Bibliography Books

Feather has followed jazz for scores of years primarily as an observer. His observations, braod as well as detailed are invaluable. The photographs are almost enough to make one's most interesting "coffee table book." A must have for jazz buffs.

I can't think of a single REAL JAZZ MUSICIAN who has not read this book...if not they are reading it PRESENTLY!!!!!!!
It is the ultimate reference guide.
When the Jazz community lost Mr. Feather we lost an invaluable friend and supporter of the artform we affectionately refer to as JAZZ.

An indispensable reference for Jazz fans, especially for those interested in pre-Coltrane Jazz, like yours truly.

Compiled from the best extant leaves of Shakespeare's First Folio, this edition is a labor of love. The binding and slipcover are more impressive in the Norton's first edition, but the pages within contain Shakespeare in a way that's rare today: unedited, giving a real sense of Elizabethan and Jacobean times.

Of course, the absence of footnotes or explanatory text places the burden on the reader, and it's likely you'll want to have some supplementary materials handy in case a particularly obscure turn of phrase arises. On the other hand, the remarkable introduction by the late Charleton Hinman provides a remarkable glimpse into the history of the First Folio, and is essential reading in itself.

It does not, of course, contain all of Shakespeare's plays, as scholarship has enlarged his ouevre over time; but just about everything is here.

A huge volume (14 inches high by 9 inches deep and over 3 inches thick), this is the ultimate coffee table book - in itself, an suggestion of period bookcraft. If you have the space, and can do a healthy bench press, this is the kind of educational experience that you could spend a lifetime poring over.

This is a superb book in every way: fine scholarship, painstaking reproduction, beautiful presentation. Nothing else is in the class of the Norton First Folio facsimile. To those who may look askance at the price, I can only say the book is worth every penny. What Heminge and Condell said in "To the great Variety of Readers" about the original Folio is equally applicable to this reproduction: "Iudge your sixe-pen'orth, your shillings worth, your fiue shillings worth at a time, or higher, so you rise to the iust rates, and welcome. But, what euer you do, Buy."

The best resource of it's kind for anyone interested in getting back to the "roots" of Shakespeare. If Amazon allowed half stars, I'd take off half a star for it's price. It's too expensive to be accessible to students, the people who could get the most usage and benefit out of this fantastic book.

It is rare that one can use words like `gripping' for abstruse texts such as this, but I could not find another word in the English language that more accurately describes it. I await the sequel with bated breath.

I agree with Boke's assessment, save for his consistent misspelling of "empiricism".

For years, the name Poe has been synonomous with the highest level of scholarship in early Modern Russian studies. In this monograph, he has once again reasserted his dominance in the field, while simultaneously demonstrating the precise empericism on which he has founded his impressive career. The current manuscipt will doubtlessly serve as the standard by which all future accounts of the early Modern Russian era will be compared and judged.

A great guide for the collector who wants to identify the different fossils in the slabes he has collected.

The Fossils of Florissant written by Herbert W. Meyer is a wonderful collection of flora and fauna from the Florissant Fossil Beds National Monument just outside of Colorado Springs, Colorado in the shadow of Pikes Peak. Encased between layers of volcanic ash from an erupted volcano 34 million years ago are animals, leaves, and plant life at the time and are remarkably well preserved.

"The Fossils of Florissant" is a collection of different museum specimens all brought together in one readable tome for not only the specialist paleontologist but the causal reader of interest as well. This book is easily followed and is laid out well. There are ample illustrations and photographs to whet the readers interest making for a book to keep. These fossil specimens are so well preserved that a color patterns of tiny flies are preserved.

"The Fossils of Florissant" is a feast for the imagination as one wishes to understand life's history on planet Earth and this is a clear snapshot into time as it was on a wooded lake shore some 34 millions years ago in the Eocene. There are pictures of flowers, spiders, and insects galore making this one of Earth's richest deposit of life on Earth in this time.

