Lewis Carroll Books

If you like mysteries, this an exceptional book to read. Dead Secret is a great mystery/archeological novel involving very realistic accounts of archeological facts. The best part about this book is the mix of law with the archeology. The use of justice in the novel sets you up for some great surprises as Landon (head of the Museum of Antiquities) finds himself knee deep in a sea of greed and misleading suspects. As Landon hunts the area of Wolfcleugh Woods trying to find more evidence of archeological findings; he gets swept up in the grasp of the greed monsters, Shangri-La enterprises, who need the land to make a back road for a new resort. With time running out, Landon is desperate to find evidence of ancient life, otherwise, he will help the money mad builders win the battle over the land. Of the many mystery books I've read, this book is definately the most attention drawing of them all, a wonderful book from beginning to end. Roy Lewis is definately the master of law and archeological works of fiction.

Pitting profit and greed against research and ecology is a familiar backdrop to a well-written murder mystery. There's a lot of the "good guys" versus the "bad guys" stuff going on, but the author has provided plenty of motives and opportunities, and the convoluted relationships of the numerous suspects provide an entertaining evening of reading.

Set in northern England, Wolfcleugh Woods and the adjacent bog are a mysterious and colorful locale for the latest in the series that features archaeologist Arnold Landon. He and colleague Portia Tyrrell are assigned to evaluate the archeological significance of an area described in the prologue as shrouded in fear and superstition. The land is the center of a local controversy created by a group of greedy and callous developers eager to build a road to their latest luxury resort, tastelessly named Shangri-La. The landowner is playing reluctant host to a group of enthusiastic and ingenuous environmentalists who are determined to prevent the ruination of the forest. Equally adamant is the archeological team who have recently uncovered a well-preserved centuries-old "bog body" and want to continue undisturbed with their digging and research. The machinations of the developers, the politicians, and the Department of Museums and Antiquities who employ Landon are described in venomous detail, and all of the peripheral players live up to maximal stereotypes. Local policeman also live up to expectations, which includes the soon-to-be-retired but experienced DCI Culpeper pitted against the overly-educated wiseacre young colleagues and an intrusive and condescending superior officer. Violence predictably erupts as the land-related disagreements between the antagonists escalate. When other human remains are turned up and Landon himself stumbles upon a body of quite recent origin, both he and Culpeper must change their perspectives and concentrate on discovering the murderer.

Lewis has once again created a nicely suspenseful mystery with multi-dimensional lead characters in a colorful setting - an overall good read.

Land developer Ken Stafford decides to build a highway access road through the ancient peat bog in Northumberland, much to the dismay of its owner, environmentalists, and several protestors. When a centuries-old body is discovered remarkably intact, many feel that more research and exploration of the area is warranted. Protagonist Arnold Landon, an archeologist, and his assistant Portia are summoned to evaluate the area when a more recent body (that of one of Stafford's most vocal opponents) surfaces shortly thereafter. Now Landon and Portia must also hunt a killer, in addition to hunting for the bog's archeological significance.

There are plenty of twists and mayhem in this story, including some personal conflicts which may raise a few eyebrows, but the story seems to lack a "pulse". It is interesting, believable and very well written, but not very exciting. Although this book did not quite tickle my fancy, I would definitely read another Roy Lewis novel without hesitation. His writing is flawless, and he places fascinating characters in unique plots.

Alice in Wonderland is a great book that i very much enjoyed. The story was very interesting and enjoyable. I liked how the author made things symbolize something else. Like the way the rules of the game they were playing were also the rules of the land. Even though this book is intended for young kids, this book is excellent for all ages.

Alice in Wonderland is a great book that i very much enjoyed. The story was very interesting and enjoyable. I liked how the author made things symbolize something else. Like the way the rules of the game they were playing were also the rules of the land. Even though this book is intended for young kids, this book is excellent for all ages.

I'm always amazed when I finish reading Alice's Adventures in Wonderland how I feel like I just read the transcript of a dream.

