Sorry - I wanted to like this book, but I just couldn't. I tried, but I kept having visions of all those horrible Harlequin Books my mother used to read when I was a kid. That maybe is not fair - this book strives for more ... but it is just a little too much. Proceed with caution.

"Is true love just a name given to sexual pleasure? Such was the question faced by Tom Clifden, a clever street hustler who found himself sexually glued to Hank Carter, a struggling would-be actor in New York City. Their physical and sexual appetites for each other knew no boundaries. Night after night they revelled in passionate and uninhibited sexual episodes. But the question comes up much later. Tom is 53-years-old and (without Hank) has used his good looks and street smarts to good advantage. He owns a string of bars across the country and is comfortably settled in Key West. His quietude ends abruptly when a letter arrives from Eunice, a woman who 25 years earlier was Hank's first love - and the woman whom Hank had abandoned for Tom's unbelievable sexual powers and pleasures. This is the story of two handsome young men who try to build a relationship during the sexually explosive and carefree years of the late 60s. The tale of their love unfolds, revealing the challenges of the ever-growing temptations of Infidelity." - abstract from Intermale

I wrote a review for GAY BOOKS, a Yahoo club, in a forum message I posted to William Rooney. Here is the text of that post: "Hi, I read your book Thursday. I didn't expect to be off work, but since I was I took advantage and read it. I truly enjoyed the book. I like the way you write...crisp. I usually plow slowly through books, but now and then I find a writer whose words flow so readily that I can just go with it like a jet. You're such a writer. Easy to read? Maybe that is what I'm saying. I do know that is a part of it. The story was fun. I have a few theatre friends, a retired gay off-Broadway production manager, and was in a few musicals (chorus boy) myself...way back when...so I liked the setting a lot. I thought Tom was a rather brutally honest guy...honest in how he just went at life with seeming purpose. Hank was my favorite, and no doubt is one of your favorites...I could tell. I don't know if you based the book on real life, but if you did...I believe Hank would have been a precious memory. Stylistically I LOVED THE BOOK! The first person narration, and the reportorial or documentary method...journal-like...made me feel like I was being let in on a personal secret...like the author, YOU, took me into your confidence on these sensitive matters. That said, I also found it very interesting how honestly you revealed yourself psychologically and sexually. Very commendable honest approach.

All in all I loved the book. I look forward to your next one.

By the way, the Title: INFIDELITY seemed perfect to me after I read the book. It startled me at first, but after meeting these guys, I understood.

THANKS... monkglen aka jungbud"

Tindell is one of the foremost Joyce critics and this in-depth analysis of FW is well worth the money. In the text the author discusses the historical, literary, and philosophical framework of FW while maintaining an less-than-monotonous tone. Any and all of Tindell's Joyce studies are recommended.

This book meant a lot to me years ago when I first began reading "Finnegans Wake." I felt paralyzed before each new chapter of "FW" if I didn't read Tindall first. Now I just plough on through Joyce, and I haven't read Tindall in years, but it's still close to me heart. (Allen's review is on the money.) Also, check out Tindall's "A Reader's Guide to James Joyce."

Guides to "Finnegans Wake" seem to be a dime a dozen now a days, but rarely are they so insightfull and easy to use. Although perhaps it is not as good as Bishop's or Campbell's Guides, but it is shorter and easier to read, so it is good for the beginer. It also acomplishes this condensation without significantly marginalizing any of the great themes of Joyce criticism. Thus, perhaps this deserves four stars for the material covered, but it still does so in such an easy way that I give it five for readability.

This is one of those books that once you take the time to get familiar with, it will pull you along at a slow and sometimes painful pace. The honest and direct sensuality of the people, Kate's confusion between the love of life and the distaste for the common man, the marraige of religions, and the stuggle to become true men and women do offer the reader a wonderfly detailed story. I recommend this to anyone who feels they need a mental vacation for the social triviality of the modern day world. It is a book to help regain perspective.

I must agree with the other reviewers that this book has some wonderful writing. There are passages of description that simply dazzle. The scene in which heroine Kate first sees the gathering of the Men of Quetzalcoatl, where the beats of the drums seem to draw the soul from the earth, is absolutely mesmerizing.

