S.L. Taylor's review of this book was most helpful, however:
1.) Remember, it doesn't necessarily have to be big to satisfy!
2.) Emile Zola's prose was only turgid after he had been
drinking. the rest of the time he didn't say enough to make
any sense to a reader what-so-ever.
3.) Who wants to be associated with Proust anyway? Nobody named
"Marcel" could have written a book like this in the 1st
place.
4.) Christopher Hitchen's talks funny, but I like his hair.

5.) There are worst hobbies than dead postmasters general you
know, like bowling, air guitar, goal tending, & marrying
cops!
I find the book a fascinating addition to the library of obscure FDR related bits of trivia.

There are 5 reasons that no stamp collector who is interested in stamps of the FDR era should be without this book.
1.) It is not as big as A la Recherche du Temps Perdue.
2.) Brian C.Baur's prose is not as turgid as that of Emile Zola.
3.) Much like Proust and Zola nobody knows who Brian C. Baur is either.
4.)Mr. Baur does not use as many big words as Christopher Hitchens.
5.)This book contains important historical information not found anywhere else.(e.g The names of Postmasters who have been dead for more than half a century.)

This book is really great, it's about a very important but little understood issue. It's full of factual documentation of all aspects of the MIA issue -- from how the counting was done, to the various political angles the issue took at various times throughout the war -- and is a great read, as well. It brought back a lot of memories of the bizarre things that went on then, and still do today.

Franklin has done a great service for contemporaty America, and the collective memory of the Vietnam War in U.S. history. His book illustrates that maxim that truth is not only the first casualty of war, but often suffers long after a war has concluded.

His extensive research reveals that the post-Vietnam War POW/MIA "myth" (i.e. a misrepresentation of the truth) has been a cruel hoax propagated by right-wing politicians (Nixon, Kissinger, Robert Dornan, Ronald Reagan, Ross Perot, and a host of others) in an attempt to create a pseudo-history of the Vietnam War where the U.S. military become the "real" victims of this war, not the millions of Vietnamese soldiers and civilians whose country was destroyed.

As Franklin notes, "every responsible investigation conducted since the end of the war has reached the same conclusion: there is no credible evidence that live Americans [were] held against their will in Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, or China" after the war." (p. 14) Franklin knowledgeably concludes his book by noting that "the last chapter of the Vietnam War cannot be written so long as millions of Americans remain possessed by the POW/MIA myth."

The lesson is clear. Beware of false politicians who manufacture bogus history while cruelly exploiting other peoples' tragedies to further their own warped and self-serving political agenda. H. Bruce Franklin's book more than lives up to John Lennon's Vietanm-era plea - "gimme some truth, just gimme some truth." You'll find it in this book.

As with most of Gottshall's books, the projects are not for the beginner. Good knowledge of woodworking processes are necessary to build these beautiful period pieces. The finishes advocated in the book are dated but are completely appropriate for the pieces involved. Pieces of this quality deserve finishes that are reversible by our heirs and that would exclude a lot of the modern water-based and polyurethane finishes.

Excellent book and a valuable reference for anyone interested in reproduction furniture. The section on finishing techniques is a bit dated, but the real value is the detailed drawings of reproduction pieces he built. Not for the beginner. The instructions are straight forward, but they require you to be comfortable with woodworking techniques. Great book.

THE MANUSCRIPT BOOKS OF EMILY DICKINSON. Edited by R. W. Franklin. 2 vols, 1442 pp. Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, England: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1981. ISBN 0-674-54828-0 (hbk.)

What do we mean when we speak of "an Emily Dickinson poem" ? If you think about it, we could mean one of at least five different things. We may be referring :

(1) to her poems as they are found in her original manuscripts;

(2) to their photographic facsimiles as in the present edition;

(3) to the Variorum editions of Thomas H. Johnson or R. W. Franklin which attempt to get over into typographic form as much as they can of her highly idiosyncratic manuscript drafts - with all of their variants and their peculiarities of line breaks, spacing, punctuation, and of alternate words about which she never made up her mind but placed neatly alongside or beneath many of her poems;

(4) to the reader's editions of Johnson and Franklin which offer what these Dickinson scholars and expert editors feel is _one_ (of many possible) sensible and acceptable readings out of the mass of variants;

(5) or finally we may be referring to her poems as altered, revised, regularized, tidied-up and smoothed out so as to be made to look more 'normal' and acceptable to ordinary readers. At this fifth and furthest remove from ED's own drafts, we are given a text by a towering genius as modified by someone who was far less than a genius, and who has usually damaged the poem in various ways.

