A CONCORDANCE TO THE POEMS OF EMILY DICKINSON. Edited by S. P. Rosenbaum. 899 pp. Ithaca and London : Cornell University Press, 1978 (1964) and Reprinted. ISBN 0-8014-0362-6 (hbk.)

The present book is a computer-generated Concordance, not to every word in Emily Dickinson's poems - common words such as "a," "at," "both," "they", "when," "which," etc., - have of course been omitted, but to every significant word.

As a computer generated book it suffers from certain weaknesses inherent in this type of project, but for most users these will probably be only of academic interest. In use this Concordance works very well indeed, and I have always been able to quickly locate whatever I was looking for.

Its most obvious use is to locate 'lost' poems, and with 1,775 poems to worry about, everyone must have had the experience of almost going nuts trying to locate the poem in which a remembered word or phrase or line occurred. But with the Rosenbaum you can kiss all such tortures Goodbye.

Its second use is of course as a research tool. How many times, for example, does Emily Dickinson use the word "fish"? The Christian camp are very eager to claim ED for their ranks, and we know that the fish is a very important Christian symbol, and that fish, fishing, and fishermen feature prominently in the New Testament. We also know that ED's contemporaries, and presumably ED herself, ate fish, and that fishing was and is considered a 'sport.'

This is the sort of question that can occur in the course of one's reading and thinking and writing about Dickinson, and is one that Rosenbaum can quickly answer. His answer amazed me, as it may you. His anwer is 1. According to him, the word "fish" occurs only once in ED's poems, in the phrase "my pantry has a fish" from poem 1749 "The waters chased him as..."

Mine are the simple pleasures of the enthusiast. Dickinson scholars will no doubt find other and more sophisticated uses for the Rosenbaum, and some may even have found things in it to quibble about. But so far as I'm concerned it's an invaluable tool, and one that any student of ED would enjoy using and find extremely useful.

My only complaint is that (in my copy) the print on many pages is very faint. Presumably somebody forgot to ink the rollers, and the result has been to make some pages difficult to read, or to scan easily, though others are black and clear enough.

The book is standard 8vo in size (6.25 by 9.5 inches), bound in full strong cloth, stitched, and not particularly well-printed on excellent strong paper, and has clearly been designed for the sort of heavy and long-term use it will probably get.

The kicker, of course, is the price. So if you weren't born with a silver spoon in your mouth, maybe you could add the Rosenbaum to your Wish List and keep your fingers crossed. Or else rob a bank. Because I know you'd love it.

When an aging German banker is found, his body decapitated, hands severed, Lord Francis Powerscourt is called into action. Powerhouse has developed a reputation as an investigator but this case is bigger than anything he has tackled. A vast conspiracy to destroy the British Empire threatens England's place in the world. Germans and Irish republicans combine to threaten Queen Victoria--and the institutions that British power rests upon. Before his investigation is complete, Powerscourt will be shot at several times, develop interest in early arson research, and put his own wife at risk.

Author David Dickinson draws a convincing picture of Britain at the end of the 19th century. Victoria nears the end of her long reign and the entire Empire prepares to celebrate her jubilee. Yet already, Germany (still allied with Britain at this time) sees its place as the dominant nation of the world and views Britain as its primary threat.

Powerscourt makes a sympathetic protagonist. He is clever enough to make a difference, willing to throw himself into the investigation, and very much in love with his wife and family. Scenes where Powerscourt plays cricket or visits his tutor add depth to this interesting character. His curiosity about arson plays into the story and also shows the type of talent that makes Powerscourt an effective investigator.

Dickinson introduces enough subplots to keep up reader interest. Even minor characters such as Dominick Knox of the Irish Office tantilize the reader interest. Unlike GOOD NIGHT SWEET PRINCE, the earlier novel in this series, DEATH AND THE JUBILEE is conservative rather than questioning of authority. Both novels are definitely worth the read.

The title of this remarkable 385-page book might account for its going out of print. It's not about how to develop system with high quality - instead it's a complete blueprint for developing an in-house system for managing quality. This includes issue and metrics management and project planning and control functions. Literally, the author has provided complete plans for a software project and quality management system that would be a welcome addition to any organization with a well-defined SQA function or is operating at a capability level defined by SPICE (Software Process Improvement Capability dEtermination), CMM (Capability Maturity Model), or even a procedures-driven standard such as ISO 9000-3.

Chapter 1 gives a complete preliminary plan in the form of dataflow diagrams for the system. This provides a high-level view of the system. Chapter 2, over 70 pages, is the data dictionary. It's well thought-out and takes you one level of abstraction lower in the design. It also serves as the data architecture and can be used to derive a DDL (data definition language) SQL script. Chapter 3, roughly 180 pages, is the heart of not only the system, but how to employ it. This chapter contains process descriptions for major milestones (project initiation, preliminary analysis and design, detailed analysis and design, build and install).

