This book provides brief, but accurate, historicalinformation on Vienna's most famous musical inhabitants.All of the important figures are here--Mozart, Beethoven, Haydn, et.al.--as are chapters on Viennese institutions like the Boys' Choir, the Waltz and the State opera. Rickett presents an encapsulated biography of the each composer, along with a few details of their lives in the city. Unfortunately, the book requires the reader to have a fair amout of knowledge of music and these composers to comprehend what is said. In this light, the book is neither a detailed scholarly account nor a good introduction to the non-trained fan of music. Sadly, there is no better book on the creative geniuses from this most musical of all cities.

This book could have been so much better. This is one of the most popular German lager styles to brew, yet the authors suggest the use of Belgian and crystal malts in place of the standard Munich malt which is used by all Bavarian breweries. Definitely the most disappointing book in the series.

It is difficult to read and make sense of the facts in this book. The history of the beer style is hard to follow. Information is presented in a scattered fashion, and ranges from extreme detail in some areas to glossing over other points.

This is a helpful book for brewers, however the main emphasis is on the Vienna style. I have travled extensively in Germany for 5 years and never seen a Vienna beer. I felt more attention should have been placed on the popular and robust styles of Marzen and Fest beers. However, the book does contain good material and was helpful to me.

This book, Pynchon's earliest published short story, puts on display the traits that will make Pynchon one of the finest English-language writers ever: a free-wheeling imagination; a catholic, encyclopaediac store of knowledge; a troubled morality; and a capacity to be damn funny.

If you've read _V_ or the short story "Entropy", you've seen this setup before: a college party and a protagonist operating within that system. There are very good reasons it was left out of _Slow Learner_: the humor is forced, the ideas aren't fully formed, and the whole thing is an exercise in imperfection. Which is not to say it's meritless -- the protagonist and the plot live in my brain still, two years since I first read it.

It can be found online, however, and even if it couldn't, thirty dollars is a bit steep for a piece like this. If you must get it, get all of his other published fiction first.

It's tempting to start this review by saying sociologists should stay away from musical topics, at least if they can't appreciate music. Maybe a fairer criticism would be if you're going to upset the apple cart this much, you'd really better have a sturdier theory than Tina DeNora has here. DeNora is a sociologist at the University of Exeter, and she thinks Beethoven's genius was constructed by society. She says Beethoven's place in the musical firmament was a result of certain aspiring elite aristocrats of the time having a predilection for Beethoven's "difficult" music in an attempt at social one-upmanship and wanting to use him to advance their own standing in Vienna. To put it simply, Ludwig was at the right place at the right time, he had the luck. There is no analysis of the music itself in this book, because she has decided it is irrelevant. I'm not kidding.

DeNora would likely argue that our criteria for "greatness" have been pre-determined by the very elements that we then go into a "great work" looking for. The aesthetics of criticism are a social construct, and so is the music; therefore it's no wonder the two fit together so well. Music criticism is taste writ large, that's all. (Sociology, on the other hand, is not subject to these social tastes and trends, of course.)

Actually, I felt upon approaching this book there may be something to her argument. As Michael Walsh jokingly and insightfully remarked in his book Who's Afraid of Classical Music, "Ludwig 'Rights o' Man' Beethoven was always sucking up to royalty in his dedications." It's hard to deny: he knew who buttered his bread. It's easy to view talent, especially when from the distant past, in a vacuum that we don't extend to the present. In today's world I find myself wondering, for just one example, if a fine but unremarkable actress such as Gwyneth Paltrow would be where she is were her mother not Blythe Danner and her father not a prominent TV producer who is good buddies with Steven Spielberg. Is it any coincidence that Gwyneth's first role was in a Spielberg film, Hook?

So what does DeNora say? After several chapters on the state of the aristocracy and aristocratic taste of the time--chapters I enjoyed and am not prepared to defend or debunk--she focuses relentlessly on the famous quote about Beethoven from Count Waldstein, saying he would go forth to receive the spirit of Mozart from the hands of Haydn. DeNora argues, repeatedly, (she seems to think that by repeating a groundless assertion she can make it stick) that this statement played a huge role in elevating Beethoven to greatness in the minds of the Viennese aristocracy. Of course this begs the question how did Mozart and Haydn achieve *their* reputations? Sure Beethoven understood how he could benefit socially from the patronage of Haydn--he?d have to be an idiot not to understand it--but seeing it solely on those simplistic terms ignores the fact that he was innovating, and that except for Mozart and Haydn his contemporaries were not. DeNora seems to make a big deal out of this, saying they were thrown on their own as freelancers because they lacked Beethoven's connections (while giving us no real evidence that this is in fact the reason they "went commercial" and he succeeded as a serious artist). She conveniently ignores the fact that Schubert had no significant connections, yet has also come down to us as a "great composer." Hummel's sonatas, written around the same time as Beethoven's and Schubert's, show just how far ahead of their time Beethoven and Schubert were. But this is not mentioned.

Furthermore DeNora either underplays or seems unaware of the reputation of Mozart, of how his music was also considered extraordinarily difficult well into the 19th century. Beethoven himself singled out the fifth "Haydn" quartet of Mozart and said that in this work Mozart was showing to the world what he could do if only they were ready for it. Of course, some of Beethoven's patrons had also been Mozart's, but this shows the idea of serious music did not begin with Beethoven, and this makes her thesis about changing tastes in the aristocracy weaker.