The present 2-volume set of 'The Manuscript Books of Emily Dickinson' brings us as close to the real thing as most of us will ever get. It gives us photographic facsimiles, with full scholarly apparatus, not of all of her poems but of those she bound into forty fascicles, tiny hand-stitched manuscript-books that she squirreled away in her room and that were not to be discovered until after her death many years later.

Here you can see how her strange handwriting changed radically over the years. Here you can see all of the peculiarities of her spelling. Here you can see all those little asterisks which she used to indicate an alternate word elsewhere on the page, usually at the foot. Here you can also see all of her line breaks and her idiosyncrasies of spacing, both of which are often highly significant. Here, in a word, you can see the hand of a genius at work.

Personally I think we are extremely fortunate to have these two volumes, and that all lovers of ED's amazing poems, poems that are one of the wonders of the world, should be grateful to R. W. Franklin for the arduous labors that must have gone into his impeccable edition, an edition with full scholarly apparatus that provides a wealth of fascinating information about the forty fascicles.

The two large, heavy and sturdy volumes are stitched, bound in half cloth, beautifully printed on a very strong, smooth, ivory tinted paper that we are told is the finest paper in the world and I can well believe it, and they come in a buckram-covered box.

It's clear that no pains have been spared to give us, not only accurate and annotated photographic facsimiles of every page of the Manuscript Books, but also to give them to us in sturdy and beautiful volumes that are a fitting vehicle for the works of the amazing woman we know as Emily Dickinson. How astounded and gratified she would have been to have seen this set, a set that would warm the heart of any bibliophile, and that belongs in the collection of all Dickinson enthusiasts.

this book is the best if you love emily dickinson. it really inspires you to become a poet one day.

When I first began to read the first chapter of this book I was looking at the dates in the book and realized that they were from not that long ago it was recent that this happened. I felt sorr for Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr when he had to repeat school because of his lack of knowledge. The parts that struck cords with me is that he was playing a major role in history and he could not be with his wife and cherish the moments of their child being born because he was always doing something with the civil roght movement. He wasw never at home to be with his kids and when he did come home it was not that much. He also was put in jail a lot for things that he felt was right and there were a lot of people who were trying to hold him down from doing his job. But this is a really great book and I encourage anyone to read it to see what we had to go through just to ride on the bus and to vote amd to get our right we were denied after slavery was abolished. But this is a really good book for a person to read if they are doing a report on him.

Franklin looks deep into the life of the late Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King Jr. His insightful looks on the full compass of his life makes for an extraordinary piece of work. Never before mentions of different aspects of King's life makes this biography a must read for all who have loved and adored King.

Both More Calf Fries to Cavier and it predecessor Calf Fries to Cavier could have just as aptly been titled "West Texas Soul Food I and II". The books contain an abundance of recipes for hearty, comfort-food dishes which many West Texans, as well as Southerners and those from the Southwestern United States, grew up eating. Both Calf Fries and More Calf Fries to Cavier should be essential in recipe collections of folks wanting to discover a special niche in home cooking. My wife, who is originally a New Yorker, swears by these books and has used them as her basis to a discovery of Texas home cooking.

This book and its predescessor cover the full gamit of traditional home cooking for the South Plains area of Texas. Dishes are flavorful and hearty. They are the traditional fare for the hard-working cotton farmers and cattle ranchers of the area. These dishes are meant to fill up the belly and stick to the ribs. They are recipes from an area known for good food all year round from blustery winter to blistering summer.

