John Miller (2)Rezensionen

Surprisingly good. Enjoyable stories of and or about cape cod. Maybe especially fun to read while on the cape.

NA

A little disconcerting that so many of the couples split up. Nice photographs, though.

This is a collection of fictional and nonfiction writings connected to Berlin. Some are about the city itself, some about its people, its history, its atmosphere. Like any collection, some of the selections are better than others. Overall, the book gives the reader a sense of the city that is entertaining and thought-provoking.½

I really enjoyed this collection, for the most part, but as someone who edited a few anthologies during my time as an editor at Penguin, I had a few quibbles. Overall, I was happy with the range represented here--particularly happy to see an excerpt from Louis Armstrong's fantastic autobiography here, as well as Ellen Gilchrist, who is a revelation. I also loved the historical documents included as well.

On the other hand, there were some pretty embarrassing copyediting errors that I guarantee were not in the original books (including one in the Confederacy of Dunces excerpt and the Robert Penn Warren excerpt). The other aspect I found a bit off-putting was the pervasiveness of the n-word in the selections here. Example: the excerpt from Robert Penn Warren's All the King's Men begins with, in my opinion, a rather purple description of the highway leading into Mason City. Embedded in that description is some rather embarrassing and, frankly, poorly written descriptions of black sharecroppers, including and complete with an attempt at dialect. Yes, this was the late forties. I'm not going to rail against RPW for writing this way. But I do think that the editor here, John Miller, could have used a bit of discretion. Including this excerpt from RPW was marginal--Mason City is not New Orleans, and the entire excerpt takes place there. But also, it's not really underscoring anything, which is what I'd imagine including this description might do, and as it does in other pieces in the book, especially Gilchrist's devastating "Rich." And having never read Anne Rice, I am glad to know that I should continue to avoid her work. Argh. Oh, and Carl Sandburg's description of Lincoln's trip down the Mississippi was a kick in the pants to read his biography of Lincoln.

The edition I have is part of the MoonBox. I read it in the mood of Halloween. It is a compilation of stories, chapters, and poems (11 total) from authors such as Lord Byron, Angela Carter, and Bram Stoker. There is a little paragraph biography of each of the authors at the end. Most of the stories were just okay, but it's an interesting collection. My favorite was the tale by Angela Carter- really good and the reason that I rated it more than a 2 star overall; I will probably look into more of her works.
I liked the white font on black pages, but the red illustrations did nothing for me.

As books from the public library on Islam go, this was the best so far, though I still found it incredibly superficial - almost pointless.

You can learn 10x as much about Islamic beliefs from Wikipedia. If you want a beginner's guide to the socio-economic politics driving Islam then this is also a decent start, but there was nothing here for anyone but a novice, a curious investigator of Islam.

Inside Islam? Definitely not. A passing glance from a moving car window at best.

This is a collection of short stories, book excerpts, essays and poetry about the islands off Massachusetts. Included are Melville, Poe, Plath, Mailer, Paul Theroux, Vonnegut... My favorites are a short story by John Cheever called "The Chaste Clarissa" about a summer regular on the cape who spends his vacation trying to seduce a taciturn young wife whose husband is away, and the essay "Provincetown Diary" by Louise Rafkin, who won a place in the town's writing residence program.
This seemed like the perfect book for an end-of-summer read.

How can you not earn five stars when you have people such as Alex Haley, James Earl Jones, Norman Mailer, Joyce Carol Oates, and a plethora of others writing about you? The pictures are great, vut everyonje seems to be hung on the one showing a victorious Ali standing over a fallen Sonny Liston. The only thing that may have improved the book is more -- more interviews with Ali, more pictures of him, more copy from people such as Angelo Dundee and Howard Cosell, who knew him intimately.

A nice book on the subject of place in relation to the place of inspiration for a group of artists and writers. For those who are not real familiar with the artists this would be an interesting starte book. The artists include: Georgia O'Keeffe, Gary Snyder, Larry McMurtry, Eudora Welty, Peter Matthiessen, Henry Miller, Terry McMillan, Anne Rice, Henrty Davis Thoreau and Richard Diebenkorn.

What a mixed bag of stories one can find in this book. Some I loved, some I didn't so much. Some were a little strange, especially some of those cures. But that's ok. This is not necessarily a book of stories about New Orleans. It is however a gathering of stories by people who either were from New Orleans, or lived in New Orleans at some point. It is an illustration of how this most decadent city can tug at your soul. Most of the stories are short and can be read in one sitting. Authors include such greats as William Faulkner, Anne Rice, Tennessee Williams, Truman Capote, and even Louis Armstrong. Although you might not like all of these stories, I think you might find one or two that catch your interest. For me, it's all about New Orleans, and that made reading it worthwhile.

This is a lovely collection of stories that anyone looking for the vacations of her childhood should read. They're not all happy; the Cape is a weird place in the off-season, and sometimes a weird place in the on-season (witness Kurt Vonnegut's story). But the collection ends on a proper note with Paul Theroux and his description of a summer vacation. As my dad says, a bad day on the Cape is better than a great day at work.

Although I enjoyed this book and recommend it to others, the editors of this anthology have made several mistakes that force me to give it a less-than-glowing review.

The first problem is that I had already read about half of this book in the originals. By choosing Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Alice in Wonderland, The Doors of Perception, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, The Sign of Four, The Picture of Dorian Gray, and Kubla Khan, they ensured that anyone who was both well read and interested in drug literature had already read many of the pieces. Sure, they are great, but I would rather be introduced to something new.

Another problem is that it is primarily composed of excerpts, and no context is given about the greater work. The book would have been much enhanced with a brief introductory paragraph or two before each of the excerpts, orienting the reader. This is somewhat remedied at the back of the book, in the Author Biographies section, but the excerpt from Dickens' The Mystery of Edwin Drood was almost nonsensical out of context.

Besides the items mentioned above that I have on my shelves already, the highlights consist of an excerpt from Carrie Fisher's Postcards from the Edge (which I have to pick up now), Terry Southern's great “new journalism” piece, The Blood of a Wig (which I already have, but I suspect that most people probably don't so I left it off the list above), and Sigmund Freud's thoughts on cocaine.

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Women writing about women...