Jean Arthur Books

I was assigned this book in a Freshman Lit class and what do ya know I really like Rimbaud.

For all who love Rimbaud's work this is the book for them. The included letters give the reader a glimpse into the boy genius that was Rimbaud. He certainly was a difficult person but there is no denying his brilliance as a poet.

From a person who absolutely does not understand French language, like myself, this book is a 'pain-in-the-behind' to read!

First of all, it seems like Fowlie translated 'too literally' from Rimbaud's original French text (I can sense that by noticing some words that are same both in French and English on the same line). This in turn makes the English translation to sound too 'flat' and 'unimaginative' (and 'difficult'). Most of the poems, I have to read several times to understand what Rimbaud (or should I say Fowlie) is trying to say. Worse, in some cases, I have to go to a bookstore and read other editions done by more imaginative translators to fully understand what Rimbaud's poetry is about. Now that's sad...

If you know French, this book may be good for you since you can ONLY read French text, but if you don't know jack about French, DO NOT BUY THIS BOOK! YOU WILL BE BORED TO DEATH! Read the ones translated by more creative authors. Rimbaud's work deserves better treatment than this! I will sell this book at an used bookstore and buy Paul Schmidt's version!

I ... found Fowlie's over-literal translations ugly and lame. But I think this may be deliberate. The unbeautifulness of the translations forces you back to the exquisite French original. It's a joy to have these poems as Rimbaud wrote them, and a bilingual edition is a must for the non-French-reader. If you want a beautiful English translation, I recommend reading Paul Schmidt's in conjunction with this one.

This is very complete, but the english translations are pretty bad, useful if you are reading in french and forget some of the words. If you are going to read Rimbaud in english, get the Louise Varese (new directions) editions instead.

This is a story about a land where people have forgotten many things. A girl named Yasmin lives in this land, but she has not forgotten what is right, and only she can help the Queen when she has forgotten even her own name. But in order to save her, Yasmin must practice the art of Perfume Making, which is forbidden to girls... The illustrations in this book are just wonderful, and the story is captivating. It's also set in a very different culture, which is nice to get the flavor of. The way that the story reminds us of the power of our sense of smell is something I enjoyed as well. I did think one of the illustrations was a little bit scary for little little kids, though... If your children scare easily you might want to wait a bit for this one.

The graceful, clever story has been well told, wonderfully illustrated (as always, in Claverie's case) and so badly designed. It's a shame that a perfect format, so right to the spirit of the story, fell into the hands of a designer who managed to put the worse ornaments next to the amazing illustrations, thus shadowing the whole achievment!

If you love Poe, you will love Rimbaud. He isn't as insane as Poe but his writings as dark and mysterious. He shouldn't have died at age 19.

I do not know French well enough to read these poems without their translations. That is where Wallace Fowlie's literal translations often come in handy. The only problem with his translations is that they tend not be very poetic. Often, Fowlie rearranges word order unnecessarily, creating more functional English, but losing some poetic impact. This isn't a big problem since the French text is right there, and one can get a sense of the beauty of the original poem.

Sometimes, though, the translation fails utterly, as in "Le dormeur du val", where Fowlie translates the phrase "chante une riviere / Accrochant follement aux herbes des haillons / D'argent" as "a river sings / Madly catching on the grasses / Silver rags". The sentence in Englsh makes no sense whatsoever, and as I don't know French very well, it took me a long time to realize that Rimbaud was saying the river looked like silver rags on the grass. A little more guidance with the translation would have been appreciated.

All in all, I would recommend this book, as it's the only comprehensive collection of Rimbaud's poems I'm aware of that offers you the French version alongside an English translation. Unless you can read French and will be fine with simply a French version, you should get this book so you will have the original to reference, as you are bound to run into problems with any translation.

Backus is a distant relative of Phillip Klingensmith a participant in the Mountain Meadows Massacre. The author seeks to tell Klingensmith's life story by weaving her narrative with the testimony he gave in the first trial of John D. Lee. It is a unique way to carry her story and her writing is engaging, and favorable towards Klingensmith. She does tend to take Klingensmith at his word, and doesn't deal with the few times he was misleading or lied during his testimony, especially when he was talking about the massacre. On the whole a good book, and well worth the reading.