The reader will enjoy this book as it is. The book is well appointed and there is pictures of fossilized vertebrates from this time even thorough they are small. The larger vertebretes are only fragmetary but this show that this area was a one time teaming with life and is a good cross section into how life was at that time. If you have any scientific background you'll enjoy this author's prose. Even if you are a casual reader, you'll enjoy reading about life's past.

"The Fossils of Florissant" gets a solid five stars from me. This is a highly readable well illustrated book that will capture and hold your attention till the end. The study of geology and paleontology at plases like Florissant clearly shows that the world is, if for nothing else, an everchanging, evolving place.

This is a delightful book, well written and profusely illustrated, about one of the world's premier fossil insect and plant localities. It is written for the serious paleontologist, as well as the casual inquisitive reader interested in the natural world.

Florissant Fossil Beds National Monument is remarkable because it constitutes a highly detailed snapshot of life at a time when the earth was entering a period of major climate change. The setting is a 34 million year-old forest, along a lake teeming with exceptional diversity, in the shadow of an erupting volcano. Due to the outstanding quality of preservation, many unique fossil plants, birds, butterflies, spiders, bees, and fish from this site appear to have met their demise only yesterday.

During the last 100 years, a large number of prized fossils from Florissant have been scattered to museums all over the world. The author has traveled extensively to find and catalog these specimens, and assemble a collection of color photographs printed in exquisite detail. He meticulously reconstructs the ancient ecosystem from the fossil record, at times much like a detective unravels clues from a good murder mystery. Interesting twists abound. For example, why is the only fossil of the tsetse fly-the blood-sucking, disease-carrying scourge of equatorial Africa today-- found at this location high in the Rockies?

When it comes to fossils, big is not necessarily better. Dinosaur books have grabbed the imagination of many in the last few years, but The Fossils of Florissant, by Herbert Meyer, is a newcomer that deserves to be at the top of the heap.

This catalog art book documents the life and work of a truly visionary crank artist. A. G. Rizzoli combined rich, crisp architectural renderings with a compulsive and entrancing inner life. Seen in contrast with the humble scope of his earthly existence, these radiant works are simultaneously dazzling, confounding, and - at least for me - full of heart-rending pathos. I look at these works and I feel deeply for this man and I resonate with his artistic vision. I am moved in a way that completely alludes me when gazing at the work of many abstract, cubist, and other modernist "fine art" masters.

In terms of originality, vision, skill, and dedication A.G. Rizzoli may eventually stand as one of the true masters of the 20th century. An extravagant claim, perhaps, but when I compare Rizzoli with Picasso, Dali, Klee, Miro, or Duchamp I cannot help but feel that they would have all welcomed him into their august company as a true original who has expanded the creative realm of possibilites in art. Of equal interest is the manner in which Rizzoli, faced with a desolate life of lonliness due to his inability to function in a social realm, or for that matter a sexual one, took these circumstances and created an alternate reality of sublime beauty and wonder. This superb book allows all of us to share in this utopian vision and, for at least a little while, daydream, ponder, and wonder at this remarkable vision of an alternate reality. The authors, curators and restorers who have brought Rizzoli's life work to light are to be highly commended as preserving and exposing this incredible and wonderful work.

i saw the exihibit of his work at the museum of modern art in S.F. it was magnificent! i could have spent days going over all the detail - i got so engrossed in every detail of his work and writings about his life..that i went back a second day ....what a sad and wonderful life this man had.

Like the gay sleuths of whom he writes, esteemed scholar and gay historian Gunn leaves no stone unturned in his roundup of gay detective and mystery fiction. As entertaining as it is erudite, this reference book belongs on the shelf of every mystery lover, and especially of every fan of gay fiction and gay history. Victor J. Banis, author of TALES FROM C.A.M.P., JACKIE'S BACK

Wayne Gunn's THE GAY MALE SLEUTH IN PRINT AND FILM covers books and movies never treated with any seriousness among bibliographers--that's because, in order to treat gay issues, an author often had to market his or her works as pulp fiction. Here, Gunn has treated pulp as if it mattered, and found some eye-opening themes and ideas, hidden in the genre fiction. His work is a labor of love: pulp is not generally available at your neighborhood bookstore! His work is thorough, smart, and very readable.

