the emperor's new clothes!!

While Monet is my favorite Impressionist artist, I have little affection for most of the work he did in the last years of his life. However, "Monet: Late Paintings of Giverny from the Musee Marmottan" is about more than the work the artist did during the first part of the 20th-century. What is fascinating about this book is how it talks about Claude Monet as a skilled landscape designer who turned his garden at Giverny into a living canvas which served as the subject for almost all of his later work.

The text of this book consists primarily of four essays: (1) "The Musee Marmottan and Claude Monet," by Arnaud d'Hauterives, the museum's curator, that briefly discusses the history of the Monet collection found there; (2) Lyn Federle Orr's "Monet: An Introduction" provides what is really an overview of Monet's body of work; (3) Paul Hayes Tucker's "Passion and Patriotism in Monet's Late Work" discusses how the artist started focusing on particular elements and enlarging them in his paintings. This essay is illustrated with not only reproductions of Monet's paintings but photographs of Monet's garden from that period; (4) "Monet as a Garden Artist" by Elizabeth Murray focuses on the strong parallels between Monet as a painter and a gardener. The essay includes a detailed diagram of both the Flower Garden and the Water Garden at Monet's home in Giverny, as well as an axial view of the two. What I like most about this book is that I learned more about the garden and its relationship to the famous paintings of the water lilies, the Japanese bridge, and the other familiar sights.

This book ends with the Exhibition of 22 paintings displayed at the Musee Marmottan, from two "Water Lilies (Nympheas)" paintings from 1903 to a painting of "The Roses (Les Roses) from 1925-1926. Almost all of these paintings reflect the darker style of his last years. However, I think with this book you will come for the paintings, but stay for the garden. Of course, now I have a strong desire to go there and see these things for myself. For a visit there, albeit a slightly fictional one, check out "Linnea in Monet's Garden," a children's book that adult will certainly enjoy by Christina Bjork and Lena Anderson.

I reviewed this book at the store for an hour so you don't have to. This book contains the following, a very confusing tedious test to take, buying 50 or more supplements, taking these supplements all day at different times during several months, jumping on trampolines, and eating cruciferous veggies. Very nutty in that it wont tell you what day would look like on the diet or what foods you can eat, and it seems the publisher here has a vested interest in you buying these supplements. Don't waste your time. You will lose weight from sheer frustration.

I read many, many books on weight loss. Most were very restrictive in the diet. I was really looking for a healthy diet that a person could live with. Something to help me lose about 10 pounds and get some energy. This book is great! I learned alot about food and liver in the fat flush plan, that started me using some great supplements. Now after reading this book, I have learned about other supplements and it has given me energy and helped me maintain my weight without much effort. Thanks for a great book

If you're like me, you've always been mystified by the uncanny similarity between Hank Williams and John Lee Hooker, to say nothing of the near-identical vocal qualities of Hank Snow and B.B. King. Luckily, we have a book that explains it all. According to Ed Ward in the first 1/3 of "Rock of Ages," country and rhythm & blues evolved along parallel lines until coming together and producing the country/r&b offspring called rock and roll. Yes, this would certainly explain the vast similaries between Grandpa Jones and Muddy Waters. According to Ward, "the hillbillies were getting radical (musically)" in the early 1950s--hillbillies like Flatt and Scruggs, "Little" Jimmy Dickens, Lefty Frizzel, and Tennessee Ernie Ford. Certainly, when one listen's to Frizzel's "If You've Got the Money I've Got the Time," one can hear a musical revolution in the works. Radical, radical stuff.

As a warm-up to listing such maverick selections as T. Ernie Ford's "Shotgun Boogie," Ward provides scholarly and valuable historical background, including a one-sentence account of the origin of jazz: "In 1902 or thereabouts, someone improvised a countermelody against the one the rest of the band was playing, and the seed of an all-new indigenous American music, jazz, was planted." I frankly prefer this account to the more complicated and stuffy one contained in the 1926 pop song "Birth of the Blues," which features lyrics about new notes pushed through a horn 'til they're born into blue notes, or something like that. That may be more academically correct than Ward's account, but I'd rather be entertained as I learn. And Ward brilliantly sums up the big band era by noting the era's three types of orchestras--"sweet, corn, and swing." By the time rock and roll is born (starting on page 98 with the helpfully-titled chapter, "Rock and Roll Is Born"), we have finished the Ed Ward Roots of Rock Home Study Course, and are ready to digest all of the usual cliches about how rock and roll died (temporarily) in the late 1950s, how Tin Pan Alley took over rock and roll songwriting, etc., and suddenly we're in the 1960s.

