I've never read the Old testament really, except for samll fragments here and there. These volumes provide a way into these ancient texts, and the short intro by contemporary writers give a soft entry into what is usually very dense matter. -
A few minor complaints. I would rather hear what Pasolini or CS Lewis said about a canon than some of the writers picked. Also, the books are cheaply made. The overall design of the package is very clever and innovative, but I would prefer it was twice the price for books that were a little more substantial.

Being a local to Madison, Wisconsin, I felt I had to write this review. Quivey's Grove is a fabulous mid-western restaurant housed in an 18th century farmhouse with just the right blend of food to make you cry from joy, with a homey ambiance filled with antiques, quilts and creaky wooden floors to whisk you back to another time and another place. All the entres in the restaurant as well as the recipes held within this book are made with an eye to midwestern seasonal (i.e. fresh) foods prepared expertly. There are special sections on holiday foods that will rival even the most dear childhood memory of dinner at Grandma's. The desserts are exquisite! Sample recipes include; duck and cherry tart, smoked trout and roasted red pepper terrine, roasted chicken breast with apple, dried cherry, and black walnut stuffing, sweet potato shoestrings, cranberry chutney, chocolate truffles, black walnut tart with maple cream, pork Brigham with apple brandy cream sauce, and steamed gingerbread pudding with brandy cream sauce. While these recipes are NOT for the diabetic, or those with specialized diets, they are wonderful treats! Enjoy!

Sandy Bandt-Coles Madison, WI

For anyone interested in Shelley's life, this very good book provides an engaging account of what was his first known love affair - events that took place during his often-neglected early teens. The book is short and reads like a novel, making abundant use of Harriet Grove's diaries, which (alas) were heavily deleted by an anonymous hand wishing to eradicate all references to Shelley, but still yield a lot of interesting information. Unfortunately, the letters exchanged between the teenage cousins are not extant, and all we have are Harriet's references to the epistles she received and sent. Desmond Hawkins does a good job of depicting an attachment that flourished with surprisingly little contact (the two cousins actually seem to have spent very little time together - but maybe in Regency times that fact didn't hinder a romance the way it would in modern times) and eventually withered, maybe because of Harriet's bewilderment at Shelley's radical views and increasingly unconventional behaviour. The reader is left to wonder what might have happened if Shelley had married his amiable and well-bred cousin instead of the ill-fated Harriet Westbrook and, subsequently, the dauntless, talented Mary Godwin. The history of English Romantic poetry might have been very different as a consequence.

This book was excellent. It's a great book about a young girl having to grow into womanhood very young. The story will grab your attention and it won't let it go until it's all over. If you don't read this book, you'll be missing out on a great story that could possibly teach you a lesson about yourself and the people around you.

A good if somewhat dated book on telephone survey methodology.

This book is essentially extracted from the New Grove Dictionary of Opera, gathering together the items for Verdi. It contains a chronology of Verdi's works and highly significant events in his life, a 30 page biography, followed by almost 200 pages devoted to the operas separately. A not very useful glossary and (more useful) index of roles completes the work.

The individual opera discussions tend to follow a fixed pattern: a very brief characterization of the type of opera and its first performance; A list of the initial cast.; a table of the characters -- and the categories of voice for which they were written; a brief description of the background to the writing of the opera and its initial reception; a fairly lengthy synopsis of the plot and major musical feature; a brief assessment of the opera.

By and large all these features are very well done. I would have liked more analysis, and at times there are tantalizing snippets of information whose relevance is not followed up. You are not likely to sit down and read this book from cover to cover -- it is presumably not intended for such use. Instead, it provides an excellent vehicle for looking up the nature of particular Verdi operas and where each one fits in to his work -- there is remarkably little about the contemporary musical scenes.

Most Civil War buffs concentrate upon the war east of the Mississippi. By comparison, the two battles of Pea Ridge and Prairie Grove are obscured by their distance from the main scene. I was interested, as my g-grandfather set up and ran a field hospital at Fayetteville, during the battle of Prairie Grove, Arkansas. The book is one of the best I've read in it's description of the tactics employed. Even better, the timely maps are simple, clear and placed closely to the verbage they cover. Similarly placed are short biographies of the major officers on each side of the battles. Unit narratives seldom drop below company level and the book cannot be considered an exhaustive study. But, at the end of 126 pages, a reader will have a sufficiently clear view of the events to gain a good grasp of the strategy and tactics used in these two important battles.

