This Re/Search volume includes a comprehensive bibliography and numerous interviews with Ballard, most done during the 80's. I was amazed to see an 80's interview with ballard by Grahme Ravell, who has come into fame in his own right since then. Re/Search Ballard also has numerous excerpts as well as The Atrocity Exibition in full. The volume is filled with intriguing Ballard quotes, photos and other Ballard miscellany that would surely be difficult or impossible to find anywhere else. Well packaged, informative and useful. For the Ballard fan, not the new reader.

This book is an amazing introduction to the works of a man with great thoughts. The introductory interview contains almost too much information and opinions; it is hard to wrap your mind around. But for those of you up to the challenge, it is great reading. Ballard's fiction and non-fiction excerpts are all enticing and the biography is very interesting, giving justice to the very exciting life Ballard has lived. An excellent read for anyone interested in finding a new author, or for those who simply want to read more of Ballard's works.

If you are looking for a quick overview of the history of submarines and submarine disasters, "Lost Subs" provides several hours of interesting reading.

The book describes the historical development of the submarine, from Bushnell's Turtle and Fulton's Nautilus, through the Hunley, the Holland, and the U-boats of the two World Wars, and on to the nuclear boats of the Cold War. The text is filled with photographs of submarine wreckage and rescue efforts, dramatic paintings of submarines at sea, and diagrams showing how sumarines work. Especially interesting is a detailed recreation of the CSS Hunley's pyrrhic victory against the hapless USS Housatonic during the American Civil War, together with some interesting speculation about why the Hunley sank after its successful attack.

The book's main weakness is that it surveys a big field that has been thoroughly covered in other works. If you enjoy digging into the details, this book may disappoint you. But if you like your maritime narratives to be accompanied by dramatic and often moving photographs and paintings, "Lost Subs" will be a very enjoyable adventure.

If you would like to explore the subject in more detail, try:
Peter Hutchhausen, "Hostile Waters" (a near catstrophe when a Soviet boomer experiences a missile tube failure);
Brayton Harris "The Navy Times Book of Submarines: A Political, Social and Military History" (everything you always wanted to know about the history of submarines, from the 1620s on)
Edwin Gray, "Few Survived: A History of Submarine Disasters" (the title says it all)
John Craven, "The Silent War: The Cold War Battle Beneath the Sea"
Sontag & Drew, "Blind Man's Bluff: The Untold Story of American Submarine Espionage" (hard to put down)
Hicks & Kropf, "Raising the Hunley: The Remarkable History and Recovery of the Lost Confederate Submarine"

From the Civil War submarine Hunley through the 2000 sinking of the Russian submarine Kursk, this 176-page medium format book has eight chapters about the loss and subsequent discovery or recovery of several famous American, Russian German, Japanese, British, Australian and Israeli submarines. By far the best feature of the book is the large quantity of well-reproduced paintings and photographs. There are terrific paintings depicting nighttime images of the CSS Hunley stalking the USS Housatonic in Charleston Harbor in 1864 and dramatic paintings of German U-Boats stalking their prey in the stormy WWI-WWII Atlantic. The most unique and haunting images are underwater photographs of sea growth-encrusted submarines taken on research and archeological expeditions around the world. There is a small bibliography, list of relevant websites and source for each reproduced painting or photo.

I recommend this book. While not providing full details on any of these famous incidents (virtually all the submarines are the topic of at least one full book and numerous articles) this book is a good overview for anyone interested in naval and submarine history. It makes a photographic/painting supplement for the more demanding submarine researcher or buff.

Maybe even a 4.5. Not as comprehensive as "The Best Short Stories of...", but it's a good intro to Ballard's work. It gives a first-time reader a good idea of what to expect. Ballard writes some top-notch stories (The Drowned Giant, Bilennium, Deep End - all included here), but in his collections, they always seem to get diluted by the not-so-greats. Still, the majority of the stories in this book are quite good; more forward-thinking and original than anything that came out of that period. I think the best quality of his stories is that they deal with societal concerns, and not just sci-fi. Quite an enjoyable book.

