Alex To Books

The materials that were sent where what I expected. The only issue was the lemonade was past expiration date.

This book and kit is great for helping anyone who wants to set up and sponsor a lemonade stand for Alex's Lemonade Stand For Pediatric Cancer Research. It's a great kit for just plain making lemonade, but I'm sure once you read the story, you'll want to make it an Alex's Lemonade Stand. This kit is a wonderful thing to share with kids and to help them give to a worthy cause.

a friend of mine lent me his copy,since we both want tobe in the caricaturing business,i was amazed at this guy`s teaching style,you could really follow and do what he`s telling you,after a few days i bought my own copy,since it`s a pretty good deal,he shows you the do`s and dont`s of the business.good.

This book is highly recomended to anyone who is serious about learning to draw caricatures. Alex Hughes gives excellent examples of famous people he has caricaturized and gives the reader a simple or basic ideas on drawing caricuatres.

Most of the book is written in a expository way, but some chapters and all the appendices are useful for reference. The example MMX programs are great and the accompanying CDROM is more than worth the price of the book. One drawback is that the book needs to be updated for the Pentium Pro and Pentium II vagaries.

Given this book, I was able create several MMX routines for performing high-speed bitstream compression. Each instruction is discussed in great detail with clear diagrams and examples. Useful rules are given for calculating the exact timing of MMX instruction sequences so that you can optimize the u/v pipeline pairing of instructions. An excellent choice.

It's amazing no other writers have pursued this concept more which is that to achieve high rates of chess mastery, one has to at least progress to the Class A stage. This book takes 30+ games from Class A players playing Class B players and some C players showing how and why the Class A player wins. This is an education in itself. Most chess books are written by Grandmasters or International Masters who use the games of elite masters for instruction. Hey great, but did you learn Calculus before Arithmetic? If you get my point, you will get the point of this book.

Mr. Dunne presents a very refreshing guide for the Class C and low B (USCF 1400- 1700) rated player. With his directions and the cooporation of the reader, the average tournament player can see a marked increase in his or her playing ability. More importantly, it should help the chess player improve on aggression and attacking ability. If the chess player has been away from the game for too long, this is a grat refresher course on turning your chess talents back on and improving them! Mr Dunne has my thanks for helping my game!

I save my 5-stars for books I truly love and this is one of them! I couldn't put it down (which is hard to do w/two kids under 5!) - thanks for such a great escape - I was completely engrossed from start to finish.

I usually prefer historical fiction. This book really surprised me. I was not sure I would like it. But, I was soon hooked. I liked the back and forth narraration between the two main characters and understanding their varying viewpoints. I was crying by the end because there were many twists and turns that I did not expect. Suspense was great. The author let you figure things out on your own but had you guessing about certain events. I did not like some of the language and I felt one event (hard to say w/o giving away too much but had to do with a stange sexual encounter in the main character's teen years) was repulsive...and yet... what would we do in this character's shoes being placed in the same circumstances? Interesting. There were a few "sappy" sentences throughout such as "then we laughed and danced under the trees" that sounded so cheesy & contrived. Overall, the book has an unusual premise that I really thought would be difficult to believe but this author really pulls it off. This book will remain a favorite for me. I spent days after finishing it going through all the events in my mind and I really could not quit thinking about it. Loved it.

I had heard great things about this book. However, I struggled a bit as I began reading. The concept of time traveling can be a bit confusing. (I heard this comment from several people who have also read the book) After 60 pages or so, you begin to accept Henry's ability to time travel and really get involved with the story. I think that Claire's entries provide some insight/clarification on Henry's time traveling.

It really is a wonderful love story. The connection between Claire & Henry is one of a kind. Their bond is captivating and engrossing. You just want to keep reading.

As a Chicago native, I found the local references to add to the story. Niffeneggers descriptions of the city and the surrounding areas are vivid and accurate.

Overall a great read. I highly recommend. It's well worth the wait.

