These short stories, as fine ones should, allows the reader to enter alien lives quickly and succinctly. The people she describes as usually sad and lonely, locked in meaningless relationships and drifting in purpose. While I think that she is too pessimistic about reliationships - they all have their ups and downs and she assumes that we get stuck down - I was very moved by her tales and enjoyed the density of her very very fine prose. This is a writer to watch, and I will return to these stories and watch for longer fiction from her.

Warmly recommended.

These short stories, as fine ones should, allows the reader to enter alien lives quickly and succinctly. The people she describes as usually sad and lonely, locked in meaningless relationships and drifting in purpose. While I think that she is too pessimistic about reliationships - they all have their ups and downs and she assumes that we get stuck down - I was very moved by her tales and enjoyed the density of her very very fine prose. This is a writer to watch, and I will return to these stories and watch for longer fiction from her.

Warmly recommended.

THis big dictionary is the perpetual 2nd choice in our household: it is clumsy to find the right word, somewhat out of date, and poorly covers slang. So we only use it when we know we must wander in it in frustration.

Tepidly recommended. Oxford dictionaries are far better.

These stories intertwine in a wonderful and very moving way. The writing is simply beautiful, the tone perfectly expresses the tug between inspiration and the bleakness of everyday life. Though as a novel it seems disjointed, the whole thing comes together marvelously at the end, in a very surprising and moving way. It actually made my cry a little, yet feel wonder at the possibilities of life even as we experience so much pain. Not many novels can do this much, particularly contemporary ones.

Warmly recommended.

This is the story of a guy who tries to contruct a perfect life, from sports heroism in high school and marrying a beauty queen, to a huge house in the New Jersey countryside. Of course, his world of appearences comes crashing down on him when the going gets rough. ALong the way, there is lots about post-War American society as well as the ravages of aging.

Unfortunately, given this great premise and the inexplicable fact that it won a Pulitzer, this novel fails on many levels. First, it is written in a rambling, almost stream-of-consciousness style that is distracting but also totally failed to envelope me in its rhythm and world-view. It is personal taste to a degree, but I simply did not like it much. Second, while the tragedy is piercing and frightening to any parent, the novel keeps leaning towards melodrama without quite wholly falling into it. I mean, the guy could appear to have a charmed life without marrying a former Miss New Jersey and then suffer from something less than his beloved child becoming a fanatic political murderer. Life is hard, illusions are shattered, and falls are brutal by far less than all Roth's soap-operattish exaggeration. Third, the only truly three-dimensional character is the Swede, the paragon who crumbles under all the pain. You see him from a lot of angles, whereas the women remain the merest caricatures, peeping into his constructs and illusions without gaining much real life throughout. Even his brother is in the end easy to label as the angry-brother-become-arrogant-surgeon as is his harddriving-poor-immigrant's-son father. And none of these characters, not even the Swede, is rich enough to live on in my imagination.

WHile I was disappointed in these problems, which I believe make this novel mediocre, there were many interesting points, but again they tend to be personal and I don't believe would carry over for most other readers. I lived for a time in the New Jersey he describes and travelled often through bombed-out Newark, about whose history Roth informed me in the book. I also very much enjoyed the stuff about the glove industry, but then as a business writer I admire business owners. Moreover, I knew people like the Swede and Roth makes a convincing case for the confusing anguish they feel when things go very wrong. Plus, as I said, it brings the parent's ultimate fears for their kids to the surface. Finally, there is the panorama of American life, which Roth succeeds in evoking, but again that can be viewed as parochial and of little interest, say, to my European friends, most of whom did not like this novel.

In balance, I did enjoy this novel and it got me to think, but I expected a far, far better performance. Recommended tepidly, with these reservations in mind.

My son is obsessed with the Disney cartoon of Peter Pan, so it was natural that he would want to see this. One of my joys with my kids is revisiting things that I loved at their age as well as discovering new things. Unfortunately, though the incomparable Spielberg was involved, this film is wholly lacking in that indefinable magic that makes for greatness. I found the whole thing flat, the acting poor to fair even with Robin Williams, and the attempt to add on to an wholly contained work of art a dimsal failure. You shouldn't try to make a knockoff of something that stands perfectly on its own. This is the worst that I ever saw in a Spielberg film. The only things going for it are special effects and rollicking violence.

Not recommended.

