Book Description
Valentine, perceiving the need for a more objective reappraisal of Bennet's significance, and drawing on considerable Bennet correspondence, has produced this first sympathetic biography of the eighteenth-century preacher. ... Read more

Book Description
In Who Betrays Elizabeth Bennet? John Sutherland unravels 34 literary puzzles in a sequel to his bestselling works Is Heathcliff a Murderer? and Can Jane Eyre Be Happy?.As well as exploring new conundrums Professor Sutherland revisits some previous puzzles with the help of readers who offer their own ingenious solutions, and set fresh posers for investigation. Victorian drug habits, railway systems, sanitation and dentistry are only a few of the areas that shed light on the motives and circumstances of some of literature's most famous characters: Elizabeth Bennet, Betsey Trotwood, Count Dracula, Anna Karenina, Alice and many more come under the spotlight in John Sutherland's highly entertaining collection. 'Sutherland puts humanity and the human, logic and curiosity, back into criticism . . . His respect for the realism of texts inspires, inspirits and delights.' Valentine Cunningham ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

As The Well Runs Dry
Mom always said, don't fret if you scraping the bottom of the barrel,that's where all the best stuff is!However with John Sutherland's series of puzzles in classic fiction, there's no denying that, with the publication of this volume, he had reached a cul-de-sac pretty much: no turning back.the pickings here are slim, and many of the best ones were contributed by avid fans of the series, who would write in with their own ideas.Even the schoolchildren with their riddles concerning Dickens' Christmas Carol do better with the puzzlers.In the first two books, his supply seemed inexhaustible, and every time you turned the page of one of precious Victorian novels you found something newly strange.Were they elm trees or lime trees in MIDDLEMARCH?That sort of thing.Now the elm-lime controversy is about the most breathtaking he can summon up.

Where to turn to next?Well, he was able to leap back in time to polish off the mysteries of Shakespeare (how does a clock toll the hours in JULIUS CAESAR centuries before clouds).And then he came to the present day and modern fiction in the REBECCA book.All the while managing to keep Olivier's divine profile on the cover (except for the JANE EYRE book which had to suffice with Orson Welles).More power to him, he's a great git, but this just isn't his best.The anomalies of Frances Price in MANSFIELD PARK, of Esther's mother-in-law in BLEAK HOUSE, of Jim's family in HUCKLEBERRY FINN, all have been treated often and elsewhere by others.(In fact, Sutherland is almost invariably creepy when he comes to write about American fiction, I wonder why.)

That said, I do like some of the puzzles, for example, in A TALE OF TWO CITIES, Sydney Carton knocks out his lookalike using chloroform (sparking a chloroform craze in Victorian fiction).The only problem is, the book takes place during the last days of the French Revolution, of course, before chloroform's invention.And usually i skip over Sutherland's Trollope and Thackeray riddles, maintaining a low opinion of both men as writers and thinkers, but here he almost persuades you they're not only habitually careless, but matchless too.There's still a lot of life at barrel's bottom, just like my mother used to claim.

A great companion to the classics
This is the third volume of Sutherland's puzzles in classic fiction series.Along with the new mysteries, Sutherland also revisits some of the puzzles from "Is Heathcliff a Murderer?" and "Can Jane Eyre Be Happy?" to acknowledges corrections and alternate interpretations.

As usual, Sutherland's work is interesting and entertaining.He examines the works of 19th century greats such as Jane Austen, George Eliot, Charles Dickens, and William Thackery, and sheds light onto both mysteries in the texts and the writing process itself.I don't always agree with his interpretations of the texts, but Sutherland's essays are always well-written, humorous, and engaging.He'll make you want to read the classics all over again!

Well, who is it?
Wow!I was amazed, especially how Sutherland revised his essays on Wuthering Heights and Mill on the Floss.What marvelous insights?What does Lady Dedlock die of?Why doesn't Laura tell her own story in theWoman in White?Read this marvelous book to find out. ... Read more

Book Description
Lull your child to sleep with this lovely moon pillow book.The soft terry fabric makes for great cuddling while you read the touching rhymed story.The moon-shaped cloth book also features:

- Playful illustrations
- A scarlet satin ribbon for closure
- A pull-string that plays the endearing bedtime melody, "Brahms's Lullaby"
- And more!