"The Time Traveler's Wife"

So many stories are based on the life and experiences of the author, as this story is, in a roundabout way, is, but, oddly enough, it is not the focus of the story. It is refreshing to read such an unusual story. The author is a paper maker and sculptor, as is the wife in this story. The really interesting part is the husband is a time traveler. His body goes places and times he has no control over, though he does seem to end up in places that are, eventually, familiar and comfortable to him.
Top start reading the story, you need to realize that it will jump around from places to people to times. It takes a bit to realize that the chapter headings are a guide to where and when the chapter is happening.
The characters are folks you would like to share a beer with. They are normal and nice and neighborly.
It is a sad story, but, hey, life is essentially sad: people live, people die, it happens and you go on. The fun is in the love the husband and wife have for each other. I am lucky to be so in love (like Tom Hanks said, "I won the lottery.") as well, so I can relate. In the end you realize there is a lot that the author did write in or chose to leave out, it would have been extraneous. There was a lot of joy and sadness, but you enjoyed reading about it all.

I knew they were making a movie out of this book so I thought I would read it and I also bought it based on the Amazon reviews. I wound up loving this book so much that I read it very slowly towards the end because I just didn't want it to end.

I already miss reading about Claire and Henry. The characters were really well developed and I quite like that the characters are flawed, especially Henry. In fact, it's what I loved about him.

I would get a little confused at times with the time travel aspect of the book, but I didn't care because to me, it was all about the relationship between Henry and Claire.

After I read a few more books that I've been wanting to read, I may go back and re-read this one because I loved it so much. It is my favorite book so far - if you are in love with love, then you will want to read this book.

I personally really like the writing style of the author. I have also read The Kite Runner, Marley and Me, Love in the Time of Cholera, The Namesake - all different, all great -but I LOVED The Time Travelers Wife.

This was a phenominal read and very fast paced. First let me preface this review by saying that i do believe that its important to read the Alex Cross books in order. Many of the "bad" reviews came from reviewers who have not read the books in the proper order. OK, coming off my soap box now.

Alex Cross is on the hunt again. High Profile murders are being committed in the Heart of DC to some pretty important people. Alex is pulled off of a more personal case in order to work on this high profile one. But fear not the caped crusader will not be denied his target. The intesity of this book is great and i found it very difficult to put the book down. I thoroughly enjoy Patterson's writing style. He makes his stories easy to read and thrilling on top of that.

If you are looking for some exciting reads this summer i encourage you to read the Alex Cross series. You wont be disappointed...

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My headline says it all, I have equally loved every single James Patterson book I have read, I am his #1 fan and this book...just like all his others, didn't disappoint me in the least! S.L. Chessor author of My Tongue Fell Out & Poodlums Boogeymen and Booglers.Poodlums, Boogeymen and Booglers: A Poetry CollectionMy Tongue Fell Out

This is one of my favorites of James Patterson. I have always had difficulty putting down one of his books. There are two murder cases. One is Jack and Jill murders and the other is the murders of black children. These were two different cases, but why would Alex Cross think the murderers are one and the same? Read and find out, you will enjoy it. By Ruth Thompson author of "The Bluegrass Dream" and "Natchez Above The River"

Writing as a Small BusinessQualifying Laps: A Brewster County NovelSins of the Fathers: A Brewster County NovelTravelersThe Bluegrass Dream: A Wilderness Adventure of Early SettlersNatchez Above The River: A Family's Survival In The Civil War

"Jack and Jill" was good, but it took a while for me to get into it. It seemed to stagnate in the middle, then finally did start moving again. But, let me add that when it did start moving again, it was great!

A set of assassins nicknamed Jack and Jill are loose on the streets of Washington, D.C. The pair are killing famous and influential people, such as movie stars, newscasters, and lawyers. At each crime scene, the duo leave a few lines of rhymed poetry detailing what they have done. And during the course of each murder, the Secret Service get a call as to where to look for the body.

In D.C.'s poor Southeast area, young schoolchildren are being murdered in broad daylight. The killer is an amateur, but few people are willing to volunteer details on what they have seen happen.

Detective Alex Cross is assigned to work both cases. The first is frightening because Jack and Jill are the Secret Service code names for the president and his wife; those protecting the Chief are worried about an assassination attempt. The second is terrifying because it is happening a few blocks from Alex's house. But when the powers that be decide that solving one set of killings is more important than the other, problems begin to arise.

Like the other novels in James Patterson's Alex Cross series (this being the third book), "Jack and Jill" revolves around a fast-paced plot, a set of murders that mirror the racial tensions in the United States, and more twists and turns than a maze. And, like his other novels, you won't be able to put it down.

