This story considers the evolving, somewhat troubled psyche of a German youth, Sinclair, as he matures during the decade prior to WWI. The analysis of Sinclair's turmoil purportedly reflects the European or German moral malaise at the time.

As a prepubescent boy, Sinclair recognizes the realm of good and light, symbolized by his God fearing parents and innocent younger sisters, as separate from the realm of evil and dark, symbolized by Franz Kromer, an older, opportunist who extorts Sinclair into fibbing and petty thievery. Another older boy, Demian, rescues Sinclair from Kromer's clutches, and then sows a new perception of the light and dark realms with an inverted interpretation of the parable of Cain and Abel. Demian perceives the mark on Cain's forehead not as a curse, but as a badge of courage, character and power.

Tainted by his experience with Kromer, Sinclair cannot entirely reject Demian's heroic characterization of Cain, and Demian nurtures this upset of clarity, muddling Sinclair's once clear distinction between the realms of good and evil. Demian then plants the alternative perception that the individual must delve into the self to discover his peculiar fate and destiny, a unique purpose apart from the mundane consensus, the mores of the hoard. Hesse then projects Sinclair's turmoil into a characterization of, or perhaps a reflection of, the mass psyche of prewar Europe.

I first read "Demian" forty years ago, shortly after years of total immersion in university studies. Then younger and perhaps arrogant with intelligence, I felt armed and charged for the uncertain challenges ahead.

For some reason I saved "Demian," packed it away along with my complete set of Ayn Rand's novels, trig tables and "100 Master Games of Modern Chess." "Demian" moved with me around the States, to Asia, and then to Latin America, getting old, wrinkled and as shelf-worn as I. Whenever I packed or unpacked my stuff "Demian" was there, although Ayn Rand and my trig tables had wandered away.

I forgot, long ago, why I saved "Demian," why I did not shuck it off along with my other old skins. I remember only that I intended to read it again. Now older and perhaps humbled by ignorance, I finally did, but I didn't discover precisely why I kept "Demian." The half-dozen marginal marks I made forty years ago do not score insightful premonitions of my life as I remember it. Still, I cannot argue with Hesse's pretended muddle of good and evil, or with the notion of Cain in light rather than dark. Looking back, whatever I saw in "Demian" forty years ago is not too far from how it played out.

This nonfiction book is an interesting collection of essays and musings about Amy Tan, written by Amy Tan, the author of four best selling novels. Organized into seven sections beginning with "Fate and Faith" and concluding with "Hope," the collection is in roughly chronological order. To enjoy the thread of this work, the reader should note those section titles and keep them in mind while reading.

I am not a fan of Amy Tan's fiction. "The Bonesetter's Daughter" could not sustain my interest and I have an uncertain memory of giving up on "The Joy Luck Club" as well. Although both books peaked at number four on the USA Today's bestseller list, I've yet to develop a taste for their themes.

I began reading "The Opposite of Fate" with a tinge of obligation because it was a gift from a good friend, and continued reading with dedicated interest to the end. Being an aspiring novelist, I was in part curious about the trials and tribulations of an accomplished writer of fiction, and this book has a wealth of singular anecdotes and insights. But there is much more, principally Amy Tan's tenacious sprightliness in spite of tragedies, deaths and diseases, bad luck and ill fate, always clinging to the opposite of fate. There are lessons in the Chinese-American philosophical, the multiple perspectives of truth, the management of memories and the indestructibility of mother-daughter love.

In the chapter "Angst and the Second Book," Amy Tan discusses her determination to overcome the axiom that the second book is doomed no matter what the author does, but she does not mention how well her second novel did. In fact, of her four novels, her second, "The Kitchen God's Wife," faired the poorest, peaking at the 94th position in USA Today's bestseller list, and stayed on the chart for only five weeks. Interestingly though, her first book, "The Joy Luck Club," and the second novel entered USA Today's list on the same date, October 28, 1993.

Regardless of your interests, the final chapter of this book describing the advent and of a prolonged illness and its eventual diagnosis is essential reading. Your life could depend on it.

Twenty-one dauntless people led by Jose Arcadio Buendía founded the settlement of Macondo somewhere between the mountains and the Caribbean Sea, bordering the swamp. One Hundred Years of Solitude is the rise and fall of Macondo and six generations of Buendías. It is a study in the futility of mad adventures to defeat the guile of church, state and the Banana Company.

Márquez tells this tale as if it were oral tradition, a legend passed along through generations, spoken to children in rapture by once sturdy great-grandmothers rocking on the porch on cool summer nights. Grandmothers, when telling a story to youngsters, are apt to blend illusion and reality, and Márquez preserved that quality of the narration. For example, the insomnia plague that infected the residents, not with drowsiness but with gradual loss of memory, requiring that every object be tagged with its name and purpose until Melquiades, the ancient sage, returns with a curative potion.

Young Rebeca, an unrecognized relative of the Buendías, probably brought the insomnia plague. Rebeca, who has an ancestral urge to eat dirt and whitewash, arrived at the Buendía home with her parent's bones in a sack. The sack roams through the house, with an annoying clac clac rattle, because no one has died yet in Macondo and the community lacks a cemetery. That will change soon enough, though.

