This film is one that I approached viewing, after holding out for an edition with the bonus features that the supplementary second DVD of this one includes, with great expectation and even trepidation. After viewing "Ararat", with and without Atom Egoyan`s commentary on the movie itself and on the deleted scenes (as well as all of the many other bonus features), it left me even more profoundly moved even than I had expected to feel. I won`t write any extended review. The film is wonderfully rich and layered, with several strands of narrative weaving in and out along with many different perspectives on the part of the various characters in the movie. It takes careful viewing to appreciate how much this variety contributes to the film`s greatness and profundity, something that negative critics who find it confusing do not appreciate.

The Armenian genocide is a delicate issue. I long have been involved with it through my interactions, here in Canada as well as in Turkish Kurdistan itself (where I made an humanitarian mission under joint Kurdish patriotic and U.S./Canadian Independent Lutheran auspices) in very intense involvement with the Kurds of Turkish occupied Kurdistan, a people who shared the ancestral lands which they inhabited along with the Armenian people. The tribe of two interrelated and intermarried Kurdish families with whose members I undertook most of the mission, in the greater Diyarbakir area (after two days with the Kurdish community of Istanbul outside of Kurdistan but within Turkey) included numerous Kurds of partial Armenian ancestry, although they all had become Muslim over the years since the time of the Armenian troubles prior to and during W.W. I.

I was privileged to share the memories, passed on from one generation of them to the next, of how the Armenian genocide took place, not in this case in Van of the film`s setting, but in the Diyarbakir region, where other horrendous atrocities took place that have yet to be documented satisfactorily. The Turks had abused Kurds and Armenians alike over those long years, though at the time of the Armenian genocide the Kurds had been tricked into collaborating with the Turks, who turned on the Kurds once their cynical plans had been carried out, to the shame of the Kurds, who honestly repented of what they had done, and who since have acted in great solidarity (along with Greeks) of the cause of the Armenians who wish to expose and publicise the infamies of the "Young Turks" who overthrew the relatively tolerant Ottoman regime to establish a virulent Turkish racial and nationalist exclusivism that only tolerates Kurds, Greeks, Armenians, and other non-ethnic Turks if they assimilate.

One of the most searing memories of the mission was standing at the top of an ancient ziggurat, from the heights of which my Kurdish hosts pointed out to me the path along which the Armenians were lined up from their own Kurdish village (one of the terminal points of this particular and spectacular massacre), single file, right to the city of Diyarbakir itself and gunned down or otherwise butchered for miles of corpses on end. Another memory was of seeing, elsewhere within the province of Diyarbakir, the ruins (only its foundation left) of the Armenian Orthodox Church in the Kurdish town and venerable Christian and Muslim holy site of Egil, on one of the steep slopes of this town which straddles two facing mountainsides. There I learned from eye-witnesses of this church`s destruction in the 1960s, decades after the famous Armenian attrocities, but years during which the Turks continued to destroy the antiquties of and Armenians and Kurds alike. The antiquities in Egil, however, are not so arrestingly striking to the eyes as those in Van, which "Ararat", the film and the special features, shows in all of their delapidated, hauntingly strange splendour.

I appreciate both Atom Egoyan's passion for his subject, in "Ararat", as well as his admission of some extenuating circumstances that help to soften the culpability of the Turks' cruel and rapacious behaviour at the time of W.W. I and later. The Armenians, to at least some extent, were aiding and abetting the Russian foes of the Ottoman Empire/burgeoning Republic of Turkey. However, the sheer brutality of the massacre of Armenian in Van and Diyarbakir, as the film shows the former, were inexcusable and utterly barbaric, way out of proportion to any just and limited retribution for some Armenians' collusion with the Russian Tsar's empire. Just how barbaric those purges were the film shows in terrifying vividness, as well as the impact of all this upon later generations of Armenians who have had to come to terms with such an heritage of suffering and loss.

