I read Moody's first 2 books which I really liked, so I decided to get the next one in the series, but somehow this one doesn't grab me as much. Lots of people dying in the first chapters, a crazy woman going on and on...

After reading some of the other reviews posted here, I had to write in to say that I was quite disappointed in "Derailleur." I enjoyed Moody's first two books immensely, but not this one. The plot isn't compelling, the cycling isn't to be found, and the characters aren't engaging. Did I really read the same book as the other reviewers?

I loved Greg Moody's other two books, but this one fell sadly short of the mark. Too silly, and doesn't contain those interesting insights to the world of cycling that made the other books a hit.

One of the best things about 'discovering' a wonderful writer is reading everything else they've published, not just the one you liked first. Garden State is Moody's first novel. It's a messy story about a (thank God) vanished time. It was really interesting to read, because his subsequent writing just gets better and better. It's bound by a plot at once complicated and sublimely simple. The several main characters, basically nice-people male and female twentysomethings in the 'eighties, can't quite 'leave home,' are are often stoned, drunk, or otherwise debilitated. They sleep late, smoke, party, drive around, play music, fret about their moms, (there's a freakish car accident), experience despair, visit the sick, poke through piles of laundry in search of leggings, hang out, wear black nail polish, have desultory sex, and reflect rather thoughtfully on things while spending a month (one of them does this) or so in a pretty nice mental hospital.There is wonderful yearning for meaning and love -- also oblivion and ecstasy. The whole thing takes place in NJ, which is also used as a symbol of -- something or other. Great sense of place, and a hip sort of warmth and compassion is in there, too. This novel is strange, a little bit difficult to love, but worth the trouble.

Written in a more traditional style than the Ice Storm, but with a slightly stronger storyline, and a little less uncomfortable in his depictions of his characters. The main character has just come back home from being in an instituation and is trying to get back into a normal step, while trying to straighten his life out. Unfortunately friends help him to not do so. Well written and smart, but also quite bleak. The Ice Storm was a natural progression for Moody and Purple America continues to build on the start of Moody's career. Read each of his novels and his short story collection.

I have only recently discovered Rick Moody & in a short period have read almost all of his books - this is my favourite. The stories here are reasonably varied in content, & he has a lot of fun taking liberties with form & style & content (what a story should be). These are not necessarily just straight narratives, but play around with ideas of meaningful coincedence & circles of happenings. It's always good to see a writer unafraid of taking risks in order to get at some sort of truth - it's what great artistry is all about (I think anyway). I too, along with the other person who has written a review, like the stories 'Phrase Book' (the girl who took a massive hit of acid) and 'The Apocalypse of Bob Paisner' (a term paper in which a guy flunking out of school relates his life to the Bible). One thing about Moody, apart from everything else, is that his characters here are always wholly believeable. Even if the situations are sometimes extreme, the characters ring true - they are created with a great deal of empathy, & if the reaction to them isn't always empathetic, at least it's with understanding. This, to me, is the most important feature. The last story in the book is quite self-revelatory. It's a neat idea - Moody uses a selection of books from his bookshelf as a 'Bibliography' & footnotes occasional ones in order to explain certain parts of his life. I think it takes a person a lot of courage to expose themselves implicitly like this (but it sure beats a publishers blurb on the back cover). Rick Moody is a very good writer & you don't get too much better in contemporary writing than Ring of the Brightest Angels Around Heaven.

I was really looking forward to reading these short stories by Rick Moody. There's been so much hype about this author's remarkable writing. I was deeply disappointed after reading this book. I almost stopped reading, after the first few stories, but struggled on to the very end, hoping the stories would get better or at least more interesting. Where is the emotion, feeling, and caring in these stories? In fact, there is too much added detail, skipping around, and confusion in most of these stories. The book's description states "full of deep feeling and stunningly beautiful language". Where? Did I miss something? The longest "short" story "The Carnival Tradition" was totally confusing. The title story and "Boys" were the two best stories in the entire collection.

I gave this collection three stars because of the title story and a couple of others I felt were good. However, the rest were just a waste of my valuable reading time. I hope to spare you the trouble and will NOT recommend this one.

Though endlessly influential from the get-go, Rick Moody's works have evolved considerably. If Purple America felt over-stylized to you, check out Demonology or his subsequent autobiography The Black Veil. They are especially powerful if read in that order. The title story of Demonology alone is worth the cost, and I can believe Moody's claim in an interview that after writing it he has been unable to re-read it. It is a very painful account of his sister's death, thinly veiled in fiction (thin to the point that the narrator comments on the story's autobiographical tint). The reviewers who argue that Moody changes tone too quickly and explicitly gives clues of impending disaster miss the point; the tragedy is a given. The beauty of his prose is in building up the context, prolonging what everyone knows or senses from foreshadowing and from the story's mood, until it reaches the point that he must resign himself to writing the conclusion. It is a beautiful method.

