This chef of prose serves up the interminable bond of two wildly intelligent though socially- maladroit people long after their marriage ends in letter form. Oz is tremendously gifted at telling a story and seldom while reading this excellent piece, will you not desire to step in as the peacemaker to rectify the wedge and reunite lost love.

Mr. Oz manages to tell a story of great passion without a hint of sentimentality. He sets this amazing story within the political context of 1970-s Israel and perfectly places each character within this scene. The characters in this novel are memorable for their failings as much as their strengths. Brilliantly writing in each of their voices, Oz reveals their ties, lies and love for each other. I encourage everyone to read this beautifully written book of letters from a truly gifted author.

One of Oz's greatest creations, in my humble opinion. The charchters are described sharply, without mercy, showing the different faces of the Israeli society. The cruelness that covers their words hides the true pain they feel. The cheating wife, the arrogent Husband, the rebeller son, the Zionist - aall hurt themselves and their beloved ones in their strugle for existence in a mercyless country, our country.

I enjoyed the first part which promised a light-hearted caper about stealing the Victory of Samothrace with a Greek island setting and bright original erudite wit The pathetic comic hero then takes over the narrative and we delve into deep psychological issues ending in tragedy. This part is also quite good but the change is jarring.

The basic plot is about an attempt to repatriate the Victory of Samothrace. This gets overlaid with the love affairs and neuroses of Photi Anthropotis. For the first two-thirds it reads as a light-hearted caper novel, and a very entertaining one, with a Greek island and Paris backgound. The last part gets more serious and psychologically complex - still very good, but I found it hard to switch gears. Photi is a clownish character at first, but becomes the conflicted and suicidal narrator later.

I first heard of NIKE on ABC's Good Morning America! It had such great reviews I had to get it. The story is very well written and would make an extremely entertaining film. Flokos has created a wonderful and exciting story around the real NIKE statue in the Louvre. Movie-goers are impatiently waiting for more original stories and will be lined up for this one!!

In The Promised Land, Nicholas Lemann tells several interwoven tales. One is about Mississippi sharecroppers who migrated to Chicago during the middle decades of the century. Another is about the bungled policies of President Lyndon Johnson's "war on poverty." Binding them together is Mr. Lemann's attempt to understand why the United States has a black underclass that probably lives in greater squalor and desperation than any other people on earth. The book's perspective is the by now standard one that pins most of the blame for black failure on white racism, and it leads to a call for an "ambitious wave of new programs" that will bring the underclass into the American mainstream. Nevertheless, The Promised Land is by no means a simple rehash of the liberal clichés of the 1960s. Mr. Lemann does not gloss over the failures that stemmed from the soft-headed zeal for uplift that characterized the period. At the same time, his accounts of the lives of underclass blacks do not leave an impression of helplessness and victimization so much as one of fecklessness and self-destruction. The author coats his facts with a layer of liberal indulgence, but he has gathered the facts and they are not pretty.

"The Promised Land" is a very detailed documentation of the lives certain African Americans that migrated from the South (specifically Clarksdale, Mississippi) to Chicago. Lemann follows these people throughout their lives, from before they left to after they arrived in the North. He recounts the many problmes they encountered as well as the freedoms they received upon reaching Chicago. Although the book is well written and very informative, it can get a little dense, and read more like a history book then as a story. On the whole, however, it was very interesting look at the downside of the promised land.

"The Promised Land" is a fascinating study of the effects, both on the "immigrants" themselves and on America, of the migration of Blacks from the Mississippi Delta to the industrial cities of the North, in this case, specifically Chicago. The book traces the experiences of a group of individuals who made the migration, telling their story through time, beginning with the immigrants and continuing on with the families they built in the North, with a rough time frame of the 1940's - 1970's.

The book comprises 2 basic strengths: the approach to the material and the resulting structure in which the story is told, and the sheer interest of the events themselves and the people who lived them.

