I actually share a large number of the opinions that Peck articulates in this book, and I certainly recognize the absolute necessity for this kind of merciless criticism in such a deluded, hype-driven age. The problem is that Peck doesn't have the credibility to deliver it.

This is not because he is himself a novelist of only mediocre accomplishments--after all, many great critics had no talent for the writing of fiction itself. It is because he is guilty of the same kind of dubious back-scratching and addle-brained marketing hyperbole that is responsible for the degenerate state of contemporary publishing.

In his blurb for Jonathan Safran Foer's _Everything Is Illuminated_ he writes breathlessly that it is the best first novel ever written.

Excuse me?

Now, let's give Peck the benefit of the doubt that he actually believes this and has good reason to do so, although we know that he is a family friend of the Foers' and works together with Jonathan Safran Foer's brother, Franklin, on the staff of The New Republic. Yes, let's forget all that. But has Peck ever heard of _The Tin Drum_ I wonder? That was a first novel. So was _Invisible Man_. So was _Catch-22_. So was _Buddenbrooks_. So was _Amerika_ by Kafka. So was _Wuthering Heights_. And _Sense and Sensibility_. This is, of course, to say nothing of _The Tale of Genji_. The list is long and exceedingly distinguished.

Regardless of what one thinks of _Everything Is Illuminated_ (I personally found it a mixture of cleverness, good intentions, and overweening self-indulgence), to say that it is the best first novel ever written is to say something stupid and irresponsible. Such a statement can only be the product of favoritism or abysmal ignorance--neither of which are qualities I value in a literary critic. When he then goes on to call Rick Moody the "worst writer of his generation" in this book, he demolishes his credibility entirely. Rick Moody is an uneven writer who has written some halfway-decent books. The "worst writer of his generation"? No. That is called "writing for effect." I do not read critics for their pathetic attempts at effect (and exaggeration is the cheapest, most witless form of such)--I read them to find a model of how to be an intelligent, sensitive, and yes, sometimes dismissive, reader. I do not read them to chortle over how much they resemble Fox News commentators. We have enough of that in our society. Too much, in fact.

In order for a critic to earn the right to launch such withering frontal assaults on people who are merely trying to practice their craft, he must demonstrate that he can not only tell good from bad from mediocre, but also that he can tell the great from the "almost-great" and the "merely good." AT THE VERY LEAST, he must desist from the corrupt game of writing meaninglessly effusive blurbs for his friends.

Ramana Maharshi's technique of Self-realization is simplicity itself. This should already be indication enough that he has discovered the profoundest truth. This book is a bit like a Mozart score. When you look at the pages there doesn't seem to be very much there. It all seems so simple. Yet when you play the Mozart, as when you apply the principle of Self-Inquiry, something very unexpected and altogether miraculous happens.

When one correctly applies the single and singular principle he expounds in these talks, the result is well-nigh infallible. Which is not to say that one sees bright lights or is consumed with ecstasy or anything of the sort--that's not what is supposed to happen anyway. What happens simply is that the mind is stilled, and the true nature of mind, ego, and Self is glimpsed. With practice, this glimpse turns into a gander and then turns into a wide open view.

Alas, as one very wise reviewer below put it, many people "enjoy being lost." What Maharshi makes absolutely crystal clear in these talks is that Realization is right there for taking, and always has been, and always will be. In other words, "The Kingdom of Heaven is within." Those who do not realize do so because, in the final analysis, they either enjoy being lost or they are profoundly afraid of what realization implies--even those who claim to be seeking the way. And so the endless rounds continue: the books, the tapes, the discussion groups and meditation retreats, the trips to India and Tibet, the fumbling attempts at Tantric Yoga, the crystals, the gurus, etc. This is all well and good: the Self is always still there, watching, and will still be there when one has tired of the spiritual circus.

My own words crumble and dissolve in the face of Maharshi's very modest-seeming but singularly pure and profound wisdom. I don't know what else to say except that Maharshi's words show the way, and then provide the guidance and inspiration to abide in the Self that is always already there. I give this book all the stars in the cosmos!

Arthur Golden is not a horrible writer and certain passages here are quite beautiful; the problem is that this book is not an act of literature but an act of opportunism. Writers must deal with and present either experiences or ideas or a combination of both. Ideas are in the public domain and one needs no qualification to traffic in them except for the ability to do so convincingly. This is not an issue here because Golden is not an "intellectual" writer and this is not a novel of ideas.

Which brings us to the domain of "experience." Now, I would never argue that authors must rigidly hew to the parameters of their own experience and turn out one autobiographical book after another. When writing a character-filled book in the third person, for example, an author is called upon to imagine other minds, other realities, other lives, and this exercise of the empathetic imagination can be a wonderous thing. The problem comes when an author, like Golden, attempts to write an entire novel in the first person from the vantage of a person who is completely removed from himself in time, space, culture, and gender. This does not spring from a desire for authenticity: it is, in fact, nothing more than literary machismo. "Look!" he's shouting, "look what I can do!" And it simply doesn't ring true, except to people who know even less about the subject than the author does.

I am neither a geisha, nor Japanese, nor a woman, but I have lived in Japan longer than Golden has and I would wager my Japanese is just as good or better. Although Golden gets many of the factual details right, there is so much about the tone and the psychological sketching here that simply "stinks of butter," as the Japanese used to say of Westerners a century ago. As a very serious student of Japanese literature, I can assure you that no Japanese would ever write like this, that is to say, like Dickens in a kimono. The novel is just too busy: too many characters, too much plotting, too much incident, and most damningly, too much naivete about the workings of the human heart. In fact, it should be made publicly known that the woman on whom Golden based this story sued him for misrepresentation and is in fact writing her OWN book to set things straight. She has her own pecuniary motivations, no doubt, but her criticism still stands. It's her life after all.