Moll Flanders / 0-451-52633-3

Defoe's novel, Moll Flanders, one of the first true English novels follows the "true" story of a lower-class woman who - eventually - turns to a life of petty thievery and prostitution partly as a means to live, and partly as a means to a middle-class life of relative riches and ease.

This thin little novel is a fairly quick read and the story pacing moves at a quick clip as we read through the salacious and scandalous life of this matron is not particularly clever nor particularly beautiful, but she is persistent, dogged, and increasingly amoral enough to make a life for herself just above the level of extreme and desperate poverty. Through the course of her life, Moll takes several husbands, bears multiple children, and chooses to view her life with pride and detachment, rather than with the shame she 'ought' to feel. In this regard, Moll is perhaps the most modern of the historical novel characters, because she views the societal norms which would compel her to pious poverty with a jaundiced eye and recognizes that the 'shameful' things she does to survive, the gentry do on a much wider, if more socially acceptable, scale.

I read this several years ago. Didn't have much of a problem with the writing style, but others might.

As a mom, I just couldn't get over the fact she gave birth to about 10 kids, didn't give a flying leap about any of them, and abandoned every single one of them at her earliest convenience. I have heard of a lot of REALLY bad mothers, but none that just walked away, never gave another thought to any of them - on about 6 different occasions.

My modern mind wants to guess she had reactive attachment disorder since she was abandoned herself, but of course she just may be the imagining of a man who didn't really care to write about a woman's relationships with her children. (Wikipedia says he had 8 kids by the same wife and 6 survived, so he should have known of the bond a woman has with her children).

It's an interesting book, but I can't fully recommend it as a story. I would recommend it for people interested in 17th and 18th century England and America.

This story seems a bit dated, and once you understand the premise that this is a fallen woman story, it becomes a little predictable and holds little suspense. One interesting aspect is that it's a man narrating as a woman, but the style gets a little crusty, and you can almost read the second half by just skimming the adjectives and nouns, good gentleman, good governess, horrid wretch, thief, and etc. Things go from bad to worse for Moll as she ages, and loses her money making beauty, but she eventually regains her peace of mind and some comfort through something like a stroke of luck and her re-deliverance to Virginia. Interesting that Virginia is considered a step down from the home island and a world of hard labor and servitude in the year 1683 as opposed to England.

I would say that this story is a bit outdated, since it becomes just a list of misfortunes, and the premise that she is a penitent woman at the end of the story with many secrets and no confessional available is a bit hackneyed and lame. It's got it's points though and it serves as a valuable point for looking at literature of this time period. My main problem is that the story is broken into chunks of three page stories of misfortune and then another chapter starts (although there are no actual chapters) of misfortune. So there is after a whil a feeling of more of the same.

To fully understand and appreciate Moll Flanders you should have some understanding of the status of fiction at the time Daniel DeFoe was writing and some knowledge about the man himself. As Nancy Springer has indicated, the novel is an example of a "picaresque adventure," a style of writing that was popular at the time. These stories glorified a new kind of hero--the ordinary person, who engaged in a series of often wild and improbable events in exotic places. The picaresque rouge was a rebel against the remains of the feudal system with its hierarchy of human worth. Such novels featured a clever, strong-minded, low-born character who knew how to survive. What DeFoe did differently is to make his character a women and have her adventures take place largely in England.

The novel is also largely autobiographical. DeFoe himself experienced many financial ups and downs, yet he persevered. In fact it wasn't until he was 60 years old that he began writing novels and achieved some measure of fame and financial success. He spent time in Newgate prison and deeply in debt. He was also an outspoken political reformer who wrote more than 250 political pamphlets.

Having said the above, the novel still has its faults. One is that it is written in a continuous manner with no chapter breaks. While DeFoe may have been trying to say that time is continuous and that distinctions (such as hours, days, weeks, etc.) are mere fabrications, still readers like to have books broken down into chapters. A more serious flaw is the lack of names. Apart from her first husband there are virtually no names given to the characters. Even Moll herself is not identified by the title name until well into the book and even this name is not her actual name (which we never learn). Instead characters are identified in some impersonal way (my Lancashire husband, my governess, etc.) The lack of names makes it hard for the reader to engender any sympathy for Moll and the other personages in the book. Also the action is so fast paced that it flashes by like looking through a kaleidoscope, the scenes and action constantly shifting and changing. For example, within the first 100 pages Moll is married five times, has several children, goes to Virginia, finds her mother, etc. There is no time for the reader to reflect on the tragedies that befall her, especially given that they are told in a matter-of-fact manner.

