Gerry Fitzgerald is moved to revisit her past when her best friend, Samantha Kiley becomes pregnant. Suddenly, she needs to find the child she gave up for adoption thirty years ago, when she was a postulant nun and could not keep the child. This has been a haunting secret from her family, and learning it shocks and angers her two nearly grown children, each of whom are dealing with their own painful situations. Gerry's firstborn is not all that thrilled with meeting her either, but does so anyway, defying her own family.

The road ahead of each player in this excellent drama is rocky, to say the least. Matters of the heart, both romantic and otherwise plauge them as the newly found families learn to love one another and deal with romances. New love and new life await, but so do pain and danger.

**** Not classified an inspirational romance, this novel still has profoundness that will appeal to the Christian audience, despite occassionally strong language and sexual tensions. However, like Andrew Greeley or Nelson DeMille, Ms. Goudge has succsessfully realized in her writing that Christians do not live in a whitewashed world and have flaws and issues just the same as secular people. ****

We read a condensed version of this book in class. I really enjoyed it. I really cared about the characters. It also had good basketball elements; the games were very descriptive. Ed Sorrell was one of the greatest characters I have read in a long time. It's not just a basketball book: It also has great characters. Even though it was published in '58, it's pretty much timeless. I felt most of the book was relavent today. I definitely reccomend it to anyone who is looking for a good book.

This is the best photographic essay of Washington. The pictures are lightyears above the competition. True artwork. I am sending this book to friends in London for a good view of life here.

"Kid" Carson lived the sport of boxing. He takes the aspiring student further in this book than most "how to" manuals. Besides talking basic boxing skills and training, he talks about dealing with managers, promoters, the press, and other elements that a promising young fighter would do well to read. The honest straightforward presentation and the liberal doses of black and white photographs make for a great boxing handbook.

"They talk of planning economies, of controlling business, of controlling prices and wages... But they are always using power upon and controlling people, and not just some of the people either, but all of them." - Clarence B. Carson

According to historian Clarence Carson, the 20th century was characterized by one major phenomenon: it saw the whole world fall under the sway of a single idea, which Carson refers to as "collectivism" or "socialism", though it often borrows other names.

Whatever its form, this idea fundamentally proposes "to achieve human felicity on this earth by concerting all efforts toward its realization", which requires that we "root out, discredit, and discard all aspects of culture which cannot otherwise be altered to divest them of any role of inducing or supporting the individual's pursuit of his own self-interest". And because men are not naturally inclined to sacrifice themselves to the alleged "good of the whole", force must be introduced into the equation: the instrument to be used to perform these twin goals cannot be other than government.

This idea has two major variants, the revolutionary and the evolutionary. The former is what we call communism, as theorized by Marx and Engels and put into practice on the Russians, Chinese and countless other victims. The latter Carson calls "gradualism", though it has also been called "Fabianism", "progressivism", "liberalism", "democratic socialism" or, most disingenuously, "democracy".

In this book, which according to him is less about the idea than its grip, i.e. its spread and implementation, Carson analyzes first revolutionary socialism (with the bolshevization or Russia and the nazification of Germany), then evolutionary socialism (from its genesis in England to its power grab in Sweden and the United States) and their clash known as the Cold War.

After WWII, Carson explains, the two variants of socialism split the world into two blocks: communism dominated the block centered in Moscow, and gradualism, the block centered in Washington. It is these two ideologies, and not communism and "capitalism" or "democracy" that were embroiled in the Cold War.

This revisionist analysis of the Cold War (in Book VII) is all the more brilliant as the old theory of a conflict between "capitalism" and communism has been replaced in some circles by a much more perfidious interpretation: "revisionist historians... declared that the conflict was all a product of American hysteria, that communism had not so much fomented it as been victimized by it. Communism, in this view, was a bugaboo invented by Americans so far as its aggressiveness and threat to world peace was concerned." (p375)

On the contrary, Carson says, the West did fight against an expansionist, bellicose and tyrannical ideology. It is the nature of what it was fighting *for* that has been misconstrued: the so-called "free world" was in fact on the evolutionary road to socialism. In other words, the two blocks did not differ in their ultimate ideals or goals, but in their tactics, which explains the self-restraint of the alleged opponents of communism.