This attractive book, of which I have the second, revised edition copyrighted 1923 (of 240 textual pages, plus many unpaginated colour plates of illustrations by John Fulleylove), having restored my copy lovingly to good condition by hand, states in the "Publisher`s Note" therein that "the author has revised the work and slightly abridged it", which would make the somewhat fuller first edition of 1902 even more worthwhile to own. Kelman lovingly describes the land, its history, and how it was at the dawn of the 20th century. The work makes for an unique kind of reverentially Christian treatment of the land so important to the ethical monotheism of Christianity and Islam and, of course, of the more unsavoury religion of rabbinical Judaism. As documentation of the Holy Land, one might wonder why it is that paintings serve to illustrate this account of pre-Zionist Entity Palestine; although, of course, there is much attention to the Biblical antiquities in these watercolour paintings and in the text, one also can obtain a good impression of how historic Palestine looked, longtime settled it had been, too, in pre-Zionist-afflicted times, before the Zionist squatters arrived en masse to usurp a vast part of the indigenous population. One does have to admit that resort to photography of the book`s era would have resulted in solely black-and-white illustrations, rather than the more evocative colour illustrations that painting and its printed reproduction permit.

For the modern reader, this book and tour guides like it retain great value. They eloquently refute any claims by Zionist Jews or by their supporters, often so-called "Zionist Christians", that Palestine was an empty land awaiting a just take-over by Jews who claimed that they needed a national homeland. (Fortunately, several more honest Jewish historians themselves, even in "Israel" itself, have begun to dismantle that Zionist myth.) Palestine already had been highly settled by its Arabs and other peoples and was well developed and prosperous. Its then population consisted mostly of agrarian Arabs, many of them Christian (in greater relative numbers than the more prevailingly Muslim Palestinian Arabs of today) and some minority Armenian, Greek, Sephardic Jewish, and other minorities. To make room for the Zionists who came later, the Zionist zealots, most of them Ashkenazic Jews, at that, rather than Middle Eastern indigenous Sephardim, later razed hundreds of the towns and villages of historic Palestine and variously drove away or outright slaughtered a large proportion of its original, mostly unarmed peoples. This book shows just how much was lost to the soulless concrete and asphalt of the Zionist squatters that replaced the lovely original Palestinian indigenous population centres, larger and smaller, cultivated fields and orchards within the ever-shifting borders of what today constitute alike present-day "Israel" as well as the Occupied Territories of the West Bank and Gaza.

So, if the reader and lover of art and of travel would like to know Palestine as it was meant to be, and as it once existed in peaceful and venerably picturesque tranquillity, a book such as Kelman`s and Fulleylove`s "The Holy Land" makes a good starting point. Enjoy!

is attractive book, of which I have the second, revised edition copyrighted 1923 (of 240 textual pages, plus many unpaginated colour plates of illustrations by John Fulleylove), having restored my copy lovingly to good condition by hand, states in the "Publisher`s Note" therein that "the author has revised the work and slightly abridged it", which would make the somewhat fuller first edition of 1902 even more worthwhile to own. Kelman lovingly describes the land, its history, and how it was at the dawn of the 20th century. The work makes for an unique kind of reverentially Christian treatment of the land so important to the ethical monotheism of Christianity and Islam and, of course, of the more unsavoury religion of rabbinical Judaism. As documentation of the Holy Land, one might wonder why it is that paintings serve to illustrate this account of pre-Zionist Entity Palestine; although, of course, there is much attention to the Biblical antiquities in these watercolour paintings and in the text, one also can obtain a good impression of how historic Palestine looked, longtime settled it had been, too, in pre-Zionist-afflicted times, before the Zionist squatters arrived en masse to usurp a vast part of the indigenous population. One does have to admit that resort to photography of the book`s era would have resulted in solely black-and-white illustrations, rather than the more evocative colour illustrations that painting and its printed reproduction permit.

