First Black Actors On The Great White Way tells the stories of the actors, critics and others involved in the production of Three Plays for a Negro Theater in the early 1900s, examining changing race relations and perceptions in light of both wartime and theater production of the times. An intriguing survey of black acting's changes in an early period of American rights issues just emerging.

Curtis White is a rarity among writers of the sort of academic articles which generally fall until the title of "Cultural Studies" -- he is a able to write clear, insightful sentences and put them together to create coherent and compelling arguments. I read this book in one sitting, spellbound and exhilarated, and though it's only 118 pages, that same amount written by some more prominent cultural studier would take weeks to read, if it got read at all.

White's perspective, though, is fascinating -- he seeks to link social politics and cultural politics, something which has been done by right-wing anti-intellectual culture warriors such as Dinesh D'Souza and William Bennett, but has seldom been accomplished by leftist academics, who generally wanted to divorce the social and cultural realms. Before reading this book, I was so disgusted with academic literary theory, so tired of its apparent irrelevance to anything other than doctoral dissertations, that I swore never to read anything with the words "literary" and "theory" together on any page for the rest of my life. Now, though I may not be rushing out to find the latest tract on post-post-structuralism, I'm also not closing my mind to the possibility that literary theory may have some value.

The pieces collected in this book were published between 1984 and 1997, with the majority having been published in the mid-1990s. The questions White raises are consistent, however: what is the place of literature (particularly fiction) in our society, what is the function of academic literary scholarship for both the artist and society, and what do both literature and theory have to do with the world at large. White's bias is clearly in favor of innovative fiction, small press publishers, and social activism (broadly defined), and many of the joys in the book come from his iconoclastic clashings with various know-nothing pundits and overinflated egos.

White is remarkably erudite, but seldom parades his erudition. His perspective is unique: he is not only a critic and an academic, but also a publisher and a novelist and memoirist himself. He deserves a larger audience, for the pleasures in his texts are many.

This story of the breakup of the marriage of two psychotherapists is told alternately from the husband's and the wife's perspective, with glimpses also of their daughter's experiencing of events and a distanced interpretation of how the same events might be interpreted in a screenplay. In the end, although one learns much about what the characters think and remember, one doesn't really know in full what actually happened. Not unlike real life.

I was looking for this information to supplement the information provided in the support exam documentation and the performance field guide from MG Hill, and online docs. This book has great information but does need to have a different name as I thought this would be more geared toward how the IOS was actually programmed and give a better understanding of IOS versions.

If you troubleshoot networks this is part of the magic bullet needed to help in understanding memory and memory pool allocation, IOS Resource Management, processes, CPU, buffers, and cache. The book spends quite a bit of time on large scale routers and needs to give a bit more focus on smaller scale equipement, also the information on Netflow is only 5 pages long

There is a lot of good information in this book that I've never seen anywhere else, so I'm going to give it 4 stars...though, it should be called something like "How some Cisco routers switch packets and use buffers". It is far from a thorough treatment of IOS internals- but what is there is well written and valuable. I especially enjoyed the discussions about the algorithms and data structures used by the various fast switching methods.

This book centers around buffer allocations and buffering problems. It will give you a better understanding of when different buffers are used. I think the title should have been "Cisco IOS Buffering, What you need to know".

You definitely have to read between the lines to fill in what all is happening to the data as it flows through the router in different ways. I feel that it is rather limited in it's descriptions of the IOS SW Architecture so don't expect to come away with the full details on how IOS does its job.

This is not a book for beginners.

Buy it. Read it. Savor it.

Hilarious, irreverant, highly original, and deeply resonant, but finally a sad lament about the relationship of a father and son via the TV. Memories of My Father Watching TV has as its protagonists television shows of the 1950s and '60s, around which the personalities of family members are shaped. The shows have a life of their own and become the arena of shared experience, veering off into whacky "memories" where what really happened is often confused with vaguely remembered television plot lines, and become a son's projections of what he wants for himself and his father through characters in shows like "Combat," "Highway Patrol," and "Bonanza." In the background, as children try to fit themselves into the family mythology of good and bad TV, their budding imaginations record every hurt, near hurt, or imagined hurt inflicted upon them by silent, depressed, nearly catatonic fathers. Comic in many ways, Memories of My Father Watching TV pricks at the pain lurking beneath the blue-light glow of one of our most universal experiences -- staring at the tube.

