Joseph Conrad Books

I was satisfied with purchasing this book from Amazon.
The shipping was fast and it was packaged in a nice box.

... I reread Heart of Darkness because my "guys" reading group included two who had not ever read it. The story stands up far, far better than I would have guessed. Conrad is really superb, and this shortish novel could well persuade new readers that "literary" stuff is worth their while. I had forgotten how subtle, how grown-up Conrad's expectations of his reader are. Truly quite marvelous.

With trepidation, I splurged on the Norton edition, even though I am pretty hostile to English-Professor post-modern posturing and nonsense. I am glad I got it, however. The wealth of historical documents help make the then-contemporary setting come real. The big surprise for me was Chinua Achebe's fine essay. While "bloody racist" is still over the top, Achebe has a case of some importance, and argues it well. It is even a comfort to find that the knee-jerk responses by assorted literature professors are indeed just as much postie poo as I had expected. (It's always a pleasure to find that one's unexamined prejudices are warranted after all.)

A particular pleasure for me was talking about the book with my daughter, who has taught it to her honors high school English class. She has developed views, and I learned really quite a lot from listening to her. Book, $11.90; my time, $free; finding out your daughter has deep insight and can teach you, PRICELESS.

In short, wonderful story and useful edition.

I read this book for a graduate Humanities course. Buy this edition, it is the best with great critical essays. Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, written in 1899 is a seminal work about the ills of colonialism, as well as a postmodern look at the subject of mankind. Conrad's book had a crucial influence on five important works of the twentieth century: J. G. Frazier's book The Golden Bough. Jessie L. Weston's book From Ritual to Romance, T. S. Elliott's poem the Waste Land, Joseph Campbell's Hero with a Thousand Faces, and Francis Ford Coppolla's movie Apocalypse Now, screenplay by John Milius, was based on Conrad's book. Another interesting fact is that this work was read by Orson Welle's Mercury Theater Players on the radio and was to be his first movie. After doing some work on it he abandoned the project to do Citizen Kane! I would have loved to of seen what Welles could have done with this story. Conrad's story is so riveting in part, because he himself served as a riverboat captain. High school teachers and college professors who have discussed this book in thousands of classrooms over the years tend to do so in terms of Freud, Jung, and Nietzsche; of classical myth, Victorian innocence, and original sin; of postmodernism, postcolonialism, and poststructuralism.

Just a taste of the plot reels you in! Marlow, the narrator of Heart of Darkness and Conrad's alter ego, is hired by an ivory-trading company to sail a steamboat up an unnamed river whose shape on the map resembles "an immense snake uncoiled, with its head in the sea, its body at rest curving afar over a vast country and its tail lost in the depths of the land" (8). His destination is a post where the company's brilliant, ambitious star agent, Mr. Kurtz, is stationed. Kurtz has collected legendary quantities of ivory, but, Marlow learns along the way, is also rumored to have sunk into unspecified savagery. Marlow's steamer survives an attack by blacks and picks up a load of ivory and the ill Kurtz; Kurtz, talking of his grandiose plans, dies on board as they travel, downstream.

Sketched with only a few bold strokes, Kurtz's image has nonetheless remained in the memories of millions of readers: the lone white agent far up the great river, with his dreams of grandeur,his great store of precious ivory, and his fiefdom carved out of the African jungle. Perhaps more than anything, we remember Marlow, on the steamboat, looking through binoculars at what he thinks are ornamental knobs atop the fence posts in front of Kurtz's house and then finding that each is "black, dried, sunken, with closed eyelids-a head that seemed to sleep at the top of that pole, and with the shrunken dry lips showing a narrow white line of the teeth" (57).

I especially became interested in Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness from the movie Apocalypse Now. There is a scene in the movie that shows Colonel Kurtz's nightstand in his cave. T. S. Elliott's poem the Waste Land is one of three books on the nightstand. The other two are Jessie L. Weston's book From Ritual to Romance, and J. G. Frazier's book The Golden Bough. Anyone wanting to understand the movie Apocalypse Now, especially the character of Colonel Kurtz, and what Milius and Copolla are trying to tell their audience need to read these three books as well as Conrad's Heart of Darkness!

As a graduate student reading in philosophy and history I recommend this book for anyone interested in literature, myth, history, philosophy, religion and fans of Apocalypse Now.