This is one of the oldest book - but its value will remain in my heart forever. Rousseau believes that every man is born with moral values and everyone knows what he's doing. There is no need of government nor any order because man can live on his own. This is a very interesting book that states the strong point of view of Rousseau. I've read this book and I agree with Rousseau - even though not completely. There are many more books like, Lord of the Flies that goes against the natural goodness of man. I find both of them to be interesting - as there are many approaches to life! So - if you want to know the true state of mankind - pick this book up and read! I'm sure you won't be dissappointed!

I know that the appropriate stance when reading a book about famous thinkers is to use some historical imagination and put myself in their shoes. No one ever said this would be easy, and I am by no means equipped to do it properly even yet. Let me be honest: Christianity seems unalterably silly to me, the more so as I read more about it. The only thing that seems likely to rescue it for me, as an intellectual pursuit, is if I read some modern thinkers who were born into the Western scientific inheritance after the Protestant Reformation had a chance to shake itself out, and who completely absorb those teachings into their religious writings. I have a couple pointers to works that might fit this bill (The History of Scepticism from Erasmus to Spinoza and The Philosophy of Spinoza), but in the meantime I can't help reading all of this with a smirk.

McGiffert does his very best to treat these great thinkers seriously and concisely. We move briskly from the mediæval background to the Reformation -- namely Augustine -- through Luther and Calvin and Zwingli and Luther's student Philip Melanchthon. From there we get all manner of new Christians: we get Anabaptists and Socinians, Puritans and Pietists and evangelicals. They loathed each other. They viewed Christ differently. They viewed the relation between civil and spiritual government differently. Some took the Bible more literaly, some more symbolically. Some -- most -- of them viewed man as bottomlessly depraved, salvageable only by divine intervention. One sect's optimism forced its opponents to adopt an even more reactionary position. And so the whole mess spun out of control. (Well, that's one way to frame it. Another way is that the ambiguities in the Bible and in the life of Jesus, combined with new print technologies and wider literacy, led naturally to a flowering of divergent ideas. This is the kind of flowering where people kill one another. Death flowers.)

One outcome of all of this was Rationalism -- making peace with the scientific and mathematical changes being wrought all around them and trying to justify Christianity on the basis of objectively obvious axioms. These didn't work out. One proof (described on p. 227) is based on the rightness of Christian ethics: since the outcome of Christianity is right living, clearly Christianity is right and true. Naturally one has to then argue that no other system of ethics could possibly produce right outcomes. The only way one can really cling to such a belief is by ignoring the non-Christian world altogether. This the British, among others, did.

Maybe Christianity is totally incompatible with argument. This would conflict with a few hundred years during which Christians did feverishly try to make their religion mesh with reason, but why not? Late in the game, then, we get books with titles like Dodwell's: Christianity Not Founded on Argument: And the True Principle of Gospel-Evidence Assigned, counseling us that "Religion will not admit of the least alliance with reason," that "The only power to bring us to religious faith is the Holy Spirit," and that we should "trust ... in the Lord with all [our] heart[s], and lean not unto [our] own understanding." This has a certain kind of honesty, but it sounds suspiciously like the terrified ravings of someone who's been backed into a corner: not only is he not scared, he's happy to be in the corner. He cannot explain why standards of argument that apply everywhere else do not apply to his own favored religion, so he pretends that he's not obliged to argue.

Protestant Thought Before Kant is sort of the dual of Diarmaid MacCulloch's sweeping epic, "The Reformation." Where MacCulloch was expansive and detailed, McGiffert is tightly focused and content to paint arcs. Where MacCulloch methodically covers the history with only enough theology to fill in some gaping holes, McGiffert's book is a little gem of theology with virtually no history surrounding it. The Thirty Years' War merits only a peep from McGiffert, whereas the first half or two-thirds of MacCulloch's book teased us toward the War's final convulsion.

McGiffert could use more history; its absence means that he has to fall back to metaphysical handwaving. He tells us that liberalism, with its new feelings of optimism about man's place in the world and his ultimate redemption, emerged from some vague "modern spirit" (p. 176) or "general spirit of the modern age" (p. 187). As someone who respects historical materialism of the Guns, Germs, and Steel vein, this just won't do. But I can't blame McGiffert for cutting out almost all history: he wanted to pack all of Reformation theology into a couple hundred pages. I'll cut the guy some slack.