Whether he's talking about the Kitchen Debates or about the Third Man, Curtis White's prose is absolutely stunning. A challenging and difficult read, Memories of My Father Watching T.V. is both a devestating social critique and an honest and heartfelt personal journey. Grappling with complex themes which focus on identity formation and masculinity, White masterfully constructs his novel around the ways in which a father and son are constructed by 50's and 60's television shows. While some of his subtle allusions to Freudian psychoanalysis may be jarring and grotesque, his narrative is seamless and eloquent. Particularly interesting is reading Memories while also reading Montrous Possibility, essays in which he talks about himself as a writer, and more specifically as a postmodern writer. Edgy and daring; I loved the book and highly recommend it. Who couldn't love flowers spontaneously errupting from a underneath a general's helmet?!

I embarked on reading this book because the publisher and a newspaper reviewer called it "darkly comic," and I was seeking relief from serious literature. The author appears to have made great effort to be funny, but the resulting humor is bitter and cynical. Here's an example of the humor, from a chapter in verse by a Modern Prophet: "and the Lord sent frogs. A Plague of Frogs! ... And the Pharaoh called in his magicians to give an expert opinion and the magicians said, 'We can do that.' And so saying the magicians created even more frogs. A frog for a frog, so to speak, One magic frog for every frog of God."

I found the book funny, from time to time, and some objects of the author's derision perhaps deserved skewering, such as the disemboweled Congressman roasted as a human sacrifice. More often, the humor was misplaced and offensive. I do not like parodies of the Bible. Much of the book concerned a Modern Prophet observing human society and finding it wanting. Nearly as offensive to me were the many chapters on the lives of great classical composers which portrayed these men as ordinary, small-minded, and miserable, apart from their musical genius. Internet pornography is another constant theme, and here the humor gets pretty foul-mouthed. There appears to be little in human society that White holds in high regard and considers worth preserving. I am not sufficiently in sympathy with White's negative vision to appreciate the efforts at humor.

I found Requiem to be quite humorous and shocking
at the same time. It shows the lighter side of people's bad
times and a world that's full of sex and violence. This book
isn't for the easily insulted and closeminded...

requiem is one of the strangest books i have ever read. the main character the so called "modern prophet" basically goes around collecting interviewing murderers, madmen and others in an attempt at i'm not quite sure. when i had finished it i was scared. this book is not for the faint of heart, in fact this book is not for anyone, the world isn't ready for this book so go away and save your precious sanity
DO NOT READ THIS BOOK.

A collection of short stories leading up to the eponymous novella, Heretical Songs was a worthwhile and enjoyable book. The author seems to be quite in his element - sculpting lofty intellectualizing, fanciful conjecture, and carnal innuendo into a truly unique look at the unseen lives of some famous public figures. While the prose was at times overwhelmed by its own vaguely sophomoric cleverness, the stories never truly faltered and I was deposited at the end of the book having fairly enjoyed the ride.

Having read this book twice, I got something different out of it each time. I believe it should have 3-1/2 stars (but in the world of Amazon.com it's 3 or 4). The first time I read it, it reminded me of C. Wright Mills' "The Power Elite," in that it sets up (perhaps unintentionally?) a small ruling class in the form of Mills' pyramid. I focused heavily on the idea of people "willingingly conspiring in their own defeat." However, the second time I read it, I saw the humor in it much more and found myself dazzled by the imagery. In some ways it's about the human condition and the lack of faith that the world can justifiably put in people. In other ways, it's about people that are more than just a face in the crowd. Lovingly interspersed with strange tales from a variety of times and cultures, the book is a worthwhile read that kept me interested. I've read a lot of books, but rarely one twice. This one I enjoyed both times.