The author approaches the story he wishes to tell in two ways: He relates the story of the people themselves, giving these sections of the book an oral history like content, but intermixes the chapters with those based on an analytic, scholarly approach, where the individual strories previously related are woven into the bigger historical picture. The approach works wonderfully, giving the book a structure both readable as a straightforward story of human beings relating their own very personal roles in historical events but also allowing the reader to put these events in a greater historical context, to understand for instance the sad downward slope experienced in the Black working class communities as the years passed. The early immigrants made their way to Black sections of Chicago which, while segregated and relatively poor compared to the White sections, also managed to provide at least the basis of a thriving community, in which work was available and there was a hope of moving up in the world. The comparison of these communities in the 1940's to the boarded up, drug infested no-man's land some of them were to become later is startling.

Some of the resulting questions raised are fascinating, especially in the current environment with the all-out effort to replace welfare with workfare. At it's most extreme is the question raised by Federal Welfare authorities as to whether it is perhaps better to just support people in the Mississippi Delta with welfare, given that the outlay is relatively minor, as opposed to encouraging people to move North. They might improve their lot with better jobs not available in the Delta but with the risk that they will perhaps end up on welfare forcing the authorities to pay out much more in benefits than would be necessary to pay in the Delta with it's significantly lower standard of living.

In the final analysis however, it is the stories of the immigrants which really take center stage and make reading this book such a satisfying experience. In a world of jet planes and instant electronic communications it is hard to imagine to almost biblical migration which took place all by virtue of a scheduled train line, people being transported to a profoundly different world by a day or so of travel, a world which at least initially offered a degree of prosperity and an improvement in ,living standards way beyond that of the Delta they left behind. The fragility of that life in the "promised land" however would become sadly apparent in the mixed experiences the future was to hold for the immigrants and their families and in the sad decline of their communities.

Driven by the disappearance of the Industries and Stockyards whose jobs fueled the great migration in the first place this movement eventually ground to a halt. Victims of both economic and racial segregation, the once dynamic Black working class communities of Chicago became more and more isolated and desolate as jobs became ever scarcer and drugs and welfare took a firmer hold. Those residents who had prospered and could afford to do so left for the suburbs open to them, while those who for whatever reason, whether their own failings or just an inability to keep up with a changing world were left to reside in the inner city in such stark monuments to failed policies as the Robert Taylor homes.

"The Promised Land" captures an episode in American history not likely to be repeated, and does so in a manner which combines the best of both analytic and anecdotal writing styles, driven by the heartfelt and exciting rembrances of the particpants themselves, those who comprised the great migration to the promised land.

The Inferno was an enjoyable read, but I would have gotten more out of the book by buying and edition with some translator's notes to accompany the text. I know almost nothing about either religion or 12th certury European history, and would have enjoyed an editor's explaination of Dante's allusions and references along the way.

I read this book for my AP English class. Dante doesn't go into a great deal of description about Hell (he wrote this book for a time were TV's were still 700 years off, and expected the reader to fill it in), but it will still scare you to death. God help us if they make it into a movie now. This book is brilliantly written not only does it scare you, but also it gets you to think. If you are, like me, the type of person that can take very little description and turn it into a vivid picture in you mind than this book will make you go mad. I literally haven't slept for days because of this book. It was great!

This book is a classic, if anyone wants to be well read, then this is a must. Regardless of the meaning of the content an appreciation should be made toward the inherent nature of the story. Judge for yourself and you won't be disappointed.

i am a fan of Mr. Solzhenitsyn both as a person and as a writer. and i have read a number of his works, including August 1914 (this book's prologue, as i'm sure you know). however, this volume of 1000 pages was just too much for me. i forced myself to keep reading up to the point where i had covered 300+ pages .... and then i gave up.

i wanted to love this book, but it was too pedantic for me and seemed to lack Mr. Solzhenitsyn's usual desire to make his characters come alive. was it just me or did the characters fade into insignificance? was Mr. Solzhenitsyn so taken with relating facts and foibles that his characters got lost in the shuffle? or was this book intentionally written as an history book and the characters were "necessary evils" ? i don't know.