I had already read several of these stories in the New Yorker and heard others at readings, but those previews took nothing away from the fact that Rick Moody's "Demonology" is a powerful collection of short fiction. Despite some weak spots (like "Pan's Fair Throng," which I couldn't bring myself to finish), Moody lays down one moving story after another, making for a diverse and satisfying read.

My favorite pieces here are the ones in which Moody does what he does best and what few of his contemporaries dare to do: strive for emotional climaxes that are well-earned, not cynical but not naïve, and incapable of being overly sentimental or cheesy. The first story, "Mansion on the Hill," is probably the best example of all that will follow. Moody leavens a heavy emotional backdrop (the narrator is writing a letter to his departed sister on the event of her fiancé's marriage to another woman) with outrageous humor (his job wearing a chicken mask, the strange inner workings of a wedding production company) and the effect is beautiful and bittersweet.

Moody has all the humor of writers like Michael Chabon and Douglas Coupland, and the same comic cultural awareness. What sets "Demonology" apart, though, are some of the cleverer, more experimental stories that aren't stories so much as, well, liner notes for a CD box set representing the evolution of a certain Wilkie Fahnstock's listening habits, from the Almann Brothers to Aphex Twin; or a book catalogue that becomes a journey into a comically unhealthy crush that the cataloguer can't seem to put behind him. This willingness to push the boundaries of his chosen format while still producing classically satisfying narratives puts Moody in a class all his own.

But the more lyrical moments are just as powerful, often reminiscent of the astonishing first chapter of "Purple America," and possessed of a motion dictated more by feel than by grammar. It is this mode (in full effect in this collection in stories like "Drawer" and "Boys") that gives many readers of Moody trouble; it is true that he can be a difficult read at times, but it's a price well worth paying for the reward his stories often carry at their end.

I loved "Demonology" and would recommend it highly, although readers should bear Moody's occasionally difficult, Virginia Woolf-ish prose in mind. In my opinion, he's worth the sweat, and each story's pay-off sticks with you for a while after you put the book down. If you prefer the blunter style of Hemingway, though, most of these stories may not be to your liking.

This is one of those books that makes you sorry you started it. The story line and character development start out well....but then it seems the author developed writer's block and just bailed out.

What a waste of time. The ending is completely stupid--a total abdication by the author of his responisibility to the reader to bring the story to an interesting and satisfying ending. Of course that's not surprising given the complete lack of plausible connection between the hero and the villain. There are some hints as to why the bad guy is bad, but absolutely none of the detail that makes the serial killer novel an interesting gendre. I read Derailleur and really enjoyed it--stayed up until 2am to finish--but this book is not in the same class. Of course it does leave open the possibility of a sequel where all of my concerns may be addressed....

The sad thing about mysteries is that so many authors have made such a success by being predictable and writing the same book over and over. Despite the heat he seems to be taking, I'm glad to see that Moody has the guts to stand apart, take some chances, and push his story and characters into new territory. I loved this story and can't wait for the sequel.

I'm not basing this judgement on just one book -- I read both "Wildcrafters" and "Habitat," to be certain that I hadn't merely caught the writer in a slump, or caught her editor on vacation. Alas, apparently not -- both books had the same flaws.

The main character in this series is supposed to be a highly professional federal Fish & Wildlife law enforcement agent. The second sentence of "Habitat," however, refers to "octopuses." That's on Page One, a foreshadowing of the many slips, hiccups, and foolish errors which insult the reader throughout the book.

More substantive, for instance, is an encounter in which our badge-carrying heroine is physically assaulted -- but when the police come, they treat the incident as a he-said she-said episode, and walk away. Come ON! Not in any jurisdiction in the nation would a federal law enforcement agent of any gender or agency be treated so cavalierly. But it's needed for the plot, as are so many other ludicrous developments, so the author plopped it in and the editor passed it by.

Moody has a wild imagination, and her books could be fun, silly, James-Bond-type romps -- for example, she drags NASA into this one, an agency not likely in real life to have anything at all to do with Fish & Wildlife. However, she needs a more thorough and stern editor to address not only the sloppy errors mentioned above, but also the tendency in both of the books I read to have too many narrative threads which have to be knotted together too hastily at the end. The result is neither attractive nor satisfying.