For the modern reader, this book and tour guides like it retain great value. They eloquently refute any claims by Zionist Jews or by their supporters, often so-called "Zionist Christians", that Palestine was an empty land awaiting a just take-over by Jews who claimed that they needed a national homeland. (Fortunately, several more honest Jewish historians themselves, even in "Israel" itself, have begun to dismantle that Zionist myth.) Palestine already had been highly settled by its Arabs and other peoples and was well developed and prosperous. Its then population consisted mostly of agrarian Arabs, many of them Christian (in greater relative numbers than the more prevailingly Muslim Palestinian Arabs of today) and some minority Armenian, Greek, Sephardic Jewish, and other minorities. To make room for the Zionists who came later, the Zionist zealots, most of them Ashkenazic Jews, at that, rather than Middle Eastern indigenous Sephardim, later razed hundreds of the towns and villages of historic Palestine and variously drove away or outright slaughtered a large proportion of its original, mostly unarmed peoples. This book shows just how much was lost to the soulless concrete and asphalt of the Zionist squatters that replaced the lovely original Palestinian indigenous population centres, larger and smaller, cultivated fields and orchards within the ever-shifting borders of what today constitute alike present-day "Israel" as well as the Occupied Territories of the West Bank and Gaza.

So, if the reader and lover of art and of travel would like to know Palestine as it was meant to be, and as it once existed in peaceful and venerably picturesque tranquillity, a book such as Kelman`s and Fulleylove`s "The Holy Land" makes a good starting point. Enjoy!

is attractive book, of which I have the second, revised edition copyrighted 1923 (of 240 textual pages, plus many unpaginated colour plates of illustrations by John Fulleylove), having restored my copy lovingly to good condition by hand, states in the "Publisher`s Note" therein that "the author has revised the work and slightly abridged it", which would make the somewhat fuller first edition of 1902 even more worthwhile to own. Kelman lovingly describes the land, its history, and how it was at the dawn of the 20th century. The work makes for an unique kind of reverentially Christian treatment of the land so important to the ethical monotheism of Christianity and Islam and, of course, of the more unsavoury religion of rabbinical Judaism. As documentation of the Holy Land, one might wonder why it is that paintings serve to illustrate this account of pre-Zionist Entity Palestine; although, of course, there is much attention to the Biblical antiquities in these watercolour paintings and in the text, one also can obtain a good impression of how historic Palestine looked, longtime settled it had been, too, in pre-Zionist-afflicted times, before the Zionist squatters arrived en masse to usurp a vast part of the indigenous population. One does have to admit that resort to photography of the book`s era would have resulted in solely black-and-white illustrations, rather than the more evocative colour illustrations that painting and its printed reproduction permit.

For the modern reader, this book and tour guides like it retain great value. They eloquently refute any claims by Zionist Jews or by their supporters, often so-called "Zionist Christians", that Palestine was an empty land awaiting a just take-over by Jews who claimed that they needed a national homeland. (Fortunately, several more honest Jewish historians themselves, even in "Israel" itself, have begun to dismantle that Zionist myth.) Palestine already had been highly settled by its Arabs and other peoples and was well developed and prosperous. Its then population consisted mostly of agrarian Arabs, many of them Christian (in greater relative numbers than the more prevailingly Muslim Palestinian Arabs of today) and some minority Armenian, Greek, Sephardic Jewish, and other minorities. To make room for the Zionists who came later, the Zionist zealots, most of them Ashkenazic Jews, at that, rather than Middle Eastern indigenous Sephardim, later razed hundreds of the towns and villages of historic Palestine and variously drove away or outright slaughtered a large proportion of its original, mostly unarmed peoples. This book shows just how much was lost to the soulless concrete and asphalt of the Zionist squatters that replaced the lovely original Palestinian indigenous population centres, larger and smaller, cultivated fields and orchards within the ever-shifting borders of what today constitute alike present-day "Israel" as well as the Occupied Territories of the West Bank and Gaza.

So, if the reader and lover of art and of travel would like to know Palestine as it was meant to be, and as it once existed in peaceful and venerably picturesque tranquillity, a book such as Kelman`s and Fulleylove`s "The Holy Land" makes a good starting point. Enjoy!