i seem to recall in other books by Mr. Solzhenitsyn (e.g. Cancer Ward) a "slow start" with multiple characters (here read - this reviewer gets easily confused). however, typically after 100+ pages Mr. Solzhenitsyn begins to focus on one or two related souls and then blends his character development with history & implied comment. that is what i had hoped for and was expecting - work then reward, effort then involvement. i genuinely regret to say that i could never get past feeling as if i were a pinball being bounced from one uninteresting transcript to another.

bottom line - if one is (somewhat ?) knowledgeable of Russian history during this epoch, perhaps he/she will find this book worthy of 4 or 5 stars. otherwise, don't waste your time. by all means read Mr. Solzhenitsyn, but perhaps A Day In The Life Of .... would be a better place to get a taste of his prophetic and literary skills.

This historical novel is the sequel to "August 1914" and continues Solzhenitsyn's examination of Russian society prior to the Revolution. In contrast to "August 1914", the focus is upon the Russian home front rather than the military operations, and to my mind wins over "August 1914" because of that.

However, this is no easy read. The book is lengthy, and very ambitious in its scope - all sections of Russian society are examined - from the peasantry to the Imperial Family. Debates in the Duma are related in some detail, and although Solzhenitsyn advises that the reader may skip those parts, I found it best not to, as references to the Duma and certain of its personalities popped up elsewhere in the narrative.

Above all, the author makes heavy demands upon the reader's prior knowledge of Russian history - I could quite well imagine that the novel would defeat someone who had no background knowledge. You don't have to know the events and characters described in detail (I certainly didn't) but my very superficial knowledge did help me.

I got the feeling at the end of the novel that Solzhenitsyn's ambition was at times too high - many of the stories (for example of the peasant soldier returning home from the front) I felt deserved more space than they were given - it was almost as if Solzhenitsyn said to himself, "OK, I've covered that part of society, time to move my focus elsewhere". Overall a work of immense value in that it gave me what felt like an accurate impression of Russian society in World War One - a subject of which I really knew little about in any depth.

My approach to reading the two Red Wheel volumes has not been ideal, since I read each when it was first avaiable in English translation. The 25 year separation between the two "knots" was not ideal for me as a reader, but then the circumstances faced by the author have never been ideal. The second knot, November 1916, will reward your reading efforts with a recreation of the Great War's Eastern front, and of the unfolding disaster in the Russian heartland, that cannot be found elsewhere. Since the horrors in the process of being unleashed in the month captured here by Solzhenitsyn have not yet run their full course, one cannot, even as late as the year 2003, assess the full damage. But this novel lets us glimpse, and perhaps understand, the beginning of a nightmare--for a great people and for all of humanity.

Do not expect gripping dramatic prose from this detailed history. This is an adequate text and reference but not likely suited for the information-seeking, recreational reader. Despite studying international relations for several years, my knowledge of Russian history exhibited glaring weaknesses. Riasanovsky's work continued to appear as I researched texts with which to fortify my deficiencies. All indications show it to be a classic work of Russian history, used in university courses for decades, and perhaps the most detailed one-volume work suited for a general audience. I found "A History of Russia" (Sixth Edition) to be informative, detailed, and faithfully updated (now encapsulating the fall of the Soviet Union and Russia under Yeltsin). Although a solid text, it is a difficult tome to conquer cover-to-cover as it fails to capture the literary senses of the reader.

Riasanovsky takes the reader mechanically through the development of the Russian state. He begins with the geopolitical landscape as it existed prior to the Russians then examines in detail the flowering of Kiev, the appanage system, and the Muscovite, imperialist, revolutionary, and Soviet eras. Riasanovsky's painstaking attention to detail and thorough familiarity with other historiographies provide the reader with a comprehensive evolutionary picture. For example, his illustration of the early appanage system and the continuation of class disparities well into the 20th century shed ample light on the fertile ground into which Vladimir Lenin was able to sow the communist theories of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. His verbal portraits of leaders such as Ivan the Terrible and Catherine the Great give meaningful context to the power struggles and political imbroglios which characterized specific reigns. The addenda which have accompanied each new edition are less detailed and necessarily superficial. They provide sufficient material to update the reader on Russia's current state of affairs but beg for additional research by the more serious student.