*The World in the Grip of an Idea* is the work of a man who, like Ayn Rand, is able to recognize the fundamentals of various belief systems and is therefore fooled neither by the kind of classification by non-essentials that identifies nazism as "right-wing", nor by the orgy of renaming that would have us believe that some variant of socialism is actually not socialism but, say, American pragmatism. His analysis is so penetrating that the reader is finally able to make sense of that politically infamous century, the twentieth.

Unfortunately, in Book VIII, Carson, in an attempt to rescue the individual from its modern enemies, proceeds to launch an attack against what I would consider to be bugbears: "machines", "numbers" and "the corporation". Even though I always perceived him as a defender of nineteenth century liberalism, he calls the latter "that pallid offspring of the French Revolution which has done already what it could do." Even though I have always seen him praise the free economy, he now claims that the world must not return to "laissez faire capitalism", which he claims "was a theory for leaving the capitalist free to do what he pleased, and leaving the rest of us free to do what *he* pleased." Turning into a Naderite, he even demonizes advertising, which he says is used "to persuade the consumer that what the machines produce is what he wants"...

In this unfortunate Book VIII, Carson seems to have fallen prey to a mixture of paranoia and package dealing, seeing ominous implications in the addition of a zero to his insurance policy number, and assimilating control by force to control by wages, thereby turning "control" into an anti-concept (for a refutation, see Ayn Rand's review of Skinner's *Beyond Freedom and Dignity* entitled "The Stimulus... And the Response.")

Carson's attack on the corporation seems to be based mostly on leftist misrepresentations and sheer naïvete. He sees the emergence of the factory system as "a retrogressive development" and goes so far as to claim that "the organization of workers is inessential to production"! I think any sound economist or business historian could easily demolish this statement. (See for instance Reisman's *Capitalism*, Chapter 11, Part B on "The Productive Role of Businessmen and Capitalists".) Carson also claims that "organization" in itself is evil, a destroyer of initiative, responsibility and ability, because he mistakenly assumes that "organization" means "control from the top downward" which "insures that what will be accomplished will be restricted largely to what can be determined and directed from above." He does not seem to understand that "organization" is the division of labour applied to the company. And since 1776, we all know how essential division of labout is to wealth creation.

I did learn a lot from this book, as from all of Carson's other works, and I highly recommend it to anyone who can get a copy of it. However, the book also taught me that I was not a "Carsonian", but an incurable Randian.

This book is a quiet, simple way to talk about death with children without scaring them. The little girl has already dealt with major traumas in her life-- her mother walked out on their family, her hamster died-- and so when her great-aunt dies, she is prepared to experience a new aspect of grieving. She sees her father and her older relatives wracked with grief and she reaches out with new understanding. As a class read-aloud, it offers lots of children access with the side story of her hamster's death, allowing a discussion of grief and love and support to emerge easily. The absence of the mother in the story also allows other kinds of grieving and separation to be acknowledged.

I loved this book. Tom Carson doesn't merely joke about pop culture, he creates one of the most dazzling examples of it. This book is both high literature and low culture, ambitious and funny (if a little over the top), and his command of the stuff of The American Century (trash TV, cultish European movies, literary figures, Hollywood and Washington, DC) is so masterful that he often makes you look at the objects that comprise it in a whole new way. this is the book every American studies student wishes he in his or her head. It's a whirlwind of brilliantly evoked voices (Lovey Howell's chapter in particular) and references, but they all come together in a way that is resonant, powerful and, in the end, very moving.

First, I have to say MY pet peeve are those that don't actually read a book and feel entitled to review it. Tom Carson has written about the U.S. and its cultural history 'through the glass darkly.' I haven't yet picked up all of its many layered jokes and allusions, and I've read it twice already(and am working on the third!) Each time it's better and funnier. By exploring the culture of the U.S. using Gilligans' Island characters, Mr. Carson sets his many jokes and observations within the biggest joke/observation of all: Americans' use of something simplistic (like a sitcom) to confront something as complex as the enigma of 20th Century American culture. This may be the most American trait of all! Although the 'Ginger' character is the most spot-on, the Thurston Howell character makes me laugh and think the most. His over-educated oblivion puts the perfect twist on the TV character, making him just as obnoxious but with new depth. And the Acheson, Topeka and the Santa Fe joke is terrific. Of course, so is the joke "Hello Nurse"!, and MaryAnn's 'pissed-off' anti-French diatribe, and the great allusion to the Who with "a bad girl--to be a mad girl, between blue thighs," and . . . !!!

