Woody Allen Books

The following review of Adventures in Kinship with All Life was published by The Book Reader, an "Independent Review of New Books:"

These essays by the gentle Boone are about the silent communication that exists, or can exist, between people and animals. Boone was an adept at interspecies communication, at "the science and art of right relations." He plunged right in to universal vibrations and discovered man's unitive experiences with all things living.
"When one's heartbeat is in tune and in time with the universal heartbeat, everything that he meets will want to cooperate with him and be his friend," wrote Boone.
The book includes many stories of folks and animals coming together, discovering each other. Of earth reverberations, of dogs and plants, of a man who lived in the jungle for over forty years. "He had mastered, to a superlative degree, the science and art of right relations."
Here are high level adventures in kinship, life, and love. "Love, then, is the supreme attractive force. Humans who possess this capacity to love their pets and other animals must have within them a sort of love-magnet, a particular magnetic pole of affection."
The publication of these adventures is a good and brave act by a woman who rescued the manuscript from the trash after Boone passed on. She is Bianca Leonardo, editor, and owner of Tree of Life Publications.
"ADVENTURES..." is the sequel to Boone's earlier book, "KINSHIP WITH ALL LIFE" (Harper & Row), which has sold 300,000 copies since it was first published in 1954. The sequel is nicely done. We wish it the same success.

If you've ever wondered what God put animals on this Earth for, reading this book will give you an immensely practical and satisfying answer. Animals are our teachers, says Boone. Great teachers, too. Intelligent, aware teachers. What have I to learn? you may ask. Reading this book will give you example after example in the form of fascinating true stories written with clarity and humor. A must read for the spiritually open or for anyone who loves animals.

This is a really good piece of work. I'm a maritime history buff and I enjoyed it a lot. If you're at all interested in the early history of the New England states or especially interested in Nantucket and the way people there made their fortunes, I'd give this book a try. It's a good history that reads like a good novel in places. Highly recommended.

Mawer's splendid "Ahab's Trade" tells the incredible story of South Seas (i.e. Pacific) whaling during the 19th and 20th centuries. The principal character in this book does not have a particular name; the names themselves shift from voyage to voyage - but the constant heroic icon that keeps appearing is the longboat's crewman; the sailor who ventures out onto the high seas in little but a glorified rowboat, harpoon in hand, ready to do battle with a beast that could easily smash the boat to bits. Whatever you think of whaling, you can't deny the bravery of these men.

Mawer does not stop with a strict rendition of whaling, however: he takes the opportunity to share with the reader many a story about the Pacific in general during this fateful period, from the discovery of the Bounty mutineers on Pitcairn island, to the "ExEx" expedition of the 1830s (recently given its own entire history), to the exploits of Confederate raiders during the 1860s. The narrative ends with the (comparatively recent) international ban on whaling - a ban that Mawer does not entirely embrace. Immaculately researched and superbly written.

All That's Left to You is a sad reminder of all that was lost by the Palestinian people in 1948. Families were separated, yet a nation was born from their sorrow. This novella is the second in what became a trilogy of the evolution of Palestinian consciousness. It is here that their anger erupts. It is here that a nation begins to hear the plea of the author himself - salvation comes through actions, not through memories. A most interesting and important aspect of the novella is Kanafani's accurate portrayal of a woman's heart. This story must be recognized as a contribution to feminist literature. The main female character struggles within the parameters of a deeply paternalistic society under military occupation to come to terms with her sexuality and her shattered dreams. It is through her that the nation will be reborn. Kanafani utilizes excellent literary devices and the translation by Kirkpatrick is superb. The reader is advised to read Men in the Sun first if possible.

Like all other Kanafani works, this book was a tremendous pleasure to read and at the same time intensely thought-provoking. "All that's left to you" contains, in addition to the title novella, a selection of Kanafani's short stories. All the stories in this anthology share the feature for which Kanafani has no contestant: the seamless changes of voice within a story, often from paragraph to paragraph, sometimes from sentence to sentence. Thus we explore the trials and tribulations of the five main characters in "All that's left to you", not as outsiders or even as one of the characters, but as each one of the characters in turn. The reader is made to travel invisibly from the mind of one of the characters to that of another, miles away, to learn what they are both thinking at the same instant. This is as close to a drama or a movie as one can get in a short story, or perhaps even better. It is also interesting to see how certain threads unify the narrative. Time, for instance, whom Kanafani even declared at the start to be actually a character, is one such thread. The layers of symbolism in the story destine it to be very deep reading for decades to come. Yet the novella is so fascinating, it is very difficult to put the book down. The short stories in the anthology are equally fascinating, each in its own right. They don't lack from the changes in voice that is present in "All that's left to you", and they also have their share of critical plot twists right at the end of the story. Thus be prepared to completely change your perspective after reading the last sentence of each story.

This truly outstanding and detailed biography of Jane Addams surveys the founder of Hull House, a social reformer who was one of the most admired women in American history. American Heroine recounts her life, work and ideas, providing chapters which go into far more depth and detail than most reviews of her life, probing the philosophy behind her works and the atmosphere of her times.