I just read a "one star review" of this book, and it galled me. So I write this.
This book is a STANDARD history of Russia, used by many, including my, college courses on the subject. It is generally considered a classic.
If you want, or profess, to understand Russian history, this book is a must. Absolutely. First rate. NO, not without the author's personal imput.
But what book is without that imput? NONE.
Buy it, read it, and try to understand. Yes, read others, but read this first.
THIS IS THE STANDARD TEXT.
Take care and God bless your endeavors.

For those interested in Russia and its past, this is not a bad place to start. It is as comprehensive as a 600 page volume can be. I read the Fourth Edition, so am glad to hear that it has been updated at least to the Gorbochov era. Riasanovsky is particularly adroit at representing early Russian history, with vivid accounts of the numerous invasions (Mongols, Vikings, Tatars, Teutons, etc.). After reading this book, one cannot help but understand the national paranoia and xenophobia that has been so much a part of Russian policy and posture throughout so much of its history. It also becomes clearer why Russia has historically needed a central "father" or "mother" figure to guide it through its tumultuous periods.

As to a reader's criticism, Riasanovsky is indeed somewhat biased, but certainly no more than the typical American historian writing about US History. He gives more than equal blame, for instance, to Nicholas II for getting his country involved in the Crimean War. He certainly never acts as an apologist for any of the Russian rulers at any stage, though his admiration for Peter the Great and Catherine can't be denied.

Poles, Ukranians, Lithuanians, etc. are not going to be won over by this book, but it is to the author's credit that the reader understands why they wont be. But winning anyone's approval is hardly Riasnovsky's object. He's primarily trying to tell the story of a people, and he succeeds on that level, quite brilliantly. The story he tells is complex and fascinating, to say the least. So many colorful and unforgettable characters advanced across Russia's historical stage, that any other country would be hard put to come up with such a cast or a saga.

Mr. Hammond's study of the campaigns and generalship of Alexander is a insightful look at perhaps the greatest General in world history. What is most interesting is that the book does not necessarily focus on the specific battles of Alexander, but on Alexander as a general. In a very real way, his accomplishment as a general are greater than his conquest of Persia.

The book does discuss the battles of Alexander and describes what happened and why it happened. Hammond does a good job of putting the reader in the head of Alexander.

The book is well written and maps help explain what is going on. For those who are interested in Alexander or how he accomplished so much so quickly, this book is a must.

Excellent insight is provided by Mr. Hammond. Alexander's war campaigns and crusades are explained here in detail.This is indeed,an excellent book for people who are into military history,and out of the half a dozen books I have read about Alexander,I'd place this in first place.Highly recommended.

This is the most readable biography on Alexander I've ever read. The author gives the layperson instant access to the major events in the life of a very important historical figure.
There are a plethora of in-depth historical books on Alexander the Great, but here is a book that you can actually finish without falling asleep. A most enjoyable little tome.

Attack in Jerusalem...Suicide bombings...Reoccupation of West bank...Bush proposal for Palestinian State...

Yes - the headlines are horrendous... and, as an American Jew, there are times when I find myself questioning my feelings toward the situation in Israel. ...That is until a book such as this, as told through the eyes of the 12-year-old son of 2 Holocaust survivors, comes along reminding me of the importance of Israel to Jews all over the world!

Panther in the Basement is set in in 1947 British-occupied Palestine. While a real Underground is actively working toward the formation of a "Hebrew State", 12-year old Proffy and his friends are operating a make-believe underground movement. This first-person narrative tracks the growing pains of Proffy, from his "traiterous" relationship with British Sargeant Dunlop to his crush on his friend's older sister and, most importantly, to his understanding of a true need for a Jewish homeland as made evident through his relationship with his parents.