This collection of beautifully strange stories contains some of Ballard's most accessible work. His unique style and surreal imagination are displayed well in, The Terminal Beach, End Game, and The Time Tombs. Though he casts a long shadow, there's really no one else out there like Ballard. I highly recommend this book.

In this, the first I believe, collection of J. G. Ballard's non-fiction writings, Ballard is again writing about his favorite themes and obsessions. Dali, Burroughs and Mae West all appear. This time, however, he is writing about them in reality, for book reviews and the like, not as characters and archetypes in a hallucinatory fictional landscape. Despite our knowledge that we a reading an alleged non-fiction collection, the overwhelming presence of the Ballard worldview remains and makes one wonder if perhaps the non-fiction of reality and the imagination of Ballard are more closely linked that we would like to admit. Ballard's prose and style shine through illuminating the seemingly mundane subject matter. Also the careful categorization of the essays/reviews furthers the reader's impression that this is indeed a Ballard collection. The chapter headings of Film, Lives, The Visual World, etc. and titles such as "Hitman for the Apocalypse" adorning the review of a book on Burroughs bring to mind the headers and chronology of The Atrocity Exhibition. This in not necessarily a book for Ballard beginners. Another point of entry would better initiate a reader new to Ballard. But if you are familiar with his work and his common themes and elements, it is fascinating to watch his skill as a writer and constructer as he creates vehicles of ideological validation from Sunday supplement subjects.

Ballard describes this collection of published essays and reviews as a continuation of his fiction "by surreptitious means". Those accustomed to Ballard's imaginative gifts will be pleased to discover them no less diminished in describing the extravagances and banalities of our fin du monde era. Above all, Ballard's distinctive, fluid flashes mark this book. On Max Ernst's "The Eye of Silence": "This spinal landscape with its frenzied rocks towering into the air above the slent swamp, has attained an organic life more real than that of the solitary nymph sitting in the foreground. These rocks have the luminosity of organs freshly exposed to the light. The real landscapes of the world are seen for what they are--palaces of flesh and bone that are the living facades enclosing our own subliminal consciousness." Ballard's words and worldview are always intelligent, if not always welcome. For those who can keep up, this book offers marvelous vistas.

Margaret Lowman writes candidly about her life... as though we were the closest of friends. I expected her to write about her research, the difficulties of climbing into the rainforest canopies, and her globe trotting. And she did. She also writes of the professional challenges, cultural clashes, and personal problems she encounters as a woman in field biology, and that makes this book something quite special.

ON THE PERSONAL SIDE: Lowman married an Australian, had two children and lived in the outback, while conducting research on the Australian rain forests. On the personal side, she was expected to be a housewife, and mother. Her new Australian husband, and in-laws, did not understand her inner drive to spend time in her work. While clearly her new family did not support her in her work, Lowman persisted and achieved. She also made a decision to accept a teaching position at Williams College back in the US. She packed up the boys, and headed for home. She exchanged her marriage, and the boy's father, for a surprisingly supportive scientific community and her own supportive parents. Lowman tells of her personal life with candor, but without bitterness. While no one could accuse her of having an ordinary life, Lowman's book is also an every woman's story in that she chronicles the kind of day-to-day struggle of professional/career women faced (particularly in the 1970's and 1980's) in balancing career and family.

ON THE PROFESSIONAL SIDE: To help understand the interdependence of the rainforests Lowman mostly studies the small things... leaves, and the insects that eat them. It sounds easier than it is. Most of the leaves to be studied are high up in the canopy of the rain forests. Early in her career, she gains access using ropes and harnesses, and even a cherry picker when she was pregnant; later she has the luxury of using a construction crane, a dirigible, and even a walkway. Lowman loves the forests, and her work. (Her book contains an illustration of her favorite tree, ficus watkinsiana.)

Lowman ends the book telling us that it takes about the "same amount of energy to complain as it does to explain-but the results are incredibly different." Her book explains a great deal. I highly recommend it.