But DeNora's argument spectacularly self-destructs on page 119, in one of the most amazingly inept chapters of any book I've ever read. She describes the first time pianist Gelinek competed with a young Beethoven in a duel in 1793. Gelinek expressed confidence he would destroy Beethoven--make mincemeat of him by one account. The next day the father of the person telling the tale asks Gelinek how he did and the pianist admitted he was the one pulverized. Keep in mind he did not know of Beethoven or his reputation before the duel. You'd think DeNora would see this as a strike against her thesis, but she actually says (p. 121): "First, whatever Galinek thought of Beethoven is less relevant in this context [!!] than the ways his conversations were converted subsequently into topics in their own right--material for further discussion within the music world." Never mind that this person who never heard Beethoven before and was unaware of his reputation, by DeNora?s own admission, was blown away and humbled, what matters is how the result elevated Beethoven's position. It never occurs to her that perhaps it elevated his position because it was deserved! But she doesn't stop there: "Once again, we see that Beethoven's reputation *can be conceived of as the accumulation of a repertoire of recorded, publicized stories about his talent.*? [emphasis mine, out of disbelief] She goes on: "In telling the story of Beethoven's talent, Gelinek positioned himself as subordinate to Beethoven (as a less talented but admiring colleague); thus Galinek testified to and helped to publicize a favorable view of Beethoven's talent by aligning his own abilities as inferior to Beethoven's." What is one to make of this idiocy that passes for sociological analysis? DeNora never for a moment considers that perhaps Gelinek simply believed what he said. I think it's obvious DeNora reached her conclusion before she began and worked backwards, determined to cram every fact she uncovered into her theory even if she had to hammer the loose ends down with a sledgehammer.

Musicologist and pianist Charles Rosen, in a rebuttal shortly after the DeNora book was published, commented that an ethnomusicologist once told him there surely must be hundreds of "Eroica" symphonies that we just don't know about, written by unknown geniuses galore. As Rosen points out, we do indeed know many if not most of the works of Beethoven's contemporaries; many have been analyzed, revived and recorded. They do not come close to Beethoven in originality, breadth of thought, or structural sophistication. But DeNora, like so many revisionists with an agenda, loses her finely-honed sense of skepticism when dealing with alternative interpretations to events. Then she really tips her hand: "While these programs [of cannonic revisionism] obviously vary in levels of ambition, they share a concern with the ways exclusive or ?high? cultural forms are both inaccessible and inappropriate to the lived experience of a large proportion of the people to whom they are upheld as inspirational."

That astonishing remark could be interpreted in ways ranging from merely patronizing to racist, and it sets DeNora up as a sort of cultural arbiter herself. *Inappropriate?* Says whom? Inappropriate to whom? And why?

After all this, there is still one remaining gripe, and that is DeNora?s writing style. It is repetitious in the extreme. She really has a thin point, and takes well over 200 pages to make it. This book could have been a magazine article or two- or three-part series in a journal. Trash.

The author states more than once, in one way or another, that she does not mean to detract from Beethoven's greatness as a creator, but the effect is peculiar nonetheless. As the other reviewer of this book exclaimed, listen to the music! The IMPRESSION the author perhaps inadvertently gives, anyway, is that the world as we know it after Beethoven did his work might have been a world instead impressed by the greatness of Pfart, or whoever that circle of Viennese influencers otherwise settled on. Whereas someone totally unaware of Vienna and its doings would still have taken amazed note of Beethoven, then and since. Some folk are not that enamored of B even now, but they certainly know his power.

Are we really to believe that the music of this man does not speak for itself? Was it really his "political connections" and "who he knew" that led to his success in 19th century Vienna? Are there really other Beethovens running around out there who just haven't gotten a break. A nice parlor exercise perhaps, but really.....how about a serious listen to what he actually wrote down! What I am suggesting is a serious listen. Why, for example, does his work seem to have a much higher density of sheer thought (form if you like) than that of any other composer? Why are his thematic constructs so intellectually exhilarating as well as emotionally moving? Why does he exemplify the most startling development of style of almost anyone you can think of in the arts? What is it about his almost extra-material universal appeal? Listen to the music. Maybe the answers are found there.

Ninety per cent of the material in this book is lifted from works by the likes of A J P Taylor, and any serious historian would be well advised to buy a book by a better historian than Tim Chapman.

After "MASH" & "MASH Goes to Maine," Richard Hooker "took on a collaborator", William E. Butterworth, for a series of "MASH Goes to..." books.

The first two MASH books are basically collections of short stories with a very loose structure. The Butterworth books are sitcom novels... and not very good ones.

After the Butterworth series was played out, Hooker released "MASH Mania," which was a loosely structured series of short stories about the Swampmen in middle-age -- a rock-ribbed Republican middle-age, in fact, amazing though that may be to fans of the TV series, which Hooker hated. Although this book has politics opposite to my own, it's still funny and more importantly, Hooker WROTE IT.

From the completely different writing styles involved, I'd say that if Hooker ever even SAW what Butterworth wrote, it was to say, "Yeah, ok. I'll approve that."

I like Hooker's writing; so I felt rather manipulated by the Butterworth MASH books, which to my mind are Hooker's in name only.

This seems to be one of those cookbooks that just looks pretty but no one bothered to test the recipies. Don't attempt anything in this book without allowing for plenty of time to perfect the recipies. Unless your a cordon bleu-trained pastry chef the directions are way too vague. Proportions are off for various componets as well as with individual ingredients. If you like pretty pictures of food this is the book for you. If you want usable recipies for great desserts you'll be very very disapointed...and feel the need to write a review. I have to wonder if the author has ever been in a kitchen