Yet for every memorable scene there are pages and pages of wild romanticizing about native values, obscenely outdated musings about race, and odd sentiments about marriage and women. Unlike "Women in Love," this book doesn't present love in a very good light. Kate is seen as a woman torn between her need to be herself and her need to be subsumed by a man. And the answer is unclear at the end. I found her to be a sympathetic character despite her annoying quirks (if she hates Mexico so much, why doesn't she just leave?) and I felt the ending didn't show her growing or changing. I also felt that the other main characters (Ramon and Cipriano) became almost brutal by the book's end, and this development was not resolved in any satisfactory way.

I have to admit being profoundly disappointed by the ending, and by the bizarre theorizing about the soul of the "dark races." But, I had to keep remembering that this book was a product of the early twentieth century. And the writing is what still makes it masterful.

In the area of the poetic use and the beauty of the English language, this book is well-written and certainly worthy of one's time taken in reading it. The language and the imagery invoked is breath-taking. In the area of subject matter, it is rather unique. An Irish woman journeys to Mexico just after the Mexican Revolution and becomes involved with two men who have taken it upon themselves to return Mexico to the religion of Quetzalcoatl and Huitzilopochtli. She joins them to become the First Woman of Malintzi and wife of the First Man of Huitzilopochtli. However, in the area of social language, the book is a product of its time. The Mexican people -- and all "dark" people -- are the objects of particularly malignant language, which I found objectionable. As an historian, I can place the book in its proper perspective, however, and recommend it as a good read.

This is a well-written and interesting book about the work, and lives, of NYPD detectives.

As a police officer in a small city north of New York for the past 10 years, I have had many opprotunities to relate with NYPD Detectives. This book has the feel of a war story, with the depth of many experiences that will give a serving police officer the ability to learn more about situations that he/she may find themselves in. If you are a cop and enjoy reading books that can give you an edge on the street, and are also entertaining, this book will not disappoint you.

As the wife of a NYC police officer, I highly recommend this book to those who seek a true, "insider's" look at the life and work of the NYPD. With each page it becomes increasingly evident that the author lived, breathed, ate and slept the often disturbing, sometimes humorous and always chaotic lifes of New York's Finest.

This book is good, not great. Its to small and many of the illistrations are too small,and hard to see. But for the money its worth it. They have many other books that are a bit better than this one. Here is one that is very good 'Masterpieces of the J.Paul Getty Museum Illuminated Manuscripts'. This book is awesome with easy to read text and wonderful pictures. Happy Reading.

This is one of my favorite illumination books. Being a practicing illuminator, I need photos much more than I need lengthy discussions, historical analyses, elaborate provenance notes, etc. They have to be color photos and they have to be large enough, and at a high enough resolution, that I can learn something from them--and maybe even copy an initial, a diapering pattern, a bit of the border, or more.

This book satisfies all these criteria. In fact, the only thing I dislike about this book is the fact that it's so small, it's really hard to keep open while I paint from it. REALLY hard, because if you get large and heavy enough items to hold both sides down, inevitably the items obscure parts of the page you are painting from!

Its size can be an advantage, though. I purchased this at the National Gallery in Washington, on a midday jaunt during a conference, then went back for the next conference presentation. When the speaker turned out to be droningly boring, I brought out this tiny book and paged through it inconspicuously under the table. Could I have done that with Janet Backhouse's monumental work? I think not...;)

The selections are wonderful, and they're usefully broken down into sections based on content--excellent when you need to find a quick animal or floral image for a border, a rendering of a king or queen, or a picture of a dragon or other supernatural being. Not so excellent when you need to find an example of, say, a late 1400's eastern French book of hours (there are many, just not in any kind of chronological or geographical order). But then, there are other resources that do that. This book is interesting for its variety, its excellent reproductions, and its well-selected and unusual miniatures.

Excellent reproduction of a number of styles, with reasonable commentary. Very valuable for me as a newbie, to provide a sense of medieval style and composition. The size is at once very handy and very frustrating.

If someone set out to write a parody of Kennedy's works, it would read a lot like Quinn's Book. Hard to put down, yes; telling details, of course; but undermined by preposterous characters and an offensive kind of magical realism. Billy Phelan's Greatest Game and Legs were much better.