The book can be divided into two parts. The first half deals with Moll's amorous life--her marriages and love affairs. The second part focuses primarily on her criminal activities. Both sections tell the story entirely from Moll's perspective. In many respects Moll is a match for Thackery's Becky Sharp. Both are low-born, both get positions in well-to-do families, both marry one of the sons in the family, both are attractive and quick witted, both scheme to get money and both have various adventures and misadventures. But Vanity Fair is written as a social commentary and Thackery uses the omnipotent story teller to advantage, even having him speak directly to the reader. DeFoe, by comparison, limits himself to having his protagonist say, in effect, now I did this, then I did that, then this happened, etc.

To give DeFoe his due, the book does provide a realistic and detailed account of life in England at that time. His description of Newgate prison is but one example. Perhaps Moll's attitude also reflected the times accurately. It can best be described as "a woman is nothing without a man and to get a man a woman must have money." Thus Moll spends the entire book pursuing both. But one can question how realistic Moll Flanders really is. She has a number of children, but seems to have little regard for them. Perhaps DeFoe, needing to rid Moll of encumbrances such as children in order to engage her in so many adventures, gave her what is an unnatural attitude for a mother. In the end he does reunite her with a son, but we should note that her motivation, at least at first, is financial not familial.

All in all, the book is worth reading, but it is far from great literature.

Let Me start by saying that the Story of Moll Flanders itself is a fairly exciting One. The Story changes Venues and Circumstances so often that it only grows Dull in a few Places. It is well-written and filled with beautiful Description. However, I have never finished this Book due to two crucial Criteria:

Reason 1) There are no Chapters. I find this to be quite Discouraging, as, without any Breaks, I often lose my Spot and feel like I'm not accomplishing Anything.

Reason 2) Just like in this Review, every Noun is capitalized. If you found it annoying Here, just imagine 300 Pages of it.

I would not recommend this Book to any casual Reader. If you're a literary Scholar, however, dive right in, it's an important Work.

I am happy with the quality of the book I recieved and also the timely manner in which it arrived.

This a wonderful book. It presents a spiky topic with clarity, sincerity and humor. Never once did I get the feeling that the author was a critic writing just for other critics or a historian writing for the ages. I recommend this book to anyone who feels intimidated or baffled by 20th century classical music. It probably won't change your ambivalence toward a lot of this music, but it will give your curiosity a leg up.

The music of the twentieth century remains an almost undiscovered but volatile treasure. Too often the only classical music people are aware of are works composed in the long bourgeois century - the 1800's - and earlier. But it is only in the twentieth century when music comes face to face with itself in a confrontation that sparks revolution and counter-revolution all at once.

I hope that Alex Ross' book "The Rest Is Noise" can stir many readers into setting out on a true adventure : the discovery of Schoenberg and all of the other major composers of that fractious period. It is a true adventure because listening to this music puts the soul on the chopping block. There are perils here as well as riches that will haunt one.

Alex Ross' chronicle of Western music in the 20th century is just about as far from most histories of music as can be imagined. In most conventional histories composers and their work break into discrete, hermetically sealed capsules of time and place. One could easily believe that the great composers of Western art music worked in artistic isolation, creating their masterpieces without contact with each other or their surroundings. Of course an occasional friendship or student/teacher relationship might have existed and even been important, but that's about all.

Ross from the outset is determined to shatter walls and establish connections, opening with Gustav Mahler and Richard Strauss strolling together the night of the premiere of the latter's scandalous opera, Salome, an event at which Schoenberg, Puccini and maybe even Adolf Hitler were present. This sets the tone for the entire book, which sweeps past hitherto familiar events in music history, such as the riotous premiere of Stravinsky's Rite of Spring, while shining fresh beams of revelation on them. The core of "The Rest is Noise" consists of three chapters that examine music in three nations during particularly shattering periods of upheaval: Stalin's Russia, Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal America, and Hitler's Germany. Each centers around a major composer, Shostakovich, Copland and Strauss respectively, examining these artists and the frequently tortuous relationships they had with their contemporary governments and politics in minute detail. I plan to read and re-read these and other chapters, as it is almost impossible to digest all of the information presented at one sitting. It will be easy to do so, since Ross has a knack for finding arresting images and anecdotes that stick in the reader's mind: Schoenberg and Stravinsky knocking about in Beverly Hills, thinking about writing film music; Pierre Boulez railing against his former friend John Cage; and perhaps loopiest of all, the quintessential serialist Milton Babbitt trying his hand at writing a Broadway musical.

