Chester's choice of poetry is especially exciting! Based on my enjoyment of this selection, I have purchased and am reading "Unmade Bed" by the same editor. A very worthwhile and enjoyable collection!

This collection covers the first two years (1931-3) of the famous comic strip DICK TRACY (except for its very first story, reprinted in an earlier collection). It's fascinating to see how the strip evolved. Chester Gould's artwork started out very poor, but we can see it gradually improving. Tracy's character also evolved. He started out as a weenie by today's standards, and the character paradoxically benefited from being reduced to a square-jawed icon. Notice that in the first year he sometimes used disguises; he didn't do this much in later years, since his visual presence is the strip's anchor. Notice also that few of the stories were about bootleggers: the public was already turning against Prohibition.

Yet much of the first-year work in this collection could have been dispensed with. I enjoyed the Hammettesque story of Texie Garcia, a gun moll blackmailing a politician. (Texie: "Think what you could do with a thousand dollars." Tracy: "Yeah? I could roll it up in a wad and cram it right down your slippery throat.") Ditto the Lindbergh-like story of Big Boy Caprice kidnapping Buddy Waldorf Jr., with its knock-down dragout fight at the end. But editor Herb Galewitz himself admits that the stories of Tracy's demotion to a beat cop; con man turned kidnapper Broadway Bates, who resembles Batman's foe the Penguin; bond forger Alec Penn; and dope smuggler-blackmailer Kenneth Grebb are somewhat below par ...

Of course, after a year the strip really came to life, and gained readers and newspapers, when Junior first appeared. This was also the occasion for introducing the thug Steve the Tramp, the first of the strip's great villains. He and counterfeiter Stooge Viller dominate the second year, even escaping prison together.

The editors would have been well-advised to drop much of the first year, and their selections from the first six months of the Sunday strips, which weren't yet connected to the daily continuity. The space saved would have been better spent on some later stories such as Junior's mother, or Jean Penfield's fight with Tess Trueheart.

When many people think of naval action in the Civil War, they likely think of the battle of the Monitor and the Merrimack. Ellet's Brigade is about the "brown water" action that took place around Vicksburg before and after the seige of that Confederate city. The brigade was run by a visionary, Charles Ellet, Jr., who believed the way to defeat the Confederate river navy was to use inexpensive, expendable rams. His thinking led to the Union victory at Memphis, where he was killed. After Ellet's death, no one knew what to do with the fleet of rams. Rear Admiral Porter, with the help of Ellet's relatives, developed a Marine unit and used the rams as part of a counter insurgency group against rebel guerrilla activities. Ultimately this effort failed, because there was no effective chain of command over the brigade. The brigade essentially ran itself and during the years following Memphis hurt the Union effort in the west as much as it helped it. Author Chester G. Hearn does a great job moving the story forward and documenting the facts. This is a good read and well worth any Civil War buff's time. I strongly recommend it.

This is an autobiographical slice of Chester Aaron's life as he waas intoduced to garlic growing and became a garlic devotee. Aaron and his cat take the reader into the world of garlic,its many varities, and how to best grow these bulbs of life. At the end of the book are thirty recipes for tasty garlic dishes. It is a very readable primer on garlic growing.

This cocktail table style book presents a number of nice photographs of royal palaces and manors in Sweden. An excellent text of architectural discourse is included in both English and Swedish. Additionally, you will learn much of the royal family heritage, traits, and history. A thin book of only 100 pages with 50% Swedish text. Mycket bra!

This is a typically entertaining entry in Himes' Coffin Ed Johnson/Grave Digger Jones series. The two Harlem police detectives investigate a stabbing at a wake and the usual cast of colorful characters--gamblers, pool sharks, holy-roller preachers, etc.--are on hand.

Himes may well be the best black American author of all time. It seems he was sold short by serious critics because of his status as a "crime writer" & perhaps by mystery fans because of his race, but it appears a major reappraisal of his work is underway and he is finally getting his due.

GRADE: B

A strange heroic land--Nato-wa, wild newfound region beyond the Artic north of Siberia, warmed by uncharted ocean currents and by great volcanic fissures and hot springs; a land thickly wooded with evergreens, and supporting many and varied wild animals. Stranger still its human population: a people so like the North American Indians that Kioga's father, who had discovered that land and people, had decided that here was the original birthplace of the Amerind race. Strangest of all-the story of that medical missionary's son, raised by the natives after the death of his parents, known as Kioga or the Snow Hawk, who rose to manhood to become the war-chieftain of his tribe. KIOGA OF THE WILDERNESS is the story of Kioga the man. It is a strange and unparalled adventure in the great tradition of heroic fiction.

All written by Chester Wickwire, poet, chaplain, activist, philosopher, mediator. Its title suggests that Longs Peak, a tangible monolith, is the subject of the author's work. Its subject is, indeed, Longs Peak, but mostly in its ethereal, metaphysical frame.

Many who have walked in the shadow of Longs Peak, or have stood upon its summit, have been deeply affected by the experience. Some, like Wickwire, find their lives changed in the process. Now all of the challenges of the past, and the uncertainties of the future, become framed in a unique language whose words developed special meaning there.

Good poetry takes you by the hand and leads you in paths trod earlier by the poet, showing you sparkling trinkets and wonderful treasures along the way. Wickwire does this well. But, being a realist, he also shows the sadness and decay between the baubles. All seen through the eyes of one who has thought long on deep things.

Don't buy this book to read specifically about Longs Peak, the three dimensional. Obtain it to peer beyond three dimensions, into a more distant world... the world of the human mind.

Chester Himes is a truly remarkable and amazing writer who has largely been forgotten by the reading public. Along with 'The Quality of Hurt,' the first part of Himes' two volume memoir, no where in American letters has a writer so captured the life of an expatriate American artist then Mr. Himes. From his days serving prison time and learning to write, to his final days in Spain where finally he was able to live as the artist he wished to be, this story is as amazing and 'American' as any yet produced in some 300 odd years of our country's literature.On a personal note, I first read this book while living in New York City as a very poor young man myself. It made me laugh on cold nights, at, yes, the absurdity of it all, and I recommend it to anyone who has dared the Gods and tried to make a living by his pen or laptop.

...This book gives an excellent view of the concept of ANN but covers them in pure mathemetical way. You can learn so much about the equations used to describe ANNs but I would doubt that you can learn enough to make you able to utilize them. It is a good read, but needs more practical approach to it, but talking about such a topic is not a well-defined path, so I give it a 4-star rating