For mystery buffs or fans of gay literature, The Gay Male Sleuth in Print and Film by Drewey Wayne Gunn is a must-have. The book is pretty evenly divided between a fascinating look at the gay male sleuth throughout history and a comprehensive bibliography of books featuring gay male sleuths.

It's obvious that Gunn has done his homework here, and equally obvious that this is a genre he loves. While academic in nature, the book is easy to read and understand, and actually quite enjoyable. It certainly fills a void. While there have been a few other studies and bibliographies on LGBT mystery and detectives novels, they missed many titles and practically ignored books featuring gay males. There were virtually no books indexing gay male sleuths in film.

There is much to learn in these pages, even for a writer of a gay male sleuth! For instance, did you know that the first recognizably gay detective did not appear until 1953 in an English novel The Heart in Exile by Rodney Garland? However, it was not marketed as a gay mystery and so it is often overlooked. The first actual gay sleuth presented as such appeared in 1961 in a pulp novel by Lou Rand titled The Gay Detective. It too was largely overlooked because of its pulp origins. It was only recently that gay mystery novels really took off and became truly a marketable subgenre.

Gunn breaks his history into bite-sized sections based on authors, characters, themes, and sometimes the target audience. For instance, you'll find Bleeding Hearts listed under Teenage Sleuths (for Teenage Readers). The bibliography claims to be the most comprehensive ever offered on this subject, including more than 600 novels, over 100 movies, and nearly 20 television or video series.

If you enjoy mysteries in general, and gay mysteries in particular, then you'll want to be sure to pick up a copy of this book. It will provide you with a reading list to last a long, long time!

I bought this book when it first came out in 1982 and STILL turn to it whenever I need some quick info on a book, or an author, or a particular subject. I WISH it were updated, but even though it is 20+ years old it is still the best of its kind!

"A Booklover's Companion"--and, oh, how very true that is! I love to just veg out in a comfortable chair and page slowly through this wonderful compendium (I wish Mr. Gilbar would bring out a "Son of Good Books" that would update us on what he's been reading in the 20 years since he compiled it) of thematically arranged lists of books both famous and lesser-known. Everything from Homer's epics to Time-Life's Old West series and the Rivers of America books is in here, each of them personally read by the compiler. His squibs are necessarily brief--after all, he's trying to explain the attraction of some 9000 different works!--but should at least give you a hint of whether the book might be worth a look; and, as he points out, all "exist and can be found"--through InterLibrary Loan if you're low on funds. But no matter how low on funds you may be, if you love to read, you should own "Good Books," and that's not a general recommendation.

With all the controversy that swirls around "best of" lists today, it's a pleasure to encounter a "list" of great books in which the compiler doesn't claim any unique insight other than his own love for literature. Gilbar seems to be a reader who hasn't forgotten what it means to value a book for its adventurousness, its quirkiness, and its visceral appeal. He doesn't try to use academic or professional standards to judge a work -- rather, he uses his own wide-ranging and boisterous curiosity to compile a reading list which any book lover can enjoy.

Before starting, allow me to mention the fact that I am reviewing solely the poem "Howl" in Howl and Other Poems.

I read "Howl" this summer as a 16 year old and was absolutely stunned and amazed. As far as enjoying the poem I was entirely too confused by it the first time I read it to actually enjoy it; so let me start by giving the reader of this and prospective buyer of Howl and other Poems the advice to read "Howl" several times before forming a concrete opinion about it. To best describe it shortly, "Howl" is the story of a man that has been through and survived and recognized the horrors of the post war 1940's and the 1950's. "Howl" shows the oppression that people faced during this era and gives a ghastly description of the government and institutions in general at this time. The main strength of Ginsberg's poem is to expand the mind of the reader, even if that means confusing the reader. Take for example the stanza:
who were burned alive in their innocent flannel suits on Madison Avenue, amid blasts of leaden verse & the tanked-up clatter of the iron regiments of fashion & the nitroglycerine shrieks of the fairies of advertising & the mustard gas of sinister intelligent editors, or were run down by the drunken taxicabs of Absolute Reality,
This is an absolutely mind boggling sentence. It attacks the areas of fashion and advertising and the powers of editors in newspapers. Stanzas like that are why I enjoy this poem, it is a critique of the time that Ginsberg lived in and allows one to see parallels in the current day and age.