She could be good, but her style will always be more fantastical than realistic. If you're looking for believable wildlife settings with common-sense sleuths, stick with Dana Stabenow's Kate Shugak series, or Nevada Barr's Anna Pigeon. If you're looking for giddy and glamorous fun, Moody's Venus Diamond *might* be your girl -- someday. Here's hoping for better from this lively writer!

After three outings that were fun, although a bit off-the-wall, this fourth effort is rather a total loss. Briefly put, Venus Diamond is on a case again, although she gets into it indirectly. The Greedy are seeking to profit from the Protectors of near-extinct wildlife. The Moralists and the Environmentalists are in there, too.
There were too many plot elements to keep track of; too many subplots that do little to advance the major thread; too many "just-in-time-and-place" resolutions of sticky issues.
Of course, everything gets more-or-less resolved by the last page, but one can hope that Venus' next outing will be more grounded and less contrived.

Habitat is the fourth mystery in Skye Kathleen Moody's series starring Venus Diamond, Fish and Wildlife agent, continuing her high level of suspense writing with another exciting and thought-provoking mystery. Venus, recently married and, at the insistance of her husband, on leave from her job, is suffering from depression which she attributes to Seasonal Affective Disorder. However, the doctor she consults diagnoses it much more accurately as 'spiritual suffocation.' When her husband, Richard Winters, accepts an overseas assignment, Venus agrees to help her boss with the particularly nasty and vicious murder of Dr. Hannah Strindberg, and simultaneously throws herself into grave danger while curing her soul's suffocation. Venus refuses to accept the arson investigator's formulaic solution to the crime, and instead investigates those associated with Strindberg in the secretive Breedhaven project to harvest, freeze, and clone embryos of endangered species. Once again, Moody gives readers an extremely well-crafted plot, which is supported by a tremendous depth of research. She demonstrates her sensitivity to a variety of viewpoints concerning the very complex issues of cloning, preservation of endangered species, and the relationship between science and the general public. Her characters are realistic, complex, and very well developed. This novel is most highly recommended for those readers who want an action-packed mystery which also has believable characters and a thought-provoking plot.

Based on an extensive research project this book promises a lot but delivers nothing. The first thing that you have to recognize is that there is hardly any structure at all. Repitions abound without adding any value. The style of writing is close to unbearable - they could have put the contents into a fourth of the pages. The cases are sketchy at best; they claim to offer best practices but are nothing new. The book tries to look into the future and puts forward a wildly speculative view of what the authors think lies ahead; again they do not offer a vision but describe the status quo in future tense. For people who like real satire I recommend Moody's Harley Davidson poem! Summary: Only recommended for those who need to own every book on the subject...

As a purchasing professional, I turned to this book to gain insight to new or advanced purchasing practices that might help me in my work and I was very enthusiastic about the book when I began reading it. Instead of new knowledge, I found repetitive stories about the mass production environments in the automotive and related industries. Although some new thoughts or ideas were presented, I did not feel as if this book taught me anything novel or cutting edge. It is simply a repeat of purchasing concepts that can be found in many other operations or supply chain books flavored with managerial buzz words and the self-glorifying personal success stories of the authors and the companies they work for. If you work in a job shop environment or for a small to medium size business, this book is virtually useless. If you are in a huge mass production environment with a large budget, it might be of some value, but my guess is that you would already be familiar with the concepts presented.

Ifyou are looking for a "how to" book, look somewhere else. This book appears to have only general rules of the thumbs , wrapped in lots of manager lingo (people resource allocation, globalization, etc.) Overal very disapointing. The only positive side are the occasional industry examples, but there are not enough of them to make this book a good buy.

This book bills itself as "the New Testament Revisted." Revisited by whom, you may ask--writers interested in spirituality, religion and questions of scholarship--like Percy, Price, and Updike--or a bunch of glib, Gen-X New Yorkers whose interpretation of the New Testament is about as shallow as a parking-lot puddle? There are some great writers in here, but even they are dragged down by the overwhelming stupidity, presumptuousness and arrogance implicit in solipsistically re-exploring a work millions of people visit pretty regularly, thank you very much. For such a smart writer, it is hard to believe that Rick Moody so wholly swallows the highly debatable reconstruction of Jesus given to us by the Jesus Seminar. Another annoyance: he writes in his preface that all the writers were welcome to write what they pleased, but as editor of this venture he wanted to keep out any "repressive" interpretations of Christianity. It seems it has never occurred to Mr. Moody that the very fabric of the Judeo-Christian faith is repressive, and without that repression it loses much of the moral authority that made and make it so attractive to non-Christians. Moody, also in his introduction, writes that this book had as its genesis a "dinner party" conversation about the evangelical wing of the far-right. That seems about right, since this book is the literary equivalent of a dinner party: half-smart, filled with people who have no idea what they're talking about, and even though it's short, it feels really long. JOYFUL NOISE is little more than a calling-in of favors and a Cliffs Notes version of trendy New Testament scholarship. A book to despise.

