This reference book fills a niche for the secondary music teacher, private tutor, and church music director searching for a scholarly, yet concise definition of musical terms and brief biographical sketches of musicians.

Stanley Crouch is an excellent essayist, and of his books, Notes of a Hanging Judge is the best I've read so far. That being said, some of the essays in this collection still anger me, some 8 years after I first read them.

Much of his national exposure has seemingly been created by the gratuitous pot shots he takes at notable blacks, in efforts to knock them off some imagined pedestal. Two examples stand out. In the Rage of Race,(#34) one of two essays about James Baldwin, Crouch embarks on an acidic deconstruction; claiming that Baldwin's late-career work "sold out to rage, despair, self-righteousness and a will to scandalize." Crouch further wrote that Baldwin's mantle as black literary spokesman led him to neglect his craft, and eroded the impact of his subsequent work. To the contrary, there are numerous black artists, whose passion and activism did not lower the quality of their work(i.e. Paul Robeson; and Ishmael Reed-see Airing Dirty Laundry, and Writin' is Fightin). To Baldwin's credit, he defiantly refused to "sit in some ivory tower perfecting my craft" while events on the civil rights ground demanded his attention and participation. In "Nationalism of Fools(Essay #25)Crouch reduced Malcolm X to a purveyor of "a cockeyed racial vision of history which precluded any insights into human nature..." Crouch's willingness to adopt the mainstream consensus about Malcolm left him no room to study the true evolution of Malcolm's world view; it expanded beyond U.S. borders, transcended civil rights, and embraced human rights instead.

With these criticisms, you may wonder why I gave this book 5 stars. I did so because I LEARNED SO MUCH!! Crouch introduced me to people I'd never heard of, and whose work I now enjoy. The best example is("Chitlins at the Waldorf"-Essay #6) his tribute to Albert Murray, who was a contemporary of Ralph Ellison. Murray's book, Stompin the Blues, is widely regarded as the definitive text about the meaning of jazz and the blues. Because of Crouch, I now have four of Charles Johnson's books. Crouch's essay, "Another Master" profiles Senegalese film maker Ousmane Sembene, who recently had a month-long festival of his films shown at NYC's Film Forum. For all the acerbity in some essays, Crouch also shows real compassion and empathy, as his essay about Lionel Mitchell attests.

For the most part, I will never align myself politically with the conservatives with whom Crouch appears cozy. However, I will never stop reading his essays either, for they are rich, improvisational, educational and eclectic. Notes of a Hanging Judge is an intense,fascinating workout, which is at times fun. It is a truly worthwhile reading experience, and I highly recommend it!

This concise guide is even better than Cliffs NOtes and contains the author biography, plot summary, character analysis, themes, style, historical context, critical overview and criticism for 16 novels. Novels include: A Tale of Two Cities, The Sun Also Rises, The Pearl, Ethan Frome, The Color Purple, Les Miserables, One Hundred Years of Solitude, The Bean Trees, The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, How the Garcia Girls lost their Accents, The Outsiders, Like Water for Chocolate, Ender's Game, Love Medicine, Giants in the Earth, and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep. This series covers the high points for each novel and also has great side topics: Compare and Contrast, Media Adaptions, Topics for Further Study, etc. Useful as both a study guide and a reseach source, it sucessfully highlights the points in approximately 25 pages per novel.

This book presents a mind-blowing revelation on every page, and yet you will recognize everything in it from your everyday life. That is what makes it so chilling. Milgram demonstrates in definitive experiments how typical people recruited from off the street can, using no more than a veneer of authority, easily be persuaded to commit torture and even murder on innocent victims. The book thereby essentially explains the psychological mechanics of the Nazi and other concentration camps, the Death Squads in El Salvador and across the World, and the many other forms of atrocity that have become so characteristic of the 20th Century, this "Century of barbed wire and watchtowers". Ever wonder how you can find air force pilots willing to drop the bombs to start a nuclear holocaust? Answer: It's the easiest thing in the World! A certain percentage of the population will have the proper psychological profile, and you just select them. If psychologists and social scientists really wanted to know what are the ruling principles of civilization and what are the sources of so many of its ills, they'd be running experiments like Milgram's year-round in labs across the planet. Instead, very little work of this kind has since been done. Why? Because it's considered "ethically questionable"! In a classic case of "kill the messenger", the very man who shows us concretely how torture has been so thoroughly integrated into the political structure and who exposes the blatant hypocracy of our rulers, is accused of abusing his subjects and of betraying their trust! In the back of the book Milgram, by the way, faces all ethical objections head-on and refutes them all convincingly. Buy this book if you want to find out what is "really going on", but you may be upset by what you find.

