This final novel in The Reluctant King trilogy (preceded by The Goblin Tower and The Clocks of Iraz) is the most entertaining read of the three. I had already come to respect and feel comfortable with the good and brave Jorian, unbeheaded king of Xylar, and his wizard friend Karadur, and I had been waiting the equivalent of several hundred pages to read about Jorian's long-planned, very dangerous mission to rescue his chosen wife Estrildis from Xylar. As always, Jorian's adventures are, much to his own chagrin, fraught with danger and excitement at every turn, and the events of this novel are certainly no exception. For two years the Xylarians have pursued Jorian because he had escaped the kingdom with his head at the end of his five-year reign and thus thrown the politics of the country into turmoil. In Xylar, each king is beheaded after five years, and the next king is chosen by throwing the passing king's head into the crowd to see who catches it. Jorian's plan to reenter Xylar in an effort to get his chosen wife back is incredibly dangerous, but true love makes any good man risk his own life in its pursuit. In the way of all Jorian's plans and wishes, however, things never go quite the way he hopes.

All three novels in the trilogy can be characterized as humorous fantasy, but The Unbeheaded King is by far the funniest. The action begins with Jorian and Karadur flying into Xylar in a large golden bathtub (the explanation for which can be found in The Clocks of Izar); amazingly, Jorian enters the tower where his lady resides and comes close to succeeding in his objective at the beginning of the novel. Then he trips and causes an alarm to ring out, forcing him to shimmy back up to the hovering bathtub and flee forthwith. Undaunted, Jorian, back in the neighboring land of Othomae, seeks other means for achieving his overriding aim. When he asks a sorcerer to summon a demon to attempt a rescue, the banter between the unhappy demon and the sorcerer is well-nigh hilarious, with the demon complaining about being summoned from his plane unjustly and threatening to foment his fellow demons into an attack on the human plane of existence after he finishes his assignment. Very humorous examples of why you should never underestimate a demon's capacity for stupidity produced many a laugh on my part. Several of Jorian's famous escapes from danger are, as usual, fantastic and highly entertaining, and the miscellaneous stories we hear from Jorian's lips as well as those of his friends (both human and, in one case, a ghost) bring even more humor to this enchanting work of fantasy.

I am sad to see this trilogy end. I would gladly read novel after novel based on the times and trials of good Jorian and his reluctant ally Karadur. De Camp is a fantastic writer, bringing to vivid life the lands and peoples of his fictional world, steering his fantasy along at full steam, never allowing for dull moments. You do not read about De Camp's imaginative realms, you journey there yourself and watch your friends and heroes go about their business right in front of your eyes. One cannot help but me amazed at both the bad luck and the good luck our heroes are met with, nor does one ever tire of trying to figure out how they are going to get out of each successive mess they perpetually find themselves in. It may take the reader a few pages to get comfortable with the mediaeval-sounding language the characters often use, but familiarity comes so quickly that you may find yourself unconsciously uttering words like forsooth and instanter in your normal conversations and cursing any bad luck that comes your way with phrases such as "by Imbal's brazen balls."

This is one of the more enjoyable fantasy books I have read in a long time. Although the conclusion played out a little differently from what I was expecting, I was thrilled with the way De Camp ended this epic because it seems uniquely and honestly faithful to the characters and the spirit of their adventures. It is with sadness that I bid friends Jorian and Karadur goodbye after three novels, but I take with me the memory of a joyous read full of great humour, enthralling adventures, and utter fascination. If you want to read fantasy as it was meant to be written, you would do much worse than to pick up De Camp's account of the adventures of the unbeheaded king.

Third and last book in the trilogy which was later published in one volume as the Reluctant King, this volume picks up after Jorian has escaped the seige of Iraz and represents the last attempt to rescue his lady love Estrildis from captivity. Xylar will exchange her gladly for his head; as ex-king he blocks them from gaining a new king becuase their political system requires the king's head be chopped off after five years and tossed into the crowd to see who catches it and becomes the lucky person for the next five year term.

Novaria, the setting of the trilogy and several other books, is explored more. And provides the mishaps that get in his way: a demon too busy to do his job right, lasso men from Xylar trying to pull him back, evading said men while trying to sneak back, and assorted other perils. In the end Jorian does discover true love. Albeit you'll never figure out how if you are used to reading save-the-princess-kill-the-monster romances.

One thing I like about de Camp's writing is that it's fairly well thought out and detailed. Novaria is a real world with it's own character. Jorian himself is a story teller and that in itself indicates the dedication to story telling de Camp possesses because, unlike some books, Jorian actually can mesmerize the audience with stories. Unique tales at that.