'Gilliagn's Wake' by Tom Carson is either a self-absorbed, self-righteous diatribe disguised by hipster cool references, or it's one of the great epic allegories about what it should mean to be an American.

My vote is on the latter.

The book is like an onion. Peeling away each layer only presents you with more layers to with which to deal. I doubt that I will be able to understand all the references - and I pride myself on being the culture-vulture (always get the free drinks in the bar trivia games, I do.)

So, what do we have here?

Imagine if you will, a discouse on the history of the United States in the 20th Century. A history that is also a reflection on the weight of the mantle of becoming and enduring as agreat power. A reflection that is, perhaps, darkened by the fact that we're not living up to all we can be. Why? Well, think of Lord Acton's comment, "Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely."

That''s what Mr. Carson presents to us. A homily on how we are in dreadful danger of lettting the last best hope slip away. He screams at us to not let it happen.

But, instead of presenting this in a conventional manner - something Paul Kennedy did with "Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: 1500 - 2000", Mr. Carson elects to follow the revolutionary approach of using that which we are as a weapon against ourselves.

It's written in a prose style that is Joycean, but also holds elements of Marxian fervor (Groucho, not Vladimir), along with Lennonesque puns, and maybe even Faulkner-like stream of conscious ramblins.

America's histiory is told within the context of its culture...more precisely, it's pop culture. The story comes out in seven narratives. Each describes a piece of the whole, through interaction with events and persons.

The seven narrators are very, very familar to us. maybe more familiar than the so-called famous people with whom the interact. Who are they?

A former PT boat captain now running a day-cruise service.
A rich couple.
A movie actress.
A scientist.
A young woman.

And - very briefly - a possibly insane young man named Gil.

Their stories depict their actions, to be sure. But, more importantly, they also depict the story of America's actions, whether good or bad, whether well intentioned or selfish.

It's not always a pretty picture, we - as a people - have some things of which we should be ashamed. But, we have more, much more, of which we should be proud. proud enough to go on to redress the wrongs.

And, at the end, when another symbol is brought before us - and we see she is in distress and needs our help - you cannot help but wonder at how much the author loves his country and wants to make it all that it can and should be.

The guide book gave a broad brush overview of the Lake Tahoe area. But it didn't cover any area well enough to be very useful on our vacation. It would have been fine for a tourist who might never have been to Tahoe, but it didn't help us find the true jewels of the area. We did better driving around, reading brochures and the paper.

This book is a great introduction to the Tahoe area. We have a vacation house there and it's been a good resource. For in-depth information about, for example, hikes it is not the best book. Obviously, though, the authors didn't and couldn't be in-depth about all the numerous activities that Tahoe has to offer!

Odd. We were impressed with the accuracy of the information provided in the revised What Shall We Do Tomorrow at Lake Tahoe. But we read a criticism, by an unknown person writing from Soda Springs, that some information contained in the book was inaccurate. So we called the authors. The erstwhile critic had not contacted them. The common courtesy of offering "corrected" information had not been provided. Why not?

I think the best course of action would be for potential book buyers to disregard the negative comments from Mr/Ms Anonymous. Rather, use and enjoy the book for the quality publication it is.

