Having read all other of JHG books, I must say I was very disappointed in this one. No wonder the publisher refused it and she later published under John Garth. Her readers would have been very disgusted at the theme she chose for the book.

Hill Man was written by Janice Holt Giles under the name of John Garth. A book about rural life, which was not in keeping with the other books JHG had written. I thoroughly enjoyed the book in the 60's, and I can hardly wait to get my copy.

Janice and Henry Giles were two outstanding people!

This translation was first published in 1844. It is, as the other reviewers pointed out, incomplete, missing one of the most important pieces - the peroration to the Five Tyrants. Gildas himself wrote in extraordinarily complicated and idiomatic (if grammatically perfect) Latin, whose understanding has greatly improved (as if you couldn't guess) in the years since 1844, and certainly needs a better translation. And as if that wasn't enough, there are at least two more recent and perfectly functional translations, Williams (1899) and Winterbottom (1978), the earlier of which is out of copyright, perfectly available and has a commentary part of which are still valuable. So why did Penguin resurrect this prehistoric oddity? They must be mad.

As the other reviewer notes, it is an incomplete version, lacking the Epistle addressed to the five tyrants. Furthermore, certain passages in Giles' translation seem to be shaped by the academic studies of his time, rather than a direct translation.

Gildas, a Briton, represents the early history of his people using texts from foreign authors, as those of his countrymen have either been "consumed in the fires, or exiled with his countrymen."

An early Christian as well, Gildas represents the backwardness of the early Britons in first inviting the pagan Saxons to defend England when Rome could no longer offer protection. A few words on Rome leaving instructions to the Britons on how to manufacture arms and protect themselves, and remarks on early defense against the Scots and Picts round out parts of the text, but scriptural statements as injunctions to his people form the main core of this highly readable work.

A fine translation with footnotes of the earliest English historian.

Jeannette Rankin lurks as an obscure footnote in the history of American politics. In school we're told she was the first woman elected to Congress and the only member of Congress to vote against U.S. entry into both World Wars. And that's all we're told about her. Kevin Giles, author of "Flight of the Dove" attempts to fill in the gaps by detailing Rankin's education, involvement in the suffrage movement and struggle for world peace. Unfortunately, Giles faces a significant and self-admitted stumbling block: Rankin wrote very little of her ideas and methods for attaining peace or her other ambitions. This shortage of material makes it harder to picture Rankin in the context of her times or to understand what drove to do what she did. Giles fails to make up for this lack of material by quoting contemporary newspaper accounts that wrote about her. He also fails to delve deeply into personal journals and memoirs of Rankin's colleagues and contemporaries. While using some of these sources, he mostly summarizes them, producing a defensive condescending biography. Jeannette Rankin wasn't perfect and some of her ideas may have been wrong, but she deserves a better biography than this. She was a woman who opened a lot of doors and stood by her principles while living in a fish bowl, observed by harsh skeptics just waiting for her to make a mistake. She deserves to be understood and brought back into the American pantheon.

As a beginning learner, I expected this book to be a bit more structured vs diving right into complex sentences and phrases.

For me personally, this book would have been more helpful to focus on everyday usage in the office place, as opposed to focusing on a specfic business situation (financial turnaround).

For intermediate speakers already accustomed to the language, you may find this book useful. If you are just starting, look for something else to give you grounding before taking this book on. My two star rating is more my missed expectation and level of learning, vs what the book can deliver.