This attractive book, of which I have the second, revised edition copyrighted 1923 (of 240 textual pages, plus many unpaginated colour plates of illustrations by John Fulleylove), having restored my copy lovingly to good condition by hand, states in the "Publisher`s Note" therein that "the author has revised the work and slightly abridged it", which would make the somewhat fuller first edition of 1902 even more worthwhile to own. Kelman lovingly describes the land, its history, and how it was at the dawn of the 20th century. The work makes for an unique kind of reverentially Christian treatment of the land so important to the ethical monotheism of Christianity and Islam and, of course, of the more unsavoury religion of rabbinical Judaism. As documentation of the Holy Land, one might wonder why it is that paintings serve to illustrate this account of pre-Zionist Entity Palestine; although, of course, there is much attention to the Biblical antiquities in these watercolour paintings and in the text, one also can obtain a good impression of how historic Palestine looked and longtime settled it was, too, in pre-Zionist-afflicted times, before the Zionist squatters arrived en masse to usurp a vast part of the indigenous population. One does have to admit that resort to photography of the book`s era would have resulted in solely black-and-white illustrations, rather than the more evocative colour illustrations that painting and its printed reproduction permit.

For the modern reader, this book and tour guides like it retain great value. They eloquently refute any claims by Zionist Jews or by their supporters, often so-called "Zionist Christians", that Palestine was an empty land awaiting a just take-over by Jews who claimed that they needed a national homeland. (Fortunately, several more honest Jewish historians themselves, even in "Israel" itself, have begun to dismantle that Zionist myth.) Palestine already had been highly settled by its Arabs and other peoples and was well developed and prosperous. Its then population consisted mostly of agrarian Arabs, many of them Christian (in greater relative numbers than the more prevailingly Muslim Palestinian Arabs of today) and some minority Armenian, Greek, Sephardic Jewish, and other minorities. To make room for the Zionists who came later, the Zionist zealots, most of them Ashkanazic Jews at that rather than Middle Eastern indigenous Sephardim, later razed hundreds of the towns and villages of historic Palestine and variously drove away or outright slaughtered a large proportion of its original, mostly unarmed peoples. This book shows just how much was lost to the soulless concrete and asphalt of the Zionist squatters that replaced the lovely original Palestinian indigenous population centres, larger and smaller, cultivated fields and orchards in alike present-day "Israel" and in the occupied territories of the West Band and Gaza.

So, if the reader and lover of art and of travel would like to know Palestine as it was meant to be, and as it once existed in peaceful and venerably picturesque tranquillity, a book such as Kelman`s and Fulleylove`s "The Holy Land" makes a good starting point. Enjoy!

I had expected this film, from all of the controversy and brouhaha about it, to be much more explosively bitter in tone than, in fact, it is. Enough folks have said sufficient things about its content, so I won`t belabour matters about these now fading controversies regarding this motion picture. I find the film deeply moving, despite not agreeing with its implicit premise that compassion lets a priest "off the hook" regarding his sacred vows. Neither Fr. Greg, the gay young priest, nor his heterosexual superior, Fr. Matthew, should have made such vows, i.e. should not have sought ordination. In the case of the former, to be a gay man, sexually active or otherwise, and also a Catholic is one thing; to be a sexually active gay Catholic priest under vows, however, is indefensible. Similar strictures apply to his wayward, sexually "straight" superior, Fr. Matthew, whose own secretly active sexual life also is not in keeping with his ordination vow of consecrated celibacy.