Enter Geoffrey Stokes, who tells us all about how "rock" replaced "rock and roll" in 1963, a full 61 years after jazz was invented. (But what happened to "and roll"?)

And so it continues. There are certainly smaller volumes of crank musicology out there, but "Rock of Ages" is probably the most comprehensive collection of pop music mythology to be found anywhere. The authors don't leave a single music-journalistic cliche unturned, and some of the names and titles dropped herein are more than worth checking out. But if you are looking for serious rock musicology, hide thyself from this.

A tour de force of monumental proportions, Geoffrey Stokes has really turned an entire generation of music into a concise yet informative book that truly stimulates the intellect of even the faintest fan of American rock & roll. Clever anecdotes reveal each musician's voice behind timeless classics of the modern era. A must have for all; this book can easily complete a collection or start it. I recommend it with ALL of my critical expertise.

I found that this novel had more viewpoints than an actual story. And just what was the story? It seemed that ten pages could have been enough. Stupid, stupid, and more stupid!

Bill Buckley took a break from Blackford Oakes to give us this exciting Vietnam-era war novel, and I'm glad he did. Tucker is an excellent protagonist in the vein of Clancy's "Mr. Clark".

I read this book when it first came out, thirty years ago, and I'd forgotten most of the details. But I remembered enjoying it a great deal, so I set out to find it again, and Inter-Library Loan came through. (They usually do.) It's only 250 pages, a pretty fast read -- and now I know why it had stuck with me all these years.

Brian Chaney is an epigrapher in Hebrew and Aramaic documents, translator of a recently discovered scroll at Qumran which has upset a lot of people. He's also a demographer and futurist and has written a report for the government laying out probable trends for the near future. (The story begins in 1978, which was also the near future for Tucker, who feared the repressive trends he himself observed in the late Sixties.) Chaney gets drafted for a secret project run by the Bureau of Weights and Measures (a nice touch), which has managed to build a forward-traveling time machine. He and his two colleagues -- a no-nonsense Army major and a freewheeling Navy commander -- will journey to the end of the 20th century to see if those trends have panned out, to bring back information to allow the government of 1978 to lay its plans to deal with future problems. But the President, naturally, sets the target of the preliminary field trial at 1980; he wants to know whether he's going to be reelected. Oh, yes, the politicians will never hesitate to take over science for their own ends, and Tucker knows it. Then there's Katherine Van Hise, known as "Katrina," who is more or less the managing director of the project at the local level. Chaney is very attacted to her, and so is Commander Saltus. And so they make their jumps, singly and one at a time, to 1999 and to 2000 and to sometime in the 2020s (I think) . . . and nothing is as they thought it would be.

This is an intimate drama of Armageddon in Illinois, a reduction of global catastrophe to manageable proportions. The style is quiet and perfectly straightforward, the imagery is both subtle and apocalyptic. And the three time travelers -- and Katrina -- will turn out to be unexpected heroes.

Arthur Wilson Tucker, known throughout science fiction fandom as "Bob," was not a scientist like Asimov or Benford. He was, in fact, a motion picture projectionist from Illinois who wrote mysteries and science fiction stories and novels on the side, beginning in 1941. This book and 'The Lincoln Hunters' are certainly his best (and best known) work, but there was another whole side to him -- the raconteur and noted wit who hung out with the "ordinary" fans at WorldCons, and who held forth at hotel room parties on the benefits of bourbon ("Smoooooth!"), and who cheerfully distributed business cards with only his name on one side and the words "Natural Inseminations" on the reverse. (I still have my card from MidAmericon in 1976.) The fans loved him and he loved them. In fact, Bob Tucker was the first Fan Guest of Honor at a WorldCon (Torcon in 1948). And when the room parties burned themselves down to glowing coals in the small hours, you could find him on someone's balcony arguing literature and political theory and social dynamics as astutely as any Oxford don. He had a longtime interest in Near Eastern archaeology which is obvious in this book. I expect most younger sf fans have never heard of Tucker, and that's their loss.

