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Books to read if you're planning a vacation in "Dover", sorted by average review score:

Trent's Last Case (Dover Mystery Classics)
Published in Paperback by Dover Pubns (September, 1997)
Author: E. C. Bentley
Average review score:

Not bad.....
This is the first of Trent's cases that I have read and I am not sure how many there were previously, but this was an enjoyable read. The characters are developed nicely, the plot flows along at a decent pace, and there are enough twists to keep me guessing. Of course, the solution comes from left field, but was rather interesting based upon the characterization of the deceased. A definite old time mystery without much gore and [sexual content], but interesting nevertheless! Maybe I'll read some of his earlier cases.....

Of Manners and Manors
Trent makes a lasting impression in this, his first, last and only appearance. Appearing in 1913, "Trent's Last Case" is among the first classic English country murder mysteries. It's all butlers, country houses, motor-cars and dressing for dinner, sprinkled with wry observations on the manners of the wealthy, country folk, inn keepers, servants upstairs and downstairs, police inspectors, husbands, widows, American secretaries and French maids.

We begin with our man Trent arriving in town to investigate a murder. The plot is brisk, without enough clues to make it a whodunit. Trent's an established painter with a national reputation as an amateur detective and newspaper correspondent. An amateur sleuth would be incomplete without a nemesis, so we have a long-time friendly rival, Inspector Murth. The presumption of a long history and the effortlessness of the characters' interactions was drawn beautifully. All is revealed through what the characters say and do, not by long narrative descriptions. I rather wish this was only the beginning for Trent and not the end.

The birth of the Golden Age
Actually Trent's last case is his first - and his last: E. C. Bentley didn't write another full-length novel (although there is a disappointing collection of short-stories entitled 'Trent Intervenes', I think; the only edition of this I have seen was in the green and white Penguin crime classics). The importance of 'Trent's Last Case' is that it helped to shape a new paradigm in British detective stories: witty, social acute, conservative (to the point of looking down on 'trade'), and flippant bordering on frivolous. We have Bentley to thank for Allingham, Christie, Crispin, Hare, Innes, and Sayers; the alternative could have been more tedious imitators of the Great Detective, Sherlock Holmes.


World War One British Poets: Brooke, Owen, Sassoon, Rosenberg, and Others (Dover Thrift Editions)
Published in Paperback by Dover Pubns (April, 1997)
Author: Candace Ward
Average review score:

A good introduction at an inexpensive price....
Since the title is "World War One British Poets," I thought that the collection would be from poets who served in the military. Not only do the editors give you that, but they include male poets which did not serve (Kipling, Hardy, etc), but also two female poets (Alice Meynall whose son-in-law served and died, and May Wedderburn Cannan who served with the Red Cross in France). This provides a bit more background to the time period.

These poems aren't all about the horrors of war (like Owen's "Dulce et Decorum Est"), but are also about the honor and pride felt by the British soldier (Brooke's "The Soldier"). Granted, some of these poems were not meant to be recruiting devices.

Although there are some great poems in this book, the biggest plus is the price. For less than two dollars (US), you are getting a fairly good cross-section of British poets writing in WW1.

A good, inexpensive primer to WW1 poetry
The two cultural features from the First World War that have survived the test of time are its popular music and its poetry. While the music is generally remembered as peppy and cheerful, much of the poetry serves as a dark and grim counterpart. As it is, some of the greatest 20th Century poets derived their inspiration from those tragic years.

This book is an excellent and inexpensive sampler of World War One-era poetry. Most of the major battlefield writers are represented, including Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen, Robert Graves, Isaac Rosenberg, and John MacCrae. Other important writers who were inspired by the war are also included, such as Rudyard Kipling and Thomas Hardy. Two women, Alice Meynell and May Cannan are also represented. The editor included a balanced number of patriotic works and anti-war poems.

Each writer has a mini-biography, followed by a sampling of his or her works. The quantity varies from a single poem, up to 11 works. The selections are representative of the authors, and many of the best-known titles are here, including Dulce et Decorum Est and In Flanders Fields.

This primer is hardly comprehensive nor is there much critical analysis of the poems or poets. But it is not meant to be. This book combines a well-rounded selection of poetry with an extremely low price to make it an attractive introduction to World War One-era poetry. This is not the best anthology out there, but it is a perfect introduction for those who are curious about First World War poems and don't want to pay a hefty price.