Readers may enjoy knowing that the original publication of this intriguing book was 1932, and that Grace Hebard was a political economist and otherwise important figure in the development of the Universiy of Wyoming. She also was the primary promoter of the notion that Sacagawea (her term was Sacajawea, with a "j") died in 1884 at the Wind River reservation.

The importance of the book lies in their accounts of differences in approach to skill formation in two countries - France and Germany. The authors spare the space for reader to answer, which countries has the best systems ?

Germany has a very intergrated appraoch with employer, unions, local and federal governments involved in addressing present and future skill formation. France does not have. He gave a description of both country's approaches and all the different institution involved (societal approach).

He gives a summary at the end of the book.

By now, the amazon community knows the drill: Few men entered the White House with as deep a resume as James Buchanan. Entries on his CV encompassed: Member of the Pennsylvania Legislature, election to the House of Representatives, appointments as Secretary of State and Ambassador to England. And yet, the common consent is that Buchanan blew it: His pro-Southern attitudes did nothing to forestall or prevent the Civil War. The guy is on most short lists of "Worst Presidents". The issue here is how does Professor Baker present the Buchanan story? The answer from this reviewer is not very well. Baker simply does not write clearly. This reader should not have had to go to About.com to learn details concerning such landmark legislation as the Kansas-Nebraska Act, the Missouri Compromise, and the Compromise of 1850.Those were key milestones in the slavery dispute and deserved a full, clear airing in any biography of any President of the era. To make matters worse, the typesetting and paragraph spacing here are, to be charitable, awkward. Have mercy on those of us with bi-focals! Perhaps not compressing the tale into only 4 chapters might have helped. Professor Baker has every right to be critical, but she overplays her hand here. Her unrelentingly negative attitude toward Buchanan seems almost personal! Yes, the guy was a lonely bachelor with no apparent lady friends but did that absolutely make him a homosexual? Why does it matter if he truly was? The bottom line is that it is almost impossible to recommend such a turgid, dark piece of writing. James Buchanan was a key President, if a poor one. His story needs to be told but this reviewer feels Professor Baker has failed to do so on an even keel. There is a bright spot here: This bio is brief and quickly read. Those who dislike lengthy tomes have nothing to fear. The American Presidents series usually succeeds with brevity and has done so here. The good news ends there.

James Buchanan possibly was one of the best qualified men to assume the office of President. Qualifications don't mean anything if you don't have backbone and belief in principles. Buchanan bent over backward to try to please his Southern friends and it didn't get him anywhere. He tried to be rigid on forcing the North to bend to the South's ways. This didn't help him in the North. He defied the will of the people of Kansas and made more enemies. Finally everybody was fed up with this man. The South suceeded and the North elected the Republicans. The Democrats became a wilderness party for the next twenty eight odd years. James Buchanan played an instrumental role in the downfall of the Democratic Party and the United States.

This is a short quick read. However Baker makes it plain that leadership does not develop from experience. A better leader may have found a way to change and compromise so that the United States didn't not go through a horrible war. Poor leadership by James Buchanan.

So Jean Baker judges James Buchanan. (5 points if you can name the other two members of the triumvirate.) For her, his presidency was a miserable failure. This was surprising because, at least on paper, no man was more qualified to be chief executive. Buchanan had personal contact with every president since James Madison. He'd served as a congressman, senator, cabinet officer, leader of his party (Democrats), and minister to England. Moreover, in a post-Jacksoninan period when the presidency was viewed as a primarily administrative (rather than executive) office (perhaps this goes some way toward accounting for the "feckless triumvirate"), Buchanan saw himself as a wielder of power and an initiator of policy.

But Baker argues that Buchanan, for all his apparent qualifications, was too dogmatically pro-Southern in his views, and too unpragmatic in dealing with sectional crises, to be an effective president. He stacked his cabinet with pro-slavery yes men (a cabinet, by the way, which was notoriously corrupt). He pulled strings behind the scenes to persuade a fellow-Pennsylvanian on the Supreme Court to vote with Taney on Dred Scott. He totally fumbled the Kansas crisis, doggedly defending the Lecomptian slave constitution even when it became clear that the vast majority in Kansas were free-staters. And in the long lame duck period before Lincoln took office, when the states in the lower South pulled out of the Union, Buchanan completely lost his head and became paralyzed with indecision and panic, sometimes unable to get out of bed.