This unique book is about Margaret Lowman's life as a self-described field biologist who studies the mysteries of forest canopies, one of the last biotic frontiers on Earth. In Life in the Treetops, Lowman is a pioneer canopy scientist she describes the little known worlds of the treetops, their inhabitants, flowers and fruits, growth and mortality, patterns of diversity, and plant and animal interactions. Lowman writes about how, in order with the scientific hypothesis she was focusing on, a different canopy access technique was used. She's particularly good at exposing the life of a field biologist from a woman's perspective, what it was like to cope: with the demands of a challenging career; with marriage to an Australian sheep farmer; with housewifery; with motherhood to two young sons; with conflicting cultural differences about gender roles; and with divorce and single parenthood. Lowman's descriptions of her various arboreal ecological projects were fascinating. She emphasized the pleasures and intellectual rewards of studying the natural world without ignoring the projected vicissitudes of researching in wilderness settings. In the end Lowman is the director of research and conservation at the Marie Selby Botanical Gardens in Sarasota, Florida. This is an inspiring story for everyone, not just for women or those interested in careers in science, but for everyone.

As a young woman who hopes with all her heart and works with all of her passion to be a scientist one day, I recommend this novel without a doubt. Dr. Lowman attacks every issue she faces head on, candidly describing her emotion and scientific endeavors as if the reader is a personal friend. As a female, I myself can relate to her described frustration of being a woman in a primarily male field. Even my closest male friends look at me with doubt and treat my five year love affair (ongoing, of course) with science as a joke simply because I am female (as the butt of their jokes imply). It's wondorous to read of other accounts involving similar emotion. On a scientific note, Dr. Lowman makes no adjustments for fear of the reader who does not care for biology; she writes about science just as she writes about emotion. For that, I urge parents to prod their children to read this memoir, adults to read, and all others to digest.

I was extremely excited to look up "Horror" here & find not some Koontz or Saul or Rice travesty recommended by readers, but ATROCITY EXHIBITON. A very difficult work. Some experimental, avant-garde stuff just irritates me, but the reason I kept at Ballard was because I believed him. I had to crack it open. Break it. Made me bleed a little. Your mind starts to fill in narrative gaps in the disjointed structure that are more disturbing than anything Ballard could come up with. The cool, clinical, obsessive prose and particularly the idead of "a technology of pornography" I found especially enticing. Be on the lookout for his great short "The Terminal Beach"--Traven/Travis appears there too. I don't want every book to be like this, but in a world of Anne Tylers and Mary Higgins Clarks and even (god forbid I take his name in vain!) Charles Frazier it's good to know this stuff is being read and appreciated. My friends think I'm crazy and pretentious for liking it--but I really do!

Ballard has a knack for making his insane ideas and conceptsmake perfect sense. This is a perfect example of that. This book isfilled with breathstealing bizarre concepts. You can really get to thinking about them. Many ideas in this angered some. Liz Taylor, Jackie O, and especially Ronald Reagan are all hit hard by Ballard's vicious insight (I don't think Ballard trying to be insulting. He was just being... weird). It's hard to tell exactly what this book is. Is it about the Atrocity Exhibition or is it the Atrocity Exhibition? The letters found at the bottom of random pages point to the latter. Ballard throws away everything anything ever taught about writing, including plot and continuity so don't try to find any, and sets out to create pure art out of words. Does he succeed? Yes.

Interest in Ballard's work is sure to be stirred by the controversial film of his novel, "Crash." "The Atrocity Exhibition" shares many of the same characters and themes. In fact, of the two works, "Atrocity Exhibition" is the better: it pushes the artistic conventions of fiction to the limits to explore the degenerating mental landscape of the protagonist. Against a nightmarish postmodern background of unethical psychological experiments gone awry and obsession with media icons, even questions of simple identity become impossible to unravel. Travis/Travers/Traven/Talbot is pushed to madness and perhaps even murder - one character seems to die in four seperate scenes! - by his co-workers, fellow psychiatrists at a teaching hospital. Modern architecture becomes confused with perverted sexuality as the protagonist projects his fantasies of Elizabeth Taylor onto high rise apartment buildings. This edition is a gem. It contains four additional Ballard stories, a preface by William S. Burroughs, and deranged illustrations by Phoebe Gloeckner who juxtaposes her world- renowned medical illustrations with images of disturbing eroticism and mechanization. Provocative, exhilarating and terrifying, Ballard sucks the reader into the psychosis of his characters. This work is Ballard's literary masterpiece. After reading it, the world seems a much scarier place.