Suppose an individual is in a time machine that is stopped during the period of the release of Carson's book "Silent Spring." The environment is headed in a downward spiral, and any voice that speaks out against new methods of chemically destroying pests is suppressed by the strength of the government and its scientists. But in this moment, Carson defies the odds and strikes against these giant foes by releasing her literary arsenal upon the scientists and their chemical pesticides. By using specific examples, overwhelming amounts of facts, and well thought out scenarios, "Silent Spring" powerfully assaults the use of chemical pesticides on farms in the world.
Carson, one who had her M.A. in zoology and was chief editor for all publications of the United States Fish and Wildlife Services, was the perfect individual to speak out against pesticides such as DDT in this "David and Goliath" match-up. Carson begins her book by playing out a scenario, one that could have occurred if the effects of DDT had not been exposed. By using vivid diction and a foreboding tone, Carson effectively portrays to her worldwide audience the horrifying effects that some chemical pesticides have on the environment. Carson then breaks the book down into sections that give specific examples of chemical pesticides harming nature, and then produces many facts and figures related to the use of these chemical pesticides. She also goes on to offer possible solutions to the problem, and gives possible outcomes in a manner that reflects Robert Frost's work "Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening." She explains that the road "less traveled by" is the one that consists of a pesticide free world, where nature can continue to grow and expand. She explains the well-beaten path as the one that may be easy at that time, but would eventually lead to death and destruction in the world. This very powerful comparison helps to strike fear into the hearts of people in the world, which helped to create an outcry against DDT and other harmful chemical pesticides.
This very inspirational work was one of the main reasons that harmful chemical pesticides such as DDT were removed from farms all around the world. Her work just may have saved the world from almost certain natural destruction. Individuals all around the world owe Rachel Carson a great debt for her efforts in writing this book. Thank you, Rachel Louise Carson.

Silent Spring, written by Rachel Carson was presented to the world half century ago. Although old, this book is a new overview and reflection of the power humans have to destroy. The book does not only give detailed information about each kind of pesticide, but it also presents a general picture of what the world might become if we don't stop the imprudent use of these deadly chemicals. This book set a precedent for modern biologists and ecologists. It also changed the view that mankind had toward the lethal weapons it didn't know how to use. Thanks to the advice and research of Rachel Carson, innovative ways of handling pesticides have been developed and human concern for the environment has been greatly awakened in the last half of the century. This is a magnificient work in which not only information has been recopilated, but also expresses human nature and sense for preserving our only home and partners, the animals.

I found this book to be very, very informative. It brought up many points that alot of people have probably never even thought of. The concept of humans doing such unspeakable and irreversable things to our environment is a scary reality.
The way that Rachel Carson used real examples and incedents made me realize that these kind of things are real, and that no matter how much we ignore these problems, they will persist. Many of these issues could be easily resolved, or at least the results of our misconduct lessened, if we realized the severity of these actions and did a few simple things to reduce such misconduct.
As far as the actual writing was concerned, I was a little lost at first. Carson's language was written differently than I'm used to reading. However, as I read more of the book, I found it easier to understand what she was saying. The book had a good structure and I found it easy and very interesting to read once I understood.
The author must have conducted a vast amount of research before writing this book. There is an absolutely tremendous quantity of information in its pages.
If nothing else, you should read this just to learn about what is really going on out there. Its kind of scary to find out what we are getting ourselves into without even fully understanding the consequenses. Hopefully, we will realize what we are doing to our earth before it's to late. This book does an excellent job of making you realize that we are eventually going to regret what we have done, and what we continue to do. I would recommend this book to anyone who is interested in the earth, conservationism and to anyone who wants to find out what kind of world their children will be living in.

Anne Carson recently won a MacArthur, the "genius" grant, and deserved every penny of it, in my opinion. Yes, this book is crammed with historical allusions and persona poems in one form or another. No, it is not emotionally involving. And yes, occasionally she skates the fine line between postmodern cleverness and gimmicks, with all of the "tv scripts" and so forth. Nevertheless, the quality of writing and intellect at work here is absolutely stunning--and makes Anne Carson one of the most exciting, adventurous, and brilliant lyrical poets I've been reading. Unlike the "glass" essay in "Glass, Irony, & God," you will not get anything remotely resembling an intimate first person narrative here. If that's the kind of poetry you're looking for, this is definitely not the book for you. On the other hand, if you're looking for expanded possibilities in lyrical writing--the lyric operating in an intellectual/philosophical arena--or you enjoy experimental lyrical poets--then this book is well worth the money. It's a sheer tour-de-force in intellectual imagination and breathtaking lyrical lines that spin intelligently, if not emotionally, as some of the reviewers here have cited as a criticism.

