If you happen to have a copy of the out of print book LIGHT ON C.S. LEWIS, you have basically all the comments that Lawlor has to give about his memories of the man. As for the commentary Lawlor gives on Lewis's books, I found it uneven. Unlike the lucid Lewis, Lawlor's sentences are often murky and their meanings difficult to understand. His commentaries on Lewis's books didn't really enlighten anything. I have been an avid reader of Lewis for a long time, and this is the first time I bought a book about Lewis in which I returned to the bookstore for a refund when I was finished.

According to Chaudhari, with all its positive evils, the British Empire was the best government India has ever had in its history. In this biography of the its founder, Robert Clive, Chaudhari sees something like the Nietzschean superman, acting beyond good and evil. If this was a work of fiction, the central character would be fascinating - a manic depressive adventurer who thoroughly enjoyed the squalid intrigue and violence of Indian politics, tried and failed on the strength of his achievements in India to carve a place for himself in the strictly heirarchical British society of his time, and when forced into inactive retirement, committed suicide in a fit of depression. Reality however belies this romantic myth. The squalid beginnings of the British Empire tarnished its entire history . Clive's successors were forced to go forward with his and his deputy Hastings' conquests, all of them unauthorised by the mother state. Their triumphs led to misery and economic distress of the worst description in Bengal, and when at the end of it, a semblance of order was imposed on the conquered territories, the burden of governance was borne only with the accompaniment of oppression and violence on a huge scale. All this is not mentioned by Chaudhari whose romantic view of the Empires founder blurs the distinction between true history and myth.

I bought this book and was excited about being able to take it right home and play along to the Beatles recordings on my guitar. I opened up to "I Saw Her Standing There" and put on my Please Please Me CD and to my surprise and dismay the book was in a different musical key than the CD, way off! I'm assuming they did that to make the songs easier to play on piano, but it wasn't what I wanted. Disappointed I took the book back and then ordered The Complete Beatles Scores from Amazon. I've been much happier with that book.

The semi-serious comic book fan will already be familiar with much of what is disussed here, especially if they follow the comic-related press. The casual comic reader will find little to put the transition of comics from mere heroic fare into, for a while, gloomy anti-heroism. The "context" of this transition, namely that society itself had become increasingly dark and depressing and violent and that comic literature reflects society, is barely touched upon. The interviews in the back are interesting, however and the book DOES serve as a very basic primer for super-heroics.

This book of essays by James was disappointing. Compared to his earlier autobiographical works such as "Unreliable Memoirs" it is tedious and inclined to wallow in self importance.

Many of the book's articles were taken from New Yorker magazine and, perhaps it goes without saying, that they are long and rambling. To spend half an hour reading some dreary set of opinions on an esoteric film director is not fun. I often found myself flicking through the pages to the next article in the hope that it would be more enticing.

However, two sections were genuinely interesting. His articles on Princess Diana are adulatory in the extreme but quite readable. Unfortunately, I cannot lose my view that she was granted importance well beyond her abilities. Also, his final section on the Sydney Olympics show real insight to the events of September 2000. To have been in Sydney at that time was to witness something quite magical and James does succeed in passing some of the magic to the reader.

Overall, I cannot recommend this book to the reader. Two sections of interest fail to overcome the remainder of the book and its tediousness.

If you like John LeCarre, you'll love this. The British seem to turn out these spy novels with too many characters to keep track of, all muddled up in incomprehensible comings, goings, and way too much gawd-awful talk. I read for pleasure and it is just too much work to try and understand what the hell is going on, who said what and why, etc. These Brit spy novels also have the unhappy habit of no-emphasis on conversations and events, thus a murder equates with buttering a piece of bread as far as the text is concerned. Not for me, thank you.

This is a collection of several long essays on specialized investigations into English literature. The two essays on Oxford's English syllabus were interesting for the light they shed on the appropriate approach to an undergraduate course of studies. This is not a book of essays for the general reader, and probably the only people who should consider buying it are English literature enthusiasts.

Clive Coates is a gifted writer, who has extensive knowledge and experience as a wine critic. Mr. Coates attempts to cover all the major wine growing regions of France: Bordeaux, Burgundy, Loire Valley, Rhone River Valley, Alsace, Provence and Languedoc. He writes about lesser known appellations and informs the reader about the better growers in each appellation.

This book, "The Wines of France," falls well short of the other scholarly writings of Mr. Coates, e.g., "Cote D'Or, A Celebration of the Great Wines of Burgundy," or "Grand Vins, The Finest Chateaux of Bordeaux and Their Wine." This recent effort could be well suited for those who are interested in a broad overview of French wines. However, one should not expect the same level of schorlarly achievement as reflected in his prior works.

While Badley raises a few interesting points, she takes the literature far too seriously and will lose many readers because of her writing style, which is too heavy with academia. She also seems to have a feminist axe to grind, as she spends a great deal of space writing about feminist elements in the authors' work.

I would recommend looking for this at the library if you feel you must read it. There's not enough here to merit the cover price.

It remains an intriguing fact: the trip of Rudolf Hess to England. There were no indications that he was mad (at least not madder than the other nazi leaders) and all of a sudden he decides to fly to England to start the peace negotiations...

The authors write a very stout book to investigate what happened or what could have happened. And that is my major problem with the book: on the basis of a number of very flimsy clues they draw far-reaching conclusions which they then present as the only possible truth in the rest of the book. They then use those conclusions as the basis for even more far-fetched conclusions etc.

I also think that there is more to the flight of Hess than the ravings of a lunatic, but this book is a very easy way to come with a fantastic story. And the major conclusion (the person in Spandau prison was a double of the real Rudolf Hess who died in WW 2) is not supported by the evidence presented in this book.