Daytime scents of nightmare horrors. Man and his insane ways - bushman, postman, commoner, who to blame? Unless you are familiar with the background of this stunning novel do yourself a favor and get the Norton Critical Edition. For a century Conrad's novel has drawn raves and rage. Each is left to decide where the sanity line lies, to the right or to the left. Upriver or downriver? Riveting every page of the way.

One of the must reads in literature. Probably my favorite novel ever written. The short length is decieving. It is not a novel to be blown through without thought. The themes of this novel resonate more in our day and age than ever before. Literary greatness.

Captain Macwhirr has a lack of imagination that both imperils the crew and may provide their salvation. He sails his ship the Nan-Shan directly into a typhoon because he is unable to envision weather worse than he has seen in the past. Macwhirr must find a way to hold his ship and crew together to weather the storm.

This book is so compelling because of the actions of the colorful and intelligent characters who swirl around Macwhirr. While critical of the captain when becalmed, they hold firmly to his unchanging, stolid figure when things look hopeless. In an uncertain situation, people will follow certainty -- even if its source is dubious. I think this nugget of truth and the reflections of it we see in real-life lend this novel its power. Macwhirr is certainty itself, more from mindlessness than steadfastness, and others follow.

Beyond the fascinating story and character-study is Conrad's stunning writing. He says so much with so little without the hard edges of Hemingway's prose. Conrad uses adjectives, but with a diamond cutter's precision.

Joseph Conrad was a master of language. In a brief but classic book, you will experience the incredible power of a typhoon while on a steamer as if you were there. Especially real is the scene in the chart room after the initial damage. It is very dark, and Captain MacWhirr lights matches to see his surroundings. Conrad's concise descriptions make you feel even the flame of the match as it burns down. If only this book were longer! I would have loved to know more about Captain MacWhirr's adventures. I HIGHLY recommend this book, as well as Conrad's "Heart of Darkness."

This novel is unforgettable. Conrad creates a sense of terror regarding the forces of nature that will stand up to any special effects that Hollywood can produce. The scene describing the panic below deck of the Chinese workers is one of the most powerful in literature. Not to be missed.

Taking maximum advantage from his long years at sea, and from his innate insight into the human soul, Conrad tells an outright and direct story about a huge typhoon in the midst of the Yellow Sea. But the book is not so much about the storm in itself, but about the human character and how it reacts to disaster.

Captain MacWhirr is famous for being an efficient, calm, dull and silent man, someone you would trust but not like. He seems to be rather unbrilliant, though, never understanding why people talk so much. The other characters are also interesting, especially Jukes, the "young Turk", vivid and dynamic; Solomon the head engineer, another wise man from the sea, and the disgusting and repugnant "second officer", the type of coward you don't want to be with in this kind of drama.

Human character, then, is revealed by limit-situations much more than at any other time, as war literature fans know, and this tale will leave you wondering how YOU would react if you had to make decisions in the midst of a horrible, and wonderfully depicted, typhoon.

Great narration on the audio book captures the British and Scottish dialects, but it's so smooth that it's easy to be lulled into dreamland. I had to go back to the excerpts on Amazon and replay parts of the tape to catch the true impact of Conrad's words.

Captain Mac Whirr, a short, fat, dull but dependable seaman, commands the Nan-Shan for a Siamese merchant firm. He writes twelve letter a year to his uncaring wife and has two children who barely know him. During typhoon season in the China Sea Jukes the first mate tells the Captain to change course to avoid the looming storm, but Mac Whirr will think of nothing but forging straight ahead. The Captain and Jukes as well as Solomon Rout the chief engineer (Long Sol, Old Sol or father Rout to his shipmates and Solomon Sez to his wife who quotes pearls of wisdom from his letters to anyone who'll listen) and the Bosun are at the center of the crisis that follows.

During a storm like no other the actions of everyman are almost predetermined by their biases, intrenched beliefs and in some cases ability to react. In six short chapters Conrad develops a great story of how different men behave in a fight for survival.

The tale of the last leg is told in pieces from letters home. The Captain's letter is barely read by his wife who has no idea what happened. Solomon's is sentimental and cherished by his beloved. Jukes reveals the most. Unsurprisingly we find that Captain Mac Whirr wasn't so dumb after all.

It would probably be better read than listened to and deserves at least four stars for the classic it is.

