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He seeks revenge by establishing a private army, gets the support of the population and becomes a threat for the whole establishment. The outcome is brutal.
The story develops as an unstoppable stream of first, verbal, then, violent clashes.
Kleist cleverly heightens the tension by using sophisticated legal advisers (Luther) and coincidences.
A compelling read about the theme 'justice/injustice'.
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It's one of the best books on a microprocessor I've ever read. It includes everything - memory management, cpu exceptions, cache organization, etc., plus a full description of the instruction set, suitable as a reference for assembly-language programmers. I used this book while teaching a class on computer architecture at the University of Illinois.
You can get a free PDF copy fo this manual from the MIPS web site, however, I'd prefer to get the hardback or the paperback (it's grey - but out of print,). I don't even program the MIPS CPU any more but i lost my paperback and i want another since the MIPS chip is a very significant chip in the history of computer architecture.
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An academic's recommendation of a book as a "good read", however, can often be regarded as suspect by undergraduates and general readers. Perhaps our overexposure to dissertations and monographs have perverted our sense of what constitutes an enjoyable and easy to read book. To counteract such biases and perversions, I asked my wife to read Hauser's book. This book passed my wife's test. If only all books published by academic presses could boast such accessibility.
Originally published in Germany in 1950, My Farm on the Mississippi was clearly written for a non-academic audience. In this brief, very accessible book, Heinrich Hauser, an opponent of the Nazi regime and wartime German refugee, turns his three years from 1945-1948 on a Missouri farm near the German-American community of Wittenberg into an engaging adventure story. This book caught the eye of Curt Poulton, a historical geographer and translator at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs, who translated this work into English. Poulton argues that Hauser, as a German living among a German immigrant community in the wake of World War II, offers invaluable commentary upon this 1940s "postimmigrant America" where immigrants' native language and customs were still alive.
In 1939, Hauser, a prolific writer of fiction and non-fiction, escaped from Germany with his Jewish wife and two children. After unsuccessfully trying his hand at farming in upstate New York and then at city life in Chicago, Hauser and his wife yearned for the romantic fresh air of the proverbial American heartland. With no prospects or firm destination, Hauser set off for St. Louis and points southward in an old 1928 Packard in search of his dream farm. South of St. Louis and just north of Cape Girardeau, Hauser and his wife began passing signs to "Stuttgart", "Dresden", "Altenberg", and "Wittenberg". In Cape Girardeau, Hauser spotted a "Dr. Schultz" and paid this German-speaking physician a visit to inquire about the region and the German-sounding places. Working through the German-American subculture, Hauser soon bought a farmstead south of the town of Wittenberg, Missouri on the Mississippi floodplain.
Hauser recounts how his wife Rita and son Huc struggled to make the farm a working proposition for the next three years. Most of the profits, however, were used to provide care packages and other aid to their German friends and relatives back home. During the rest of the time, his family survives horrific floods, raging forest fires, and a comic shipwreck. During the summers, his son Huc devised plans and adventures such as making a boat with an outboard motor in ways reminiscent of a Little Rascals episode. By 1948, however, low crop prices and homesickness convinced the reluctant Hausers to return to Germany and abandon their Missouri farm.
Nevertheless, Hauser offers a useful window into this German-American society on the banks of the Mississippi. As Hauser notes, it is this region's rural isolation that permitted its German culture and language to survive both World War I and World War II and beyond. Hauser knew he was among his own kind when he saw women working the fields---a practice Americans generally avoided. In the local bars, these German-Americans would add salt to modify the sweet American beers like Falstaff and Budweiser. When the war in Europe was over, Hauser's family celebrated with a crowd of itinerant German-American lumber workers playing "schottiches" and singing songs such as "Am Brunnen vor dem Tore" and sea tunes like "In Hamburg da bin ich gewesen". Also particularly interesting (and useful for immigration and ethnicity courses) are Hauser's recollected interactions between these German-Americans and the nearby African-Americans.
Just as Alexis de Toqueville's Democracy in America offers an outsider's critique of early nineteenth-century America, Hauser's observations present a valuable perspective of postwar America, its rural traditions and ethnic relationships. Hauser is an "outsider/insider" within the postwar German-American community. Though an outsider as a recent German refugee, he can speak the language (both linguistically and theologically). This allowed him to enter into the culture and bring a unique perspective to bear upon it.
Because this book was originally written for a German audience unfamiliar with many aspects of American society and culture, Hauser's narrative is particularly instructive to an American audience today. For many undergraduate students in particular, Hauser's emphasis on the basics of everyday American life proves more fascinating to American readers today than when it was originally published. Approaching the daily life of the post-World War II America from the cultural distance of a foreigner is in many ways similar to the approach of today's readers and students separated from that cultural landscape by the passage of fifty years. Thus, Hauser's cultural observations, which may have seemed less interesting to an American reader in the 1950s when the work was first published are met with a much different perspective.
Without Poulton's sparkling translation, however, these observations would have lost much of their power to English readers. Poulton's work arouses comparisons to other recent and notable translations such as W.C. Kuniczak's translation of Heinrich Sienkiewicz's monumental Trilogy beginning with the novel "With Fire and Sword" (popular Polish nationalist fiction written during the late 19th century-a useful assignment for courses dealing with 19th century European nationalism, by the way). Poulton remains faithful to Hauser's intent to provide his readers with an adventure story. So dependent upon narrative flow and colorful description, this value and attraction of this work would have been irreparably harmed by a poor translation.
Readers interested in this approach should also see the superb collection of immigrant letters in News from the Land of Freedom by Kamphoefner, Helbich, and Sommer (Cornell University Press, 1991).
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Kleist balances on a fragile strand of (in)sanity that slides lengthwise throughout these stories, not a one of them failing to reinvent the wheel--not only formally but substantively, as it behooves us readers to admit on the double. Don't let the cover fool you either... I did, for a long time, and there should be a dead lady's freaked-out ghost surrounded by three brothers with empty eyes, chanting the 'gloria in excelsis,' all backed by a burning castle with mutilated horses. I'm referring specifically to three stories in this collection---and only three---but there are far more mind-benders, crude and massive explosions of language, and just ouright amazing plots to all of them, that my skimpy comments can do no sort of justice to them. But that's o.k., because you can look at all the other reviewers for more informative responses.
Truly disturbing, truly maddening, truly genius. Kleist notoriously blew his brains out in 1811, after shooting another woman in an altogether fitting (yes, fitting...read and see why) suicide pact formed by Kleist in order to stick one last finger up at the world that had robbed him of his "lifeplan" as a rational youth. The world, that is, responsible for his "madness" (yeah right) and these stories, which clearly many of us have taken great pleasure in absorbing. The world, responsible for his funked up play Penthilesia, which Goethe avoided like the plauge, and for which Kleist had to be physically restrained from challenging the man to a duel.
If so many people hadn't reviewed this already, I tell you, I may have agreed with him about this absurd world. Thank God he was wrong!