Great Poems on War
I am not a poetry reader. Perhaps due to a lasting revulsion of forced readings in various literature classes during my tenure in public school, poetry used to be a real turn off. Until I picked up this slim book of poems of British World War I poets, that is. After a few pages of some of the excellent poetry in this book, the pulse quickened, the lights came on, and poetry suddenly seemed useful.

World War I (1914-1918) is pretty much a forgotten war today. Occasionally, you'll see a documentary containing grainy footage of men in strange helmets climbing out of trenches, usually moving at a freakishly quick pace due to the inadequacy of the early film process. WWI is further overshadowed by the mega-death body count of WWII. But WWI had its own unique horrors as the nations involved resorted to poison gas, mechanized warfare, and attrition strategies to kill off some 15 million people. The new methods of mechanized warfare failed to stifle the human element of war, and this is where these poems come into play. Some of the soldiers involved in the conflict were poets and writers, and they used these talents to document the battlefield horrors for the folks back home.

There are male and female writers here, and those who were there and those who stayed home. Those who served in the war do the best jobs with their poetry. Even May Wedderburn Cannan, a woman who served as a nurse at Rouen, writes better poetry about the war than such distinguished literary figures Rudyard Kipling and Thomas Hardy (both of whom write from the safety of the home fires).

Keeping in line with the subject matter, most of the poems are grim and violent. Many of the poems focus on the incongruity of nature and violent acts of war. In one stanza, birds are chirping, the sun is shining, men are singing, and all seems right with the world. The next stanza is filled with sudden mutilations, violent death, and the shriek and scream of shells and bullets. Some of the poems deal with the anguish of watching someone die or killing another human being, as Wilfred Owen writes in "The Target" about a possible meeting in the afterlife with an enemy he's killed:

"Well, if they get me, first I'll find
That boy, and tell him all my mind,
And see who felt the bullet worst,
And ask his pardon, if I durst."

A few of the poets speak in favor of the war, seeing it as a call to glory or a defense against barbarism (see Rupert Brooks, John McCrae, and Rudyard Kipling). Others rail against the rulers and the senseless attrition warfare (Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen, and Isaac Rosenberg best represent this viewpoint).

Regardless of ideological viewpoint or writing style, all of the poems have a beauty that comes from dealing with horrors beyond the comprehension of the individual. The overwhelming power of the poems should make the hardiest soul's eyes mist over with tears of frustration, agony, and profound sadness.


Electra (Dover Thrift Editions)
Published in Paperback by Dover Pubns (April, 1995)
Authors: George Young and E. A. Sophocles
Average review score:

Sophocles was no amateur
Great drama. I'm not a huge "classics" fan and yet I enjoyed this. If you're into Greek mythology and like flowery language and prose (and lots of melodrama) you will enjoy this. HINT: don't read these plays line-by-line like a poem - I find that it's more difficult to follow them that way. Read this like you would a novel.

Sophocles looks at the psychological dimensions of Electra
The murder of Clytemnestra by her son Orestes is unique in Greek mythology in that it is the one story for which we have extant versions by all three of the great tragic poets. Consequently, it is insightful to notice how each tragedy privileges different parts of the story. In "Choephoroe" ("The Libation Bearers") by Aeschylus, the middle part of his "Orestia" trilogy, Orestes is obedient to the gods in avenging the death of his father and the pivotal scene is the confrontation between mother and son when Clytemnestra begs for her life. In "Electra" by Euripides the title character has to persuade Orestes to go through with the deed and the dramatic confrontation is now between mother and daughter. In the Sophocles version of "Electra" the emphasis is on the psychological dimensions of the situation; after all, it is from this play that Freud developed his concept of the Electra complex.

Towards that end Sophocles creates a character, Chrysothemis, another sister to both Orestes and Electra. The situation is that Orestes is assumed to be dead and the issues is whether the obligation to avenge the death of Agamemnon now falls to his daughters. There is an attendant irony here in that Clytemnestra justified the murder of her husband in part because of his sacrifice of their oldest daughter Iphigenia before sailing off to the Trojan War (the curse on the House of Atreus, which involves Aegisthus on his own accord and not simply as Clytemnestra's lover, is important but clearly secondary). The creation of Chrysothemis allows for Sophocles to write a dialogue that covers both sides of the dispute. Electra argues that the daughters must assume the burden and avenge their father while Chrysothemis takes the counter position.