It would be beyond the grasp of any author to treat everything he or she examines with equal depth and skill, and not all of Ross's writing is revelatory. His glance at Debussy, for example, produces no new insights, and while I may be prejudiced, I don't think Jan Sibelius merits the loving, detailed chapter he gets, as enthralling as the actual writing may be. Nevertheless, I don't recall another book about music, and I've read many, that brought both music and the people who created it to such vivid, immediate life. This one will stay on a shelf where I can easily reach it for a long time to come.

Famously (well, sort of famously, in small, self-regarding circles), Barnett Newman once claimed that 'our argument [is] with Michaelangelo'. Almost equally famously, Robert Hughes, standing in front of Newman's 'Stations of the Cross' retorted to camera 'Sorry, Barney, you lost'. The attitude was clearly in the air, because Ross quotes John Cage as saying, at around the same time, that 'Beethoven was wrong'. He even uses the phrase as a chapter title, but I can't imagine him following up with Hughes' putdown.

The problem is that, in the end, Ross takes the stuff he writes about too seriously. But, lets face it, 'classical' music, post Schoenberg and Stravinsky, has, for the most part, withered from a world historical, into a niche activity. The most it has aspired to, the most it probably can aspire to, at least when not chasing after the bourgoisie with a chain-saw, is intelligent prettiness, but this is not something that Ross is willing to admit, and without that basic perspective, the whole thing is a bit overblown.

There are good bits: Ross's response to Webern's piano variations is almost word-for-word identical to mine, but even then, on the whole, I find his critical idiom bombastic, esp given the status of the material, and I do think that a general culling of darlings should have been enforced, if necessary, by a friendly editor: sentences like 'In twentieth century music, through all the darkness, guilt, misery, and oblivion, the rain of beauty never ended' do not make my day better.

One curious thing I noted is how so many of the composers who feature are painted in negative terms, as either politically naive (Copland, etc.), nasty (Boulez - Ross does not like Boulez, and who can blame him) or plain evil, Webern. Adrien Leverkühn is invoked a lot. I wasn't sure what to make of this.

Another curious thing is that there are no transciptions of actual music: Ross does everything with joined up writing. It seems that actual music in a popular book about music is today about as welcome as actual written down equations in a popular book about physics. For some reason, I find this slightly dispiriting.

Finally, I should declare a personal connection to all this stuff: John Cage changed my life. The ultimate cause of my meeting and marrying my wife was a Cage concert (in Saarbrucken, where I lived at the time, which was a very ambitious sort of place: one memorable year, the local opera house - a gift from Adolf Hitler personally - had Wozzeck, Lulu and a magnificent production of Moses and Aaron, all in one season). The Cage concert was memorable fun, but it did did nothing more than confirm Cage's location in the pantheon somewhere below Vivaldi. I don't mean that negatively, but relative to Beethoven? Sorry John, you lost.

I have been following the basic guidelines of Alex's detox plan for about 2 weeks now and I am feeling really good. Taking some time to completely eliminate toxins from my body has helped to reduce (end?) cravings for processed, chemical-filled foods. Part of the reason it has been so easy is that the recipes she provides are fantastic! When people hear what foods I have cut out of my diet, they always ask "what do you eat?" Answer: yummy, fresh satisfying meals. Particular favorites of mine are Orange Date Scones, Avocado Sesame Pasta and Chickpea Lemon Spinach Salad.
This is a great jump start to get on track to healthier eating.

This book is ok-- if you know anything about healthy eating, vegetarian or vegan diets, or the mistreatment of animals slaughtered for food, then you probably will not find this book very useful. However, if you don't know anything about these things and consume a high-fat diet full of animal foods, bad carbs, and rely on convenience foods full of sodium and chemicals, then this book would be a good resource to help you change to a more healthy lifestyle. But, it is not really a diet, it's more like a guidebook to what is wrong with the way you currently eat and foods to add and eliminate to help you eat and feel better.

