I rate this as a mediocre writing effort. To me, the characters were not really well developed and the story, while emotional, was not that interesting. It was worth reading, but I wasn't really sorry to finish it, so I can move on to something better.

If you want to read a better, even great, Vietnam novel, I'd recommend you try Fields of Fire by Webb, or Close Quarters by Heinemann, or Better Times than These by Groom. Fragments pales in comparison to those works.

A breathtaking story bout a group of Soldiers in Vietnam. Fuller made me care about the soldiers and the villiagers that the soldiers wee trying to help.

First of all, Robert Olen Butler is an excellent writer, so when he undertakes a project you know there has to be some real potential in it.

Unfortunately, "Tabloid Dreams" seems to be the exception. The gimmick here is that he has fashioned a dozen stories to explain a dozen tabloid headlines (real or made up? It doesn't really matter.) The problem is, with such outrageous premises, the stories do little more than expand on an already-ridiculous idea, and the reader is never fully "vested" in the story. There are some clever turns, and here-and-there he approaches the tenderness and compassion of his earlier short stories, but on the whole this collection falls flat with a resounding thud.

Now that one of the stories ("Help Me Find My Spaceman Lover") has been expanded into Butler's next novel ("Mr. Spaceman") I'm revisiting "Tabloid Dreams," but I'm afraid my opinion of it hasn't mellowed any since I first read it 4 years ago.

This collection of short stories is one of the most poignant pieces of modern literature I have ever read. It explores the idea of connecting with your fellow man in an age that is hell-bent on separation. It begins with the story "Titanic Victim Speaks Through Water Bed;" a story about a man who realizes the importance of having a physical being, only after he loses it, and ends with the tale of a "Titanic Survivor Found In Bermuda Triangle." This is the story of a woman who has devoted her life to one cause, and when that cause is gone, she sees that her ceaseless devotion has left her empty and unfulfilled. This collection speaks to all the hopes and fears that live deep within ourselves. After all, who wants to reflect on their life and see that it has all come to nothing? After reading this book, if you do not have a deeper appreciation for your friends and family, you have missed the point entirely. Make that connection and live your life with no regrets.

A far cry from his poignant stories about Vietnamese immigrants in "Good Scent from a Strange Mountain" Butler's latest collection tells the stories behind the headlines we all love to make fun of. Be it marriage to a space alien, a glass eye spying on a cheating spouse for its owner, or the soul of a Titanic passenger being discovered in a couple's waterbed; these stories are a collection of wacky/sad/funny/creepy tales that are a must-read for any short story connoisseur.
Ray Schmitz III

I bought the book because of the interesting description on the back cover and the note that said the author was the "winner of the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction." This book was dreadful. Thoroughly unsympathetic characters, terrible dialogue, and an unconvincing plot. Sometimes I laughed out loud at the contrived conflicts and plot twists. I felt I should finish the book just to make sure it was really that bad. It was. Please don't waste your time reading this dud.

I loved this book. It is probably my favorite Robert Olen Butler book. The book is sort of a cross between Camus "The Stranger" and Hemmingway's "A Farewell To Arms."

I read this book because I have never read anything in this field. This book was published in the 1970s when conditions for elderly people were bad. High inflation was reducing the value of the nest eggs of many. Large lay-offs also meant that many older people could not depend on their children for financial support. As such, this book was important in that it addressed all issues, major and minor, that elderly people have to deal with in this country. These issues still exist, but I dare say the elderly population are the most privileged class in this country this decade. The last 3 years have seen reduced public funding for education, as taxes have been reduced, primarily on savings, sales of securities, and property. Programs to help the future (children) are being cut to fund tax cuts for the middle-aged and elderly portions of America.

Yes health costs are going up, but if one looks at medicine over the decade, one notices that most of the advances have been in treating adult and elderly diseases like Alzheimers, cancer, Parkinson's, and heart disease. Almost no advances are being made in treating diseases of young people. Most importantly, inflation over the last decade has been extremely low, which is great for people living on fixed incomes. This book is good reading, but the problems it highlights are ones that every individual has a lifetime to prepare for.

I think this is one of those books that will appeal more to women than to men. It is the story of a forty-year-old New York auctioneer who seems to think an awful lot of herself. She has the usual romantic complications, including a banal liaison with a cliched Frenchman, whose "secret," when we find out what it is, is pretty silly. This is not an offensive book; just not very interesting. There are some lines of dialogue here that will make you roll your eyes and groan.

Readers will be attracted to Mr. Butler's latest effort after being enchanted by 'A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain.' However, Fair Warning, while not without merit, does not live up to the Pulitzer prize-winning Good Scent/Strange Mountain.

The stories in Good Scent/Strange Mountain are told from the perspectives of Vietnamese immigrants, both male and female, living in the United States after the war. Fair Warning is told from the point of view of an attractive, successful young professional woman in modern New York. Neither is the vantage one expects from a white American male. I found this approach astonishing in Good Scent/Strange Mountain, but just entertaining in Fair Warning.