This book is where you should start off to understand Ballard's later fiction (CRASH, ATROCITY EXHIBITION, HIGH RISE, or anything after the early 1970's). This novella reveals Ballards signature pessimism and facination for the technological landscape: its inherent role in the systematization and categorizing of human behaviour. In RUNNING WILD, Ballard shows the devastating effect when our primal urges rears its ugly head after buried for too long. The novella is set in a self-contained living complex (much like HIGH RISE) where tragedy is struck. Like Freud, Ballard accepts the tragic, barbaric reality of humankind and continually asserts (which he does in his latest, COCAINE NIGHTS) that the primal nature of man will subvert, or altogether revolt against any "civilized" attempt to change it. This novel is depressing and revealing. Read it. It won't take long to finish it and it also won't be long before you become a Ballard fanatic.

Although this book is short, it still has a great story that's haunting and very disturbing. Just from what's on the back you get an idea about what happens, yet as Ballard explains it, it doesn't matter WHAT happened it matters WHY it happened. This book also acts as a chilling prophecy of how western society will become. I read this after I read "Crash", by Ballard, but both books are very different and it's hard to believe that they're both by the same author. It won't take long to read, but it'll be something you'll remember.

Just as he was able to foreshadow the Regan presidency in the late 60s, Ballard's finger on the cosmic pulse brings us "Running Wild." Although a British writer, much of what Ballard synthesizes seems to flourish more lividly in the US. This story of teens seemingly smothered with caring who rebel against the planned community they live in is yet another eerie prediction of the present, set in Britian in the story, yet it seems to be actually happening right now in the US. A cool, who-and-how-dunnit, I read this book at a quick pace, following the Scotland Yard investigator as he builds his unorthodox theories of what happened. More accessible that some of his global disaster novels, this is a good book for those new to Ballard, and a great addition to the collection for fans.

In this book the author stressed the importance of ¡§building trust, accentuating the positive, and redirecting negative behavior¡¨ in order to speech up the effectiveness at work and at home or to improve our private life.

In fact, the truth, which both whales and people perform better when you accentuate the positive, is not a new finding. Animals such as birds, dogs and monkeys also perform better when you accentuate the positive.

But the authors used an interesting Heading ¡¥Whale Done! : The Power of Positive Relationships¡¦ for the book.I think, this¡¦s a good marketing strategy for promotion the book. At least when a shopper come to a book shop, seeing the title of the book, he/ she would like to have a quick look of the abstract of the book.

In addition I don¡¦t know if the ¡§business manager and family man Wes Kingsley¡¨ is really an existing individual in the world or not. But I really admire him. He has such a creative thinking and reflective mind that he associated the techniques used by animals¡¦ trainers to the techniques used by a manager, compared this two sorts of techniques, and then made use of the result to improve his own management skills. Perhaps, being a student who studying in Marketing, I should learn to be also as creative and reflective as Wes Kingsley.

Whenever Ken Blanchard (one of my favorite authors) comes
out with a new book, I usually rush to read it . . . so when I
saw that WHALE DONE! THE POWER OF POSITIVE
RELATIONSHIPS had just been released, I got hold of
a copy and devoured it in one sitting.

You'll be able to do so, too, in that it is real short . . . but
don't be fooled into thinking that there's not a lot of "meat"
contained in its 128 pages . . . Blanchard, along with
coauthors Thad Lacinak, Chuck Tompkins and Jim

Ballard, takes a simple tale and uses it to get you
thinking about how both whales and people perform
better when you accentuate the positive . . . that information
may sound basic, but it is far too often never used.