However, I have low expectations of priests. I am a believing and observant Roman Catholic, but I do not accept the line that priests are, humanly speaking, special men in these sad times. In fact I have such a low opinion of the priestly fraternity that I avoid priests like the plague; I try to avoid them before or after Mass, impatiently glide by or circumvent them at the church entrance. Catholic clergymen are, 90% or so of them, lazy creeps and have been so since the way that the implementation of the changes (real or purported) of the Second Vatican Council ("Vat.-2") lowered standards so drastically. One sees an example of this in the film, where the rigourously harsh old priest tries to converse in Latin with the gay young priestly dude, in rather simple Latin at that even for a Latin-rusty layman like myself, and the younger man has no idea of what the older man is saying. Latin is not the end of it; the seminaries have churned out priests who are opinionated cusses but, in parishes with a good representation of professional folk and skilled labourers, are more ignorant than most of their congregants are in regard to their respective callings` body of expertise. Why should we respect these ignorant supposed mavens? Then, as if their bland ignorance were not bad enough, the standards of holiness and devotion, as well as knowledge of all things Catholic (like doctrine, apologetics, Holy Scripture, patristics, basic plainchant) have plummeted. Priests now, for the most part, do not even attempt to live holy lives, though at least the gay young priest of this film carries out the duties of hearing confessions (sacramentally rather than amateur therapeutically, at that) and doing the rounds of visitations to Catholic households, with which few current-day priests in so many dioceses, now so lax, bother themselves.

So, it is not surprising that the two post-Vat.-2 priests, the senior of the two co-habiting with his housekeeper, the junior one, when things get tough, going out to cruise for gay companionship and sex, finding a bed partner who is truly sympathetic and appealing. Yes, the Western Rite Catholic Church would do well to be in conformity with the Eastern Catholic (Byzantine) Rite (and the Eastern Orthodox Church) in permitting priests, under set conditions, to marry. A greater good hardly could befall the Church, to deliver it from the fornicating and often homosexual unmarried clerical profession that serves it so poorly. However, as things continue to stand, the integrity of vows stands, in the face of whatever clerical discipline regarding celibacy or its preferred rarity that prevails and is in effect at any particular time in any particular Rite, Western or Eastern of the papal Church.

The priesthood in recent decades is of mind-crushing, soul-numbing mediocrity, in what has morphed, since 1965 or so, into a dumbed-down, hypocritical profession. It is a job for a man who has no real talent for much of anything and yet likes the easy pay and gentility of the position. So, yeah, I feel for these clerical dudes` sexual predicament, since I am human and react as one, but they can go stuff their heads in the toilet and flush so far as being somehow worthy of any special regard. We laity have a right to be pious and observant but also anti-clerical. Priests are an unavoidable necessity, to carry out the sacramental life of the Church, but they deserve no praise for that, since they do it so poorly and either listlessly or prissily. I would rather talk to the parish janitor about the latest in cleaning supplies than to a priest about anything soever! I expect NOTHING of priests, since they have "delivered" so little for so many long years. I once did respect, many at least, of the priests whom I knew who were formed pre-Vat.-2, but they were another kind of men and priests altogether than the lounge lizards at our altars today, who refuse even to prepare a sermon that lasts more than five minutes, in part because they are too lazy, also in part because they are too ignorant or downright stupid. So, yeah, I do not find this film shocking; it is rather just rather (too hiply) realistic.

It is worth seeing "Priest" and it is, indeed, touching, but the Church that it depicts is one that should not be what it is. The acting of the entire cast is excellent and the film well captures the bleak cityscapes of England`s industrial northern metropolises. I do wish that this DVD edition had included some "special features" about a film that has generated so much controversy, heated comment, and far too much misunderstanding as "Priest" most certainly has done so, but the censorship that already afflicts the DVD edition probably hints at wariness to go down those paths in making the film available. Don`t be scared, fellow Catholic, rather get the DVD of this movie, which has much of real value, despite some excessively modish concerns, to convey about the dingy corporate life to which the Roman Catholic Church has sunken.

Rob Carrick is a prolific writer, of books as well as journalism, about personal finances, real estate, etc. His style and manner of conveying information are marvels of clarity. Some have criticised his background of studies in journalism, rather than in business, but perhaps it is his journalistic orientation that helps him to avoid the conformist mindset, and rigidly unworkable and outdated theories behind them, of Bay Street and of Wall Street.