Anyone who has had to read either of these titles for school knows that teachers find a lot more in them than first meets the eye. Cliff Notes are a great way to gain insight into books and get a feel for the various interpretations. NOTE TO STUDENTS: You still have to read the book, folks. This just helps you understand it.

Reviewing CliffsNotes on Conrad's Heart of Darkness & The Secret Sharer is an excellent way to delve into the novel before reading the novel. Cliffsnotes provides background information about the author Joseph Conrad and summative narratives of the book.

Cliffsnotes helps the reader understand the plot and subplots of the novel as well as a hint about the motives of the characters involved in the conflict.

This Cliff Notes guide provides a clear and concise analysis and discussion of the famous Conrad short novel. The author discusses Conrad's personal background as it relates to the story, and the characters, themes, plot elements, the social and cultural views and philosophy of the author, and many other aspects of the book in an easy to understand way.

Conrad is one of the few novelists, which include Melville, Tolstoy, Dostoevski, Lawrence Stern, and Jonathan Swift, whose work continues to impress me and has aged well as I've moved into my more mature years. Partly this is because of the dark themes he treats, such as the violence and cruelty and savagery lurking just below the thin veneer of civilization, the brooding and melancholy power of his prose, and partly because English wasn't even his native language--he even learned it as an adult on shipboard.

Heart of Darkness is one Conrad's shortest but greatest works in this sense, and after having read it in high school, I recently reacquainted myself with it after 30 years. I was just as impressed as I was back then. Most readers and movie fans will know the story's influence on Coppola's "Apocalypse Now," which is many ways a tribute to the Conrad book. This is a great book by one of history's greatest authors whose themes continue to resonate today. All an observant and intelligent individual has to do today to realize that Conrad was right about man's innermost nature and that we have not progressed at all in the last 10,000 years of "civilized history" is to look at the current sad state of the world and of humanity in general.

I could not stand reading or watching anything about Vietnam for about 10 years. I eventually watched the movie " Apocalypse Now" I found it interesting but it did not relate to anything in the central highlands. Later I saw "Pork Lips Now" and could relate this to the movie. Finally someone told me that the whole thing was based on "Heart of Darkness " ISBN: 0486264645. So I decided to read the book. I found it fascinating and much better than the movie. However I could not see the forest of the trees and needed some help in showing me what I was looking at. Because I was not in some school class, I turned to the "Cliffs Notes" Of course my views don't match the notes exactly but they gave me some questions to ask and showed me the forest. The notes include:

· Life of the Author

· Introductions to the Novel

· Lists of Characters

· Brief Plot Synopses

· Summaries & Critical Commentaries

· Critical Essay

· Suggested Essay Topics

· Selected Bibliography

Later I found a movie that was much closer to the original story,

"Cannibal Women in the Avocado Jungle of Death" (1988)

Make sure you read the short story "Youth," as well as the "Heart of Darkness." Both are super, and youth is worth it for the following lines alone:

"And there was somewhere in me that thought: By jove! This is the deuce of an adventure--something you read about; and it is my first voyage as second mate--and I am only twenty--and here I am lasting it out as well as any of these men, and keeping my chaps up to the mark. I was pleased. I would not have given up the experience for worlds. I had moments of exultation. Whenever the old dismantled craft pitched heavily with her counter high in the air, she seemed to me to throw up, like an appeal, like a defiance, like a cry to the clouds without mercy, the words written on her stern: "Judea, London. Do or Die."

O youth! The strength of it, the faith of it, the imagination of it! To me she was not an old rattle-trap caring about eh world a lot of coal for a freight--to me she was the endeavour, the test, the trail of life. I think of her with pleasures, with affection, with great--as you would think of someone dead you have loved. I shall never forget her...pass the bottle."

The only thing missing is "the nigger of the Narcisscus", but you can't have everything. As complex as "the heart of Darkness" is, you may be better served by starting this book with "The end of the Tether", it is great in its apparent simplicity, yet it has its own complexity.