The subject of the latter book is the worthy matter of peoples' relationships to objects of possession. This is potentially its most interesting aspect, but is treated too lightly to be completely fulfilling.

There are moments of wry humor in Fair Warning, but not quite enough to overcome the lack of originality in the characters. I would recommend Fair Warning only as light reading. It is not for the reader seeking emotionally stimulating, thought-provoking literature.

Fair Warning is the first of Butler's novels that I have read and therefore, I came to the novel with no expectations, other than the hope of finding a good read. Fair Warning is an enjoyable, quick read--a sort of sophisticated romance novel. I think, based on reading other reviews on these pages, if you come to this work expecting something like Butler has done before, you may be disappointed. If, however, you want to read a romance for grownups, this is your novel. It is the story of Amy Dickerson, a 40 year old auctioneer with some personal issues to resolve--her father, her mother, her failed love life. She becomes involved with two men as the novel progresses and begins to resolve some of those issues. She eventually falls in love. Not much else, but it is a quick compelling read which some readers will probably really enjoy. You just have to be careful that you are one of them.

This book rips off Tolkien's name. It is got up to look as if it is writen BY Tolkien. In fact it is a collection of largely poorly-written and factually incorrect articles by minor academics.

There's a lot of poor Tolkien criticism out there-- in fact, most of it falls into that category. This book, a collection of articles edited by Robert Giddings, is one of the few exceptions.

Of the articles included here, the two most insightful are "A Structuralist's Guide to Middle-Earth" and "'No Sex Please, We're Hobbits': The Construction of Feminine Sexuality in The Lord of the Rings". The former, while written in a very annoying, manner (essentially an alphabetical list of various motifs in Tolkien's fiction, with a brief summary of their meaning and function within _The Lord of the Rings_) nonethless raises some intriguing issues that most Tolkien scholars and pseudo-scholars, either avoid or dismiss (e.g. the way Tolkien's fiction presents issues of race). I'm not sure exactly what's supposed to be 'structuralist' about this article (I certainly don't see any sign of influence of Levi-Strauss, or Jakobson, or Barthes...), and I recognize that it's treatment of every issue is rather superficial-- but it does at least raise some questions that other writers on Tolkien have been too timid to address.

The 'No Sex Please, We're Hobbits' has the same strengths. It raises the question of sexuality in Tolkien's fiction-- and particularly the question of why there's so little of it present. This is another subject about which most Tolkien
fans & scholars shy away from or become defensive about-- but its an important issue, and one well worth scholarly attention. The most intriguing part of this article is its claim that, of all the female character in LotR, only the fearful spider-monster Shelob (who is constantly referred to as a 'she') is at all sexualized-- albeit only incidentally and metaphorically, through imagery, wordplay, and the archetypal motifs symbols. The author then analyzes the Shelob chapter in detail, noting its use of a kind of perverse wedding-night imagery throughout, and the physical description of the battle between Sam and Shelob as a kind of 'inverted rape' in which a female predator seeks out a male victim, but is, in turn, the one who is violated. This sounds like astretch at first, and there are some implausible Freudian interpretations of a few details to be sure-- and I'm skeptical as to just how much in agreement with her I am. Nonetheless, this article makes ample use of enough quotations from the text that show quite compellingly that there *is* something very odd going on this chapter-- and that whatever it is, it does have some rather vague and disturbing sexual overtones (probably unconscious ones on Tolkien's part, I'd wager).

These essays (and the others in the volume) have their faults to be sure-- and I wouldn't call any of them great Nevertheless, I feel they are among the better pieces of Tolkien criticism out there because (1) they address subjects that other folks who've written on Tolkien shy away from, (2) they raise interesting points about those subjects and suggest further questions to be asked, and (3), they're not nearly so "pious" in their approach to Tolkien and his works. This last point (#3), I think, is an especial problem with Tolkien scholarship, which, being driven primarily by fans who idolize Tolkien, tends to be overly rooted in Tolkien's own worldview and which tends to scorn any interpretations that Tolkien himself would not have approved of (*especially* when it comes to hot-button topics like race and sex!). Consequently, I find the essays in _This Far Land_, and especially the two I mentioned, to be a welcome breath of fresh air, full of spirit and originality, in a field (Tolkien studies) that so sorely needs an infusion of fresh perspectives and ideas. Because of that, I'm willing to overlook their faults.

I felt like the assignments and questions inside this lab book were really difficult for me to do as a student because I couldn't find the information in any of the 3 textbooks we have. I didn't like the "illustartions" either. I would have preferred real photos.

The knowledgeable reader who may recently have discontinued HRT and is looking for hard data re. resulting physiologic and sexual changes is unlikely to find much useful here.

Although this was a historically accurate novel, it was not very good. It was a completely unfair and biased towards the Vietnam war. It was far to sympathetic to the Viet congs and out right disrespectful to those who faught in the war.