One probably should seek out that more purely professional advice on finance and balance it with what hard-hitting, non-conforming (to the business elties) Carrick has to say about the same matters despite the mindset of the business community, which often is far from having the average individual's interests uppermost in mind, even in Canada, where regulation protects the public's interest, and most certainly does not so regard the public with any kindesss in that cynically greed- and corruption-beset, callously unregulated (or very insufficiently regulated) banana republic, the U. S. of A., or in the U.K.

A lot of reviews of the various DVD and VHS editions of this chilling film have appeared. Some folks are snobs about the "horror film" genre, not one for which I have myself much taste to see regularly, since the supernatural tends to spook me out too easily. Frankly, what attracted me initially to this movie is the seafaring aspect. I love the lore of big 19th and 20th century powered ships, especially really large ones, military or civilian, such as the Antonia Graza, the ocean-liner featured in the fictional "Ghost Ship". I served as a sailor in the U.S. Navy (something that awakened me, as early as my late teens, to the sheer dastardliness of both the U. S. of A.`s and Britain`s imperialist ventures abroad), most of the time on a ship that was at sea a good deal in all kinds of conditions in all parts of the Alantic, Artic, and Indian Oceans (and in Antarctic waters, too); I was only at sea specifically in the Pacific during those years very briefly, on a quite large vessel (a supply ship that also served as a troop transport vessel) before being transferred to the Atlantic Fleet. These ships dated from years of construction and/or refitting roughly contemporaneous with that of the film's Antonia Graza. I was in a position to see all parts of the ship on which I served longest quite often, more so than most of the seamen of the crew, since my labours took me from the bilge right up to the top of the rigging quite a lot. That was mostly on a relatively small ship (a destroyer), so I really love seeing films of grandiose, humongous vessels such as the Antonia Graza of this movie.

All of the foregoing is simply to attest to my ability to size up the authenticity of the ship portrayal in this film (not to make a lot here of my few years of seafaring). The detail is well-nigh flawless! I usually had no difficulty recognising in what parts of the ship the action occurs at any time or what the machinery therein is. One cannot say that of all films, let me tell! This is a beautifully, very skillfully, and evocatively filmed work of cinema. It also is very suspenseful and exciting! I have to admit that re-seeing it after the initial time makes the action and motivations clearer to me. One needs to watch the film carefully to understand in every detail what is happening, the people (live or ghostly) as well as what is around them. This is more than a movieland popcorn-chewer's film.

I had hoped that the extra features would explain what the film is about better than, in fact, they do. However, those features on the DVD edition viewed are quite interesting regarding the making of the film, so they make having replaced my VHS copy with a DVD quite worthwhile.

If you like horror, gore, ghosts, the sea, and rusting mid-20th century technology, this film is for you! The acting is quite excellent and the actors attractive, too, I should add, of course!

I undertook reading this book to assess whether the sort of G.L.W.B. (guaranteed lifetime withdrawal benefit) plan that my financial advisor (with Investors Group of Canada) has explained and offered to start up for me from my R.R.S.P. Although I trust him, I always like to counter-check the worth and reliability (to accomplish my own ends, not alone to make his company a profit!) of financial instruments such as this with a/some relevant good and specifically Canadian book(s) on the subject, rather than just from the company's own literature. (In case the reader is curious, Investors Group offers its G.L.W.B. plan in collaboration with Great-West Life Assurance Co., one of the insurance companies mentioned in the book.

Americans and Brits, alas, do not have the comfort level that Canadians do in regard to investment/insurance products that Canadians do, since, in the unregulated (or far too insufficiently or negligently regulated) context of financial/insurance institutions (and of real estate, too, for that matter) in the U. S. of A. and in the U.K., there is a level of fraud that our Dominion of Canada simply does not tolerate or permit. (That is one of the reasons that the current, at time of writing this the year 2011, financial crisis, in the U. S. of A. and in the U.K., is occurring.) If feasible, I would urge Canadians residing in the U. S. of A. (which is on a fast track to transforming itself, through the venality and corruption of its profiteering institutions of finance and its cynical yet slothful and intentionally imprudent governance, into a mere "banana republic") or in the U.K., and even Americans themselves, really, ought to consider doing their investing through Canadian channels if that be feasible and not too arduously inconvenient for them.