The seven appendices cover overview of structured tools and techniques (quaint by today's standards), installing a methodology (as applicable today as when this was written in 1988!), model transformation case study (excellent reading), common questions and answers, rules for reviews (good material), survey/probe projection technique (interesting, but not profound) and business event partitioning (still valid today).

Although few of us will probably build the system provided in the book, the design itself and the copious details provided are valuable for specification and design of software quality management systems, and can also be used to develop a checklist of features when comparing commercial off-the-shelf systems. More important, the completeness of the author's design makes it a worthwhile study for determining the "moving parts" of a software quality management system.

In my opinion this book was ahead of its time and would be a hot seller into organizations and among practitioners who are grappling with how to obtain tools and systems to support quality initiatives. If you are in that audience this book is worth tracking down.

The first book in The Changes Trilogy, The Devil's Children starts Margret and Jonathan's quest through a 'changed' England in which everyone, except a chosen few, is deathly and irrationally afraid of technology. Margret is one of the few who have noticed the changes and she must run or be executed as a witch. Her quest: to find out what went wrong, and a possible remedy

This book gives wonderful insight into the lives of so many from long ago. It is very well written with great illustrations. It gives a remarkable account of the struggles as well as the everyday life of an outstanding man, who gave inspiration to so many, especially his family.

Just as a prism breaks up light into a band of colors - red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet - and their infinite gradations, so do Emily Dickinson's poems become, as it were, a prism which captures the white light of reality, a reality which as it flows through the prism of her poem explodes into a multiplicity of meanings.

It is the rich suggestiveness of her poems, a suggestiveness which generates an incredible range of meanings, that prevents us from ever being able to say (to continue the metaphor) that a given poem is 'about red' or 'about blue,' because her poems, as US critic Robert Weisbuch has observed, are in fact about everything. This is what makes her so unique, and this is why she appeals to every kind of reader, and even to children.

The present book, which has been edited by Brenda Hillman, gives us accurate texts of the poems in a 150-page selection taken from the authoritative variorum edition of Thomas H. Johnson, the well-known Dickinson scholar who worked many years to establish the correct texts.

The book is beautifully printed in two-colors on excellent paper, and in a tiny format which is perfect for the pocket. It would in fact make a very nice gift. You'd be making a gift of poetry which is one of the wonders of the world.

Though I was disappointed to find that some of my interpretations of her poems had not been quite on the mark, I still enjoyed this book quite a bit. It helps the reader understand Dickinson's background, her unusual usage of words, and her poems themselves. I think that any lover of Dickinson's poems will find something interesting in this book.

My husband and I have been Dickinson fans for most of our lives, so we've read many biographies. This one, by far, is a favorite because of the intimacy and humanity it brings out. Emily Dickinson is somewhat of an enigma, but we get the feeling from this version of her life of the woman she was, in the time that she lived. A particular passage dealt with the death of her beloved nephew, Gilbert. She wrote of his "sweet velocity", and broke our hearts. This is a book that I first borrowed from a library, but which I later searched out through book dealers, to possess it for my own. I value it over all others on the subject.

Just as a prism breaks up light into a band of colors - red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet - and their infinite gradations, so do Emily Dickinson's poems become, as it were, a prism which captures the white light of reality, a reality which as it flows through the prism of her poem explodes into a multiplicity of meanings.

It is the rich suggestiveness of her poems, a suggestiveness which generates an incredible range of meanings, that prevents us from ever being able to say (to continue the metaphor) that a given poem is 'about red' or 'about blue,' because her poems, as US critic Robert Weisbuch has observed, are in fact about _everything_. This is what makes her so unique, and this is why she appeals to every kind of reader (or certainly to open-minded ones) and even to children.

Emily Dickinson's poetry is one of the wonders of the world.

"Emily Dickinson: American Poet," with text by Carol Greene and illustrations by Steven Dobson, is a biography of the great 19th century American poet. Directed towards younger readers, this book tells Emily's story with simple language and plentiful visual aids.

Steven Dobson's evocative full-color illustrations are complemented by black-and-white reproductions of photographs, paintings, and other visual records from Emily's era. We get to see Emily at various stages of her life, and we also see her family, her friends, and the home she lived in. Greene's text takes us from Emily's childhood to the end of her life. Greene pays particular attention to Emily's personal relationships, and includes lines from some of her best-known poems.

This book is a fine introduction to Emily Dickinson's world and to her art. If your child enjoys this book, be sure to share some of Emily's poems with him or her.