Once I got used to his style of writing, I found Mr. Oz poetic in his prose and I look forward to reading some of his other works.

Proffy is a 12-year-old Jewish child in British-occupied Palestine before the establishment of the state of Israel. When his two friends, Ben Hur and Chita, find out that he's been keeping company with Stephen Dunlop, a British solder, they bring Proffy to trial and accuse him of being a "low-down traitor" and not at all the underground resistance fighter he professes to be.

PANTHER IN THE BASEMENT presents a child's view of the political situation in 1947 Palestine. It questions who the enemy truly is and whether one's enemy can be a friend at the same time or possibly later. Oz does a great job of bringing politics down to it's simplest form as he examines how three children view the enemy differently. There is an element of danger introduced through Proffy's parents who are, in fact, involved with the resistance movement against the British, although they try to keep their son feeling safe and secure. Here's an interesting story, brimming with nostalgia, sometimes purposely going off on tangents, but eventually coming to a warm, moving conclusion.

Theo, a highly capable, but directionless civil engineer in his 60's, lives with Noa, a teacher in her 40's in the small dessert town of Tel Kedar. Noa is seeking more in life, and when she comes to head an effort to establish a drug rehabilitation center she sees working on this project as the answer, but at the same time this heightens her dissatisfaction with what she sees as her lover's lassitude. The story is told in their alternating voices, a device which works very well: sometimes they are talking about the same events, more often each voice moves the story along. Oz has a great appreciation for the physical environment and conveys this to the reader: the apartment the two share, its views, the desert surrounding the town. The book is somewhat limited in its plot, and in its secondary characters; also, while I was interested in the relationship between Theo and Noa, I did not find them particularly interesting people. Consequently, what is a rather short novel, almost seems too long, yet one definitely worth reading.

The illustrations in this illustrated book are without detail and almost useless. If you are using this book for reference purposes forget it. It looks like the author passed the origional images through an imaging software program to distort them enough not to have to pay royalities or something. I'm very disappointed.

Quite simply, this book gets it's facts wrong so often I've had to annotate every page in 10 to put it right. Real life ship facts and biographies are wrongly quoted but even more glaringly this book fails in its main mission. It sold itself to me on having authoritative pieces written in it that list many ships in fiction books. Ships like the Hotspur or Virago from two noted writers novels. Guess what? The list is in error and has the wrong entries in it. Not only that but ships rates are wrongly classified in this book and the number of guns they carried. Most of the technical stuff is valid but when the author tries to weave the fictional maritime world in he fails miserably.
I do love my copy though, it makes for interesting reading BUT I would only recommend it to a seasoned historian or fan of the era who KNOWS the truth about certain facts and books and can use that to glean the goodness from this (very stylishly presented) mishmash. A glorious mess but still a MESS!

...

When I was much younger and first started reading the Horatio Hornblower books by C.S. Forester, I was blown away by the authenticity, yet puzzled by the jargon - what's a halliard, for example, or a topsail? What does it mean to shorten sail, and what is the lee side of a ship? This book would have helped immensely. It's not overly technical, nor does it swamp you with minutiae, but it gives you a good general overview of the British ships of the Napoleonic era, what the nautical terms are, what life was like on board and a couple of summaries of battles for good measure.

This is an appetizer, but what an appetizer it is. If you're looking for more technical specs of ships of the line look elsewhere, but if you're a newbie to the entire historical nautical fiction scene, I can think of few better places to start.