Being acquainted with the editors, I chose to read the introduction and afterword as book-ends. The effect was electrifying, since these writers clearly are wrestling with their personal beliefs, and struggling to communicate how important this quest can be. Any tolerant and thoughtfull religious thinker will find his/her accepted theology stretched and challenged, though many of the views seem "heretical" to mainstream conventional approaches. Take a chance and see if some of your long-held tenets don't take on a different resonance.

Edited by one of the literary giants of the 20th century, Rick Moody, Joyful Noise is the most profound treatment of the N.T. I have ever come across. Not since Chesterton's Orthodoxy has my system of beliefs been so tested. This book will appeal to, and the shake the ground of agnostics and believers alike.

I started this book with high hopes. My best friend and I met in college and are still extremely close after 20+ years. I was hoping for a story about the deep closeness women can share. As in the book, I live in California and my best friend lives in Boston, she's Jewish and I'm a WASP. We've seen each other through a multitude of ups and downs, family issues, job changes, bad partners, aging parents, etc. But I just couldn't relate to Clare and Sally's friendship. It seemed to really lack intimacy, there so many things they didn't share (boyfriends they were seeing, what their experience of pregnancy or love was, feedback on each other's choices) which they attribute to not "wallowing". Not to mention the serious secrets they kept! My best friend and I talk about eveything, all our experiences with our jobs, our bodies, our loves, our loved ones. This is a source of great pleasure and solace to both of us, and we help each other laugh and hang on through bad times, and cheer each other on in good times. When Sally starts crying at some point toward the end, Clare is so uncomfortable with it. Shouldn't a best friend's shoulder be a safe place to cry? It's not like Sally didn't have enough to cry about! The one secret Clare should have kept (about Sally's dad) she wants to tell her for her own selfish reasons, and they never actually talk it through. I grew frustrated with their apparent cluelessness. I admired them for some reasons (Clare's work with AIDS patients and Sally's optimism) but for the most part they seemed to lack empathy and insight, were remote, self-absorbed and not particularly warm or wise, and very slow to learn from experience. In addition, I agree that the book was carelessly edited. [and I, too, know what 'hector' means, LOL]. That said, I did read it to the end, but mostly in hopes that the characters would break through to some deeper self-knowledge and understanding. It's not neccessary to like characters to enjoy a book, but I could not warm up to these two.

I liked this book, for the exact same reasons that others who reviewed it did not. Although there are many women who have the type of best friend with whom they share every detail of their lives, there are just as many who love each other so much that they honor the idea of keeping secrets from each other. In contrast to an earlier reviewer's experience, my very best friend and I were inseparable from the age of 5, but we could not have been more different, and there were things I never knew about her until she was terminally ill. Only then did she feel that she could/should share certain "secrets" with me. This book is a testament to the fact that not all women "tell all" even to their best friends. The two main characters, Clare and Sally, although very different in temperament and social upbringing, are very similar in their inability to develop deep emotional ties. Sally seeks to fill her emptiness by having children and avoiding unpleasantness, while Clare seeks to fill hers by surrounding herself with the cold reality of death in her work with AIDS patients, and in relationships with men she cannot have. Both are deeply scarred and shaped by their childhood experiences, and this book explores the effects of poor parenting in an unflinching manner. I enjoyed the book, although I would have preferred a more concrete ending. For a first novel, it is quite good, and I would certainly recommend it. It would make a great book for a women's book club, for I would imagine the debating about the depth of the character's devotion to each other and what they "should" have shared would be a hot topic!

Wow! What can I say? Well I first found this book when my best girl friend was reading it. She finished it and bought 10 or more copies and gave them to her friends. After I finished it (a long read, but worth it) it became my personal favorite book of all time. I bought this book on a friday and started it at 6:00 at night: I stayed up till 3 in the next morning just to finish it! It totally changed my outlook on life and showed me a whole new angle of relationships. I bought several more copies for more friends and I'm sure this book will become a classic in its later years. This book changed my outlook on life in a way only a book could.