The story revolves around a gruff manager who visits
SeaWorld and is impressed with how animal trainers
of killer whales can get them to perform amazing
acrobatic leaps and dives . . . he begins to see how
these same techniques could be applied to his
business life, as well as his situation at home . . . in
addition, he learns the difference between "GOTcha"
(catching people doing things wrong) and "Whale
Done!" (catching people doing things right).

I particularly liked the many examples that were used,
and the fact that these could be applied to countless
work and home situations.

There were many memorable passages; among them:
"The point here is that progress--doing something better--is
constantly being noticed, acknowledged, and rewarded.
We need to do the same thing with people--catch them
doing things better, if not exactly right, and praise
progress. That way, you set them up for success and
build from there."

"Killer whales can 'take out' any other animal in the
ocean. We sometimes use that information when we're
working with dog trainers. Some of them scold and yell
at their animals. They use choke chains and sometimes
hit them. When they talk about that kind of treatment, I
ask them, 'If your dog weighed eleven thousand pounds
like Shamu, the whale, how would you treat him? Would
you use a choke collar or smack him around?' I don't
think so."

If you don't hire people on a performance review curve,
why grade them on one?

My only criticism is that some of the material seems
recycled from Blanchard's first bestseller, THE
ONE MINUTE MANAGER . . . but maybe that's not
such a bad thing, in that I still consider this his best
work . . . and a "must" read for anybody who has not
yet had the pleasure of experiencing it.

I am always on the lookout for new tools to use not only in my family life, but in the business world as well. "Whale Done!" meets both of those requirements and was a good read for me.
It is fascinating to think that the same methodology used in the training of whales is so directly applicable to managing people in our business world. I have only had this book for three days and have already begun to apply the principles that are the foundation for bringing positive behavior out of Shamu!

I am purchasing a copy of this book for each of my direct reports in the business where I am a Vice President. I have also contacted the CEO of our company in a neighboring state to recommend the book to the corporate staff. Our morale and business climate is good, however, there are some gems in "Whale Done!" that are worth building a program on for our future.
Many managers are into "positive re-enforcement" as a teaching tool, but this book goes way beyond that in the methods that it explores. Imagine if you could have as much success with your staff as the trainers have with Shamu!!!

In "Slaves In The Family," Edward Ball take readers on a fascinating and exhaustive(and sometimes exhausting) look into his family's past as slave owners in South Carolina. The author delves back eight generations as his ancestors cross the Atlantic and make their claim in America near Charleston. As the title suggests, Ball explores the lives of the slaves on the family's many plantations. This is where the book is at its most interesting. Ball not only gives us historical accounts but also meets with descendants in the present day. Their reactions, sometimes positive other times wary (especially where there is evidence of an owner-slave offspring), is very good reading.

Unfortunately, in my opinion, there is not enough of that type of material in the later stages of the book. At one stretch, the emphasis seems to exclusively shift to the extensive lineage of the Ball family. Despite the genealogy chart included in the book, I found it nearly impossible to keep track of everyone. Likewise, the author's impartiality towards his family seemed to shift and in many instances Ball seemed to be on a mission to prove that the family's slaves were well treated. The book also ends on an odd note as the author travels to Africa to visit one of the sites where slaves were forced to leave their native land. There he tracks down the African descendants of those who sold slaves and asks them to atone for their ancestors' past sins as well. While the logic of the slave seller being as guilty as the slave buyer has a good deal of validity, it just comes off as the author trying to alleviate his own burdens. I did see Ball on a talk show several years ago and he did not come off this way, so perhaps the written word is simply more open for interpretation.

Nevertheless, I would recommend "Slaves" to anyone interested in geneology, early American (especially Southern) history, and/or the slave experience. Addtionally, with my interpretation as compared to others, the book is open for some good discussion/debate. There is something to be learned through out the book - but ultimately I think think that the parts are greater than the whole.