Susan Sontag, one of the foremost thinkers and writers of today, says of Anne Carson: "[Anne Carson] is one of the few writers in English that I would read anything she wrote." Such regard for Carson is justified. One of the premiere poets today re-inventing and rediscovering language to meet our present demands of articulation, in the true post-modernist fashion, Carson has come up recently with a collection called, Men in the Off Hours, finalist to the National Book Critics Circle Award.
Men in the Off Hours contains poems and prose pieces that lay the groundwork for various intersections of opposites: past and the present, the classic and the modern, cinema and print, narrative and verse. Here we can find the paintings of Edward Hopper turned into poems as footnoted by St. Augustine's words in the Confession, Thucydides and Virginia Woolf conversing about war, and a host of other characters summoned in the forefront of contemporary image-making: Sappho, Artaud, Tolstoy, Lazarus, Antigone, Akhmatova. They can be found in the chain of poems titled "TV Men" which re-images and re-imagines the lives of these personages, how they correspond to the contemporary definitions of the gaze, as shaped and articulated by woman-as-director, woman-as-creator.
One of the best poems in the collection is "Essay on What I Think about Most" where Carson exalts the element of mistake, both in art and in our lives. It then makes a literary exegesis of a fragment poem written by Alkman, a 7th century B.C. Spartan poet, of how it masterfully harnesses the conceit of the mistake, and is interspersed with quotes by Aristotle. The persona declares: "The fact of the matter for humans is imperfection."
"Irony is not Enough: Essay on my Life as Catherine Deneuve," on the other hand, is composed of a series of prose poems that narrativizes the days of Catherine Deneuve. Here Carson imagines herself as Deneuve, somewhere in a room in an academy in France, lecturing about Socrates and Sappho, catching all the knowing gazes by one of her female students, as the snow outside her window drives through everything like rain. The prose poems are short and episodic, almost breathless, representing the smallness of Daneuve's life, and the frailty of relationships, against a backdrop of a long, bitter winter.
Carson is at best intellectual and scholarly in this collection. Her far-reaching vocabulary touches various human endeavors like myth, archaeology, science, history. Because of this pre-occupation with facts and quotes, Carson has debunked the lyric, freeing words from imposed musicality that poetry is almost always made to assume. Her poems are minefields, nuclear antechambers, blackholes. They are reckless, energetic, centrifugal. This attitude of Carson problematizes the poem as insular and solitary, breaking up its gates to the gift of intertext, where meaning yields to multiplicity.
Told in such exquisite and piercing language, her long essay (complete with an annotated bibliography), "Dirt and Desire: Essay on the Phenomenology of Female Pollution in Antiquity," meanwhile interprets classical configurations of the woman body's and its supposed vulnerability for defilement. She calls forth thinkers from various epochs who have shaped and structured the constructs with which we define one another as members of the human tribe. She then launches into an analysis of the motivation behind ancient weddings and a fragment poem by Sappho, things that speak well of the kind of boundaries we have put up as a defense from one another, as how Carson puts it: "As members of human society, perhaps the most difficult task we face daily is that of touching one another-whether the touch is physical, moral, emotional or imaginary. Contact is crisis."
Men in the Off Hours culminates with an essay Carson has written for her newly departed mother titled, "Appendix to Ordinary Time." Carson proves that she is indeed a "poet of the heartbreak," as she remembers the simple gestures of her mother when she was still here, articulating the loneliness attendant to the experience of grief, and how she found solace and comfort from the diary entries of Virginia Woolf during her last days. She grieves: "Did she think of me-somewhere in some city, in lamplight, bending over books, or rising to put on my coat and go out? Did I pause, switch off the desklamp and stand, gazing out at the dusk, think I might call her. Not calling. Calling. Too late now..."
Carson is one of the first writers to conquer the frontiers of the 21st century poetry, the first to be able to storm through the paltry and outdated definitions of language and language-making. Here is a poet who is courageous, intelligent, and fierce but at the same time tender and forgiving toward the kind of passages we undertake, solitary or communal. She always reminds us that the love for imperfection is valid and that we are irredeemable from transience, but guides us though the maze of fear evoked by these truths, if only to discover the joy and surprise that come from being here, the ordinary time we seek to mark.
Carson's opus can well be summarized in the epitaph she used for her mother:
such
abandon
ment
such
rapture