This book is written by the fiance of the guy who made "Supersize Me." She made all his meals following that movie and had him down to minimal levels of cholesterol, fat, blood pressure, and all those other health risks extremely quickly after the movie was made. Something like six weeks' time. She did something brilliant and incredible there. I thought that this book would be about how you can do it too.

It's not. It's a bunch of time-wasting platitudes about saving the planet that will convince nobody who wasn't already convinced and bore anybody who **was** already convinced. There's chapter after chapter about **WHY** doing what she did is a good idea, and maybe three to five pages about **HOW** you can actually do it. Honestly, this is the most self-indulgent, pathetic excuse for a book I have ever made the mistake of buying in my life. My father had a heart attack; his brother my uncle had a heart attack; their father, my grandfather, died of a heart attack. This woman has the ability to **SAVE MY LIFE** and she instead takes my money and gives me a bunch of pathetic, meaningless platitudes and chapter after chapter of reasons to change my diet, and no information at all about how to do it. She should be in jail for THEFT.

I do not need persusasion. I need a method that works. She has a method that works. She tells you she's gonna tell you what it is. And then there's just a ton of unnecessary blah blah blah and no useful practical information AT ALL. Except that eggplant is good for you. Like I couldn't have figured that part out myself.

BIGGEST. RIPOFF. EVER.

Non-preachy. Personal. Great recipes. This is the book that finally got me to change the way I eat. It's not a diet book really -- it's a lifestyle change primer. I lost 25 lbs. in 6 months. No crazy dieting.

I must say that I gained a lot of good information from this book. It really makes you think about what is put in the food we eat. Before reading the book I didn't give much thought to what I eat. I didn't think about the chemicals sprayed on foods, or the chemicals in milk, or all the hormones in the beef I eat. An eye opener that really makes you want to change what you eat.

THE ROAD TO WIGAN PIER is a fabulous bit of muckraking journalism by the most important political writer of the 20th century, George Orwell. O was an accomplished novelist in his own right, but it was in his capacity as an agitator for democratic socialism that his pen was at its sharpest, and in this revealing, often appalling look at the life of British coal miners, he was at his brutally honest best.

WIGAN is actually two books in one - the first half deals with his own experiences in the industrial north of England, where he investigated not only what happened at the mines themselves, but how the miners lived, or rather subsisted, in conditions of disgusting squalor and privation (he also spends a good deal of time examining the fate of the unemployed and "pensioned off"). In the latter half, he offers a pitiless criticism of British socialism, which he sees is the only positive solution to Britain's social and economic injustices, but regards as hopelessly clumsy and dogmatic in its approach, and doomed lose out to fascism unless it changed its message and won over the ordinary British worker.

Orwell's concerns in the book were severalfold. He wanted to expose and improve the lot of the common man; he wanted to make suggestions for how that lot might be improved; he wanted the Left to understand just how bad its image problem was in the eyes of the ordinary British citizen (their target audience); and he wanted, above all things, to hammer home to the world that Socialism stood for "justice and common decency" and not some watered-down version of the Russian Revolution. His greatest fear was that the fascists, by virtue of their superior propaganda and understanding of human motivation, would steal away the common man from the one system that could truly offer him a fair shake.

THE ROAD TO WIGAN PIER was commissioned by the Left Book Club, which wanted Orwell to write an Upton Sinclair-esque exposé of the life of the British worker "without whom everyone in England would soon starve." They got what they wanted, but on the bonus plan; his criticisms of Socialism, and by extension, the Club itself, were so vitriolic that the Club inserted a forward in the book which essentially refutes everything in it. The forward is worth reading, if only to unintentionally demonstrate that Orwell's attack on the Socialist leadership was dead-on: they did lack common sense, they had no understanding of the common man or of how badly they themselves were regarded by him, and their propaganda was appallingly bad. Luckily for them, they had Orwell...though my guess is at the time they weren't feeling so lucky when they read it. The reader, on the other hand, will.

George Orwell is the man. This is for sure one of the top 5 best books i've ever read. Even if I tried, I couldn't come close to doing the book justice with this review.

This work commisioned by the Left Book Club, a socialist group in England in the 1930's contains an incredible description of the miserable working conditions of coal miners in the northern industrial areas of England. Orwell's power of description brings home the awful condiditons to the reader in a very tangible and palpable way. Reminiscent of Jacob Riis' "How The Other Half Lives" or Upton Sinclair's "The Jungle", Orwell's account is unforgettable social historical writing.