Sophocles does come up with several significant twists on the Aeschylus version. For one thing, Sophocles reverses the order of the two murders and has Clytemnestra slain first, which sets up an interesting scene when Aegisthus gets to revel over what he believes to be the corpse of Orestes and makes the death of the usurper the final scene of the play. This becomes part of the most significant difference between the Sophocles version and the others. Whereas Orestes emerges from the skene distraught after the murder of his mother in "Cheophoroe" and is repentant in the Euripides version of "Electra," Sophocles has Orestes calmly declaring that all in the house is well.

Electra is not as central a character to the drama as she is in the Euripides version, mainly because she does not have a functional purpose in this tragedy. Her main purpose is to lament over the death of the father and the supposed death of her brother. She does not provide Orestes with a sense of resolve because in this version he does not consult the oracles to learn whether or not he should kill his mother but rather how he can do the deed. Still, the part of Electra has enormous potential for performance. Ironically, this "Electra" is the least interesting of the three, despite the fact Freud made it infamous: by his standards the Euripides play speaks more to the desire of a daughter to see her mother dead, but since Sophocles wrote "Oedipus the King" it probably seemed fair to point to his version of this tale as well.

A tale of revenge!
this play,i.e., Electra is literally an electtifying tradgedy about revenge. One can almsot say that it is in a way a precursor to Shakespeare's Hamlet.


Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater: The House and Its History (Dover Books on Architecture)
Published in Paperback by Dover Pubns (August, 1993)
Authors: Donald Hoffmann and Edgar Kaufmann
Average review score:

complete but black and white pictures
This is an historical books about this house but all the pictures are in B & W. And it's so sad for such a masterpiece of frank Lloyd Wright.

The Awful Problems of Turning Genius into Reality
This book is one of the best I have seen for describing in detail the challenges of creating one of America's architectural landmarks. Anyone who reads this book will be reminded of Thomas Edison's comment about genius being 99 percent perspiration and 1 percent inspiration.

Fallingwater came as a commission after one of the longest dry spells of Frank Lloyd Wright's career. Despite having no work to do, no money, and few prospects, Mr. Wright dawdled with the project while trying to sell his client, Edgar Kaufmann, as many other projects as possible. Contemporary accounts suggest that Wright only began sketching something on paper when Mr. Kaufmann was about to arrive at Taliesin in Wisconsin, where Wright did his work.

Mr. Kaufman was not an easy client. He was the head of a major department store, and was used to getting his own way. Client and architect often clashed, with bent feelings on both sides. Independent "experts" got involved who also added to the controversy, mistakes, and misunderstandings. Mr. Kaufmann deserves credit, though, for sticking with Wright as the costs soared way above the original budget for this most unique house.

Interestingly, the two were brought together by Mr. Kaufmann's son who had come to study with Wright in Taliesin. The book contains a brief introduction by Edgar Kaufmann, Jr. who ultimately gave the home to a local nature conservancy.

Even without the challenges of the human relationships, Fallingwater was a most ambitious commission. In a remote part of the Allegheny Mountains in Pennsylvania, Fallingwater is sited on top of a waterfall. The potential for the water to undermine the house is enormous. Mr. Wright also wanted to keep as many of the original rocks and trees as possible. The site survey was often wrong, and the designs had to be adjusted to reflect the reality. The design also provided other unusual problems, and the first cantilever was built incorrectly due to changes made under Mr. Kaufmann's direction.

The book contains a wealth of maps, letters, summaries of interviews with those who worked on the project, drawings, plans, and photographs of the work in progress in black and white. This detail brings the challenges to life in a very real way.

The fascinating part of this book to me is that Fallingwater's final effects are the opposite of its creation. The home seems to float above the water, like a mirage. It seems to exude tranquility and peace. Yet, its every stage of movement toward becoming a reality was like a Sumo wrestling match with enormous heavyweight egos and ideas colliding at high speed and with little regard for the impact on the other fellow.