Great book. I was tickled to see many pictures that I have never seen in any other publication.

I have only this to say about this book: Elvis was the King of Rock-n-Roll -- Unseen Elvis is the King of all Books -- and Jim Curtin the King of Elvis collectors!

The Unsinkable Spirit is truly the book about the dream we've all had at one time or another in our lives. It's amazing that Boris and Shirley sold everything at 24 years old and bought a boat. Even more amazing is that Boris, a native of Croatia, bought books and taught himself to use a sextant - and had only one day of sailing lessons before embarking on this awesome journey!
The Unsinkable Spirit takes readers along on a journalistic journey as the Kings learned to navigate around the world. Boris and Shirley are excellent narrators and readers will be held spellbound as they read about encounters with cannibals, sharks and a face-to-face battle with a large eel!
Through it all, the love Boris and Shirley have for their families  - and their dreams - comes shining through.
I've never read a book like this. I honestly couldn't put it down! I can't wait for the next episode! Don't just take may word for it. Read the first chapter for yourself at wwww.theunsinkablespirit.com. Only then will you begin to understand how this couple fought valiantly to make their dream a reality. You'll want to stand up and cheer at their triumphs and cry at their tragedies. Through it all, the spirit of living one's dream will challenge even the most insecure reader.
Shirley says it this way: "It doesn't take an extraordinary person to do extraordinary things."
This book is a keeper. You'll want extra copies for your friends!

WOW. This book was a real great read. If anyone out there has ever dreamed of sailing the south pacific, this is the book to read. A real treat.

Replying to the previous (first) reviewer: The author of UNTOLD LIVES is indeed a different Elizabeth Scarborough, whose first name, Pauline, is never used professionally. She is a historian of psychology and this book is a collective biography of the earliest women psychologists. It deals with science and psychologists as scientists, but is neither fiction nor fantasy! The "other" ES, I believe, is Elizabeth ANN Scarborough, who has published both with and without the middle name. The ACE edition of her THE GODMOTHER identifies her as a resident of Port Townsend, Washington.

This no-doubt excellent biographical book is written by a DIFFERENT Elizabeth Scarborough than the science fiction/fantasy author whose books appear on the rest of this page. Please do not confuse this serious non-fiction work with the fictional titles by the other author with the same name.

This book is full of charm, wit and excellent writing. The characters are richly drawn, quirky and entertaining. Wesley has a way of pinning down the fine details of human behavior and showing them in a sympathetic but humorous light. Poppy's vacillations are completely understandable and her struggles to get herself unstuck from a bad relationship are tragic yet funny. Wesley gives her characters the kind of dignity that makes us love them, even when they are not being very loveable. This is the mark of a great writer.

I've read all the Mary Wesley books I can find, and this one is my favorite. It's better if you have read her _The_Camomile_ Lawn_ first; but this is a very different book, lighter-hearted than some of her stories. It is funny, sometimes touching, and refuses to turn out the way you expect. Really delightful.

Peter and Annie Garret are climbing a mountain in Utah with their father. Suddenly, two amateurs come falling onto them, and sent them dangling in midair, hanging by a few cams. The two amateurs eventually falling onto the desert ground hundreds of feet below, laying motionless. Then, the father asked Peter to cut the end of the rope, from which he was holding being held. Peter eventually did, to save his sister and himself. This opening is only the beginning of this exciting and suspenseful story. People who like action will definitely enjoy this story which also teaches the reader some aspects about mountain climbing.

Three years later, Annie is climbing K2 of the Himalayas in Pakistan. She is caught in a storm with her boyfriend who turns out to be evil and selfish. Peter, who hasn't climbed since the Utah incident, sets out to save his sister.

The Garrett family climbs mountains chosen by the patriarch Royce who treats his two adult children (Annie and Peter) as if they are still teens. However, In Monument Valley, Utah, two amateurs drop into a freefall with their pack knocking Royce and Peter off the side of the mountain. Only the Garrett?s last belay with Annie still clinging to the side keeps all four men alive. However, the weight of gravity takes it toll and the two amateurs crash to earth. Royce makes Peter cut the rope, which leads to the former dying, but saves the lives of his two children.

Three years later, Peter and Annie remain haunted by the tragedy. Peter, already an accomplished photographer when the accident occurred, turns completely to nature shots to hide from his pain. Annie blames Peter for their father?s death and continues Royce?s dream of climbing the world?s toughest peaks in search of solace. However, this time on K2 something goes wrong and Annie faces certain death if Peter, who has not touched a mountain since Utah, fails to rescue her.