Howl was written over the course of 1955-1956, and is truly a product of its time. This was the beginning of the beat generation, with other writers such as Jack Kerouac and Ken Kesey. "Howl" reflects the post war era in which Ginsberg lived; an era of, as he believes, governmental oppression and assimilation. These thoughts are best conveyed in the stanzas discussing mental institutions and how they try to force a disease that may not actually be a disease out of you. Ginsberg also critiques the everlasting effects of a 1950's mental institution with lines such as "I'm with you in Rockland where 50 more shocks will never return your soul to its body again from its pilgrimage to a cross in the void" and "(who were) returning years later truly bald except for a wig of blood, and tears, and fingers, to the visible madman doom of the wards of the madtowns of the East". Along with Ginsberg's encounters with people in the post-war era and his personal experiences of mental institutionalization and the oppression he faced for being homosexual, drugs contributed much to Ginsberg's poem. Howl would not have come into existence without many of the drugs that started the new mindset of the beat generation such as Peyote, LSD, and DMT. Howl was a product of its own culture and it began and shaped much of the following beatnik era.

I do not consider "Howl" to have weaknesses as a peace of literature, but there are certain times where the reader is often confused by what Ginsberg is saying. Much of this is not so much because of the prosody of the poem but because so many of the ideas in an individual stanza are disconnected that it confuses the reader. For me, one of the stanzas that was so disconnected that it was confusing reads "who distributed Supercommunist pamphlets in Union Square weeping and undressing while the sirens of Los Alamos wailed them down, and wailed down Wall, and the Staten Island ferry also wailed". The prospective reader must be prepared to allow the images that Ginsberg provides in "Howl" give them a new way of thinking rather than try and dissect its every stanza. I very much recommend reading "Howl"; it changed my outlook on the world.

It is a shame that this annotated edition of one of the great beat/modern poems is out of print. I strongly suggest you get this book while it is still available at the used bookshops.
Ginsberg claimed to have written this work spontaneously, but this work shows the poem was written over a period of time, and edited. Maybe he was only referring to the first draft! It really doesn't matter,but looking at the drafts does give one insight into how Ginsberg created the poem(s) and the development of a classic.

I reread this little book before attempting to review it. I remembered that it was a mad mantra of transcendent power from the heart of hell, but I didn't remember how nondated it was. This work is fresher and more relevant than 99% of what passes for poetry today. How can something last nearly 50 years without going stale or becoming trite? How can it be even more real now? Maybe it is because Ginsberg ripped it live, screaming, and bleeding from a place beyond time and beyond space. He tore it from the living bowels of MOLOCH itself and showed it to HIM. After all, what does divine madness know of time?

This poem is transcendence itself. It demonstrates that when you plunge into the deepest pit of hell it either kills you, or perhaps it burns out your insides so that you become a soulless zombie, OR you transcend it and rise howling to become a Mad Poet Saint who can truely encompass the Sacred in the Profane.

Read this poem, and the others like America, A Supermarket in California, Sunflower Sutra, Wild Orphan, and In Back of the Real. It's almost frightening how relevant to daily life it is. If you didn't know it, you would never guess that it was written in the 50's. Of course Ginsberg does invoke, holy eternity in time holy the clocks in space the fourth dimension, in the Footnote. Maybe that's why it's timeless. As Cassady used to say, we know time, yes, we know time....

I wish I would have been there for that first public reading in San Fran with Kerouac running around the audience passing the wine jug. On all the planes, the Gods themselves must have jumped back in shock as a flaming monkeywrench of living poetry was jammed through the spokes of the great quivering meat wheel of conception....