As much as I love Fallingwater, I love understanding more about how it was created even more. Anyone who wants to leave a mark of greatness behind should read this book.

After you finish thinking through the implications of Mr. Wright's vision and ways of implementing it, I suggest that you think about your own personal life and work. Where are you lacking in vision? Where are you lacking in the processes to implement worthwhile visions?

Turn your dreams into beautiful realities . . . for everyone!

History book on Fallingwater
Of all the books on Fallingwater, this is the best when you want to know about how the house came into being. I have 2 copies of the book, one that accompanies me on all my travelling, and one to keep in my library. I have at least read it 8 to 10 times, and already look forward to the next time. The black and white photography is quite good, although the book would even be better with some color takes. Hoffman did a great job researching on the subject, and reading the book, it occurs that this was no easy task to get everything in order, chronoligically.


"God's Grandeur" and Other Poems (Dover Thrift Editions)
Published in Paperback by Dover Pubns (October, 1995)
Author: Gerard Manley Hopkins
Average review score:

Not poetry for the uninitiated....
This is a good, inexpensive introduction to Gerard Manley Hopkins. There is a brief section talking about Hopkins and how much of his poetry was lost. This gives you an idea of who is giving you this poetry.

For the poetry student, the Author's Preface is essential. Here, Sprung Rhythm is explained. If you are not a serious student of poetry, this will probably be lost on you. It is not necessary to read the poetry, but to understand Hopkins' style, it is a must-read.

The poetry itself is filled with religious and classical images and allusions. If you are not well-read, like me, you may not get every thing that Hopkins is explaining to you. There are some notes in the back, but these are limited. I have no doubt that Hopkins is intelligent, but I will need to do some extra reading to fully understand all of this.

I think this is a great read. It is not a quick read by any means. This is poetry which is read again and again to get a full understanding. I would also recommend reading this aloud.

Excellent Catholic Poetry
The poetry of Fr. Gerard Manley Hopkins is some of the greatest modern Catholic poetry ever produced by an Englishman. Received into the Catholic Church by J.H. Newman and later ordained a Jesuit priest, Fr. Hopkins never made a name for himself while alive. After his death, a friend of his discovered his poetry, compiled it into a short volume, and published it. It immediately became a hit amongst the English, and eventually spread throughout the entire Catholic world.

Hopkins uses a variety of verse (from sprung to your run-of-the-mill iambic pentameter), which makes for an exciting read. Some of his poems, such as GOD'S GRANDEUR and PIED BEAUTY have even made it into a poetry appendix in the American translation of the Catholic breviary. These poems are wonderful starters for meditation, and they capture the thoughts of a man's heart as it aspires towards God. A wonderful read.

God's Grandeur... Hopkins shows it well.
Hopkins is one of those poets hidden from so many because of his subject matter, yet is considered one of the most influential Victorian poets for his use of word combinations, meter and image.

Most his work was published posthumously, as late as 1920 or so, and immediately influenced the likes of T.S. Elliot (AKA, the guy who wrote the poem "Cats" is based on and "Wasteland") and his contemporaries.

While Whitman and Wilde were exalting in themselves, and just after Emerson and Thoreau were helping us see creation, Hopkins demonstrated prowess in pointing readers to see the Creator in the creation.

Atheists won't agree with him, of course, but he says it so well, they will at least go, "Hmm... if I believed, I could see that... yeah, wow, well put." The Catholics will cheer him on, "Atta boy... yep, that guy's a Jesuit!" Not undone are the Protestants who will be so impressed in agreement they'll be happy he was a Christian.

Check out this snippet from "Pied Beauty" "Glory be to God for dappled things--/For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;/For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;/Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches wings;/Landscape plotted and pieced--fold, fallow, and plough;/And 'all tra'des, their gear and tackle and trim." Those accents are in the original.

Delicious to say aloud? You should hear the second verse. His others are as tasty.

This edition is something you want to pop in with a larger Amazon order... buy it on whimsy if you aren't sure. It is an inexpensive as book can get this side of free.

I fully recommend this book.