The remainder of the book is a polemical piece critical of socialists of his day. To the modern reader that will not have as much relevance except as an example of Orwell's pursuasive writing but the earlier sections of the book are incredibly memorable.

Contrary to my expectations, this is Orwell's most personal book. He bares his soul to us. At least I think he seriously tries to be perfectly honest, if not complete.
After his success with Down and Out in Paris and London, Orwell got commissioned by the influential Left Book Club (Victor Gollancz one of the editors)to write a book about unemployment in the industrial and empoverished northern part of England. This was the mid 30s, the recent depression had led to high unemployment and endless misery in England as elsewhere.
GO went there and dug in and lived with workers and in boarding houses and crawled through mines (though he was about twice as tall as a miner should be) and talked to people and read statistics and reports.
The outcome is an oddity. Part 1 is a solid piece of investigative reporting and journalistic sociology. Chapter 1 is along the lines of Down and Out, an account of life in a boarding house in the North. Start with chapter 2 if you are squeamish. The hygienic conditions are worse than anything in Down and Out.
The following chapters in part 1 give us decsriptions of the life of miners and work in the coal mines, of the miners' leisure time, health, work safety, accidents, the housing conditions in the fearful northern slums (worse than the slums in India and Burma, says GO, because of the cold dampness), of unemployment and malnutrition, of food and fuel, of the uglyness of industrial countries at the time. The strongest chapter in this part, in my opinion, is the one on unemployment and its psychology. This subject is timeless. Even if the slums have changed, the essential condition of unemployment is surely unchanged.
So far so good and in line with the job description.
But then the man went and added a second part which deals in first place with himself, an autobiography and history of the thought of GO. Having grown up as a son of shabby genteels, he was raised on contempt for the working class. Public school education enforced the attitude. After school and after WW1, GO took a job in the imperial police in Burma and there learned to hate the system. He quit after 5 years and went into a personal crisis, a kind of horror vacui and hatred against his self. He goes on search of redemption as told with some embellishment in Down and Out. He tries to anihilate his social persona, but learns it does not work that way. The North England job gives him a chance to reconsider his position. He philosophizes about socialism and the classes. Interesting to us (at least to me), but shocking to the Left Book Club.
They decide to publish it anyway, but Gollancz adds a foreword where he thinks he needs to warn his club members that here is somebody who does not walk the line of good doctrinarism. Very odd.
By the way, did you know that quite likely fish and chips and the football pools have averted revolution in England by providing 'panem and circenses'? Says Orwell, and I love him for that kind of insight.
(This concludes my Orwell cycle, unless I decide to re-visit Burma and Catalonia.)

The Road to Wigan Pier by George Orwell is a book requested by the Left Book Club on the issue of poverty and mass unemployment in the industrial north of England. Mr. Orwell does a great job of investigating the harsh job conditions in the coal mines, the foul lodgings, the bad diet, the pitiful wages and the struggle to feed a family. He points out that much of the conditions can easily be changed IF people wanted to change them. The wealth is there it just needs to get to the lower-class.
The other part of the book is Orwell trying to explain why, if Socialism seems to be so logical, so reasonable, everybody is either turning away from Socialism and, in many changes, turning to Fascism. It seems that while people might agree with many ideals of Socialism they don't like the Socialists they meet. Orwell points out that Socialists need to work on the delivery of their message - less about class systems and more about justice and income.
When you attack the middle-class you put them on the defense. Why would they join up in a movement that is insulting them? He says the Socialist should drop the idea of the class war and focus on the basic ideals of increasing incomes, better housing for everybody, justice and liberty. He also says that Socialists are linked to progress which many people link with a machine-civilization and therefore a dark, bland future. Funny I also linked Socialism with slowing down progress and Fascism with speeding it up.
Even while the facts in the book are outdated the problems that many parties today face, such as Libertarians, are the same. How can you take a Libertarian seriously when he is dressed up as a butterfly? In print the ideas of the Libertarians and Socialists and even Democratics look good but sometimes the PEOPLE of these parties make the voters go running to the Republicans. I know many people who did JUST that - they didn't like the Republican's ideas but hated the people the Democratics had picked to run for President. Left-wingers sometimes come out, because of the terms they use or they way their come out as attacking almost everything, as nuts.