Everything is nonsensical, yet it makes sense; it is all completely fantastical, yet it is told so matter-of-fact that you simply must believe that Alice's adventures were nothing less than fact; the characters are so unbelievable, yet they always seem like old friends. The word structure and usage even reads, and in some cases looks, like a dream. You may not always understand why something happens the way it does to poor Alice, but like the unlikely heroine herself, you simply accept it and move on to the next adventure.

Review of "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland"


"Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" by Lewis Carroll is a classic fantasy that is wonderful for Middle School students who love to read.

This fascinating book is about an adventurous and curious girl named Alice who follows a "White Rabbit" and mistakenly falls into a long, long hole. When she lands she is in an amazing new land called Wonderland. Wonderland is a world of crazy ideas and unfamiliar rhymes. Alice meets many new characters such as, The Mad Hatter, The Dormouse, The March Hare, The Queen of Hearts, a Duchess, a Gryphon, a footman that is actually a fish, and The Cheshire Cat, as she tries new adventures to get herself back home. She doesn't just meet these characters she also battles with them in a court case which is bizarrely unfair , she plays crochet, and even continually shrinks and grows herself. She gets herself tied up in odd situations but her curiosity carries her onward. In the end Alice discovers something truly amazing!

"Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" is a great book for children who love to be urged onward by amazing and fascinating descriptive word choices and crazy creatures. This book is not very difficult but is not easy either. It may seem like a childish book but it really keeps your mind going and thinking about what will happen next. I recommend "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" to anyone. So next time you are at the library or your local bookstore pick up a copy and check it out. Everyone will enjoy Lewis Carroll's "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland"!

There is one thing that all potential customers must keep in mind when buying any Alice book: Do not purchase one that does not include the illustrations of John Tenniel! This edition includes all of them and the quality of the reproductions on the pages are excellent. Tenniel's illustrations help add to the childish excitement of Carroll's stories and will be especially invaluable to teenagers and adults, having just by nature of growing up lost some of the imaginative innocence, that ability to stretch reality, that we all possessed as kids.

Of course, the illustrations wouldn't mean jack if they didn't have a captivating story to work with. Carroll's amusing tale of nonsense is targeted as a kid's book, and that is always where many of our fondest memories of it will remain, but as a college student reading it I was amazed by its power to suspend reality and return me to a level of imagination that I had simply thought I lost somewhere along the way. The trip down the rabbit hole can be quite a different experience from a different point of view.

This particular edition also includes a good introduction and very helpful explanatory notes organized chapter by chapter. The introduction and notes offer insights to Carroll's life and his relations with the real life Alice and her family that, from a student viewpoint, reveal an interesting and more personal side of the Alice tales.

The Modern Library edition is a nice choice for the adult reader, featuring all the wonderful original illustrations (by British political cartoonist John Tenniel), a thoughtful forward by A.S. Byatt, and just enough notes and commentary to provide some additional historical and cultural context.

Lewis Carroll was an imaginitive genius and has created some of the most unforgettable and timeless characters with this work - the Mad Hatter, Tweedledee & Tweedledum, the hookah-smoking Caterpiller, the perpetually late White Rabbit - and the absurd situations Alice finds herself in are poignant and amusing at the same time.

However, one thing I did not realize coming back to these stories for the first time as an adult was just how largely character and situation-driven these stories are. Carroll moves rather disjointedly from one nonsensical scenario to the next, paying very little attention to a cohesive narrative thread. Indeed the world of Alice is best experienced as a whole, when the menagerie of characters can come to life, but these stories could just as easily be read out of order or taken out piece by piece. The creative work doesn't suffer a bit because of this, but readers should not come to these books expecting a novelistic experience.

These are creatures to love, lines to savor, and the most curious things to consider.

After looking through this poetry book, I decided that it would be a great book for my first grade students to own. Our classical Christian School encourages poetry memorization, and I know that my students could read many of the poems, and their parents could read the others to them. What a great bargain for classic children's poetry.