Anthony Trendl


LA Vita Nuova (Dover Thrift Editions)
Published in Paperback by Dover Pubns (September, 2001)
Authors: Dante Alighieri, Alighieri Alighieri, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and Dante
Average review score:

Prelude to Comedy
The "New Life" was occasioned by Dante's integration of his meeting of the divine Beatrice and the meaning she held for him in his own psyche. As such, it is an indispensable precursor to understanding his "Commedia" trilogy. This work is fascinating because through it we experience Dante's growth, from your run-of-the-mill medieval troubadour praising courtly love, to a man raised to the heights of ecstasy by way of his soul's true guide, Beatrice. A Jungian might say Beatrice was Dante's anima, projected onto a flesh-and-blood woman. But Beatrice is no malicious deciever (as Jung described); she is more akin to Goethe's meaning at the end of "Faust II"--"The eternal feminine/lures to perfection" or Joyce's tranfiguration at the sight of the maiden "gently stirring the water with her foot" in the "Portrait." Dante's work is brilliant not only because it reveals the spiritual urge lying beneath the veneer of romantic love (a collective illusion that our culture still labors under) but because Dante guides us through his own inner journey, from goo-goo-eyed adulator weeping because love 'hurts so good,' through his psychological turn within to question his own need for a woman's "pity," and on to his final integration of the feminine within, no longer dominated by his own unconscious need and able to follow Her from the depths of his own soul to the heights of glory. Mark Musa is also the translator of the highly touted Indiana Critical Edition of the "Commedia." But I found his translation occasionally stilted and unpoetic, when a few changes would have smoothed both verse and prose. The footnotes were nearly useless, their content was often obvious or uninformative. And they are very awkard to use: they are denoted in the text by an * rather than a number and keyed in the Appendix by page number. Unfortunately, only about half the pages are actually numbered, making the system cumbersome indeed. That said, I end with this: Read it and weep. And revel in its majesty.

That Which Has Never Been Written of Any Woman
La Vita Nuova (c. 1293; The New Life) is the first of two collections of verse that Dante made in his lifetime, the other being the Convivio. Each is a prosimetrum, a work composed of verse and prose. In each case the prose is a device for binding together poems composed over approximately a ten-year period. The Vita Nuova brought together Dante's poetic efforts from before 1283 to about 1292-93; the Convivio, a bulkier and more ambitious work, contains Dante's most important poetic compositions from just prior to 1294 to the time of La Divina Commedia.

The Vita Nuova, which Dante called his libello, or little book, is a remarkable work. It contains 42 brief chapters with commentaries on 25 sonnets, one ballata, and four canzoni; a fifth canzoni is left dramatically interrupted by the death of Beatrice (perhaps Bice Portinari, a woman Dante met and fell in love with in 1274 but who died in 1290). In Beatrice, Dante created one of the most celebrated women in all of literature. In keeping with the changing directions of Dante's thoughts and career, Beatrice underwent enormous changes in his hands--sanctified in the Vita Nuova, demoted in the canzoni (poems) presented again in the Convivio, only to be returned with more profound comprehension in La Divina Commedia as the woman credited with having led Dante away from the "vulgar herd" to Paradise.

The prose commentary provides the frame story, which does not emerge from the poems themselves (it is, of course, conceivable that some were actually written for occasions other than those alleged). The story, however, is simple enough and tells of Dante's first sight of Beatrice when both were nine years of age, her salutation when they were eighteen, Dante's expedients to conceal his love for her, the crisis experienced when Beatrice withholds her greeting, Dante's anguish that she is making light of him, his determination to rise above the anguish and sing only of his lady's virtues, anticipations of her death in that of a young friend, the death of Beatrice's father, and Dante's own premonitory dream, and finally, the death of Beatrice, Dante's mourning, the temptation of the sympathetic donna gentile (a young woman who temporarily replaces Beatrice), Beatrice's final triunph and apotheosis, and, in the last chapter, Dante's determination to write at some later time about Beatrice, "that which has never been written of any woman."

Yet, with all of this apparently autobiographical purpose, the Vita Nuova is strangely impersonal. The circumstances it sets down are markedly devoid of any historical facts or descriptive detail (thus making it pointless to engage in debate as to the exact historical identity of Beatrice). The language of the commentary also adheres to a high level of generality. Names are rarely used...Cavalcanti is referred to three times as Dante's "best friend," Dante's sister is referred to as "she who was joined to me by the closest proximity of blood." On the one hand, Dante suggests the most significant stages of emotional experience, but on the other, he seem to distance his descriptions from strong emotional reactions. The larger structure in which Dante arranged poems written over a ten-year period and the generality of his poetic language are indications of his early and abiding ambition to go beyond the practices of the local poets.