This book is one of the best books on OCD I have seen. It is perfect for someone who wants to learn about the disease, and 'the facts'. The book can literally 'be judged by its cover'. (...).

The Structuralism asserts that text tells itself and there is no place the author dwell on. With no doubt, the text we read is not the one the author wrote or intended. It's the text reconstructed on our own. According to the Structuralism, the intellectual history is the waste of time and effort. For this field traces the background of the text: what was the zeitgeist of author; what kind of influences could be spotted in the text.
In fact, text could be read in itself with no background knowledge of the text. But I suspect that kind of reading is not sufficient to depict the overall picture of the text. We always adopt or reject some part of text or another. I think such treatment of text could be done effectively only when the overall points of the text are settled down. The text is not isolated from the environment. The text itself is some kind of social action. If not, why do we write the text at all? Writing could not be a simple dabbling, but a painstaking endeavor. It's written to communicate with others. So the understanding some text should be the knowing where was the text located, in other word, the readers of text. Reading the intellectual history is, therefore, definitely helpful to understand the text.
Hughes is the right person to write such a history. He is the master in the intellectual history. this book is one of the trilogy which covers the modern Western thoughts. This book is the intellectual history of the French thoughts from the 1930s to the 1960s. This period is the cradle of Annal school, Existentialism, French phenomenology and Structuralism. Hughes argues that those schools were obsessed with the changed relationship of the intellectuals with society. As we can see from French enlightenment and the Dreyfus affair, French intellectuals enjoyed the influences over public sphere. Since the 17th C. French intellectuals didn't have any doubt about their role of steering the France. They even thought they set the direction of the Western civilization. For example, the very basic principles of democracy, liberty and equality were manifested in the French Revolution, and the very conception of rationality was formalized by Descartes. But World War I cast doubt over those doctrines. And it was commensurate to the suspicion of the role of intellectuals. It seems that the postwar West did not follow the principles they proclaimed. The Fascism was the good example. French thoughts of this period like Existentialism, Structuralism and so on are offspring of this intellectual situation. Hughes illustrates the circumstances they faced in the graphic way. And better, his recapping of major thinkers of those schools are skillful. I recommend this book to who want to understand those schools better.

Allthough it didn't seem to mention that the book was in black & white, it still is pretty interesting to see all the products the TMNT appeared on. It also has the covers for their comics, and speaking of wich, I didn't see the Ninja Turtle enima bags mentioned in Mirage issue #41 in this book. LOL

Add another facet to the World War II retrospectives ('The Greatest Generation' Brokaw, 'Saving Pvt. Ryan' Spielberg). Now, indefatigable British soldier Stanley Swift, member of the famed 'Desert Rats' under Field Marshal Montgomery, puts a human face on HIS war that sometimes criss-crossed beleagured paths of American and other Allied troops. 'Oh, What a Lovely War! mirrors Pvt. Swift's unforgettable innermost thoughts and feelings of his life in battle, long surpressed by a self-imposed half century of silence. You'll chuckle, laugh and shed tears following the strictly British account of his 'adventures' as a recruit in training during the 1940 London blitz and assignment to the Royal Horse Artillery, Seventh Armoured Division. Then it was on to historic desert battles with Nazi General Rommel's forces in north Africa, through Italy to the Normandy beaches in France, and more combat across Belgium and Holland to final victory in Berlin in 1945. It is his sister, Evelyn Swift Luscher, a Sacramento, California, author, who gives poignant voice to her brother's memoir through her dedicated transcribing and editing of his many irreplaceable audio tapes. Stanley Swift died in April, 1996, in Nottingham, England, at the age of 81. I liked the book because it told so much we never know from history books and evoked so many emotions. Everybody should know what war REALLY is. Truly, an excellent read. Elaine Adams California Writer's Club Sacramento, CA.

A highly readable but scholarly book. Should not be a reader's first book about Chinese art, but is very useful for, say, college art history at any level.

In what I found to be the most useful chapter, "Significant Criteria for Period Style," Stanley-Baker manages to isolate exactly what attributes belong to Song, Yuan, and Ming paintings. Her observant writings that link the physical with the spiritual (e.g. breathing space in relation to mountains in landscape paintings) are wonderful in their simplicity. Her essays will certainly enrich the connoiseur's love of Chinese art.

I see this book as indispensable to the student of Chinese art and highly recommended to the amateur of same.

I like this book very much, but I want to say something to the author by email .