Macondo, founded in tranquillity and innocence, welcomes bands of gypsies bearing science (like ice and alchemy), magic and illusions. The town admits Arabs too, who trade manufactured gadgets for macaws. The state invades in the form of Don Apolinar Moscote, a self-proclaimed magistrate in a town that did not need one. Likewise, the residents had become "accustomed to "...arranging the business of their souls directly with God..." until Father Nicanor, invited to perform a wedding, decides to stay and build a church. The people of Macondo, unaware they require a church, donate pitiful amounts for Father Nicanor's project until he resorts to levitating six-inches by drinking hot chocolate. Eventually the Banana Company arrives and dumps 3,200 citizens into the sea rather than pay their workers a decent wage.

Solitude is withdrawal and denial, a loneliness and helplessness, an acquired madness instilled by philanthropy and greed upsetting tranquillity and innocence. Márquez does not offer solutions for this phenomenon. It's up to us, I suppose.

Jack Miles achieved his stated intent to write a biography of the character God based on the Tanakh, a literary work. The result is a fascinating study of the evolution of the Judean notion of a monotheistic God, the linchpin for the Jewish, Christian and Muslin religions. Some reviews here either entirely shun Miles work or nit-pick at one of his arguments with certain shrillness, as if Miles had stepped on sacred toes. Unless you can accept, at least temporarily, that man created God and not the other way around, you are liable to suffer a similar upset.

Miles is a scholar. He has devoted his life to the study of religion, literature and language, and his writing is rich with insightful analogies. This is not an easy read, however. I had to look up more words while reading this work than with any other book in memory, and some required delving into the cognate, but it was unquestionably worth the effort.

After the Spanish conquest of Peru noblemen (encomenderos) responsible for administering the land were granted the labor of an Indian community. Minor judicial officials (corregidores) were supposed to defend Indian rights. In practice, the encomenderos and corregidores, and later the mestizos seized the lands. They indentured the Indians as tenant farmers, sold them into slave labor, or drove them out of the fertile river valleys into the mountains. By 1964, 200 years of Spanish rule had cut the Quechua population in half and the large landholders (gamonales or hacendados) that constituted only one percent of Peruvian farmers held 62% of the land.

Peasant land invasions in the sierra began in 1952; the first peasant union (sindicato) was formed in 1957. The formation of sindicatos, peasant strikes, and land invasions in the sierra continued through the 1960ï¿s and marginally improved the peasant condition. (Ibid.)

In 1958, the charismatic Hugo Blanco, a Quechua Trotskyite educated in Argentina, began organizing peasant strikes in Cuzco. About four years later Blanco and a small band of Indians formed a militia and engaged in guerrilla warfare in La Convención and Lares provinces near Cuzco. On Christmas day 1962, thirty peasants and five policemen died in a clash. The government formally charged Hugo Blanco for the deaths. In May 1963 troops consisting of Guardia Civil and Peruvian Investigative Police (PIP) encountered Hugo Blanco and his militia group. Fortunately for Blanco, a PIP officer discovered him first as the Guardia Civil officer had orders to assassinate him. The government held Blanco for three years before judging and sentencing him to twenty-years in prison. The Velasco government exiled Blanco in 1971. He published Land or Death the following year. In late 1992, Hugo Blanco was in Mexico recovering from a brain hematoma. (Hugo Blanco, Land or Death and various other sources.)

I read this book while researching the politics of Peru in the 1960ï¿s for a novel I am writing. Unless you have a similar interest in these peasant uprisings from the point of view of a Trotskyite fomenting revolution, or Blancoï¿s candid appraisal as to why revolution failed, or insight into the mind of a Communist revolutionary, do not waste your time with this book. It is poorly written, or badly translated, or both, and the Communist rhetoric is tedious.

I've been a serious photographer for 40 years, in and out of the darkroom all that time. I know about mixing my own chemicals and really making my images sing. I've about $5,000 in darkroom equipment upstairs, which is for sale. Adobe Photoshop Elements, for about a hundred bucks, made it all obsolete.

"Elements" is a misnomer. This software has about everything that Adobe Photoshop 7.0 (around $500) has for a photographer. I don't know about graphic arts, though.

Since 1969 when THE GODFATHER was first published there have been a number of excellent novels and screenplays about the Mafia. THE GODFATHER is outstanding because it was the first, delving into the internal workings of the Mafia which were not public knowledge at the time. It is well-written, sustains a lively pace, and intertwines a gang of interesting characters. My Wise Guy friend warrants that, with a few exceptions such as the whacking of multiple Don's on the same day, THE GODFATHER is accurate as to the internal workings of the Mafia at the time of the story.

The Thorn Birds is an epic saga about the family of Paddy and Fee Cleary, and their children, especially Meggie, the only girl. Paddy is a working class sheep shearer, but his wife Fee seems mysteriously aristocratic. The story opens in 1915, in rural New Zealand on Meggie's fourth birthday. Writing about the next two years in the life of the Cleary's, the author introduces us to the personalities, family relationships and struggles of Paddy, Fee and their first four children.