Conrad is the master tale- teller of English Literature. In this volume three stories, from three Ages of Life are included. The first 'Youth'is about a maiden vogage to sea, and the last "The End of the Tether" about an old man in his blindness. The story however which has been most written and thought about, and is considered one of Conrad's masterpieces is " Heart of Darkness".
It begins as a meditative reflection, a telling on the banks of the Thames to his friends by the veteran seaman Marlowe of a tale of exploration and disaster. He tells of a voyage into the heart of Africa in search of an enlightened European adventurer and merchant Kurtz . Kurtz has dealt in the deepest part of the jungle in trading in ivory. But what Marlowe comes to discover and see is someone who has seen into ' the heart of darkness' and dies crying out ,"The Horror, the Horror". Marlowe returns to Europe and civilization and tells Kurtz's fiancee that Kurtz's last words were her name.
But the tale is more than the story or the plot. With Conrad the meaning of the tale is the creation of the atmosphere and the meditation on the voyage throughout .It is in a kind too of bringing us into another whole mode of being in thinking about our lives.
" The heart of darkness" to the uncivilized African reality and it refers to the deepest recesses of the human soul, a soul which crosses through and transcends continents.As Conrad's great Literature does.

I first read "Youth" in my own youth, over 25 years ago. It has haunted me ever since. That it is difficult to describe why is, I believe, more a testament to Conrad's subtle skills than to my own undoubted incompetance as an expositor. On one level, "Youth" is little more than a tale of a ill-fated sea voyage, but its poignancy is unmatched by any work of short fiction I've ever come across. Good or bad, pleasant or horrific, our youth is what we all miss. The inclusion of this great novella and the magically exotic "End of the Tether" ought to be more than justification enough to buy this book--even if it didn't also include the justly famous, if sometimes obscure, "Heart of Darkness". No one should think he or she is familiar with Joseph Conrad who has not read all of these three wonderful tales. (If you can find a collection that also includes "The Nigger of Narcissus," even better.)

Mealer has written a testament to the importance of truth in reporting. Whether he planned at the beginning of his journey to become the eyes for Westerners like me on this struggle or not, he did and did it with the bravado that many of us have never had to summons in ourselves. His ability to document both the horrors and beauty of his experience and that of the Congolese he encountered is rare.

I have enjoyed Bryan's writing especially his non-idealized view of the cowboys and conflict junkies in Congo. Those who have read his taut, breathless, palpitating articles in Harpers will miss that immediacy in this book which is a bit more mellowed. He is a remarkable person who had made a journey that brought us important news. He gave himself to this story and to us in describing without embellishment or excuse his behaviors, reactions, and coping strategies. While he lamented he did not change the world's uncaring deafness to the cries of Congo, he has made a record of the savagery we all are responsible for creating, ignoring, and allowing to continue. Every time there is a report on the news of a single death or two in the continuing Israeli-Palestinian saga, i think of the millions dead in Congo that Bryan tried at least to witness. Thank you for that. I hope Ann Marie is taking good care of him!

[...]

Bryan Mealer, an editor and journalist for Harper's and Esquire takes us on a journey through the last seven years of the Congo, the nearly unknown and underreported but bloodiest civil war in recent history, where over 4 million people died. The first half of the book nearly breaks your heart as it describes a war of unprecedented savagery that imposed terrible suffering on civilians. The second half describes two journeys of hope against all odds, one up the fabled Congo River and one on the last operating rail line in the Congo. In turns lyrical and profoundly moving, All Things Must Fight to Live is a must-read if you care about Africa, peace and the dignity of each human being. Mealer proves a worthy successor to Joseph Conrad in his beautiful non-fiction narrative. Highly recommended.

Joseph Conrad is not only a Great Master of English literature, but also a man who wandered all over the world, by sea and land, producing for our delight a treasure of short stories as intense as novels, as well as a dozen novels as engaging as fairy tales. For some readers he is above all a writer of "sea stories", for others a creator of fabulous adventures; for many, an intuitive connoisseur of the human soul who gave birth to unforgettable characters. But there is more: Joseph Conrad inhabits his books, he is a friend who shows us a path, gently spelling out about a period in human history. He talks to the intelligence and the emotions. The bunch of essays of this wonderful companion, by the Cambridge fellows, gives us precious hints for travelling with Captain Conrad through the labyrinths and waves of the physical and virtual planet in which chance has placed us to live and die.

The series "Cambridge Companions" is somewhat uneven. Some titles are excellent, and others are inaccesible, tedious and really not "Companions" at all. This "Companion", however, to Joseph Conrad is probably one of the best in the series.

