Any lover of travel writing will surely love this account of how it developed as a genre in America. Ziff lays out a compact, clearly structured exploration of five American travel writers and their individual impact on American literature and overseas travel.

Ziff had to clue me in to the fact that travel writing has been the steady number 2 selling genre (after the bible) in this country since colonial times. I also didn't know anything about Ledyard, Taylor, and Stephens, and found their adventures fascinating.

Like many, I knew quite a bit about Twain's life and his travels, but his life was so rich that it was helpful to examine his later years solely through a more narrow travel-writing lens, as Ziff does. Twain's dilemna reads all too clear: he hated to be away from Hartford, but he couldn't afford the upkeep on his mansion there, so he had to move his family to cheap, 19th-century Europe. Significantly, it was the rivers of Germany that got him thinking of his riverboat days and eventually inspired him to write Life on the Mississippi. But even as he was reminiscing about his American source material, he couldn't return: the bulk of his much-needed money came not from his fiction but from his travel books, dispatches, and especially from his international lecturing; so when he had reached a good age to settle into a thoughtful retirement, he was forced to go on a punishing global book tour.

I omitted to read the section on Henry James because I personally think he's an overated blowhard, but that's my poison. The four sections on Ledyard, Stephans, Taylor, and Twain made this short work more than worth my time.

So, if you've never raced home from work just to pick up any book published by Yale University Press, try this one.

Ralph Waldo Emerson's essays don't make for an easy read, but Emerson, luckily for us, decided not to accept the easy, run of the mill explanation of the life he found around him. It takes discipline and effort to tackle Emerson's work, and I have to say that it was well worth it for me. This small paperback collection has got to be one of the best places to start for those of you interested in having a go at one of THE Trascendentalist writers. This collecion brings together in a very inexpensive buy most of his greatest prose. With this, you get "Nature," "The American Scholar," "Man the Reformer," "History," "Self-Reliance," "The Over-Soul," "The Trascendentalist," "The Poet," "Experience," and more. If there is one place to start reading Emerson, than this might as well be among the top choices. Not only is it inexpensive, but it's small, light, and easy to take around. It also includes a great introduction (by Larzer Ziff) to Emerson the man and the world in which he wrote. I highly recommend it.

This book asks the reader to think quite a bit. When I initially read the collection, I was turned off by the monotony of the diction and the drab subject matter. However, I found that Emerson asks his reader to think about his own thoughts and gain insight into the ideas he presents. This collection is an impeccable work of Transcendentalism and can be related to modern life as well. If you choose to read this book in the historical sense, you are sure to gain information about the mindset of the time in which it was written. Emerson's view on Man, Society, Nature, and the world in general is certain to provide you with hours upon hours of analyzation, introspection and plain old satisfaction. I recommend this collection essays enthusiastically.

For anyone who enjoys beautiful prose with intellectually stimulating ideas and thoughts--this book is a "MUST-HAVE" for your library collection! These classic and quotable essays are enlighting and refreshing! If you (like I do) reject the Transcendentalist doctrine and theology, you may find yourself dismissing a couple of the essays as too tasking ideologically as they are at times on the fringe of transcendental ideology. Emerson's use of the English language, however, is a breath of fresh air in this era where the common vernacular is characterized by the grotesque abuses of ebonics, profanity, and laziness. It would be incredibly wonderful if all Americans would return to the most eloquent and beautiful use of our language as Emerson does.

If I were pressed to use one word to describe this book itwould be dark. However, Crane's novel is a moving piece with momentsof transcendence and rampant dark humor.

Basically, it is the story of Maggie, an undeveloped character who takes the back-seat to her loud and abusive parents, her swaggering, self-confident brother Jimmie and his friend, the boastful Pete.

The novel chronicles the injustices that surround Maggie, who is quiet and doesn't fight back. A chilling look at poor, urban life in the late 1800's, it is also a tale critical of society's judgmentality and questioning of morality. A more complex novel than it seems on first look, it is wonderful to take apart and examine the relationship between Maggie and Pete, Maggie and her mother, and Maggie and Jimmie.

Most importantly, however, are the quiet moments of transcendence in this novel.

Crane's first book is always a pleasure to reread for the new discoveries I have always made; it might be a sentence I had not seen before, a humorous line, or simply, the wonder that an semi-educated writer--really just a boy--could write this short novel, one that was so instinctive in its forebodings of genius (Anyone wishing to chat about this book or Crane's "Red Badge"--I have a review there--or simply literature, please send e-mail: it will be pleasurably read and commented on).

Hart Crane's first novel is the tale of a pretty young slum girl driven to brutal excesses by poverty and loneliness. It was considered so sexually frank and realistic, that the book had to be privately printed at first. It and GEORGE'S MOTHER, the shorter novel that follows in this edition, were eventually hailed as the first genuine expressions of Naturalism in American letters and established their creator as the American apostle of an artistic revolution which was to alter the shape and destiny of civilization itself.