Ten years ago, Harding failed to protect a young girl from her sexually abusive father. He went after the man and revenge ended up costing him one-and-a-half years in prison, not to mention his private investigator's license. Nowadays, he does work on the side for his old friend, Donnie Wilson. The case Harding is presently working on consists of getting the goods on one Dr. Stephen Rosenberg, whose wife, Elenya, is looking for a divorce and possibly access to the supposedly two million dollars hidden in a Swiss Bank account. Dr. Rosenberg is an adulterer to the tenth degree. He not only cheats on his wife with other women, but with men as well, getting heavily into S&M and other forms of kinky sex. It doesn't take Harding long to get the pictures that will insure Elenya an easy divorce and a nice settlement. The only problem is that someone else is after the good doctor...someone so despicably evil that he makes the Rosenberg's escapades look like a day at a church picnic. This monster, for want of a better word, calls himself Gaelen, and he is gruesomely killing everyone Rosenberg has been sexually involved with in an effort to set the doctor up for murder. When Harding starts getting too close to what is going on, Gaelen comes after him and his tough kickboxing partner, Alison. After a couple of encounters with this creature, one of which puts Alison in the hospital, Harding, who isn't an easy man to scare, knows that he is going to have to put this demon from Hell down the hard way, even if he has to drive a stake through his heart. Harding will also have to figure out why Gaelen is so interested Dr. Rosenberg and his wife, Elenya, and what the hidden agendas are. THIS FAR, NO FURTHER by John Wessel demonstrates what top quality writing is about. The reader is not a bystander on this journey through the gritty side of Chicago and into the heart of unthinkable evil, but rather a participant. You will literally feel the depraved evil of Gaelen and understand why the fear it generates in our hero makes Harding a more dangerous adversary. Mr. Wessel lets us know that a person never entirely escapes their past, and for Harding, it must come full circle. As he attempts to keep himself, Alison, and the Rosenbergs alive, Harding has to eventually face the results of a passed action, and in doing so, perhaps find redemption for his failure to live up to his own expectations. Few authors are able to write such a compelling novel on their first try out, but John Wessel succeeds wonderfully in THIS FAR, NO FURTHER. Its darkness will remind you of the earlier "Burke" novels by Andrew Vachss and the later "Matthew Scudder" books by Lawrence Block. Buy this book, read it, and then pick up the second novel in the "Harding" series, PRETTY BALLERINA. After that, you going to have pray like I'm doing, that John Wessel will to write more books.

John Wessel's _This Far, No Further_, introduces us to an ex-PI named Harding.

Though he no longer holds a license (because of a sequence of events which are gradually filled in during the course of the book), Harding still does some occasional work for his friend Donnie, an old friend from his Chicago neighborhood who now works in a corporate security office.

As the book opens, Harding is tracking Dr. Stephen Rosenberg, a plastic surgeon, who has some decidedly unsavory sexual practices and preys on the nurses and students at the University of Chicago hospital. Rosenberg's wife, Elenya, is getting tired of the physical abuse she must sustain at her husband's hands and is looking for a way to divorce him.

This decidedly simple premise sets in motion a very complicated chain of events and gruesome murders, which, ultimately, I don't think, was ever satisfactorily solved. When I came to the end, I still had a lot of unanswered questions.

Still, the book was very good in its depiction of winter in Chicago; of the post-graduate hangers-on around campus, including Harding's friend, Boone; and of the unusual relationship Harding has with his former girlfriend, Allison, a woman into Goth and kick-boxing, and who now appears to be a lesbian. Harding is a memorable creation--a very well-educated, moral, romantic detective who loves horror movies. I wouldn't mind spending more time with him, though I hope subsequent books aren't as complicated.

Those who dislike a very dark, grim, at times even grotesque read, will be turned off by this book.

I've read all three of John Wessel's books about Harding, the ex-con PI. All three have kept me up late nights, reading "just one more chapter." I can't put these books down! This Far, No Further is the first book in the trio, Pretty Ballerina is the second, and its latest (but hopefully not last!) installment is Kiss It Goodbye. All three books are fast-paced, loaded with action, and are damn good mysteries that will keep you scratching your head until the end. Harding's cynical world view leads to some hilarious observances, but this guy's no slouch as a PI; he never misses a trick. Well, almost never. His girfriend, Alison, is equally intriguing as a kick-[butt] femme who keeps Harding on his toes and watches his back. She could give Xena a run for her money! All in all, the characters and the stories in John Wessels' novels a well-worth the price of admission. Wonderful books, all!