Jane Addams was a remarkable woman. This book is the best biography written of her life. She was a winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in her later life. Her liberal views of American society are covered thoroughly by this author in his chapters of her early work at Hull House, and her later work for world peace. A must read book for every woman, because Jane Addams was truly an American woman.

If you wish to learn America's history this is the best option available in the market.

I have been teaching U.S. history at a few colleges and universities in Chicago and its suburbs for the past five years. This is the textbook that I have invariably assigned in the time; in fact, as a Teaching Assistant at the University of Illinois at Chicago in the late nineties, it was the text that my mentor used in the U.S. survey class in which I apprenticed for her. I have found that my students are generally enthusiastic about this textbook's focus on "ordinary" Americans, like themselves, who, as the book reminds them, make the history of our nation, as the elites have always done, usually by going about their daily lives. Thus, Nash/Jeffrey, et al, examine the effects of some critical historical developments (such as the American Revolution; the emergence of the Market Economy during the Early Republic; the long-running intersectional coflicts over the continued existence of and the often-advocated extension of American black slavery; and, the significant role played by the self-made, visionary President Abraham Lincoln in managing the Union's ultimate victory in the U.S. Civil War) on the average Americans who participated in them. Moreover, the authors attempt to show that non-elite Americans have often actively shaped their own destinies, and not just passively allowed the powers-that-be to manipulate them (think: the Regulator Movement of North Carolina's Backcountry in 1766; the Whiskey Rebellion and Shay's Rebellion after the Revolution, both waged by average Americans out to safeguard their independence from what they perceived as governmentally-perpetrated tyranny; the manner in which many Americans, as a result of the First Great Awakening, just threw out their tradition of submission and deference to their alleged "betters"; and, the way that ordinary white laborers and farmers voted with their feet, and set out over the Appalachians in the 1780s and on to both find land and to get away from their landlords, creditors and employers in the eastern states). This particular text's unique perspective reinforces my own claim, always made to the students at our very first class-meeting each semster, that the history of the U.S. is not simply a record of the so-called illustrious achievements of elite Americans (people to whom many students have trouble relating, let alone caring much about) that must be memorized, rather, that it is also, truthfully, the collective story of all of our families.

American Ruins is far more than it appears. On the surface, it is a very well designed and exquisitely photographed essay on the vanishing farmsteads of the northern plains states in the USA. That's like saying the Mona Lisa is a woman.

On the next plane, the photographs-panoramics mainly, in black-and-white on infrared film-are beyond photography. They are a spiritual experience on paper that comes as close to the experience of truth as can be done without becoming it yourself. They are haunting, wistful, emotional evocations of the pain of time and loss, the invisible presence of people in what the picture does not, cannot, show, in the way that only black-and-white can push you out of "that" into "thisness." As the foreword puts it: "... as if the camera has recorded something going on inside your head and projected it onto a wall." Small wonder many feel black-and-white is the most difficult image recorder to work with, and also to many the most sublime when done well.

Sublime Mr. MacKenzie is. This is one of the most remarkably photographed books to come off the presses in a long time. Not just well done, but literally beyond compare; the sole occupant of its category. The photographs are closer to poetry without a pen than to the interaction between film and lens. Songs without words in an A-4 landscape book. The only thing to match them is the writing excerpts that "captions" them. (The captions in the conventional sense are Notes at the end of the book.) Mr. MacKenzie chose the excerpts himself, and he certainly did his homework well. Wallace Stegner is here, Robert Frost, Willa Cather, Henry Miller, Frank Lloyd right, and two writers who would probably be surprised to find their sentences thrust alongside the eloquence of this book. But here they are, and no the less eloquent:

"When family love is displaced onto land, every change that happens there has meaning: the calibre of the light and the texture of the clouds in a day, the big changes of the seasons, most of all the slow transformation of the infrastructure of the place itself as the decades pass. When the deflection of love is also a deflection of pain, the gradual decomposition of such a place can be excruciating, a kind of lifelong torture, and yet, at the same time, a hypnotic, unfolding story. As the place declines, layers of meaning are revealed."

=Suzannah Lessard, "The Architect of Desire: Beauty and Danger in the Stanford White Family"

To which Annette Atkins adds, in "Harvest of Grief: Grasshopper Plagues and Public Assistance* in Minnesota, 1872-78":

"Minnesota lost settlers during the dark days of the 1870s . . . but thousands remained. Some could afford to stay; some could not afford to leave. Debts held some. Others wanted to hold on to their investments of time and energy. Some held different attachments; as one man explained: `I have lost my all here, & somehow I believe that if I find it again, it will be in the immediate neighborhood where I lost it . . . I have a child buried on my claim & my ties are stronger & more binding on that account.'"

In between is writing that calls our attention to what the unrushed eye can see: ". . . leaning barns and windowless houses, jutting up like wreckage in oceans of furrowed wheat and sorghum, architecture that looks more like a visible absence of something, like a missing tooth, than it looks like a presence of sun-curled clapboard and tatters of tar paper. It looks like ruins . . . of dreams that didn't work out."