The authors of "Pensioni[s]e Your Nest Egg" do make as good a case for this financial method (in Canada) for the elderly as the company literature from Investors/Great-West does, so I am persuaded! There is good advice here also for middle-aged workers as they plan ahead for retirement. It helps that the authors of the book and of investors/Great-West's promotional brochures all write very clearly, even somewhat entertainingly ("solidly by not stolidly", as it were!), and that they avoid unduly technical complexity, even in the math entailed. So, if one wants to be sure that his retirement funds last through the end of life, no matter how long that may be, rather than to aim (worriedly, if one is shrewd about it) at some particularly advanced and arbitrarily set age in the future when coverage becomes exhausted, then I advise that the reader also acquire this book and consider the advantages of a G.L.W.B. plan.

Frederick James Crowest's biography of the great Florentine composer, Luigi Cherubini, has been widely read over the years and has undergone publication and reprint by a number of firms. It derives most of its information from the more elaborate biography by Edward Bellasis, which went through two original editions, of the which the first also has remained available in German translation, and of which the second edition, very much enlarged, still is available in reprint form, remaining the most comprehensive study of Cherubini available in English. Crowest's book is much shorter than that of Bellasis, and thus it provides a good "easy read" (thus the four Amazon stars!) for those who are content to have only a basic biography and appreciaion of this great composer, theorist, and educator.

Crowest's book once exerted enough influence to have been the source to which the U.S. Library of Congress resorted, until recent years, for its "authority file" records for uniform titles in cataloguing printed and recorded music by Cherubini. Books and dissertations by other authors, however, have displaced Crowest and, in part, even Bellasis, from continuing to exert that kind of scholarly weight. The dissertation literature on Luigi Cherubini in the English language, in fact, is of far greater importance than the publihed literature in monograph form. A serious student of musicology would obtain the Ph.D. theses by Stephen C. Willis and (an earlier one) by Margery Juliet Stomne Selden (for starters!) for comprehensive and learned accounts of Cherubini's life and accomplishments, especially in the field of opera. Then such a determined reader would move on, for major studies in English, to more specialised master's degree theses and doctoral dissertations that have been done on Cherubini's music for choir (Jennifer Barkham; Maurice Lynn White), for string chamber ensembles (Julian Duke Woodruff), for winds (David Whitwell, whose work later was published as a monograph), and for other vocal and instrumental forces. The most masterful studies of Cherubini, however, have been done in German, with very substantial contributions to the literature in Italian and French, which readers with proficiency in those languages and a strong interest in Cherubini should explore.

It is delightful that the relatively early monographic works on Luigi Cherubini by Crowest and Bellasis remain available. One should be aware, however, that their books on the composer project an image of conservative values and practices in music and politics that are, to say the least of it, quite short of the mark in assessing Cherubini's revolutionary role in music style and his interests and involvement in progressive political and social movements of his times. It is part of the real fascination of Cherubini that, as an advanced "neo-classicist", he held in an equilibrium all his own a deep respect and continuation of tradition and yet also a fiery, complex (yet marvellously lucid), and so continually surprising commitment to technical advancements in such elements of music as harmony and instrumentation, especially orchestration. (Of course, Cherubini long and rightly has been recognised as one of the very greatest contrapuntists since J.S. Bach.) However, Crowest, even if his view (like that of Bellasis) is coloured by too much innate conservatism, does render reasonable biographical justice to his work's subject, Cherubini, the composer who was the greatest reconciler of the Italian, French, and German schools of composition that preceded him and which he furthered as he himself continued to influence other major musical figures during his own lifetime and, posthumously, by his brilliant body of work.