Beginning with a short biography of Conrad's life, there follow chapters on the short fiction, and several on most of the important of Conrad's works, such as "Heart of Darkness", "Lord Jim", "Nostromo" and "The Secret Agent". These are followed by sections on his late novels, Conradian narrative, his influence, and others. All of the Chapters are written in closed essay form by leading Conrad scholars, are easy to read, and well documented with footnotes. The final chapter includes a fairly comprehensive bibliography that wil be most helpful for students and scholars alike. It will provide a good starting point for further research.

If you are interested in Joseph Conrad, beyond reading his novels and short stories, then this book will be very helpful. I recommend it highly.

When Kurtz exclaims "The Horror! The Horror!" it is in the same sense that we would also cry out if suddenly faced with the unshielded countenance of God. At the threshold, just before we were either consumed, or absorbed, this too would be our cry.

This most remarkable of books is a dissection of the Western psyche. We start with the capital city of the living dead in Europe itself. This is a land of sleepwalkers who have never awakened- they live out their lives spinning castles in the air that ultimately mean nothing. This is the state of the modern Western mind. Theory and profit, but no soul. On the journey down the African coast we encounter the European battleship antiseptically shelling the coast. These are transplanted westerners hiding in the shells of their technological terrors while lobbing shells into the outer world- without really being contaminated by it. Then we reach the coast, where the high ideals preached in Europe are more and more obviously abandoned the farther inland one travels. When the land and the natives become "difficult", pure force and brutality are used to overcome and destroy.

In other words, if they will not be "westernized", turned into copies of us, they must be obliterated. Preferably while making us a profit.

Kurtz was a strong man. He was ambitious and powerful. Perhaps he kept up the charade of "civilizing" the natives and the land in the name "progress" longer than anyone else. He kept up these empty lies until he penetrated to the deepest core of the primeval jungle. And then, this hollow shell of ideals and greed imploded. You see, as Conrad points out, Kurtz was fundamentally hollow. Yet Kurtz didn't just die, he was too strong. Instead, into that vacuum rushed the primal force itself. Kurtz became what he hated the most- he became the soul of the jungle- because he had none of his own. He became an "animal" in its highest sense, a totally natural man. Indeed he became a natural King, as the native tribes recognized. He and the land were truly one.

It is a mistake to judge Kurtz by the standards of the city of the dead. Kurtz and his warriors sweeping across the jungle, taking heads and ivory as trophies, was as natural as lions running down gazelles.... Far more natural than the hypocritical, brutal, soulless, enslavement of the coastal natives in the name of "civilization"....

I read this book for a graduate Humanities course. Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, written in 1899 is a seminal work about the ills of colonialism, as well as a postmodern look at the subject of mankind. Conrad's book had a crucial influence on five important works of the twentieth century: J. G. Frazier's book The Golden Bough. Jessie L. Weston's book From Ritual to Romance, T. S. Elliott's poem the Waste Land, Joseph Campbell's Hero with a Thousand Faces, and Francis Ford Coppolla's movie Apocalypse Now, screenplay by John Milius, was based on Conrad's book. Another interesting fact is that this work was read by Orson Welle's Mercury Theater Players on the radio and was to be his first movie. After doing some work on it he abandoned the project to do Citizen Kane! I would have loved to of seen what Welles could have done with this story. Conrad's story is so riveting in part, because he himself served as a riverboat captain. High school teachers and college professors who have discussed this book in thousands of classrooms over the years tend to do so in terms of Freud, Jung, and Nietzsche; of classical myth, Victorian innocence, and original sin; of postmodernism, postcolonialism, and poststructuralism.

Just a taste of the plot reels you in! Marlow, the narrator of Heart of Darkness and Conrad's alter ego, is hired by an ivory-trading company to sail a steamboat up an unnamed river whose shape on the map resembles "an immense snake uncoiled, with its head in the sea, its body at rest curving afar over a vast country and its tail lost in the depths of the land" (8). His destination is a post where the company's brilliant, ambitious star agent, Mr. Kurtz, is stationed. Kurtz has collected legendary quantities of ivory, but, Marlow learns along the way, is also rumored to have sunk into unspecified savagery. Marlow's steamer survives an attack by blacks and picks up a load of ivory and the ill Kurtz; Kurtz, talking of his grandiose plans, dies on board as they travel, downstream.