Although it took me a while to read Slaves in the Family because I had to work at keeping details straight, I found it wonderfully enlightening. I hated history in school because, as it was taught, it seemed irrlevant to the present. As I've grown older, I've seen how integral an understanding of the past is to understanding the present. Mr. Ball gives us this perspective in an honest and uncompromising fashion. This is not a book written to make Souterners feel bad--the English and the Africans share in the shame--but it does help us to understand what this legacy has done to all our lives today. Interviews and reviews that I had heard highlighted the possible intermingling of the white Balls and the black slaves, but that is not what this book is about. Rather than an expose of intermingling, it is a family history of people who often have no history. When he offers families a lineage all the way back to Africa, including the country of origin, I am awed. What a gift of personal history!

This is a wonderful recounting of the lives and lineage of white plantation owners and their slaves in the Charleston, S.C. area. The author has done detailed research on the Ball family, their descendants and the descendants of their slaves, tracing them from the 1600s down to the current day. The most amazing aspect of the book is its perspective on how personal family history intertwines with and becomes the history of the U.S. The reader feels directly connected with people and events down through the centuries, and by the end of the book, understands how interrelated all our lives are. I couldn't put this book down and highly recommend it to anyone interested in U.S. history, slavery, U.S. cultural history, or genealogy.

This book was very dream like ,I kept expecting the main character to wake up from his accident with a concussion...like Dorothy on the Wizard of Oz. Actually it was more like a nightmare. Imagine being trapped on a motorway island for weeks and not having the strength to get off of it. Try THIS one on that "Survivor" show! The characters in the story were not very complex but the story moved along and there was enough going on to compensate for that. It showed exactly to what lengths one would go if faced with being marooned on a concrete island. It was just under 200 pages and a short read by anyones standards....a good book to take on a vacation. That is as long as you don't plan to spend time on any deserted islands! The ending to the book was a bit of a letdown, but it leaves things open for a sequel, but how interesting would these characters be in NORMAL situations? If you enjoy reading the likes of Chuck Palahniuk, and Alex Garland...then you'll probably like this one enough to give it 4 stars also.

Gosh, I hate to see this great, little book slammed or passed over because people were unaware of what they were getting themselves into when they bought it.

Some of the negative or lukewarm reviews are correct in that those readers obviously did not like certain elements of the book, notably the lack of logical narrative progression or fuller character development but they are mistaken to consider these peculiarities of style as deficiencies worthy of criticism. This book is not intended to be a straightforward adventure story or a character driven drama, or even a novel with some surrealistic elements.

Concrete Island, like Ballard's most popular book Crash, is a novel length exploration of abstract concepts wrapped in a traditional narrative format. Consider Ballard's earlier, short science-fiction stories, where a characters' specifics are more or less incidental to the situations in which they are placed. Or his later short works where characters are no more than conceptual cyphers or sometimes just a specific instance of a notional character spanning across several stories.

With that in mind, the events and settings are supposed to be surreal and incomplete. The characters are supposed to be unrealistic and uni-dimensional. You aren't supposed to identify with anyone or anything, at least not physically, and then only to the extent that you might become aware of forces acting in your own life or impulses in your own psyche which these fantastical situations and characters represent.

So if you are familiar with Ballard's other work, or are interested in Ballard but want something a bit more approachable than, say, Crash or Atrocity Exhibition, then you will really enjoy Concrete Island - its relatively tight and fast moving, much more fleshed out than his shorter works with plenty for your brain to chew on for a while, but without frying your mind as much the Ronald Reagan-Liz Taylor psychosexual stuff.

Our physical nightmares nowadays are usually imposed from the outside: terrorism, plagues, stray asteroids, footloose vampires, these are the agents of horror. Another literary thread--starting, I suppose, with Poe, continuing through Ambrose Pierce, and going on to William Golding--deals with the nightmares we can create for ourselves, in isolation or in small groups. With "Concrete Island," first published in 1973, J.G. Ballard carries forward this latter tradition, but in a postmodern environment of superhighways, abandoned outbuildings, and rippling plains of weeds. The book itself is as constricted and airless as the story it tells, and won't be to everyone's taste. But if your appetite is whetted, read "Concrete Island." Ballard is a master of his genre.