Laurie Sheck's "The Willow Grove" is a collection of poetry for our western society as we enter the new millenium. Her poems mix the mythic and the metaphysical with current urban images. Sheck can make a TV with the volumn turned down haunt us. She can make us confront our own loss of innocense through portraying a child's view of an adult cocktail party.

While Sheck's poetry is often dark and contains mythological references, it is extremely readable, even for readers who have not encountered poetry since high school. Reading it makes one realize what a shame it is that books of poetry so rarely make the best seller lists.

Like some of the other reviewers,I grew up in DG for 20 years(in fact,parents still live there) and picked up the book partly out of curiousity to see how my hometown was portrayed. The plot and characters are a bit undeveloped thus you don't feel any true connection building between yourself and the book. The pop culture references ala Prince imply that this was supposed to take place in the 80s(the decade I went to Downers Grove South High)but then throws in the "Kurt & Courtney"movie,an obvious 90s reference. I really felt like the book was a poor man's "Catcher in the Rye" than anything else. Maybe I'm just getting old but the teens were just amazingly whiny.

The thing that bugged me were the glaring mistakes about not only the town Downers and its teens but Chicago,in general. When writers research their material,they usually go into a comprehensive sojourn for accuracy. This is where Hornburg slips. Everyone in both the city and suburbs know that North Ave runs east-west,not north-south. Wicker Park is mispelled "Whicker". Bolingbrook is mispelled "Bowling Brook". While Downers Grove has about 3 movie theatres(the Tivoli being the oldest while the others are newer and are in strip malls)none of them would've ever shown anything as edgy as "Kurt and Courtney' .That's what the Music Box,Piper's Alley and Facets Multimedia in the city's for. And why did Hornburg feel the need to make Lemont Rd and Main St two separate roads? THEY'RE THE SAME STREET! As big as Downers Grove is,Hornburg chose to focus on most of the events between the train station,63rd and 75th streets. This would be fine if he sometimes didn't make Downers sound like a tiny one stoplight town. My biggest beef was,hands down, the portrayal of Downers Grove youth. Contrary to Hornburg's vision,we weren't all stoners,slackers and disaffected. Sure,we hung out,drove all around town keeping the local cops on their toes but since 1986 almost every DG teen,at one time or another,makes the White Castle on 75th and Lemont part of their weekend hangout ritual. Really,it's these personal touches that would've made the book a slightly better read and a more vivd blast from the past for its residents,past and present. It's a pretty quick read(I knocked it out in 3 hours)and,all in all,is light fare for what it is. Do yourself a favor and wait for the paperback,better yet,save your dough and check it out from the library.

As some one who grew up in Downers Grove I have to say that about 90% of the places and descriptions in the book actually do exist and are accurate. At times I thought the character's conversations were a little too clever and thought out, but all in all I thought Michael Hornburg did a good job in capturing the feel of the Chicago Suburb. He blows the myth that the community is a "Father Knows Best" type place and puts a real face on Downers Grove.

Right before the Christmas Break, a classmate of mine asked our senior English teacher what she planned to read over the break. She, off the top of her head replied, "Oh, this Stephen King novel I've been meaning to finish." We gasped. This, the woman who forced _Crime and Punishment_, _A Portrait of the Artist As A Young Man_ and _Hamlet_ down our sometimes reluctant (but in hindsight, very grateful) throats, was going to read Stephen King! She looked at us, smiled and said, "You gotta have your Twinkie reads." And that is what _Downer's Grove_ is: a Twinkie read. Not too complex, but entertaining. I could see someone reading this while snowed-in for a few days or relaxing on the beach. You can read it in one sitting (it's not too long), or pick it up and put down while you do your laundry (you can pick it up days apart and still find your place, as I did). And it's important to have those reads. To relax. To be entertained. To take a study break every few hours. Not every book has to be _War and Peace_.

The plot is rather simple: Crystal is avoiding the senior curse where one senior dies before graduation while working our her feelings about her long-gone father, her new boyfriend (kinda boyfriend) and her mother's new boyfriend. The Booklist review pretty much gives the meat of the plot. While it seems like it could be rather unremarkable, the dialogue is witty and the characters have interesting personality quirks (Tracy, Crystal's friend, loves Hole and Crystal's brother). However, those qualities are often the book's shortcomings. The dialogue reminds me of _Buffy: The Vamire Slayer_: witty but unrealistic. I've never been to the Chicago suburbs, but I doubt everyone there has such a quick tongue. Also, the book is uber-contemporary. The girls listen to Hole and Nine Inch Nails. Not that those are bad bands, but I wonder if readers twenty years from now will know who/what those are.