Baker, unlike other more sympathetic biographers, doesn't see Buchanan as a peacemaker caught in a tide of unstoppable sectional conflict so much as a man largely unqualified by temperament (gloomy, pessimistic, fatalistic) and dogmatic partisanship to handle the crisis. Perhaps. I don't claim to know enough about Buchanan to evaluate her conclusion. But I do know two things. First, she's presented a convincing case for Buchanan's incompetence and downright shadiness when it comes to the Kansas crisis, and there's good reason to think that this example is representative of his entire presidency. Second, I'd have liked to have learned more about Buchanan the man in order to be satisfied that Baker's characterization of his temperament was accurate. I know that her volume is in a series that focuses on presidential administrations, and so a full-fledged biography would've been inappropriate. But nonetheless, I didn't actually get a feel for Buchanan the person in reading her book.

There are 72 reviews of this brief and simply-written biography of a President who came to office with superb qualifications and who bungled the job that perhaps no one could have done. I found the book quite adequate as an introduction to the decade of the 1850s. Causes have to precede effects; anyone interested in the causes of the Civil War ought to have a good look at the events that led to Buchanan's election, and the dismal decision Buchanan made in reaction to those events. Honestly, however, you needn't buy the book. Just read the 72 reviews herewith. It will take some patience, and some tolerance for bad syntax, but it will reveal just exactly how polarizing the Civil War was, and still is.

This "American Presidents" series is surprisingly top notch. I also recommend the biography of US Grant, the most underrated and slandered chief exec of American history.

James Buchanan came to the presidency with a wonderful resume. And he failed dismally. This brief biography, part of the well done "The American Presidents" series, tries to explain that disconnect. In the recurring introduction to each volume in the series that he edited, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. remarked that (Page xvii) "To succeed, presidents must not only have a port to seek but they must convince Congress and the electorate that it is a port worth seeking." And "there's the rub" for Buchanan.

His background was impeccable: Pennsylvania state legislature, U. S. House of Representatives and Senate, Secretary of State, Ambassador to Russia and England. As Jean Baker, the author of this slim volume says (Page 7): "Critical times often summon forth our best presidents, and it is worth taking the measure of those presidents who, given the opportunity, failed to rise to greatness. James Buchanan was one of those."

The Democratic nomination for president culminated at the Convention. Franklin Pierce (incumbent president), Stephen Douglas, Lewis Cass, and Buchanan. After some maneuvering, Buchanan's supporters helped get him the nomination.

After his election, though, he ran into a buzz saw: a panic (depression), violence in Kansas, and the horrific "Dred Scott" Supreme Court decision. Buchanan selected a Cabinet that was very much pro-Southern, some of his closest allies were from the South, and he alienated Democrats such as Stephen Douglas. He did not recognize the danger of the slavery issue and watched as his pro-Southern stance split the Democratic Party, enabling the one thing anathema to him to occur--the election of a Republican in 1860, Abraham Lincoln.

Why did he fail so miserably? Unreflective prosouthernism is one part of the explanation, according to Baker. Other factors--his arrogant and uncompromising use of power.

So, an interesting essay on a failed president. I think that personality quirks might be overemphasized in this book. Overall, though, a useful volume for those who want a quick introduction to the presidents.

The story of Arthur and his guinea is set in colonial Williamsburg, Virginia. Arthur, as any young boy would do, is digging around for hidden treasure when he comes upon this treasured coin. He never shows it to anyone for fear that he may be made to spend it. Arthur seems to dote on the coin, secretly looking at its brilliance in the sunlight and its shine in the candlelight before bedtime. Arthur eventually loses the coin during play and eventually has luck and finds it. He chooses to let everyone know of the coin's existence and his mother lets him keep his treasure.

I'm not quite sure if there is a moral here. Perhaps it comes down that all of us hold certain things special and that we should be allowed to do so. If that is the lesson, I'm not sure any young person would immediately pick up on it.