Sure to bring sweet slumber to young readers. ... Read more

Book Description
The Plain of Phaistos: Cycles of Social Complexity in the Mesara Region of Crete presents the results on an interdisciplinary regional field project (1984û1988) carried out on the island of Crete. This volume traces the changing patterns of settlement and cycles of social complexity from the Late Neolithic period to the present day within the heartland of the state of Phaistos. The authors and contributors publish geological, archaeological, environmental, botanical, historical and ethnographic studies that establish the regional identity of the Western Mesara. Using a combination of empirical, processual and post-processual theoretical approaches, the volume investigates a central problem - how and why did the Bronze Age and Classical states arise at Phaistos? ... Read more

Book Description
(ages 2 - 4) Merrymaking abounds when four-year-old Jason Mason Middleton-Tapp is sent upstairs to take his nap. Jason's inspired imagination transforms his otherwise ordinary bedroom into a fantasy playground. Splendidly and whimsically illustrated by Isabelle Charbonneau. ... Read more

Product Description
This book represents an innovative collaborative approach to the study of a particular region of the Ottoman empire, the southwestern Peloponnese (or Morea), Greece. It combines the study of unpublished Ottoman documents, other historical sources, and the results of diachronic archaeological fieldwork in an examination of the historical and economic geography of the Morea in the early 18th century, the period immediately following the Ottoman reconquest of this region from Venice. Central to the book is a translation of the section of an Ottoman cadastral survey (defter) listing in great detail properties in the district (kaza) of Anavarin (Navarino, modern Pylos). An introductory chapter outlines the history and methodology of the research project, while the translation is followed by chapters that provide a broader context, drawing on dozens of unpublished Ottoman documents and other sources for the analysis of the information contained in the document and the principles behind its composition. A final chapter summarizes the conclusions drawn from the research, and a series of appendixes offer additional detail, including concordances of the personal- and place-names, an index of properties described, narrative histories of the two fortresses in the region, and a new English translation of the Anavarin section of the 17th-century Turkish traveler Evliya Celebi's Seyahatname (Travel Book). A CD-ROM with a facsimile of the document itself and color versions of all illustrations is also included. ... Read more

Product Description
This Elibron Classics book is a facsimile reprint of a 1890 edition published in London. ... Read more

Book Description
Poetry. Visual Poetry. LOOSE WATCH is a selection of texts and graphics from issues 1-39 of Lost and Found Times.It features the work of 170 contributors from North and South America, Europe and the former Soviet Union.From its origins in mail art to the present, the Lost and Found Times have provided a model of how marginalised cultural workers can create productive areas of engagement within a network of activity. "Shelves clogged with leaves resist physical/ melting except as the start of extinguished/ flame peeling places of selves we thought were/ ringing rigid like a temple, but it's just a plate of/ dander corresponding to a subtle wheeze, directive/ toward the window. Where the wire sings the pigeon/ fingers like the yellow wisps of snow" ("Shelves") - Sheila Murphy and John M. Bennett. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Fish? Sugar! Sienna no walk value, ah, a comb!
John M. Bennett, ed., Loose Watch: A Lost and Found Times Anthology (Invisible, 1999)

I was surprised my library actually had this in stock. The work of John M. Bennett, and the annals of his long-running mail-art mag Lost and Found Times, are notoriously hard to find. I'm proud of my ability to have hunted down two of Bennett's books in the past ten years. To find this treasure in the stacks at the local library was astonishing.

I thought it was going to be a faster read; Lost and Found Times has been quite graphically-oriented during the time I've been aware of its existence (since 1991). But it turns out the magazine's first twenty years were more about the text, and so while the two hundred pages here do contain a good deal of collage, word art, and other such fancies, there's a lot of text to work with, too. Be prepared.

Lost and Found Times, over the years, has featured some of the premier avant-garde literary names (Ivan Arguelles, Bennett himself, Al Ackerman, etc.) and some that should be premier, but have unfortunately become obscure (the great prose poet Robert Nagler being the foremost of them reprinted here). Bennett reprints what he considers the best of the magazine's output over the years, and there is truly some fantastic stuff to be found between the covers of this book. There's some mush, too, but it's an anthology. You expect it. If Andrei Codrescu couldn't put together two hundred pages of top-notch work for the Exquisite Corpse anthology that came out fifteen years ago, no one else has any hope. (Codrescu gave it the good old college try, though, and The Stiffest of the Corpse falls only inches shy of everlasting greatness; a fantastic read, and highly recommended here at Goat Central. But I digress.)