Fifteen-year-old Daniel Quinn doesn't know his life is about to change on a wintry day in 1849. An orphan, the result of a particularly bad cholera epidemic which wipes out his whole family, Daniel apprentices himself to the boatman, John the Brawn, as a helper in lieu of living in an orphanage. But when the boat containing the actress Magdelena Colon, her maid, and niece, Maud Fallon, is upset by a large block of ice, fate intervenes, causing Quinn's fortunes and fate to be interwoven with Magdelena, Maud, and John the Brawn.
This was a wondeful novel, full of rich language, and subtle humor, which portrays the life of the Irish in the mid-nineteenth century with startling realism. Daniel's family seems to have arrived in America well before the parade of famine Irish, so starkly portrayed by Kennedy in all their squalor. While not attempting to stereotype the Irish immigrants, we see them as the white, upper-class citizens of New York did, a scourge and pestilence bringing filth and disease with them. At one point in the novel they are herded on railroad cars and transported away from Albany as undesirables, dumped on some less fortunate area of the state.
Though the fate of the Irish immigrant is not the main theme in the novel, Quinn's background of being a penniless Irish orphan doesn't increase his chances of gaining the hand of Maud, though she declares her love for him upon their first meeting when she is but thirteen to his fifteen. Fate throws them together over the years, but it is not until he is a grown man that he finally seems worthy of the precocious Maud.
Besides the obvious love story the historical perspective works well. We are treated to a look at the anti-Catholic Know Nothing Pary, the forerunners of the modern Republican Pary, Abolitionists, the Underground Railroad, and the New York City Draft Riots. A very enjoyable story.

I came late to William Kennedy's work and may have to take other reviewers at their word that this is not his best. But it's certainly pretty good, and I'll find out if the rest is better. He captures a kind of crazed picaresque worldview which is something like E.L. Doctorow on drugs. His disasters are gigantic, larger than life, and so are most of the characters. It's hard to tell if it's magical realism or just totally unlikely, but it's funny as hell and a tremendously fun and quick reading experience--in spite of the mass violence and misfortune and desperate poverty it describes.

If you've ever wondered what really goes on in a crackhouse, or what kind of people inhabit such a place-this is the book for you. I very much enjoyed Terry Williams writing style-simple and straightforward, not preachy or judgemental. I enjoyed this book so much I ordered his other book-Cocaine Kids. This is an excellent read, although it's pretty gritty. I was surprised to see it in the "Youth" section.

Terry Williams does a very good job in introducing the reader to this little known and forgotten subset of our society. The story focuses on his experiences and observations of a small group of crack and free-base cocaine users. His prose is devoid of moral undertones and is non-judgemental allowing the reading to form his own opinions and motivations.

Crackhouse: Notes from the End of the Line does not sensationalize or exploit the travails of these people in this lifestyle. This book does not shock anywhere near as much as it educates. Mr. Williams does not sugar coat anything, but he refrains from overstating the obvious.

Mr. Williams has also included a nice glossary of terms at the end of the book concerning the crackhouse vernacular.

I wish the book could have detailed the lives of the inhabitants outside of the actual crackhouse or smoking room with more detail. How were these people contributing to society when they weren't "seeing Scotty" (a phrase that Williams' group would sometimes use when getting high)? Perhaps, this was not the focus that Williams was aiming for.

In any case, I strongly recommend this book for anybody with an interest in the ethnology of crack cocaine users. I found the book educational. I look forward to reading more about this subject in the future.

The author, a sociology professor at City University of New York, was raised in the Big Apple and has lived most of his life in the area. In 1979 he bought a 24-foot New England catboat, built on Cape Cod in 1910, and proceeded to fix it and sail it around the New York area.

With this book he presents a portrait -- and sketchy history -- of the city from an angle few people know it. Structuring the story as a fairly continuous though interrupted sail from his home in Long Beach, around the southern tip of Rockaway and into Jamaica Bay, then into Upper New York Bay and the East River, and ultimately to Long Island Sound, Kornblum offers both close-up looks at the water and shoreline, and their past history.

The approach is light and pleasant: Few stories -- whether of the freezing disaster of the privateer "Castel Del Rey" in New York harbor in 1704, knowledgeable black sailors impressed by the British Navy in the War of 1812 and jailed in England for refusing to serve against the US, various ferry disasters, or the vagaries of Robert Moses -- last more than a page or three. The only sections where Kornblum lingers are in Jamaica Bay (its environmental degradation and return), and the dockside concrete industry that built New York's towers and for which the author worked as a kid. Manhattan itself is quickly bypassed though given a loving nod, and there is no venturing into the Hudson side.