VERTICAL LIMIT is an adaptation of the movie. As with the picture, the story line is incredibly exciting and filled with nonstop action. Readers will feel the pain suffered by the siblings, who never found closure with the death of their beloved father. Mel Odom does a great job of bringing a powerfully scenic movie onto the printed page so that those readers who enjoy a heart-pumping thriller will climb K2 along side the lead cast.

Harriet Klausner

The poetically writhing words of Patrick White's Voss imbue the novel's inanimate world with a life commonly attributed to humankind alone: darkness strangles, the sun cauterizes, leaves slash at one another, rain sighs, and dawn shrieks with jubilation as red light flows out along the veins of morning. Such anthropomorphizing imagery reinforces a view of the protagonist's voyage of discovery into Australia's heart as a metaphor for the inner journey beckoning us all.

Few, however, much less those seeking consolation in worldly achievements and society's pretensions, dare venture into the uncharted desert that illumines the soul. Johann Ulrich Voss, a proud, resilient and fiercely independent German with the first touches of grey in his beard, is obsessed by a long-held ambition to cross the immense island-continent. To this misanthrope possessed of seemingly unshakeable belief in his own divinity, the future is nothing but will, its antithesis compassion, grace, humility, repentance, human frailty.

Before escaping the strictures of Victorian Sydney, by chance he meets his sponsor's niece, Laura Trevelyan, a sensitive young woman vacillating in the darkness between atheism and faith, rationalism and God, pride and humility. Despite their few encounters, when the explorer leads his expedition up the coast and turns one morning to follow his shadow into the searing unknown, he is embarking on a voyage leading ever more deeply into an inescapable love between Laura - the feminine side of his Jungian subconscious - and himself.

Their mystical journey together, stripped bare of obfuscating flesh by the tyranny of distance, penetrates into a vast land. As unforgiving as the outback, this unfamiliar realm is governed by an irrationality that confounds human plans and perceptions, and erodes hubris and obstinate self-belief. United by a love born high above the expedience of mundane coupledom, as their physical separation increases, and long after correspondence by letter has become impossible, they draw ever closer. It is testament to the author's imaginative powers and his skill as a novelist that their transcendent union, despite the hundreds of miles between them, is consummated with a wedding and newborn child.

Without marching towards one's own destruction, there can be no humility and therefore no love. Voss and his small party are gradually worn down over the months by the rigours of their journey and the hidden allegiances unearthed by their tribulations. Laura's love, burning with anxious awareness of the leader's fallibility, spreads into the fissures appearing in his beleaguered resolve, prising cracks still wider in a series of dreams shattering erstwhile convictions. In striving to cross these landscapes of land and love, in which all are destined to suffer and fail, the human soul is ultimately liberated to return into a God omnipresent in the very physicality of the earthly environment itself.

Who hasn't rejoiced before a field, a river, an expansive sky, and perhaps tried to capture its essence in words or paint, on film or even as music, just as Voss, albeit more disturbingly, endeavours to take the entire country within his stride? Earth, trees, rocks, sky, air, and indeed all physical forms, are objects of love, illimitable repositories of the all-encompassing whole that is our dreams and our struggles to live as human beings. They absorb and preserve our spirit. To try to depict our physical environs, to strive to encompass them in a journey itself destined to failure, is to create a self-portrait.

This is an ancient wisdom possessed by the many aborigines the party encounters, peoples who in their veneration for the harsh land they inhabit recognize this terrain as their history and all that they are, as the terrestrial home of their revered Great One. To push into the interior in a vainglorious and inevitably futile attempt to conquer the exalted residence and all it signifies is to invoke His wrath, to bring the Great Snake down from the sky in anger.

We all have deserts to cross. Voss grapples in the Australian wilderness with the rocks of his own prejudice and hatred. But he himself is also a desert, vast and ugly by Laura's accurate reckoning. Immured in hide-bound Sydney, capital of coin and kindly conceit, itself no less a desert than the country's scorching centre, she travels the path of love into this man possessed. Only through setting off on such voyages of discovery into the interior, in the final analysis into our own misunderstanding, do we bring life and love to deserts real and metaphysical - to life and love themselves. As a sage Laura senses long after the expedition is over, 'perhaps true knowledge only comes of death by torture in the country of the mind'.

As White acknowledges in his autobiography, Flaws in the Glass, this novel has a basis in the nineteenth-century expeditions led by the German explorer Leichardt. And years before Voss was written, the seed of its eponymous character was sown in the mind of a sexually repressed wartime intelligence officer unhappily required to censor his own men's letters in the isolation of the Egyptian desert, at a time when all lived in the shadow of 'that greater German megalomaniac'.