It's good for Golden that so many people found this novel so ravishing and so interesting. He is a capable entertainer, and he knows the secret of entertainment: pander to your audience. Give them exoticism, but don't challenge their misconceptions. He spotted a market niche, he pulled off his high-wire act, and he's been amply rewarded. But if anybody thinks that this concoction attains the mighty beating heart of literature, let him or her think again.

Statistics in and of themselves prove very little outside of the context of interpretation. In order to interpret the statistics that Lomborg has assembled, one would need thorough scientific training in a number of different disciplines. The people who actually HAVE such training (research scientists in those fields) have thoroughly refuted Lomborg's findings in reputable publications such as NATURE.

The state of the environment is a very emotional issue, however, and a lot is at stake. In order to take the steps necessary to counter the havoc being wrought on the ecosystem, governments, corporations, and individuals will have to take drastic measures, measures they may find inconvenient and economically harmful (at least, in the short term). In order not to have to face the unpleasant reality, many people unwittingly fall into a well-documented psychological trap called "denial." We see it all the time: "no, my son's not homosexual," "no, I'm not going to get laid off next year," "no, I don't have a drinking problem." It doesn't matter that the majority of scientists competent to decide these matters disagrees with you: as long as you find somebody to wave numbers around and manufacture bogus "proof", you can maintain your delusion indefinitely. Well, not indefinitely of course, only until reality slaps you on the face and perhaps takes your life in the bargain. Lomborg is just giving such people fuel for their fires, and being handsomely rewarded for it. What his readers have to ask themselves, however, is the following: is it better to err on the side of caution and take steps to counter potentially catastrophic disruptions in the ecosystem, or better to err on the side of making all decisions on the basis of short-term convenience and profit? How much is there to lose in each case if you make the wrong choice? This would the only sane standard to apply, even if Lomberg DID have a strong case (which, as the scientists have concluded, he does not).

F.D. Reeve is one of the finest, most underappreciated poets now at work in this country. For thirty-some-odd years he has been producing work of stunning power and relevance, work that reminds one all at once of the prophetic voice of Yeats, the piercing, crystalline sensibilities of Stevens, and the wild winds and fur pelts of a Siberian shaman. Unfortunately, the cultural spirit of the times, in its myopia, hasn't been able to keep up with him. It's true that Reeve has sometimes had a weakness for doggerelesque flourishes, but why so many critics focus on those while ignoring the overwhelming power of the rest of the work is a mystery.

Although "The Urban Stampede" of the title is an oratorio written for performance and perhaps doesn't stand up as well on the page, the short poems included in this collection are, as the previous reviewer stated, monumentally good. Simply quoting lines from these poems will not do them justice, will not show how they cohere, but some of the lines are simply astounding. From "The Side Show Uprising": "Praying for what they had nothing of/the homeless died one by one on the cold stones/unable to bear the grotesques of love" From "Still Life": "Real are the apples of Sodom, which when you touch them/dissolve in smoke and ashes on the table" From "Highgate Easter": "Old Believers gone, the words lie on the stones:/ No life is true but dying makes it fair" From "Bones in a Landscape": "the zodiac came alive;/a holy man at the door/arrested the unfaithful stars" From "Looking Ahead": "Neither was nor will be, the Great Attractor,/black moon, pangalactic draw,/something from nothing, the secret dies./Nowhere to go--we breed where we are--consumed in natural law."

I could cite many more, but best just to get this book and read the poems, as well as Reeve's previous work. Long after today's Poets of the Hour have been forgotten, there will be many of us still reading his poetry, for its beauty, its timelessness and prophetic daring, its metaphysical grandeur, and its raw, hungry energy.

This story has been described as a "love triangle" between the narrator Bendrix, Sarah, and her husband Henry, but it is really more a story of three people revolving like planets around a fourth, unseen, yet pivotal character--God, whose existence remains to the end neither affirmed nor rejected.

Graham Greene belongs to what I would call the school of nomads and heartbroken cynics. He travelled the world, he viewed it with an intelligent yet humane mixture of compassion and disgust, and he struggled to the end to give man some hope while at the same time viewing man's condition with utterly unsentimental realism. It was a difficult balancing act. Greene was too intelligent to accept the cardboard God of the sentimental and the superstitious, but he realized too that without a belief in some transcendent order in the universe man was liable to destroy himself within the dark tentacles of war, greed, obsession, betrayal, and despair. At the same time, he was acutely aware that this belief in a higher power could itself lead down the very same hole. It is precisely Sarah's belated discovery of faith that ruins any chance of her attaining happiness.

Greene's genius in this novel is to set this grand metaphysical drama of man and faith as a background against the foreground of a passionate, mature romance. These two tragic themes, the impossibility of love and the impossibility of faith, combined with man's absolute inability to live without either, resonate with one another to create an almost unbearably moving work of art. I can't remember the last time I wept reading a novel, but there were moments reading The End of the Affair when a turn of phrase made my throat clench and the tears well in my eyes.

This is a work of power, feeling, intelligence, and nuance. It deserves to be considered one of the great novels of the century. Do not hesitate to read it.