Kathryn Stockett is a talented writer, and The Help is an extraordinary first novel, but there is a great problem at the heart of it. Stockett takes on the voice of black women in the American South, and no matter how fine her perceptions and how admirable her sentiments, as a white woman (no matter her life-long personal experience as someone from the American South), her imagination can't possibly stretch to contain the totality of black experience.
I live in Canada now, but when I was 9-10 years old, we lived in Texas, and we had "help" -- not live-in help, but someone who came in 3-4 times a week to clean up and prepare the occasional meal. When she could she would baby-sit my two younger sisters and me. She was our favorite baby-sitter.
This was in the early '50s, when segregation still ruled full force. Much later my father told me that the first time Alma came to baby-sit and he got ready to drive her home, she climbed into the back seat of his car. He said, "Come sit up front." She said, "If I do, there's going to be trouble." We came to Texas from Europe, and my father was astonished. He said that was when he began to understand just what segregation in the South really meant.
I can't begin to compare our few years' experience of the American South with Stockett's life-long experience, but I do feel this. As a veteran (white) journalist, even if I had spent my whole life in the South, I would never dare to take on a black person's voice. Stockett's rendition of black speech is accurate, but because it was necessarily written out of a white person's perception, it can only sound patronizing.
I think Stockett could have created a great novel if she had written entirely from a white person's point of view. It would have been more difficult, but writing true is always difficult.

The Delta blues guitar style is sometimes sophisticated and difficult, sometimes deceptively simple. There are many guitarists today, like Grossman himself and players like Keb Mo, Taj Mahal, John Hammond Jr., Eric Clapton and many others, who have mastered the techniques note-perfect and make amateurs like myself turn green with envy.
That said, there is no one now who can match the inimitable sound of the musicians who came from the Mississippi Delta, the earlier acoustic artists who performed solo like the legendary Robert Johnson and Son House:
The Complete Recordings
Original Delta Blues
and later artists like Muddy Waters and Elmore James, who took the Delta blues to Chicago, adapted the styles to electric guitar and added a band:
His Best: 1947-1955 (Chess 50th Anniversary Collection)
The Sky Is Crying-History
Of course the singing as well as the guitar can't be matched, but that's another story.
Grossman's tablatures are accurate and easy to read. His book provides fine instructions. But as Grossman would agree, you should listen to the real thing as you work with the tablatures.

A. Customer is confused on one crucial count. The important question: has he/she read any of Fante's works? His/her review does not make this clear. At any rate, his/her review misses the point. The operative expression here is "trust the tale, not the teller." It is clear that A. Customer would not have liked to invite Fante to his/her dinner table. Nor, as far as that goes, would I have. But the work is what is important. Fante wrote in a brutal yet darkly romantic style that brings to life a segment of Los Angeles society that no other writer has written about, an element of this strange city's history that disappeared with the flattening of Bunker Hill. Stephen Cooper's biography is for those who have read Fante's work and are interested in the writer's life. Those readers may turn out to be appalled at how he lived that life, but that does not take away from the value of Fante's work. Full of Life is not for readers who judge a writer's work by the political correct- or incorrectness of his/her attitudes. Look at the biographies of F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner or Ernest Hemingway -- no one would question their importance to American literature, but in the light of present-day values, their lives were a regrettable mess.

Multatuli's Max Havelaar (published in 1860) is one of the classics of Dutch literature. It relates in first person the experiences of a colonial administrator in what was then the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia), exposing a web of injustice and corruption.
The novel aroused instant controversy in The Netherlands and eventually led to a series of reforms. The effects that followed the publication of Max Havelaar have been compared to those achieved in the United States by Uncle Tom's Cabin, which was published only a few years before the Dutch book.
I have read Max Havelaar in the original. Roy Edwards has accomplished an accurate and sensitive translation, an admirable feat considering the difficulty of bringing to life in English the twists and turns of 19th-century Dutch.
R. P. Meijer has provided an illuminating introduction to the historical background of the novel in addition to a fine biographical sketch of Multatuli (Eduard Douwes Dekker), whose account of Max Havelaar's experiences is largely autobiographical.