But the one truly compelling qualitiy is Hornburg's portrayal of teenage girls. Being a Michael (appartently a guy), he has the unusual talent of wrting from a place he is supposedly unfamiliar. These girls come to life and at times it is hard to believe that was written by someone who had never been there before. The girls giggle and plot how they are going to meet the guys they like, not run over to them and fling their clothes off. The girls have other interests besides their weight or looks or boys. The girls approach their problems the way girls do, not the way adult men may like to think they do.

As for the geographical inaccuracies that other readers pointed out: not being from the area myself, I had no clue. Hornburg could have made up the whole town and I wouldn't have been the wiser.

This book can be put down and picked up two weeks later with little review. Can be read in one sitting. Won't make you think too deep, but will entertain you. So, depending on your mood this could be a great book. Actually, a great Twinkie read. So just relax and...Yummy!

I'm fairly shocked by the passions of both those who love and detest this book. It's not a particularly striking example of either the defects or virtues of a certain kind of of work being produced by a segment of today's younger poets. After Ashbery, why anybody's surprised by poetry of studied self-consciousnness which deliberatly guards it's "meanings" is beyond me. I doubt that either those who hate this book or those who attach words like "brilliance" or "genius" to its not particularly original effects are very well read in either contemporary poetry or the work that's been over the past fifty years.

that when I read this book, my first reaction was: "There is REALLY no point in finishing my own manuscript." Timothy Donnelly has written the book that I wanted to write, and has written it BETTER than I ever could have written it. To the reader who wrote that this book has no rhythm: get real. I don't believe anyone has written a book of poetry with this much form and meter, in some long time. I, however, am from the campsite that endorses the acrobatics -- with or without the "meaning." And how does this "lack" of substance (an assertion with which I do not wholly agree) make him any different from roughly half of the younger writers publishing today? How many times do I have to sift through poems about somebody's butterfly garden or their kitchen love affair, before the God of Poetry shats out somebody like Timothy Donnelly to wake me up? How many times can I read "experimental" poems by the lit journal clicky cliques that are so pointless and tedious that I would have better luck removing my own pancreas with my teeth then get through one of their poems, before a Timothy Donnelly arrives, snuggled in with my nutmeat? And Timothy Donnelly ACCEPTS the clicky clique poems and rejected mine and I STILL think he's the surest thing since Oxy Clean. And you have to hear him read -- go to "Live From Prairie Lights" and look him up. Long live poetry that REALLY IS experimental and is NOT afraid to use meter and rhyme and all those devices that the de-con-struct crowd treats like a rat corpse. They may camp at my campsite -- but they don't share my s'mores and He-Man sleeping bag. 27 Props, to which I am giving a well-deserved five stars, turns both experimental AND modern poetry on their heads and gives them the "what for," as well. And BTW, I loved the observation by one of the reviewers that "this book is fast and fun like a Sunday drive with a guy who talks fast about fun stuff." Damn right. And if you're in the Pac NW with a Turkish Royal in one hand and some binocs in the other, all the better.

It's very interesting how almost every bad review of this book is an ad hominem attack: that is, the reviews either accuse the poet directly of being some kind of a faker, or trying to pull something over on us; or else they insinuate that his "clever" style is somehow a direct attack on the reader. And all those reviews sound a lot alike, as if they were written by the same kind of person, someone who is bitter and confused about how Donnelly's poetry could ever have been published (as opposed to theirs).

The explanation is simple. These poems are deeply searching, sometimes crazed, often neurotic (in the sense of returning over and over to the same themes, images, even lines, as in "Sonata Ex Machina" or "The Driver of the Car ..."), and very brilliantly composed. And often beautiful. They certainly are unlike almost anything being written today, which makes the vitriolic accusations of the fix being somehow in even more mystifying. At worst, you could say that Grove published a book that tries and fails, which seems in artistic terms to be something worth praising ... at least the book doesn't just sound like everything else.

These poems attempt to mean (and succeed) in unexpected, harrowing, and brilliant ways. They are difficult and tonally strained precisely because the poet is attempting to confront the deepest existential issues, and not just using a lame period style to cover up the fact that there's nothing of import being faced in the poems. And they are avatars of negative capability, something we could always use more of in literature.

Take a look at this book. It's something important, and something new. Again, at worst you could say, well, the poet made an honest effort and tied himself in knots more often than, well, not; but I don't think that's what you'll feel, if you approach the book with an open heart and a ready mind, and not with the bitterness of a professional resenter.