Susan Sontag, one of the foremost thinkers and writers of today, says of Anne Carson: "[Anne Carson] is one of the few writers in English that I would read anything she wrote." Such regard for Carson is justified. One of the premiere poets today re-inventing and rediscovering language to meet our present demands of articulation, in the true post-modernist fashion, Carson has come up recently with a collection called, Men in the Off Hours, finalist to the National Book Critics Circle Award.
Men in the Off Hours contains poems and prose pieces that lay the groundwork for various intersections of opposites: past and the present, the classic and the modern, cinema and print, narrative and verse. Here we can find the paintings of Edward Hopper turned into poems as footnoted by St. Augustine's words in the Confession, Thucydides and Virginia Woolf conversing about war, and a host of other characters summoned in the forefront of contemporary image-making: Sappho, Artaud, Tolstoy, Lazarus, Antigone, Akhmatova. They can be found in the chain of poems titled "TV Men" which re-images and re-imagines the lives of these personages, how they correspond to the contemporary definitions of the gaze, as shaped and articulated by woman-as-director, woman-as-creator.
One of the best poems in the collection is "Essay on What I Think about Most" where Carson exalts the element of mistake, both in art and in our lives. It then makes a literary exegesis of a fragment poem written by Alkman, a 7th century B.C. Spartan poet, of how it masterfully harnesses the conceit of the mistake, and is interspersed with quotes by Aristotle. The persona declares: "The fact of the matter for humans is imperfection."
"Irony is not Enough: Essay on my Life as Catherine Deneuve," on the other hand, is composed of a series of prose poems that narrativizes the days of Catherine Deneuve. Here Carson imagines herself as Deneuve, somewhere in a room in an academy in France, lecturing about Socrates and Sappho, catching all the knowing gazes by one of her female students, as the snow outside her window drives through everything like rain. The prose poems are short and episodic, almost breathless, representing the smallness of Daneuve's life, and the frailty of relationships, against a backdrop of a long, bitter winter.
Carson is at best intellectual and scholarly in this collection. Her far-reaching vocabulary touches various human endeavors like myth, archaeology, science, history. Because of this pre-occupation with facts and quotes, Carson has debunked the lyric, freeing words from imposed musicality that poetry is almost always made to assume. Her poems are minefields, nuclear antechambers, blackholes. They are reckless, energetic, centrifugal. This attitude of Carson problematizes the poem as insular and solitary, breaking up its gates to the gift of intertext, where meaning yields to multiplicity.
Told in such exquisite and piercing language, her long essay (complete with an annotated bibliography), "Dirt and Desire: Essay on the Phenomenology of Female Pollution in Antiquity," meanwhile interprets classical configurations of the woman body's and its supposed vulnerability for defilement. She calls forth thinkers from various epochs who have shaped and structured the constructs with which we define one another as members of the human tribe. She then launches into an analysis of the motivation behind ancient weddings and a fragment poem by Sappho, things that speak well of the kind of boundaries we have put up as a defense from one another, as how Carson puts it: "As members of human society, perhaps the most difficult task we face daily is that of touching one another-whether the touch is physical, moral, emotional or imaginary. Contact is crisis."
Men in the Off Hours culminates with an essay Carson has written for her newly departed mother titled, "Appendix to Ordinary Time." Carson proves that she is indeed a "poet of the heartbreak," as she remembers the simple gestures of her mother when she was still here, articulating the loneliness attendant to the experience of grief, and how she found solace and comfort from the diary entries of Virginia Woolf during her last days. She grieves: "Did she think of me-somewhere in some city, in lamplight, bending over books, or rising to put on my coat and go out? Did I pause, switch off the desklamp and stand, gazing out at the dusk, think I might call her. Not calling. Calling. Too late now..."
Carson is one of the first writers to conquer the frontiers of the 21st century poetry, the first to be able to storm through the paltry and outdated definitions of language and language-making. Here is a poet who is courageous, intelligent, and fierce but at the same time tender and forgiving toward the kind of passages we undertake, solitary or communal. She always reminds us that the love for imperfection is valid and that we are irredeemable from transience, but guides us though the maze of fear evoked by these truths, if only to discover the joy and surprise that come from being here, the ordinary time we seek to mark.
Carson's opus can well be summarized in the epitaph she used for her mother:
such
abandon
ment
such
rapture