I have long enjoyed Revel's perspective, which really is hard to define: he is at once of the left and yet a relentless critic of European pretention of a monopoly on progressivism. His sarcasm is so biting, his vision so clear - if often dead flat wrong as when he predicted the Soviet Union would win the cold war - that I have been entertained as much as I have learned from reading his books and columns. His is a truly great writer.

With this book, you get to know that man and his times. WHile brilliant and capable of incredible discipline, he lets on that he was not a serious student and hence was not made of the stuff of academics. Because I like him, I enjoyed learning all the details of his life, from his beginnings in Marseille, to his entry into the Ecole Normale - where Sartre and Aron studied with many of the most eminent French writers of the 20C - to his briliant career as a journalist. He did very interesting things, from introducing Luis Bunuel's Mexican period to a mass audience to helping the writer of Papillon to become a household name in the 197os to hanging out with opium smokers in the Hotel Regina in the 1950s (the first hotel I stayed in in Paris and so a special treat). Of course, he was also in the French resistance in a minor way! You read of the genesis of his many books, which included philosophy, lit crit, political polemics, gastronomy, and many other subjects. Then there is his combat as an editor of the distinguished weekly magazine L'Express with the ideologically rigid extreme left, which he takes up with the most remarkable gusto and humor.

This can serve as a history of the political ideas of the second half of the 20C with a perspective that many Americans will enjoy, admire, and undersatnd, which these days is more difficult than one would care to imagine. I read in on moving back to Europe after an absence of 15 years and enjoyed every single page.

Warmly recommended.

I have now plowed through the second and final volume of this series, and though my energy began to flag, I still think this is one of the great classics of all time. Though not exactly chronological, the stories in this volume tend to occur later than in the first volume and are often longer, which is understandable given that Julius Caesar and Alex the Great are covered in this volume. THe stories are also more intricately interwoven - you get lives that overlap, such as those of Brutus and Caesar, with slightly different takes and details in each one. The upshot of all this is that the serious reader will need to keep this around as a reference, going over the text again when some question of detail comes up or to refresh one's point of view. Plutarch's take on things is very different from that of many authors: he is a pro-aristocrat conservative and admiring of martial prowess, yet pro-Republican. Once again, the reader really needs to know the historical context before undertaking this. It is not at all introductory.

Warmly recommended. Though it takes real effort at times to continue, it is well worth the slog.

This is the story of the journey of an idea - that of engineering a society conceived as an organism - from its roots in the romantic movement with Michelet to Lenin, the ultimate man of action, on the threshold of power. Only Edmund Wilson, whose erudition as an autodidact was unsurpassed in his time, could have pulled this off: the ideas and inspiration pulse with life on every page. You get to know Marx, ENgels, and scores of other characters intimately as they dream of building a socialist order that would fundamentally re-order society and its economy. WHile I was never a sympathiser for communism, this most certainly gave me a feeling for the seductive beauty of the dream. THere is even a forward by Wilson, who admits to being overly optimistic, that what he chronicled with such excitment actually led to "one of the most horrible tyrannies in the history of mankind." THis is intellectual history at its very best, freed in the hands of a master writer from the pedantry and puffery of academia, and unflinching in the audacity of its partisan interpretations. Also beautifully written, it is a window into the hopes and dream of the 20C.

Warmly recommended.

This book is interesting to those with some acquaintence with Italy, particularly us foreigners who live here and don't understand what the heck is happening very well. I got to know a bit about the politics, and in particular the insidiousness of the Berlusconi politico-business machine, as well as a bit about the culture, such as why their television programs are perhaps the worst in the developed world. There is also a lot about the Italian penchant for wild conspiracy theories in a very interesting investigation into the many unexplained acts of terrorism of the last few decades. However, while there was nothing patently wrong in it that I found, the more I read the less I felt like I was learning - that is an odd feeling, but the author starts to repeat himself and meander into more and more personal stories that lack relevance, at least for me. (Did I really need to know that his "favorite student" at the Univeristy came on to him in the spring by pumping her hips in her chair?) In addition, as I am not a soccer enthusiast, I grew very bored with the large amount of coverage the sport got as a "reflection" of the culture.

While Jones has a pleasant writing style for a journalist, when he attempted to expand his good - though definitely throw-away - articles into a book, his talents appeared to fall short to me. At the end of each chapter, for example, he adds some silly observation that leads to the theme of the next chapter, which becomes a very tedious and contrived device.

This is a good intro, just not that good. Recommended tepidly.