This is a very welcome counterbalance to the many voices that stress differences among cultures at the cost of losing sight of what we humans share. With extensive use of anthropological studies, Brown alerts the reader to those almost innumerable and too easily taken-for-granted elements of humanity. We all smile when happy, mourn the loss of a child, negotiate a place in a social setting with specific traditional roles. We all eat, experience hunger, learn which foods are acceptable, connect eating with social occasions, use food-related activities as basic metaphors for aspects of life. (The annotated bibliography is especially good for its lists of shared human factors.) Those who stress differences among people now usually do so to promote tolerance of "the other." But a good basis for tolerance is to recognize the common humanness within all the differences. This book does that well. It is good but highly readable anthropology.

This is a comprehensive survey of the anthropological study of human universals, human nature, culture vs. biology, etc. It's also a critique of the field of anthropology, and one given from a refreshing outside-looking-in perspective. Brown deals with several influential cases (such as Margaret Mead's study of Samoan adolescence) and shows where they erred. He discusses the processes of defining and demonstrating universals, takes us on a grand tour of the history of universals in anthropology, presents the basic gamut of how universals have been and can be explained. In the final chapters he lays out his position and leaves cultural relativism thoroughly refuted. Cultural relativists, he demonstrates, have relied on universals even in their attempts to show cultural relativity. Among even the most dissimilar human languages, for example, the similarities (grammar, syntax, rhythm, content, etc.) still far outweigh the differences. Anthropologists have historically focused on the differences while remaining blind to the (often more fundamental and important) similarities. I'm a little leery of some of the traits Brown ends up calling universal; he does acknowledge the "working" nature of such a list. But what precisely shall be found to be universal is less important than simply the shift to an orientation that would seek to understand human nature in such terms. This is what Brown proposes. He understands the place of anthropology in the social sciences, the field's potential, where and how that potential has gone unrealized, and how anthropologists will need to alter their approach if they're to be fruitful in the future. I haven't even scraped the surface here; the book is a gold mine of interdisciplinary connections and it brims with insights. More than anything, it's a sensible, biologically-informed, (dare I say) reality-based account of human nature. The tone is that of a genuine pursuit of truth, as opposed to the trend among some social scientists to search high and low for anything that supports established theory. This book is packed, and in many ways it only aims to lay the framework of a better approach to the subject.

This is a very welcome counterbalance to the many voices that stress differences among cultures at the cost of losing sight of what we humans share. With extensive use of anthropological studies, Brown alerts the reader to those almost innumerable and too easily taken-for-granted elements of humanity. We all smile when happy, mourn the loss of a child, negotiate a place in a social setting with specific traditional roles. We all eat, experience hunger, learn which foods are acceptable, connect eating with social occasions, use food-related activities as basic metaphors for aspects of life. (The annotated bibliography is especially good for its lists of shared human factors.) Those who stress differences among people now usually do so to promote tolerance of "the other." But a good basis for tolerance is to recognize the common humanness within all the differences. This book does that well. It is also highly readable anthropology.

If you could buy only one Elvis book, this is the one. Far more than just a listing of the books on Elvis, it is a great study of American culture and how we reacted to Elvis.

Mary Hinds' Infinite Elvis: An Annotated Bibliography offers her readers a precise measurement of the impact Elvis Presley has had on the American popular culture both as a performer and as an icon. The informative, reader friendly text is enhanced with more than 1,700 verified entries ranging from biographies to discographies, fiction to travel guides, poetry to comic books, major articles to dissertations. Here documented are his concerts, his eating habits, posthumous Elvis sightings, how his death changed the media's treatment of celebrities, even how a new religion devoted to Elvis emerged to become part of mainstream America. Infinite Elvis is essential reading and a very highly recommended reference for all personal, academic, and community library popular culture, music history, and Elvis Presley reference collections.

One of the most intelligent and well-written books about Elvis Presley. Hinds proves her theory - that Elvis is one of the most impactful individuals in the last half of the 20th century - in a thorough, effective manner that is entertaining as well. Her writing is a delight to read! She covers every aspect of Elvis' impact through almost everything that has ever been written about him. Very useful, as well as fun to read.