Then he goes beyond all that, to the lives unseen in these pictures, flesh long gone but souls still there, a kind of spirit of determination to match this spirit of place: ". . . boredom, bad luck, debt, despair; about the blizzard that leaves you burning your inside walls to stay alive because if you go outside for firewood you'll vanish; about a summer erupting with wheat until the grasshoppers darken the sky and eat everything-wheat, vegetable garden, even the leaves on the trees; about a husband who tells his wife he'll be right back after he rides out to round up two cows-she watches him ride around the cows and keep going and he never comes back."

Beauty of a special kind, these-of death, decay, the falling to ruin-but life of a kind all the more: eonic, seasonless as a century, brutal cold and brutal heat, wind vying only with grass for endlessness, and to the human who endures these and thus surpasses the self, transfiguration. Into this, the Great Plains, families came, filled with grit and ambition and not a few starry-eyed dreams. They are still here, here in these pictures. Look around the corners and there they are, in the boards of the barn they nailed, among the leaves in the trees they planted. With all that's in this book, we can see what we never would have before, the eyes of dreams become the last remains of a rainbow.

That said, this is what books used to be in the highest sense of the craft. And still are, if only we seek out and buy the work of presses like the Afton Historical Society.

This is the book for people who didn't think that they liked landscape photography. MacKenzie takes you through a voyage to the abandoned worlds of farms, schools and other building in the middle of the nowhere lands of midwestern America. Here we find that ruined farmhouse, strangely sculpted by the winds and snow of many winters, but not depicted as some quaint, picturesque image, but as a stark vision in long Puritan panoramic views that work to make the landscapes appear as through they are suspended in time, a strange reminder of once active places, now abandoned and ruined, but notheless spectacular in their setting. This is the photographer that will make you throw away your Nan Goldins and your Cindy Shermans and discover what is it that makes photography the newest vibrant member of the visual fine arts.

As psychologist I recommend this book. It boosts self-confidence and places the individual in the centre of the universe and nature. We can find ourselves in this book. It's the proto Bible if we see gods as principles. We see here that all teachings of Moses and Jesus are Egyptian too, besides G'd given or according to nature. The content is so powerful that it even can create worldpeace. Pyramids are 'good news books'.

Allen's translation and take on the Pyramid Texts is both profound and a wonderful read. Rather than just dry translation Allen uses the English language the way it was meant to be used. I would highly recommend this book to any student of Egypt. This is the source material combined with the translations of Faulkner and Budge among others one can gain a comprehensive insight into ancient Egypt from various view points without a lot of the "New Age" hoopla that surrounds so many recent publications concerning Ancient Egypt.

Terry Lynn Taylor's books struck a very deep chord with me. I ahve read them all and cannot even say which I enjoyed the most. Please consider this book as you walk your path with angels.

Kathy

To me, Terry Lynn Taylor will always be the "Angel Lady". She was one of the first to share the amazing world of angels with us. In this book she shares experiences and attitudes in regard to the Angelic Friends. Highly recommended, as are all of Taylor's books.

How my tutoring students enjoyed this book! The girls weren't nearly as engrossed as the boys, but the boys asked for second helpings. They were willing to work their way through the short descriptions on each page and spent time looking at the excellent and terrifying photographs of each animal. They had lots of questions. If a piranha and a great white shark got into a fight, who would win? Hmm. Leaving aside the question of freshwater and saltwater, I'd bet on the great white against a single piranha.

We also used the photos and descriptions to write riddles for their family members to solve. The language is challenging for struggling readers ages 7 to 12, but I find myself reaching for this book again and again because my students want to read just one more page.

I really love the concept behind "Animals Nobody Loves," which combines an easy-to-read text by Seymour Simon with a wealth of full-color photographs. In his introduction, Simon notes, "Animals are not bad or evil. They do what they must in order to survive," This educational book focuses on various animals that have been unfairly feared or hated throughout human history.

Animals covered in the book include sharks, bats, grizzly bears, cobras, vultures, and many more, including two of my personal favorite misunderstood creatures: the rat and the hyena. As the book progresses Simon generally sheds some light on the myths surrounding each creature. The photographs are striking, although 2 or 3 may be a bit gory for some readers. Overall, a good book.

This 30 year old book is a wealth of information about the Arabian horse,its history around the world and the struggle to keep it pure. The author in this book has shown the pilgrimage of the Arabian horse from preBiblical times to the spread to England and around the world. It is well illustrated and there are many photos of old foundation horses. A lovely, historical book for anyone, and especially for those Arabian Horse lovers who want to learn more about this wonderful breed's history.

Well, I'm not an english native speaker, but this book was simply excellent... my first book about arabians and a terrific introduction... no complicated stories but a clear overview of the most important horses and breeders in the past with a lot of rare pictures... an introduction to make you read more !!! The book starts from the Lady Blunt story and follows the english horses whole the world round... eacht country has a separate chapter with it's most important horses, stories and pictures... and this book is NOT expensive !