The story resumes in 1921 when Meggie is ten years old. The Cleary's move to Drogheda in New South Wales, Australia. Drogheda, in the Outback some 610 miles West of Sydney, is a vast sheep farm owned by Mary Carson, Paddy's long lost sister. Mary Carson is immensely wealthy, shrewd, treacherous and weary of living. Since Mary has no other living relatives, she invited Paddy to run Drogheda during her final years. In return, he would inherit the bulk of her vast estate...well that's what she told Paddy.

Mary Carson has an interesting relationship with a twenty-eight year old, ambitious, handsome Catholic Priest, father Ralph de Bricassart. Having enticed father Ralph with generous contributions to the church, Mary claws into his psyche to play mind-games, and conceives a twist that will set the story soaring. The central intrigue, however, is going to be the relationship between Meggie and Father Ralph during the next 48 years.

This is a brilliantly crafted tale that draws the reader into life in the Australian outback where it took six weeks for the mail wagon to complete its rounds. It also pokes a hard-nose into the workings of the Catholic Church and the trauma of celibacy. The descriptions of Drogheda as it changes during the seasons and over the wet-drought cycle are a bit tedious at times, but otherwise the pace moves along with vivid and believable characters.

Margaret Mitchell was born in Atlanta in November 1900. When she was around thirteen, her family, affluent but not wealthy, moved into a big house on Peachtree Street, one of the principal settings for Gone with the Wind, which she began writing in 1926. The Macmillan Company published Gone with the Wind in May 1936; it won the Pulitzer Prize in 1937. The movie, which won ten Academy Awards, premiered in Atlantic City on December 15, 1939.

I read the ï¿Special Commemorative 60th-Anniversary Editionï¿ (paperback) purchased from Amazon.com in February 2003, which commemorates the film, not the book. The back cover of that edition quotes the Washington Post claiming itï¿s ï¿The greatest love story of our time, the story of Scarlett Oï¿Hara and Rhett Butlerï¿.ï¿ I suspect the person who wrote that saw the movie, but did not read the book. If itï¿s the love story that interests you, I suggest you buy the video. If you want to understand the origins of the Southï¿s point of view though, at least the upper middle class Georgian point of view, then read this book.

I was raised in Connecticut and have been often perplexed by the notions of some of my Southern white peers, puzzled for example by the intractable bigotry of intelligent people who are unwilling to understand that they ought to know better. Conversely, Iï¿ve admired the generous, unselfish, seemingly pointless hospitality given me by a Southern adversary, a rival, so incongruent that it smacked of hypocrisy. Having read Gone with the Wind, Iï¿m less perplexed and puzzled now. These people were bred on deep roots.

Margaret Mitchell fashioned her novel from stories about slavery, the Civil War, reconstruction and abolition told by those who had survived those dramatic events. The people who lived through those terrible times, or their children, told those stories. From these tales, Margaret Mitchell painted a broad panorama of a culture in forced transformation: The brutal and reprehensible conduct of the Yankees, the greed of the carpetbaggers, the noble origins of the KKK, and the corruption of the Northï¿s reconstruction. It is Southern noblesse telling the story of their decline. Margaret Mitchell is their apologist.

The paperback version I read has 1024 pages of small type with narrow margins. Mitchellï¿s writing is sometimes exciting, but often itï¿s tedious. Descriptions tend to be excessive, and dialogue is often more like monologue. This style may have been fashionable fifty years ago, but Iï¿ll deduct a star for it today.

This story is set London in early 1914 as Germany was mobilizing and war was inevitable to those that history would prove astute. France was in peril even if England assisted, and the British Empire itself would be at risk if the Germans prevailed. So, The First Lord of the Admiralty, Mr. Winston Churchill of the Liberal government, armed with a note from King George, convinces The (conservative) Earl of Walden to negotiate a secret treaty with his wife's nephew, Alex Orlov, also nephew to the Czar, for Russia to enter into the fray. The anarchists learn of this plot however, and Feliks, The Man from St. Petersburg, has five pounds sterling and a determination to assassinate Alex Orlov on English soil.

This story is rich with the history that bored us in school, that stuff about Victorian pomp and starving Russian peasants floundering for a new political order, the prelude to communism. Follett gives us a sense of the debauchery bred from wealth and privilege, and the desperation born of inhumanities in an era gone by. He introduces us to men threatened by women's suffrage, others terrorized of government, and through them, we better understand why society changed, or perhaps mutated. That stuff is woven seamlessly into a story of intrigue without long speeches or tedious lectures. We get our lesson without having to take notes.

My only quarrel is Follett's propensity to interrupt with back-story, once with back-story within back-story if I'm not mistaken. It's a minor irritation though, one scratch and it's gone, because we are more worried about how his characters are going to sort out the mess they're in. And in the end, you're going to believe The Man from St. Petersburg might have been.