Rather than upon this somewhat loose and insubstantial collection of biographical sketches, Strachey's fame rests upon his quartet of long essays, Eminent Victorians. One can see why. Strachey was an ironist of Wildean pretensions, and in this book he writes too frequently of subjects with whom he is in obvious sympathy - a largely eighteenth-century assembly of essayists, biographers and letter-writers. Thus, whilst always appreciative of the eccentric or the absurd, Strachey too frequently floats off into vapid sentimentality (the dangerous obverse of irony - as Wilde also knew). As a historian Strachey was a recycler rather than a pioneer of information - with the result that the value of his books depends wholly upon their style; and, deprived of its ironic edge, the style comes across as merely well-groomed. As rarified as the French high culture he repeatedly dwells on, Strachey's writing here seems either frigid or simply decorous - with the exception of one paragraph towards the end of the book in which he is galvanised into a superb digression on the vulgarity of English Victorianism. To quote it here would be to remove the main reason for buying this otherwise tame, uninformative, effete and impeccably-written book.

Giles Foden is a journalist and his first two novels were very promising. The Last King of Scotland, a fascinating study of Idi Amin and the charisma of power and corruption - and one of the best first novels of the 1990s; Ladysmith, a fine siege novel. On the strength of these two novels Foden was proclaimed by Allan Massie one of the best young British novelists. However, while the big breakthrough as a literary novelist awaits it is customary for promising British novelists to turn their attention to cinema. One cannot blame them. There is little money to be made in literary fiction, even as one of the best young British novelists. So, a young man's fancy will turn to thoughts of big name actors, big budget action thrillers, and the end result sees novels by numbers. Sadly Giles Foden seems to have followed the same path as Philip Kerr.

This novel deals with al-Qaida and the US embassy bombings of the late 1990s. The novel was substantially completed before 11.9.2001 and its content evidences the diligence of Foden's researches into ther organisation (although there is a didacticism here that is not present in his earlier novels). It looks at the early links between bin Laden's organisation and the American CIA, one of the three central western characters being a CIA agent involved in training al-Qaida operatives in Afghanistan during the Soviet occupation. This strand is for me the most successful part of the novel. Quiller is an interesting character, battling his past failure, trying to make recompense. He echoes those characters that populate Foden's previous novels (although even aspects of his character - such as his missing limb - feel like caricature). However, Quiller is off centre too often. Instead the plot centres around a young American marinne biologist Nick, (Memo to central casting - man on a mission, driven, unable to commit: promising for Ben Affleck?), and his sometime love interest Miranda, a diplomat at the US embassy in Tanzania (memo to central casting - attractive, strong woman, stumbling into love, powerful scenes when on solo investigation. All scantily clad sections wholly essential to plot due to extreme heat: Try J-LO?). Neither wholly convinces, and the love story feels like a pitch for a movie.

I wonder if the book was rushed out to remain topical. It could have benefited from a longer gestation, the paring down of the plot, the building up of the characters.

The pages keep turning, but a week after I'd finished the novel there were few scenes that remained in the mind, no long lasting impression. One could say it was perfect airline reading, and one can see a big budget all action movie, if it were not for the problem that Foden makes clear the complicity of the US in the development of bin Laden's movement.

On the strength of Foden's previous work I will look forward to his next novel, but I don't think I'll be revisiting Zanzibar.

Are you a big fan of the movie "Tombstone"? I was. I loved the interaction between the characters -- Wyatt and Doc as played by Kurt Russell and Val Kilmer, in particular. I'm sorry to say that the book doesn't come close to capturing the excitement of the movie. I think this was Giles Tippette's first attempt at writing a novelization, and I don't think he did it very well.

What really ruins the book is the dialogue. A paraphrase:

Doc said, "And what would you do if 'she' walked in here?"
Wyatt said, "Who?"
Doc said, "You know who. That dusky-hued Lady Satan, that's who."
Wyatt said, "I'd probably just ignore her."
Doc said, "Ignore her?"
Wyatt said, "That's right, ignore her."

And so on. You get the impression that he simply used the Find -> Replace function to replace the line break between the character name and the line of dialogue with " said,".

In Tippette's defense, the rest of his writing, to my knowledge, is nothing like this. But this book is depressingly poor at conveying the magic of the screen. If you're interested in having it on your shelf, I strongly recommend tracking down a copy of the actual screenplay.