I can't wait for this author to write her second book. I should be just as wonderful and inspiring in the last. Now, I am reading the book for my 3rd time for my book club.

The Ice Storm was a novel filled with product placement--bean bag chairs and books such as I'm OK, You're OK--to infuse it with unearned reality. The Black Veil, on the other hand, has only a few products and is for the main part a self concerned attempt at trying to touch the college-aged reader. It fails. The long sad lament at the end gives the game away. Moody says he's sorry for not writing about his mother; for not including his first kiss; for the many things left out. The list is revealing. Why did he leave out his first kiss? Where is his mother? The heart? Is this supposed to be another boy-searching-for-father story. If so, it doesn't work. We can't get past the weak writing. To sustain a book that connects up literary history with personal history takes good sentences. Moody's prose is inexpensive. It leans on verbose overkill. And it's hard to care. Moody milks his short rehab experience. But it comes across as being a short stay by a rich kid in a world he won't engage. It feels jaded. Unearned. A token trial. All the same you see that Moody is trying hard to humanize himself, to get rid of an inner coldness. It makes you think about all of those who have really suffered; the poor, the meek, those without rich fathers in their new cars to tote them around. Moody has tried to establish himself as a rock-star fiction writer. His main concern is with coolness. He longs to be the cool kid. When in truth the cool kids are the ones who don't care. The whole concept of cool has reshifted. Like so many rock stars, he's a product of the arena system. He shoots not for art but for the charts. One has to wonder why Moody links himself with the Beats. He's the only one who makes the link. See the introductions to his books for self-serving tidbits. There is nothing in his work of the heartfelt love of life that the Beats gave us.

This book takes a little while to work its spell on the reader, as Moody gradually earns our belief in the relationship between his own experiences of depression, guilt and grief and his historical, American inheritance -- a legacy of Calvinist self-laceration, certainty of the inherently sinful nature of the human soul, and, most damning of all, our ferocious history of the destruction of native peoples, a taint that seems to have settled deep into the psyche of the land. I'm amazed that the book has been accused of being narcissistic and self-absorbed. In fact, it seems to want to offer a corrective to what can sometimes be a narrowness in contemporary memoir; it wants above all to link the speaker's spiritual and emotional condition to his culture, his history, his family, to find it source in the blood and soil and genes. It's a brave, convincing attempt, and ultimately the image of the veil haunts and troubles, persisting in the mind long after one's closed the book. THE BLACK VEIL is formally ambitious, fiercely self-aware, and it provokes the reader to examine the troubled legacy of American history. I think this is one of the most surprising, riveting memoirs to come along in a long time.

i'm astonished by the initial disparagements of rick moody's new book, and the alacrity with which readers peg him as self-absorbed, full-of-angst, &c. he's neither of those things; The Black Veil strikes me as a work of tremendous bravery and honesty. most moving for me are the implications of the book's genealogical project, which sort of extraordinarily problematizes precisely the sort of isolated self-interest of which moody is so weirdly accused. the book seeks to imagine a relation between not just one generation and its immediate antecedent, or one generation and antecedent centuries previous, but a relation between one person and a world which itself exceeds this straightforward mode of narrative time. this, as an art, seems at once both ancient (one could say, with an ear toward the old testament, almost biblical) and unrecognizably new-- hence, perhaps, so few people knowing what to do with this work. the black veil takes the individual person as a point of departure for a new conception of self and interrelation which seems a challenge to both readers and other writers alike. this is no more an ordinary memoir than it's an ordinary genealogy, than it's an ordinary digression. the book, in its local (predictably exquisite) details (e.g. some of the most sensitive descriptions of the Maine landscape since Jewett), and more importantly, its larger outline, is an act of love-- tho a love provocative (and radically ethical, and daring) in its glimmering unfamiliarity. read it read it read it read it read it.

Not much to say about this small book, did not like it. Read much better books on soulmates than this one. Sent it back did not capture my interest at all,and I read alot of spiritual books. But this one, just made no sense to me at all. Just could not even get through it.

I must say that the book is much better than the audio tape. The book itself however is more for someone who wants to know more on Karma.It does cover aspects of Twin Flames, but it just is not that captivating, as Ms Prophets book on reincarnation.
My personal opinion on the book is that it is more on preaching God's word. I would really enjoy finding a book on how you know that you found your twin flame, and what twin flames have in common,not on The Violet Flame,that is mentioned way too may times in this book.

I did enjoy this book but felt it not to be as informative as I had hoped. Not a bad book to own but not the best book for serious research on twin souls.