Inexpensive and filled with gems. Enjoying old favorites and some I had never read before.

Victorians are experiencing something of a comeback after decades of censure as the strange, repressed, half-crazy relatives we don't want to tell anyone about. We are discovering that the Victorians were not so different from us.

The Victorians did, however, produce their own brand of eccentricity and none are as delightfully eccentric as the Victorian/Edwardian writers for children discussed in Inventing Wonderland. Jackie Wullschlager starts with that greatest of all Wonderland writers, the master himself Lewis Carroll and ends with Jazz Age Pooh creator A.A. Milne.

The eccentricity of these Victorian writers is their confident, and sometimes troubling, obsession with childhood itself. Wullschlager assures us, correctly, that these writers' obsessions did not cross the line into pedophilic behavior. To 21st century sensibilities this seems scarcely creditable, especially after reading letters by Lewis Carroll to various girl children. Carroll, Lear, Barrie and Grahame's effusions about childhood can only be understood within the context of the Victorian age, the age that produced and adored Wordsworth's overly quoted (then and now) "But trailing clouds of glory do we come/From God, who is our home" (Ode: Intimations of Immortality From Recollections of Early Childhood).

Wullschlager is, I think, a bit too dismissive of Milne, who is regarded in the text as a has-been, clinging to the last remnants of the Victorian celebration of childhood. Wullschlager's overall point in this regard, however, is well made. The Victorians invented and took seriously the concept of childhood as a wonderland. Consequently, they produced children's writers of a truly magnificent stature. When the concept of childhood=innocence & pleasure was abandoned, in the early 20th century (thank you, Freud!), the result was an almost tongue-in-cheek parody of the earlier writers. It just wasn't possible to take childhood that seriously anymore.

Writers for children have of course continued to produce masterpieces, largely in the fantasy area, but that particular brand of unself-conscious Victorian nonsense and idyllicism may be lost forever. The Victorians are not as strange to us as we may like to believe, but they are certainly unreproducable.

Recommendation: Interesting, well-written, well-paced. Not the most complete biographical sketches but a complete analysis of biography and art. Give it a try.

As a self-proclaimed James Barrie freak, I've read numerous books and newspaper-magazine articles about him. The Barrie chapter in Inventing Wonderland is definetly one of the most informative, but it loses a few points in the entertainment department. I read the Carroll, Barrie, and Milne chapters and thought that Jackie Wullschlager tends to examine her subjects a little too closely. At times, her meaning becomes lost in a pile of pop psychobabble, but the overall impressions were very clear (especially Carroll's disturbing fixation with little girls). Especially touching were A.A. Milne's bittersweet descriptions of pride in his adult son Christopher Robin, but at the same time longing to play with his little boy just once more. Such nostalgic, personal pieces make the book is beautiful, but it would be about a hundred times more beautiful if the author had kept the stories a little simpler.

This effort at telling the history of the twentieth - century by eye-witness accounts of major events is at times illuminating and at times disappointing. There is an undue focus on events in Great Britain. There are omissions, such as that of the Six- Day War in the Middle East. There are moving documents such as the section from Anne Frank's diary.
The material on the whole is not intensive enough to provide any major insight into a historical event or process. But as an impressionistic work , a survey work it is generally a good and fair piece of work.

History as shared by those who were there! We're using it in our homeschooling. The price is right and the articles put history in a more personal light rather than dry commentary.

I don't read any French but do have the start of an Alice collection. This book had to be part of it. Received quickly and in excellent condition.

this whole series is fantastically edited for younger kids. We've been moving through the whole set!

It's everything you remember, chopped down, but not dummied down for kids between six and ten.

This Alice in Wonderland music by Alec Wilder was transcribed in part from a 1958 recording. Very charming, and music was only written for parts that Lewis Carroll specifically said were songs. Lobster Quadrille is quite fun. Flute parts are written in small print which could be tricky to prepare for performance, I don't know if separate flute parts are available.