This is an excellent guide to reading any difficult philosophical or spiritual material in terms of realising what is said or meant at its deepest level. It is not a guide to critical appraisal, however.

A great book by C. S. Lewis. Lewis is also the author of the adventerous "The Lion, The Witch, And The Wardrobe. This book is proboably Lewis's best book.

Careers in Marketing. Marketing is one of the oldest careers going back to primitive time. It has evolved and changed as our livelyhood has changed from hunter/gather to farming to industrial to todays complex markets. Challenges abound as marketers grapple with an economy in flux, changing tastes and values, emerging and disappearing brands and other factors. Another evolving factor is from few items with buyers close at hand to the beginning of this century when we produced more to sell than customers and emphasis changed. Today the emphasis is no longer selling planned and produced goods but rather identifying customer wants and planning products to satisfy wants. Marketing has changed into a complex and sophisticated field needing a large number of highly trained professional in specialized functions.

Background: The stylistic heritage of the Perry Mason mysteries is the American pulp magazines of the 1920s. In the early Mason mysteries, Perry - a good-looking, broad-shouldered, two-fisted, man of action - is constantly stiff-arming sultry beauties on his way to an explosive encounter that precipitates the book's climactic action sequence. In the opening chapters of these stories, Gardner subjects the reader to assertive passages that Mason is a crusader for justice, a man so action-oriented he is constitutionally incapable of sitting in his office and waiting for a case to come to him or to develop on its own once it has - he has to be out on the street, in the midst of the action, making things happen, always on the offensive, never standing pat or accepting being put on the defensive. These narrative passages - naïve, embarrassingly crude "character" development - pop up throughout the early books, stopping the narrative dead in its tracks, and putting on full display a non-writer's worst characteristic: telling the reader a character's traits instead of showing them through action, dialogue, and use of other of the writer's tools.

Rating "Ground Rules": These flaws, and others so staggeringly obvious that enumerating them is akin to using cannons to take out a flea, occur throughout the Gardner books, and can easily be used (with justification) to trash his work. But for this reader they are a "given", part of the literary terrain, and are not relevant to my assessment of the Gardner books. In other words, my assessments of the Perry Mason mysteries turn a blind eye to Erle Stanley Gardner's wooden, style-less writing, inept descriptive passages, unrealistic dialogue, and weak characterizations. As I've just noted, as examples of literary style all of Gardner's books, including the Perry Mason series, are all pretty bad. Nonetheless, the Mason stories are a lot of fun, offering intriguing puzzles, nifty legal gymnastics, courtroom pyrotechnics, and lots of action and close calls for Perry and crew. Basically, you have to turn off the literary sensibilities and enjoy the "guilty" pleasure of a fun read of bad writing. So, my 1-5 star ratings (A, B, C, D, and F) are relative to other books in the Gardner canon, not to other mysteries, and certainly not to literature or general fiction.

"The Case of the Dangerous Dowager": B-

This Perry Mason mystery has a promising premise and opens nicely, but falters in the latter stages, never really bringing the disparate elements of the mystery together in a very satisfying way. The central problem with the story is that the mystery itself is too weak - Gardner fails to divert our attention from the crucial clue - the timing of the visits to the office where the murder is committed - and we realize who the guilty party is as soon as Perry himself does.

The situation is a good one, one that Gardner uses with outstanding results in some of the later entries in the Perry Mason series - dealing with a blackmailer. Matilda Benson engages Perry to buy back gambling IOUs signed by her niece, and held by the apparent owner of a gambling ship that cruises the waters just beyond the twelve-mile limit. Perry approaches the problem the way we've come to expect from a man who dearly maintains a zero-tolerance policy when it comes to blackmailers: with a frontal attack, full of bluff and bluster and the kind of aplomb that would unnerve the steadiest of criminals. This confrontation is very neatly handled by Gardner and makes for a very tense and satisfying read. A nice game of cat-and-mouse engineered by Perry.

On the night of the crucial confrontation, however, Perry finds the blackmailing holder of the IOUs dead, and Matilda Benson and her niece both aboard the cruise ship - and possibly engaged in that old shipboard pastime, toss-the-gun-over-the-railing. The coincidental visit to the ship of all the key characters on the same night is not carried off very convincingly - we are too aware of the sheer contrivance of the whole setup.

Despite the excellent situation and the effective ambiance of the gambling ship, getting Perry's client off the hook is a bit too easy - the comings and goings from the murder scene are too well monitored and too straightforwardly reported by Gardner to be sufficiently mystifying.

The set pieces are good and effective, but unfortunately the whole amounts in this case to less than the sum of its parts.

I loved reading this book, simply because of the way Gardner presented the whole plot.

One of the charms of Mason Mystery is the strange opening. This may be one of the strangest; when Mason was working in midnight, a mysterious girl was prowling on the fire escape; Mason tried to catch her who slapped his face and went away; the newspaper reported the incident as Mason's love affair and Della mocked him "it is not safe to trust you alone in the office." I enjoyed this opening very much. I also enjoyed the whole story.

Perry Mason's at it again, trying to save the hide of a beautiful fan dancer accused of murder. If you've never read a Perry Mason novel, here's what they have going for them: Terrific pace (a couple of pages in and you're embroiled in a mystery), good dialogue, complicated plot, a decent amount of suspense (especially in the court room scenes) and best of all, a very quick read. A lot like the TV show. All the Perry Mason novels I've read (about 10) are pretty much the same, which is really the one main drawback. Six months from now, I doubt I'll remember much about this book. Still, a lot of fun. Again, a lot like the TV show.

I love Perry Mason Mysteries; however, I found the detective work in this one to be a bit contrived. Perry Mason finds out things about the murder and the true killer that isn't really explained until he tells Lt Tragg. How he arrived at it isn't apparent in the story. It is a good entertaining book though. I recommend it for you mystery lovers.

Erle Stanley Gardner's Perry Mason is faced with a particularly difficult challenge in "The Case of the Queenly Contestant." Especially duplicitous people, including his client, surround him as he tries to get to the bottom of a case involving a woman who may or may not have had the non-marital child of a now-wealthy (and presumably dead) business owner. The woman, Ellen Adair, was once a beauty contest winner who hoped to make it in Hollywood. That failed, though, and she ended up pregnant, she says, and unmarried. That's when she changed her identity and began a new life.

Now, twenty years later, Ellen seeks Mason's help as she tries to stay hidden. She is being pursued by a variety of formidable forces seeking to get to the truth of her past. At the heart of the case is a nurse who seems to be shopping her story to the highest bidder. The nurse soon turns up murdered, though, and Mason's client is the prime suspect.

This Perry Mason novel is slightly more involved than most of the others and about par for the course in terms of quality. Par, of course, is a high standard for Gardner, and "The Case of the Queenly Contestant" is entertaining and satisfying as a mystery and entertaining diversion.

This book fills a void. The grammar is straightforward, the examples clear, and there are plenty of exercises. It's excellent for students of chinese who have some foundation already and are looking vastly and quickly improve upon it.