In the typo sweepstakes, the book does all right, although it says "mechanical break" on p. 156 when "brake" was meant, and I believe I saw an unintended sentence fragment on p. 143. Most egregious, the great A.J. Liebling is identified on p. 103 as "Libeling" (though the name is correct in the bibliography)! A pity there apparently are youthful editors (I don't suppose there is such a thing as a proofreader in publishing anymore) who do not know this great journalist's work backward and forward.

Another ominous development -- to this reader, anyway -- is that the lovely cover photograph is an unreal composite. Different photographers are credited for different portions of it. I find this vaguely disturbing.

The writing is definitely four-star quality or better. Here's my favorite passage: "Up another shadowy bend stood two snowy egrets, with their outrageous yellow boots and platinum punk haircuts. How chic, these mudbank sushi bars. The egrets were spearing for sand bugs, moving along the edge of the marsh with the herky giant steps of students at a party stepping over empty beer cans."

I give the book only three stars because it is slight. Probably an excellent gift for the average non-reader who happens to love sailing or New York City, or the casual reader who knows little about either, but I would have liked to know more.

This is the account of a sailboat cruise, but rather than crossing an ocean the author travels maybe 40 miles from home, into the maelstrom that is NY harbor. It's an interesting book, sort of, but I expected more history of the harbor, more about what the place is, and less of the author's personal experience.

I expected the former thanks to a review in the NY Times, I think -- some newspaper, anyway -- that suggested it was less an ecological than an historical journey. Without this preconception, I probably would have liked the book more. If you're from NYC, it's worth a read, but there are many better sailing accounts if you want hairy-chested adventure, or to learn something about sailing in general. There are also better books about ecology of the shoreline.

But the style is pleasant and the author seems like a man who would be an enjoyable sailing companion. That's worth three stars.

This is a delightful view of some of the Big Apple's waterfront. William Kornblum writes well, and I am pleased to meet the family, friends, and acquaintances of his journey. Having explored much of our city, and having studied many of the coasts from opposite shorelines, I nevertheless learned much from Kornblum's views from his catboat. I also enjoyed his flash-backs, particularly his days as a youth working at the Transit Mix dock. As another reader noted, the book has a few errors that should have been caught. The A train travels neither through The Bronx nor over Williamsburg Bridge (p. 91). In Red Hook, the parish school is within the Brooklyn diocese, not archdiocese (p. 122). When I find errors on topics I know well, I begin to worry that the publishing industry has a problem with fact-checking in non-fiction. Yet, I must say that this book is a thoroughly enjoyable meeting of humans, views, and story. I recommend this book as a gift.

The subject matter is indeed compelling, but the writing of this story is extremely dull. The first rule of writing is to SHOW your reader what's happening, and if you're lucky, you'll evoke emotions in your readers and they'll grow attached to your characters. In this book, Styple tells (instead of shows) and then proceeds to tell you how to feel at the same time. There is some incredible civil war literature out there, including Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier and The Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All by Allan Gurganus. I recommend skipping this one, and reading another instead.

There's a lot of Civil War fiction out there, but this is a true story, which makes it worth reading all the more. I recommend this book for those who want to learn about a real young man from the Civil War, his trials, and what he accomplished. The Little Bugler was a hero, and this book is a winner; a modern classic for young adults.

This book was well written and told an unbelievable story about a young boy gone off to war. The story expressed the boy's bravery through times of pure horror in a descriptive and exciting style that will spark anyone's interest. Even those not into history will love the drama and suspense in this true story.. This is definately a book well worth reading.

While the content of the photographs is timeless and Kleins genius evident, I still found myself disapointed with this book. The problem is the layout. All the images are full bleeds covering every inch of paper. This means lots of cropping, no borders,absolutely no "breathing space" for any of the images, and of course the book's center seam running thru all the pictures. If the intent of this layout was to further emphasize the claustrophobic feeling of NYC then the publishers have succeeded . I found it tedious and I am sorry I purchased it.

I wish some innovative design could give a second chance to this book. These pictures look so common, now. The layout of the book is also so common that you feel you are reading a year book from Time-Life 1960. Yes, all this might have looked revolutionary in the 50's. To-day, you will buy this book because it will remind you of some place or some time that is important to you.

Fundamental book on photography. No more needed to say