These books are not really meant to go together. When she was sixteen years old, Miles Franklin wrote My Brilliant Career, A NOVEL, but was plagued for years by people who believed that this book was an autobiography. Some people continued to insist it was, or even misrepresent it as such even after being personally informed by Miles Franklin that the book was a novel. Finally, Miles Franklin withdrew My Brilliant Career from publication, and in the fifties, wrote My Career Goes Bung as a response to those who continued to believe that My Brilliant Career was an autobiography. My Career Goes Bung is a parody of the literary world, not a sequel to My Brilliant Career, and frankly, if you read it immediately after, it will probably spoil the magic of My Brilliant Career for you.

That said, here is my review of My Brilliant Career:

The is a beautiful and startling book. Written by Miles Franklin in 1901, when she was just sixteen, it is the story of a young girl, Sybylla Melvyn, trying to live her own life in Possum Gully, Australia. She doesn't want to marry, and repeat her mother's life. She'd like to travel, but she has no money. She's bright, but her prospects for college are non-existent. More than anything, she would like to be an artist, but not because she has a passion for any particular artistic expression; she just likes her imagined idea of an artist's lifestyle.

She has a brief respite when she goes to live with her grandmother, and meets Harold Beecham, who becomes her best friend. She also gets to know her Aunt Helen, "neither maid, nor widow, nor wife," who cautions her of the dangers of marrying for love. Sybylla wonders why she should marry at all. If she had a fortune, she declares, she would give it gladly to someone she loved, but "the word wife finished [her] up."

Life has tougher things in store for Sybylla, but she is a survivor, and she begins to write. She masters metaphor: "If the souls of our lives were voiced in music, there are some that none but a great organ could express, others the clash of a full orchestra, a few...the...exquisite sadness of a violin..., and mine could be told with a couple of nails in a rusty tin pot."

Maybe she writes because of what she knows, or maybe she has insight because she writes, but Sybylla, from Possum Gully, to genteel Caddagat and Five-Bob Downs, to the muddy M'Swat farm, and back to Possum Gully, knows classism, demagoguery, democracy, socialism, feminism, and cynicism.

Sybylla is a joy to know. I can't recommend this book more.

It's hard to believe that this novel was written by a young woman in her teens. it's even harder to believe that it was written in the late nineteenth century. So much for Victorian attitudes... Sybylla rages against her parents, shuns marriage in favor of a career, sees classism and injustice as it truly is, and at one point questions the exuistence of God. The result is an entertaining story. Sybylla is a worthy literary sister to Anne of Green Gables, or the March sisters. The story has a little less of the innocence to it, but all of the charm. The description of 1890's Australia are vivid, as are all the people Sybylla meets (and those great Australian geographic names.)

Try and find a copy of this book... and then demand it go back into print! You won't regret reading this, and you'll enjoy it wholeheartedly. (Beware, My career Goes Bung is not a "true" sequel, and can easily be skipped without missing anything.)

This is a birthday/address book, and it's way cool. The top half of the book is where you write down birthdays that you want to remember. The bottom half of the book is the address book. There's space for you to write people's addresses, phone numbers, and even email addresses. The two halves of the book are very useful, because you can go to the birthday section on the top, and see who's birthday is coming up. Then you can go to the address section on the bottom, and look up their address. And you can do all that without having to lose your place! It's so easy, and really cool. At the back of the book, you can find great quotes to inspire you, your own zodiac astrology sign, each month's birthstones and flowers.. and even the history of the names of each month! There are very cute drawings all throughout the book too. Two thumbs way up! :)

This is a birthday/address book, and it's way cool. The top half of the book is where you write down birthdays that you want to remember. The bottom half of the book is the address book. There's space for you to write people's addresses, phone numbers, and even email addresses. The two halves of the book are very useful, because you can go to the birthday section on the top, and see who's birthday is coming up. Then you can go to the address section on the bottom, and look up their address. And you can do all that without having to lose your place! It's so easy, and really cool. At the back of the book, you can find great quotes to inspire you, your own zodiac astrology sign, each month's birthstones and flowers.. and even the history of the names of each month! There are very cute drawings all throughout the book too. Two thumbs way up! :)

This is an awesome book! My friends and I filled it out and we love it! You get to write all about what you think about everything. Have fun!

If you worry about your daughters writing not-so-nice things about their schoolmates in a more standard "slam book" relax! This one will get much nicer, friendlier, inclusive remarks. It has fabulous stickers too, in 18 designs.