Year of the Quiet Sun is notable as the novel which won the first place Campbell Award in 1976. While not as well known as the Hugo or Nebula, the Campbell award is quite prestigious, and is chosen by a jury based on literary excellence, not just popularity.

Despite its award, Year of the Quiet Sun is not very well known. It is interesting and well-written, but it's particular plot hasn't aged well, and it contains things which may seem anachronistic or politically incorrect. A major thematic element is race, especially the divide between blacks and whites in America. When Tucker wrote this book, he projected the difficulties of his turbulent time into the future and predicted things would get worse. He describes race riots in Chicago of the late 1990s which result in the black parts of the city being barricaded and completely segregated racially. Black militants and white U.S. soldiers prevent either side from crossing over.

The picture portrayed of black militants, and their violent hatred of whites, is particularly ugly. This is in no way a racist book, but it confronts these issues head on and is certainly politically incorrect by today's standards.

Dating it perhaps past the point of continued popularity is the fact that the book is about time travel, but the time travelers only journey about twenty years into the future. Thus, they visit a time which is already past. The world war instigated by a Chinese-Indian-Arab alliance and the subsequent collapse of the United States has, of course, not happened, but one can still read this as alternative history.

The out-of-date events didn't really bother me, although the idea of time travelers from the 1970s boldly going forward to the year 2000 did strike me as amusing.

The main character is a civilian scholar and renowned demographer who has published a controversial book about the origins of the Bible's Book of Revelations. This creates some tension between him and the two military men who work with him on the government's time travel reconnaissance project.

The book contains a rather unusual time machine (it must be plugged into an electrical source), some military action, speculation about the near future (now past), a compelling romance, and lots of interesting discussion about society and world politics.

While I'm glad I read Year of the Quiet Sun and consider a worthwhile work of science fiction, this is not a book I would strongly recommend as a "must read." It may appeal to some readers for historical reasons or because of its specific topics. This is a very well-written book, which continually presents unexpected but logical surprises. Its time travel plot is very original, with twists and developments I haven't seen elsewhere. Nevertheless, there are many books available which are more important classics or simply more enjoyable for contemporary readers.

The author has fallen into the trap of dividing the animal world into herds and preditors. Ecologically the most sucessful preditors have been pack hunters. If he had understood this, he might have developed his argument for Promethian Satanism more convincingly. As it is, he has missed the mark with regard to love. No K-selected species can endure with out it, since it allows for the investment in progeny. His view that to a Luciferan the ultimate predation is predation of God, I found odd, since I haven't found many on the Dark Path who take God seriously. On the positive side,this book does point out the distain many feel for agape. It was a valiant attempt, and the logic sound, in that, the conclusions did flow from the premises. A better grasp of Ecology should improve his next book.

While the book does fully discuss the "basic forms of prophetic speech" in detail, it is not a text that can be taken lightly. Much of the information seems a bit convoluted at times and the author seems to be repetitious and occasionally self contradictory. This is a text for serious study of prophetic works contained within the OT and is a classic reference for those willing to muddle through minutia.

The book is overall quite good as an introductory text for accounting, but there are other books out there, equally good, that come a lot cheaper.

While I would have preferred less famous speeches since many of my students were looking for audition pieces, I found both this and his "Speeches for Women" books very helpful in de-mystifying the acting of Shakespeare. As an actress trained in British Drama Schools I have found it very difficult to know where to start when trying to get the college students I teach to even try acting Shakespeare. Without a passionate interest in Shakespeare (and these students just don't have it) the way I was trained just doesn't work. But the Folio technique really hooked them. With just a few basic "rules" they were willing and felt able to get up and give his language a try. The Folio technique is fun and immediate and got them up and going quickly; this is important in today's world - the fine-tuning of the speeches can come later. I highly recommend it to both high school and college drama teachers - especially if Shakespeare is not a priority in your acting student's lives. My students responded boldly and confidently and now seem less afraid of Shakespeare.

In 1580 Pope Gregory XIII commissioned this gallery with 42 large panels that represent Italy. Maps on the right side show the Adriatic side of the peninsula; those on the left side show the Tyrrhenian and Ligurian coasts. The quality of the paper and reproductions is excellent. Each map is discussed, and close-ups show the art and craft of the cartographers and artists. The author claims that this is the largest cycle of geographic images in Europe. This is a book to linger with; no matter your nationality, it may make you homesick.