIFFERENT PERSPECTIVE ON CHAUCER

I have to say tha I was thoroughly unimpressed with this play. The author seems to be using the same characters that we all know and love, but most of them seem out of character. It's also a musical so every once in a while the characters burst out in song. This can be anoying; especially when you consider the fact that there is on music written for it. The authors tell people to write their own simple music. This is a disaster waiting to happen! The redeeming quality of the book is the other "helps" that are included in it. They are very good and in depth dispite how short they are. Overall, I do not recommend this purchase

This is the third full-length biography of Tolkien, after Humphrey Carpenter's and Daniel Grotta's. Carpenter's is accurate, well-written, and insightful. Grotta's is none of these, and White's reminds me much of Grotta's. The writing is abysmally clunky, and the text is riddled with completely amateur factual errors on every level, from confusing Dorothy Sayers with Dorothy Parker to inflating Tolkien's discomfort with Charles Williams's work into a seething personal hatred for which there is no contemporary evidence: rather the opposite. White's task, as the title suggests, was to analyze Tolkien's work as well as to recount his life, but there is no literary criticism as such in this book. White starts off his analysis badly by declaring that "the published letters relate almost nothing of his private life," which could only be thought true by someone disappointed at not finding the "personal demons" and "inner drives" (his words) that he thinks Tolkien ought to have. Accordingly, he supplies them. For instance, White reduces Tolkien's motivation for writing his mythology into a simple Freudian longing for his lost mother, and then adds insult to injury by claiming that this oversimplification takes nothing away from Tolkien's achievement. White shows no understanding of what made Tolkien tick, and replaces him with a textbook psychological construct.
Parts of the book are not this bad. White is less digressive than Grotta, and he shows at least a minimal knowledge of Tolkien's posthumously-published works. He concludes with a rousing defense of the value of Tolkien's work, but doesn't really engage with the criticisms. Against elitists who half-believe that popularity is a sign of worthlessness, it's no reply to emphasize Tolkien's popularity.
At one point White criticizes Tolkien for objecting to errors in a publisher's blurb. Tolkien didn't understand the publisher's publicity needs, White says. But no publisher needs to be factually inaccurate, and neither do Tolkien's biographers. This book is likely to be a source of factual and interpretive error for years to come. It adds nothing useful to Carpenter's biography, the one book all persons curious about Tolkien's life should read.

Michael White's new biography of J.R.R. Tolkien is a competently written book and people who are just now discovering Tolkien and his works will most certainly find his book most useful. BUT everyone who has read e.g. Humphrey Carpenter's landmark biography from the late 70s or the ground-breaking studies of Tom Shippey will find nothing new in it. Unfortunately, White only uses second-hand sources and has no new conclusions to offer. Moreover, his book is flawed by some truly sloppy research mistakes, such as calling Dorothy Sayers an "American" and making the Habsburgs the rulers of the "Prussian Empire" (he is clearly confusing Germany with its neighbor Austria-Hungary).
Carpenter's biography although some 25 years older is the far more substantial biography, and although White introduces more historical background material than Carpenter, his background explanations (e.g. about the First World War) are never above schoolbook level. Recommend only for Tolkien newcomers.

After seeing the movie "Lord of the Rings" I wanted to find out more aboout the man who had authored such an ambitious work of fiction. I remember for years hearing that the writing and the story were so spectacular that it was impossible to translate to the screen. I found Mr. Tolkien to be a very interesting subject and would recommend this book.

While the author of this work seems as if she means to be sincere, sincerity is not enough when your purported goal is to "adapt Elizabethan recipes for modern kitchens". More attention to accuracy in the redactions (conversion to modern recipes) and authenticity of the results would have been a better goal. The individual recipes quote "originals" with no notation as to where the original source came from (which book?), leaving no idea as to whether they have been quoted accurately. The adapted recipes not only jump to some pretty wild conclusions as to what the finished dish was intended to be, but in some cases contain wildly different ingredients than were quoted in the original recipe, with no explanation. There are also giant leaps from a baked dish (in the original) to a boiled one (in the adaptation), or vice versa. This might pass muster as a "popular" book for those who have no serious interest in authenticity in historical recreation of recipes, if it were not for the author's repeated claims as to scholarship and accuracy. Not recommended for the serious food history buff or re-enactor. I might give this to someone with a mild interest in the subject, but only with a warning about lack of historical accuracy. She even manages to perpetuate the tired, old myth of spices being used "to cover up the taste of bad meat". Nothing could be further from the truth.