Well, what can be said about this book, other than it's hardly believable that Arnold Bennett could have penned such a poor piece of work (or perhaps I haven't read enough of him?).

Briefly, Theodore Racksole, an American millionaire, buys the Grand Babylon Hotel in London in a fit of pique due to the fact that the hotel refuses to serve him the meal he wants. (The limitations of English cuisine is in fact the only believable part of the plot). Thereafter Racksole and his daughter Helen (aka Nella) become involved in various shenanigans centred on the German Prince Eugen of Posen.

This is a very very dated potboiler of a thriller. Where it isn't predictable, it's ludicrous. Those with a morbid curiosity for terrible period pieces might get some enjoyment out of reading it. I'm trying to forget it.

Well, first off, this book contains the VOCAL SELECTIONS, not the script. The blurb is a bit misleading, but if you look closely at the cover photo you can sort of make-out "Vocal Selections" at the top. As with many vocal selection books, many of the songs have been transposed. The choice of selections are pretty good, but there are some misleading statements on the table of contents page (such as title changes) which do not coincide with the CD recording. Since the CD was recorded after the production closed, it's possible that the vocal selections came out while the show was still running, and therefore the contents page explains changes from the original production. However, since that production is long gone, and all we have left is the cd, perhaps a re-print is in order??? I was hoping for a story synopsis or photos from the Broadway production, but they are non-existant. Hopefully this review will at least clarify some of my own questions prior to purchase.

This is a children's book. It is a fictional history and is not to be confused with serious baseball research. It is small and has numerous illustrations. The title is misleading.

It's incredible that Amazon.com sells such a badly printed book. While the lousy printing is painfully evident in both the text and the photographs, it is the photographs where the reader suffers it the most: more than seen, the photographs have to be imagined. Since I've seen some of them in other books and the quality was fine, the poor quality cannot be blamed on the original photographs! It's really a shame.

This book is a photocopy of another smaller book and a blurry bad reproduction at that. My advise is there are better books out there, steer clear from this very rough ashlar!
Fraternally

I haven't read the book, I couldn't get past the historical innacuracies in the description. The first mistake is the title. Anastasia was not a princess, but a grand duchess. A grand duchess outranked a princess. This may only be a minor detail, but if we're going to present this to kids as history it needs to be accurate. Unfortunately all of the Anastasia books I've looked at have similar and worse problems.

I've read other stories in the series and enjoyed them, but this one truly goes beytond the bounds. Edge is trying to find the Mexican bandits who robbed him and as usual runs into an assortment of characters in his quest. Along the way, he meets a pair of bounty hunters and their woman. Edge's treatment of the woman must be one of the most disgustingly degrading portrayals outside of S&M pornography. It ruins an otherwise exciting Western. The review system appears to not allow 0 stars, so 1 is given grudgingly.

Dutton's 1882 Tertiary History is a literary and scientific masterpiece: those who have read Thoreau and Muir will certainly agree with Stephen Pyne that this work is more imaginative than that of the other giants 19th-century nature writing. Too, I find the prose more compelling than that of Thoreau. And while some of the science (i.e., interpretation) may have changed since Dutton's original study, the data that Dutton presents with both care and flair has not. But an extremely important part of this book is the illustrations, specifically the wood-cut lithographs of drawings by Thomas Moran and William Holmes. These were not added to the original book as flourishes; they were, in addition to their beauty, illustrations of the scientific and aesthetic points Dutton was making in the text. Looking at an 1882 original, or even at the 1977 Peregrine Smith reproduction, one discovers these illustrations to be a delight: the capabilities, even in a black-and-white lithograph, to produce subtleties of light and shadow are astonishing. Not so in this UofA Press production. Their lack of care in figure replication and in overseeing the printing process has ruined most of the beauty of the lithographs: most are so over-inked that much of the detail is lost and the figures seem dull and lifeless. In fact, many of these lithographs are better replicated in the...Penguin Nature Classics paperback version of John Wesley Powell's Exploration of the Colorado River. UofA Press has done a great disservice to an important work. Save your [money]. Go to a library and delight in one of the earlier versions. Too, the entire Atlas that accompanied the monograph can be viewed on the WWW through the Library of Congress site.

The author takes a deontological (rule based) approach to defining an ethical system that persistently leaves open the "But why?" question. His identification and classification of virtues presuppose that Biblical virtues encapsulate some universal truth but then appeals to intuition and authority to substantiate his claim. Rules are great for children, but I'm an adult and need to understand why something is ethical or unethical, moral or immoral.

The other philosophical approach to ethics is called consequentialism and directly aims for the "Why?" that I, personally, find compelling. Consequentialism basically says, "To be ethical, do your best to understand the consequences (results) of your actions and then act in such a way to have the best possible set of consequences." The fact that the author doesn't explore this facet of ethics leaves him pretty far from the larger ethical discussion we can all participate in.

If you want a much better theory of ethics than this book provides: choose good long-term goals (this can be difficult, parents try to help children with this when young; self-examination, friends and counselors can help later), identify the consequences of the alternative decisions on those goals, make the decision that gets you closest to your goals (or the least far away in the case of a decision between two unattractive alternatives).

Now, I don't mean to diminish or minimize the size of the problem in understanding ethics or being ethical. Effective identification of long-term goals is hard. It's one reason why childhood takes years (seeking emotional maturity), why those who don't learn good lessons in goal making end up doing stupid (and unethical) things, why criminals appear in societies, etc.

My long-term goals are close to: 1) live a life filled with joy 2) raise children who can have joy 3) help build and maintain healthy communities (family, friends, neighbors) 4) maximize liberty and happiness in the world. You may or may not be interested to see how many rules (don't murder, don't steal, don't cheat, etc.) and how many virtues (be prudent, be charitable, be balanced (aka moderate or temperate), etc.) derive directly from doing my best to fulfill those long-term goals. Which would make this system (explained in a few simple paragraphs) a great deal more fundamental than the one presented in this book.