I read the entire book for a world literature class I was taking and I was glad to complete the book. But when I went back to start discussing it in class and writing papers and such, I had trouble remember things that happened early on in the book, or exactly how one person was related to another. This serves as a great reference for the book.

I highly recommend the cliff notes for those who just read it or those who are revisiting the classic novel.

I went halfway through War and Peace without a reading aide. I have used Marianne Sturman's reading aid for Anna Karennina and it really helped me understand what I was reading. I stopped reading war and peace after 700 pages, and bought this reading aide to help me. I started from page one, it took me a long, long time, but I was able to grasp the full meaning and magic of War and Peace. I recommend this and other Notes by Ms. Sturman.

I found this book very depressing and frightening to read. When I read it was young, Catholic, had a vivid imagination, and a strong sense of guilt. At various times throughout reading the book I was convinced that I was going to go to hell - so the book is pretty effective as a way of scaring people into behaving better. I also disagree with Aligheri's notion that premarital sex and suicide will send you hell. The description of hell is thorough and complete and I found the drawings fascinating. I enjoyed reading who ended up in hell and why.

Dante's brillance goes underglorifed until the moment the book is finished, then a sudden gush of overwhelming astonishment shows what a real "great mind" is capable of. The amazing attention to detail and the most extream symbolism in every aspect makes this book worth the time.

There aren't too many books published to help specifically for the SAT II W. Hist. So before I took that exam I bought this book for some practice problems, and it did help. I scored a 710 although I it had been 2 years since I took W.Hist. If you also plan to buy the Barron's How to...World History, read the review section, which is pretty good, but don't let their exam questions tarnish your perceptions. The questions intensified popular misconceptions and what not. That's why you would want this book for practice questions. Ironic: same publishers, two different recommendations.

This book really gave me good practice for the regents

if i wasnt rushed to read it i probably could've focused on the details and the parallelism. but that's why i'm here cuz i'm tryin to understand it better.

When I first read "The Secret Sharer" I was left thinking about our minds wonderful experiences and how good can come from bad. Conrad writes about the truth of human experiences and the corruption of mankind in such a briliant way it is unbelievable. You can feel the captain trapped with the choice of keeping the murderer, that reminds him so much of a gloomy side of himself, or turn him in.

Although the book and the SAT II: Physics test stress on different things, "How to prepare..." is one very good book. The chapters are well developed and explained. The problems are more computational than they must be. I used that book to prepare myself but my country and many others use SI units. As you know, the Physics test also use SI units. However, I had to face constantly problems and theory concerned with English system.

The more practice tests the better(by the way there is a nice problem explanation area after each test). If you are looking for a book that helps you from the ground up, forget it. Take another physics course at school. I found this book very useful for checking up on my physics.

Set in the 1940's, A Separate Peace takes the reader into the world of Devon, a boarding school on the East Coast, and into a world where the reality of war is imminent. The book itself has nothing to do with that war, and yet everything to do with it. From the first page on, Knowles presents a realistic story (perhaps even a sad one) with hints and moments of hindsight, as a thirty-some year-old Gene, who attended the school in his youth, tells the story. And while the narrative never quite takes us to the war itself, the entire theme that Knowles presents is intertwined with the very being of World War II.

Furthermore, while that conflict rages on around the world, back at Devon, a teenage Gene and his "best friend" Phineas are struggling with their own battle: Human nature. Phineas, himself, learns personally that the truth hurts, but how far does it go?

A Separate Peace is chalk-full of life-long lessons and a truth that runs deeper than we might want it to. John Knowles is a terrific author and this book is proof.

A Separate Peace provided great reading pleasure. It provided insight into the 40's, and also showed the pain of growing up during a war. I featured was, however, lacking strong female characters, nor did it give any true insights into the charactor's emotions

This is a pretty good book, for the price. It has useful language themes (travel situations, practical things) and many good sample dialogs to model your language use on. The layout is visually appealing. Its coverage of grammar is a bit skimpy. Yes, it's very simple, but they may have gone too far. There is no grammar index so it's hard to locate various grammatical explanations. The past verb tenses are not explained in the book, which I think is a deficiency. There are a few typos, too.

There are a variety of basic german books and book/tape combinations available for the person who wants to learn a bit of the language primarily for travel purposes, i.e., shopping, eating out, making hotel reservations, etc. This seems to me to be one of the best of that genre. I'm not quite sure why, but it seemed to work better for me than any of the others of this ilk. The text is nicely done with amusing illustrations; and, more importantly, the exercises and tapes seem to go a long way to achieiving their desired end of teaching and implanting a bit of German. For the person who wants more than a smattering of German, may I recommend the other Barron's course, Mastering German (the old Foreign Service Insititute course) and the Berlitz, Think and Talk German, both of which are superb, but rather more demanding and pricey than any "tourist" course.

This entry is a little more gimmicky and doesn't quite work as well as its predecessors in the Charlie Resnick series. It centers around a real-life mystery book and film convention in Nottingham, as an American writer of a lesbian series is attacked by feminists and receives threatening letters. Meanwhile, a number of men have been apparently attacked by the prostitute they picked up. Too much attention is given to the convention, which seems kind of hokey somehow, and the prostitute murders aren't particularly satisfying.

The Charlie Resnick mystery series by John Harvey ranks, in my opinion, with John D. MacDonald's Travis McGee and Robert Parker's Spenser. I normally do not like British novels, but have completely been taken with Harvey's characters, especially Charlie Resnick. These books are very realistic from a police standpoint, but are even more so in showing the character's strengths and weaknesses. I have enjoyed all of Harvey's Resnick books (Cold Light, Living Proof, Cutting Edge, Lonely Hearts and one other that I forget at the moment). I highly recommend this series.

When rating Shakespeare, I am comparing it to other Shakespeare. Otherwise, the consistent "5 Stars" wouldn't tell you much. So if you want to have this book rated as compared to the general selection of books in the world, it probably deserves five stars, certainly four. But as Shakespeare goes, in spite of being one of his best-known plays, it truly isn't one of the best.

Certainly, there are the bones of a fine plot here, but the play is very short and thus doesn't really give us the smooth development of plot and character that we usually see in Shakespeare. Nor, given how entirely unappealing the main character is, is it properly a tragedy when he dies; granted, one can consider it tragic that good King Duncan is killed, and Banquo as well, to say nothing of McDuff's family. But can a play in which the unequivocal "good guys" categorically win (and several of them even survive) be properly called a tragedy?

There are certain similarities between the plot (or at least, the theme) of this play and that of the novel "Crime and Punishment" by Dostoyevsky. If you liked that book, you may enjoy this play. If you like this play, you will probably enjoy that book (it is a much more in-depth character portrait). Granted, the issue of Kingship never comes into play in Dostoyevsky's work, but the concept of the effect a murder has on the murderer is there, and actually handled rather better.

Of course, being Shakespeare, there is much beautiful language to be found here, and as Shakepearean plays go, the language isn't too difficult for the modern reader; there are only a few places where the footnotes are absolutely essential to an understanding of what's been said. But truly, it is hard to really like this work, and while it can be interesting, it would have been better if it weren't so rushed.

a tragic story of death and betrail. A great play to watch, read, and perform. Read this play!

I thought that this book was really good. It taught me things that I never knew. I learned about the real differences between blacks and whites. I also had a chance to see out of the eyes of a black boy and it was hard for me to realize that he was put through all of that for no reason. I think that there should not be racism for the things that he had to go through. It also made me see things from a new perspective because living the live that Richard Wright had to live must of been hard. I am glsd that he wrote his book.

I really liked this book. I am in eight grade and we had to read part one for school but it was so good i read both parts.