But moving irretrievably beyond history, the novel is the product of a creative act to which the spurs are many and various, not least White's frequent respiratory afflictions. Writing the shocking denouement in the desert was fuelled by bronchitis, Bartok's Violin Concerto and a scathing review of the author's most recent book.

Although White did not rank Voss among his top three novels, this best-known of his masterpieces is but one offering from a man who dared to set off into the unmapped desert. Like the struggles of the painter in The Vivisector, the settlers in The Tree of Man and the author himself, Voss's is an epic journey deep into the human condition. On this enlightening voyage, it seems ever less extraordinary when dresses, too, sigh, muscles and hair dream, spurs and complexions accuse, men glimmer or glitter coldly, even kindness cauterizes, and the arches of one's feet become exasperated.

White has done it again: rich characters, indulgent language play, fascinating setting, gentle Australian imagry and beautifully balanced overall. For it's elegance and surprises, this book belongs in the poetry section. If you've a fan of White, this is his masterpiece; if you're new to White, what took you so long?

A wonderful collection of very moving and beautifully written poems

As he did in his earlier book, CHILDREN OF THE AIR, Theodore Deppe listens for and retrieves the humane music from the edges of sanity. In THE WANDERER KING, he has hit his stride, finding the right forms, the just-right balance between music and story. Whether he speaks of a writer like Chekhov or Kafka, or of institutionalized children, or of couples or families, or a priest in love, his poems crystalize around unforgettable images that stand for everything said and felt--an overcoat thrown into the river, abused children playing in an ancient apple tree, gooseberries, a green oyster van. The poems in this book range greatly in their subjects, but they are so ordered that their images and emotions recur and interlock in extraordinary ways. THE WANDERER KING is not a collection of poems, it is a poem of poems.

My 2 1/2-year-old grandson loves this book. He likes the illustrations and the simple wording. He asked me to read it over several times.

I appreciated the message because he is told to wash his hands after he goes potty, after he pets the cat and after he comes in from outdoors--and of course, before eating. I think he liked this book because he could see that the princess had to wash her hands throughout the day just as he does!

I'm surprised that no one has reviewed this book yet, since Amazon has sold lots and lots of copies ... my guess is that most teachers (like myself) are simply too busy to stop and write reviews :o)

I received my copy of this great book in the mail today, and my kinderkids are going to love it! It's the story of a little princess who is constantly being told "Wash your hands!" The princess is playing outside in the mud ("The little princess LOVED getting dirty!") and comes inside to eat a piece of cake. Her mother, the Queen, stops her and says "Wash your hands before you eat that." "Why?" asks the little princess. "Because you've been playing outside."

The little princess dutifully washes her hands, then stops to dance with the dog and cat on the way to the kitchen. Next the cook tells her to wash her hands, and of course the little princess asks why. This is repeated several times, with delightful illustrations, to remind the little princess (and all the children who will hear and enjoy this story) that she needs to wash her hands after playing with animals, using her potty, playing outside, and sneezing.

A humorous discussion of "germs and nasties" follows, and the little princess learns that if she doesn't wash her hands, the germs and nasties "can get into your food, and then into your tummy ... and then they make you ill."

Like Tony Ross' other books ("I Want My Potty" and "I Want to Be"), this one will be a big hit with my students while sharing an important message in a way they'll enjoy and remember.

This is book is a little strange but still very good. It could be thought of as a modern version of Lighthill's "Waves in Fluids". It first assumes that you are familiar with a pretty wide range of mathematical tools, and also that you have the necessary experience to handle long calculations. If you're comfortable with the method of stationary phase and contour integration but you've never studied acoustics or shocks, then this book is probably a worthwhile read. It's also good as an introduction to more advanced areas such as solitons, although the book by Johnson and Drazin (Solitons: An Introduction) is probably a better resource. I would have liked a chapter on waves of importance in geophysics though, such as internal gravity waves, Coriolis waves, and Rossby waves. It would have made the book an even better resource.

This modern book has considerable breadth and depth, and is ideally suited as a reference text as well as a text for upper class under graduate and graduate courses. It treats acoustic waves, waves in elastic media, fluid dynamical waves, electromagnetic waves and more. The material is clearly presented, including excellent illustrations. At the same time, it is mathematically rigorous and thereby equally appropriate as a text for applied mathematics as well as engineering courses and study. Each of the book's twelve chapters ends with a set of homework problems, for which the authors have assembled a comprehensive well organized instructor's solution manual.