The Italian of the Vita Nuova is Dante's own gorgeous Tuscan dialect, a limpid, ethereal and luminous Italian that seems as though it could have been written yesterday. In chapter XXX of the Vita Nuova, Dante states that it was through Cavalcanti that he wrote his first book in Italian rather than in Latin. In fact, Dante dedicated the Vita Nuova to Cavalcanti--to his best friend (primo amico).

Anyone who can, should definitely read this beautiful book in its original Italian, but those who cannot can still enjoy the beauty of Dante in a good translation. The book isn't as difficult or intimidating as La Divina Commedia and it makes a beautiful introduction to those who love Dante but just want to enjoy a little less of him in the beginning.

mandatory for the Dante aficionado
It's hard not to assign 5 stars to this early work of the author of the Divine Comedy. In any serious Dante course, a professor will usually pick the Vita Nuovo as an introduction to Dante's work. The work is not at all intimidating -- rather, it's quite accessible to the modern reader. Dante, in his youth, writes a series of love tributes to Beatrice, his ultimate guide in the Divine Comedy. Anyone who is contemplating reading the Divine Comedy should start here and read this first as mandatory background to the Commedia. Dante rules!


Life of Olaudah Equiano, of Gustavus Vassa, the African (Dover Thrift Editions)
Published in Paperback by Dover Pubns (April, 1999)
Authors: Olaudah Equaino, Olaudah Equiano, and Olaudiah Equiano
Average review score:

An early English novel, with a twist.
This book has less to do with slavery and more to do with the quest for middle-class status in England. For comparison, one should also read "ROBINSON CRUSOE" by Daniel Defoe and "PAMELA" by Samuel Richardson.

allows for personal reflection....
It is hard to rate a book like this...

You must read it if you're even considering it and once you've read it, you should pass it on to someone else. Life dishes us a lot. Life dishes out some people more hardship than others and sometimes we get the opportunity to give ourselves and those we love a chance at a better life. Not only does this book tell a wonderful story of a man who found strength most of us never realize we possess, but in doing so - has proven the power of language, written and spoken. The world can be full of possobilities in even the most impossible situations - to say nothing of the horror we inflict upon each other...but that's another story.

British Slavery???
In fact, there was never any african slavery inside Britain itself. i.e. England, Scotland and Wales. But this book highlights how the British went to the Caribbean islands like Jamaica and Barbados; claimed it for themselves; and from there imported slaves from Africa to grow sugar cane. Equiano was one such slave who worked hard to buy back his freedom. He eventually walked the streets of London as a free man, but he became a sailor who was once again subjected to slavery once he left England - even as he travelled and worked on his ship - much to his disgust. Slavery existed in the British Empire but was not tolerated at any time within Britain itself. For that you'd have to study the Roman rule of Britain before the British Empire was established.


Paul's Case and Other Stories (Dover Thrift Editions)
Published in Paperback by Dover Pubns (May, 1996)
Author: Willa Cather
Average review score:

This interpretation of a young adolescents life
This short story combines a extremely classical point of view about a mental unstable boy named Paul. It is a problomatic story. The book appears boring but becomes interesting once you read it.

Five compelling tales by Cather
Willa Cather has had an enduring appeal as a novelist, but "Paul's Case and Other Stories" shows that she was also skilled in the short story genre. The pieces in this book (I refer to the Dover Thrift Edition), all originally published between 1892 and 1920, are as follows: "Lou, the Prophet," "Eric Hermannson's Soul," "The Enchanted Bluff," "Paul's Case," and "A Wagner Matinee."

These stories take us to Nebraska farm country as well as to Pittsburgh, Boston, and New York City. Cather writes of Danish and Norwegian immigrants, religion, "high" culture, regret, loss, and regional legend.

The title story is a particularly fascinating character study of a boy who doesn't fit into society--you might think of him as sort of a literary ancestor of J.D. Salinger's Holden Caulfield. Throughout the collection Cather demonstrates a telling eye for visual detail and a keen sense of human tragedy.