Perhaps the book's most pleasurable surprise is a series of Al Ackerman-penned prose articles called Ack's Wacks; alternately hysterical and horrifying, Ackerman gives himself free rein to be totally nuts, and does a fantastic job. This, folks, is comedy of the highest sort, and Ack's Wacks alone are more than enough reason to seek this out. But the evolution of Bennett from avant-garde wordsmith to dyslexia artist is also documented, and for anyone who's gotten a taste of the insanity that is Bennett's handwritten poetic musings (the covers of his own Was Ah and Ivan Arguelles' Chac Prostibulario are excellent examples), this is a great way to see how he got started writing close-to-indecipherable weirdness.

There are, of course, pieces that fail to please, but the majority of what's here is well worth reading. A definitive catalogue of twenty-five years of the avant-garde in America. *** ½ ... Read more

Book Description
Sir John W. Wheeler-Bennett tells the story of how the German Army, having survived the disaster of 1918, proceeded to dominate the political life of the German Republic, exercising a virtually paramount degree of power and influence by its very withdrawal from the active arena of politics: and of how, when later it was mistaken enough to play politics instead of controlling them, it began a descent which only ended in abject defeat - militarily, politically and spiritually. The author reveals the extent of the responsibility of the Army for bringing the Nazi regime to power, for tolerating the infamies of that regime once it had attained power, and for not taking the measures - at a time when only the Army could have taken them - to remove it from power. In this second edition a new foreword by Professor Richard Overy sets Wheeler-Bennett's classic text in a modern context. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

THE book to read on the German army in the inter-war period
I was privileged to know and study under Sir John Wheeler-Bennett in the last six years of his life, when he taught at New York University Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. He was a charming, courtly, witty and brilliant man, a thoroughly-trained historian and diplomat, who lived through the period he studied and knew most of the great figures of his time.That is a very rare combination.

Wheeler-Bennett was an insider, a member of the Duff Cooper-Winston Churchill group, who lived in Germany for a considerable part of the inter-war period, until a fortuitous combination of a trip and a warning enabled him to escape being killed during the "Night of the Long Knives."He maintained clandestine ties with some dissident members of the German General Staff through the war, and directed the Allies' organization and publication of the German Archives thereafter.

"Nemesis of Power" is not a quick read, but it is absolutely fascinating, and it still has a great deal of invaluable information more than forty-five years after its writing. ... Read more

Product Description
This book traces the archaeological history of Pylos and surrounding regions in Messenia from the Palaeolithic to the present. Designed as much for general readers and travelers interested in ancient Greece as for scholars, the volume presents the findings of the Pylos Regional Archaeological Project (PRAP), which has intensively studied the region over the past 15 years. The 1998 edition, originally published by the University of Texas Press and widely used as a textbook in undergraduate classes, is reprinted with a new preface by Jack Davis and John Bennet, two of the project's original directors, assessing PRAP's impact and outlining new discoveries in the region. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Excellent archaeological analysis in an easy-to-read format
In this book, Dr. Davis and his contributors bring to the general public the cultural omplexities of a region in Greece in an easy-to-read, easy-to-understand format.From the introduction and discussion ofarchaeological methods to the individual chapters outlining particularfacets of research or particular chronological periods, the reader is takenon a journey into the world of modern regional studies.As opposed toother books that deal with archaeological subjects, Dr. Davis et al. treatthe region of Messenia as a continuum, giving no shrift to any period ofhistory, treating all equally well.The book is well illustrated andphotographed. Overall, this is an excellent book for the avocationalarchaeologist, for classroom use and for those archaeologists for whomGreek archaeology is not their forte. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Walks in the Catskills
I've used this little book for years now on some of my day hiking excursions in the Catskills. Compact enough to fit nicely into a small packpack without taking up alot of room, it has taken me to many a trail to explore, some of which I didn't know even existed. In addition to trail difficultly, directions, and a bit of local history, there is also a section on wildlife, camping do and don'ts, and trip planning. ... Read more