No aspect of Lessons of Darkness can be praised too highly. What I'd like to know is, how can I find out the artists who performed the various musical works? Herzog has chosen the most sublime renditions of his sublime selection: Verdi's "Recordare" from the Requiem, and similarly the best of Strauss, Wagner and so on. I'd like to gt the same recordings. Any help? Thanks in advance: send to johnwood@umich.edu

The snippets available on the Amazon soundbites don't do justice to Taborn's compositions, because they tend not to include the main themes, or melodies. But they do testify to his possession of dynamite songfulness in both hands. His music and playing are thrilling, and he can make a piano do everything that is within its material potential. Some numbers, like the nascent masterpiece (if anyone else can play it) "David the Goliath," may strike you as Monk on speed, but Taborn's speed isn't frenzied or chaotic. Some pretty things move fast, that's all. "Over the Water" is a mimetic, liquid tone poem. And every one of these compositions is strong, exuberant and deep.

The snippets available on the Amazon soundbites don't do justice to Taborn's compositions, because they tend not to include the main themes, or melodies. But they do testify to his possession of dynamite songfulness in both hands. His music and playing are thrilling, and he can make a piano do everything that is within its material potential. Some numbers, like the nascent masterpiece (if anyone else can play it) "David the Goliath," may strike you as Monk on speed, but Taborn's speed isn't frenzied or chaotic. Some pretty things move fast, that's all. "Over the Water" is a mimetic, liquid tone poem. And every one of these compositions is strong, exuberant and deep.

These reviews were unhelpful because when you're reviewing the 1812, you have to tell whether real cannons were used or not. That's elementary, and not to know that is to reveal incompetence!

These reviews were unhelpful because when you're reviewing the 1812, you have to tell whether real cannons were used or not. That's elementary, and not to know that is to reveal incompetence!

Nonexperts are more likely to delight in this history of the struggle for racial justice in Cuba--and how they interweave with the U.S. freedom struggle--if they read it from the back to the front. The authors focus on sports, journalism, poetry, feminism, religion, Black nationalism and U.S.-Cuban contacts--and they do so "from the bottom up," that is, by looking at how "regular folks" have sought to improve and enjoy their lives.

The higher percentage of enslaved and free Africans in the Cuban population and the difference between Anglo-American and Spanish-American political and economic approaches to slavery and segregation have resulted in many points of contrast that NorthAmericans--especially high school and college students--would do well to examine. This book is full of such points of comparison and contrast.

The anthology ends with historian Van Gosse's brief and clear account of how and why the Afro-American press greeted the 1959 Cuban Revolution with warmth and optimism. The hypocrisy of the official top-down U.S. condemnation of Revolutionary Cuba sticks out in all of its cruel arrogance after you become familiar with the crimes of the dictatorship that the "Castroites" overthrew.

The preceding final four chapters trace similarities between the two neighboring countries' racial histories and how these experiences created cultural and political bonds throughout the century:

* Geoffrey Jacques recounts the personal and musical connections between Bebop and mamba forms.

* Carmen Gomez Garcia analyzes the tradition of patriotic and anti-racist poetry in Cuba.

* Lisa Brock and Bijan Bayne cover the strong links between U.S. and Cuban Blacks in baseball.

* And Keith Ellis focuses on the two exemplary Cuban and American poets of African descent, Nicolas Guillen and Langston Hughes, and overturns the notion that the Cuban depended upon the American for inspiration.

The anthology's first six essays deal with earlier Cuban history, covering the Cubans' long struggle to get out from under the thumb first of Spain and then of the U.S. These chapters explain much about the post WW II and Castro eras. But to get the most out of them, it helps first to get a bearing on the recent past, which has not been well-covered in U.S. news media and schools.

The complexity and richness of Cuba's social experience shows that, geographically speaking, grand histories can come in small packages.

Useful because the subject is so little covered, this survey of the role of Afro-Americans in US foreign policy from the '30s through '50s, is limited by its narrow research focus on individuals and by its shallow analysis. The discussion, according to the title, ends in the late '50s, although the author dips into subsequent years. This truncation of the subject removes the most interesting period in whuch U.S. Blacks have affected U.S. foreign policy from the book's scope. Upshot: only historians and specialists are likely to enjoy it. Among key figures missing: cartoonist Ollie Harrington (mentioned only in passing) and Charles Howard, the first and most influential Afro-American journalist to cover the United Nations.