Paul's "Case"
I read Paul's Case in my sophomore language class this year and ended up writing a paper on it. I love this story and can relate to Paul. Paul is jaded by society, although he posseses the insight to see beauty others can not. He is misunderstood in his affection for the arts, and therefore stereotyped as having a problem. This is a very worthwhile story for any person who wants a thought-provoking look at society.


Totem and Taboo: Resemblances Between the Psychic Lives of Savages and Neurotics (Dover Thrift Editions)
Published in Paperback by Dover Pubns (September, 1998)
Authors: Sigmund Freud and Sigmund Frued
Average review score:

The unconscious rides again!
And this time trough those primitive manifestations performed by that very primitive peoples like aborigenes from Australia, North and South America indians and many others discovered by colonization european, manifestation that we are used to call by Totem and Taboo. This is the standard Freud's view on the subject and to understand this book is a necessary step to proceed to other important Freud's work like Moses and Monotheism, The Future of an Ilusion and many others, where he approaches with reluctance the idea of religion as an offspring of early animism.

The prior standard way of seeing these types of primitive manifestation was to see them trough the amount of dread the primitive men have against the manifestation of some praeternatural agency, to use a term used by Mr.Thorstein Veblen, a contemporary of Freud, in his magnificent book on the leisure class (The Theory of the Leisure Class). It is worthy to note that nobody can be sure on the origins of this type of tradition and that adds substance to Mr.Freud's arguments.

Sigmund Freud goes a step further to the classical view and says that totemism and taboo as animism are the manifestation of something not outside ourselves but rather inside human minds of the primitive people, where the unconscious played a good part to the forming of this kind of culture manifestation and where there is an intricate and unconscious and almost mathematical calculation in order to attribute to the priest-king, who typifies the carrier of this tradition, both the pleasures and the burden of the function. In Freud's view, both totem and taboo are traditions that have to find their origim in the unconscious of that primitive folks and not in the concurrence of fear to the dead, following the tradition of his many other books on the latent manifestations of the unconscious. The ritual and actual killing of the father by the Horde or Band of Brothers, who are in search of vital space for their development, is the real reason behind all that happens afterwards and, following Freud's hypotheses, are the groundwork of modern and ancient religion.

The concepts here explained will be fundamental to the development of the hypotheses developed latter in Moses and Monotheism.

A perfect exemplar of Freud's central arguments
Totem and Taboo, along with _The Future of an Illusion_, should be necessary reading for any serious student of social science. Of course, there are massive holes in Freud's arguments (such as his tendancy to make sweeping generalizations about other cultures from his armchair in Europe), but people who disagree with him for moral and ethical reasons tend to amplify those holes and simply ridicule Freud the man instead of intelligently approaching his arguments.
The fact is, his suppositions about parental relations (as they relate to "totem" cultures), about religion, and about sexuality are extremely relevant and have proven, over the years, to possess an extraordinary predictive power. Even if one disagrees with this literature, one should read it and know exactly what they disagree with.

Sorry Daddy, I have to cut you off
Parricide, guilt, cannibalism--what's not to love?


Treasury of Ironwork Designs: 469 Examples from Historical Sources (Dover Pictorial Archive Series)
Published in Paperback by Dover Pubns (June, 1992)
Author: Carol Belanger Grafton
Average review score:

Very interesting reference
I enjoyed this very much. I wish there could have been more photographs, but that would have been a different book. This is almost exclusively line drawings.

Very helpful and informative. Warning: trying to duplicate these in decorative metal today is *expensive*. Architectural salvage might be more affordable than starting from scratch.

Beautiful Work
I have a different use for this book than perhaps the typical buyer. I bought it because I love adapting these iron designs into borders or patterns for my pen and ink drawings and paintings. Each page was such a delight when I discovered this book I bought it immediately. You need not use it as a home furnishings book. It works just as well as an inspiring art book.

Great for Designers
I've worked in the Ornamental Iron business for 3 years as a designer and business manager. I use this book more than any other for generating some fresh, usually more elaborate design ideas. There are a number of styles represented in the many drawings. If you are interested in seeing unique and interesting wrought iron designs you will not be disappointed.


Related Vacation Book Subjects: Delaware
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