Sketched with only a few bold strokes, Kurtz's image has nonetheless remained in the memories of millions of readers: the lone white agent far up the great river, with his dreams of grandeur,his great store of precious ivory, and his fiefdom carved out of the African jungle. Perhaps more than anything, we remember Marlow, on the steamboat, looking through binoculars at what he thinks are ornamental knobs atop the fence posts in front of Kurtz's house and then finding that each is "black, dried, sunken, with closed eyelids-a head that seemed to sleep at the top of that pole, and with the shrunken dry lips showing a narrow white line of the teeth" (57).

I especially became interested in Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness from the movie Apocalypse Now. There is a scene in the movie that shows Colonel Kurtz's nightstand in his cave. T. S. Elliott's poem the Waste Land is one of three books on the nightstand. The other two are Jessie L. Weston's book From Ritual to Romance, and J. G. Frazier's book The Golden Bough. Anyone wanting to understand the movie Apocalypse Now, especially the character of Colonel Kurtz, and what Milius and Copolla are trying to tell their audience need to read these three books as well as Conrad's Heart of Darkness!

As a graduate student reading in philosophy and history I recommend this book for anyone interested in literature, myth, history, philosophy, religion and fans of Apocalypse Now.

What are the crucial events that began the 20th century? Some would say the flight of the Wright Flyer at Kitty Hawk. Others point to Ford and the mass production of cars. Still others might point to the spread of AC electricity throughout US cities. I suggest this book's publication in 1902 as one of the crucial events that dawned the 20th century, as it was the first great strike against Western imperialism in Western literature, in a century that saw the fitful and violent decline of imperialism.

In his youth, the author had spent time traveling the Belgian Congo on a steamer. His experiences there caused him to write this short novel, probably the shortest one of the great 20th century works. His story revolves around Charles Marlow, a character based on Conrad himself. Marlow sails into the Congo as an ivory trader and meets Kurtz, a man legendary for his cruelty wholly unbound by civilization and polite society. Throughout his trip, he encounters the human cruelty visited upon African locals by European overlords. This includes slavery, corporal punishment, over-taxation of locals, and outright genocide.

All this is told by Marlow to a group of listeners upon a deck of a ship lying in the Thames River in London. Marlow himself sits in a Buddha-like pose, neither engaging his listeners visually or expressing emotion at his own horrific tale. This book is quite easy to read for most senior high school students and any university student as English is its original language, and being written around 1900, the vocabulary and style is quite similar to 21st century English. For those who are unfamiliar with colonialism in Africa, this is not a good introductory book. The book does not explore the roots (political, economic, historical) of white power in Africa, let alone the Congo. It is however a good accompaniment to a history lesson in African history. It is also a very visual book that provides stark images of human suffering and cruelty. It is, overall, a great work of English literature and critical expose of what imperialism and colonialism is.

I read this book for a graduate Humanities course. Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, written in 1899 is a seminal work about the ills of colonialism, as well as a postmodern look at the subject of mankind. Conrad's book had a crucial influence on five important works of the twentieth century: J. G. Frazier's book The Golden Bough. Jessie L. Weston's book From Ritual to Romance, T. S. Elliott's poem the Waste Land, Joseph Campbell's Hero with a Thousand Faces, and Francis Ford Coppolla's movie Apocalypse Now, screenplay by John Milius, was based on Conrad's book. Another interesting fact is that this work was read by Orson Welle's Mercury Theater Players on the radio and was to be his first movie. After doing some work on it he abandoned the project to do Citizen Kane! I would have loved to of seen what Welles could have done with this story. Conrad's story is so riveting in part, because he himself served as a riverboat captain. High school teachers and college professors who have discussed this book in thousands of classrooms over the years tend to do so in terms of Freud, Jung, and Nietzsche; of classical myth, Victorian innocence, and original sin; of postmodernism, postcolonialism, and poststructuralism.

Just a taste of the plot reels you in! Marlow, the narrator of Heart of Darkness and Conrad's alter ego, is hired by an ivory-trading company to sail a steamboat up an unnamed river whose shape on the map resembles "an immense snake uncoiled, with its head in the sea, its body at rest curving afar over a vast country and its tail lost in the depths of the land" (8). His destination is a post where the company's brilliant, ambitious star agent, Mr. Kurtz, is stationed. Kurtz has collected legendary quantities of ivory, but, Marlow learns along the way, is also rumored to have sunk into unspecified savagery. Marlow's steamer survives an attack by blacks and picks up a load of ivory and the ill Kurtz; Kurtz, talking of his grandiose plans, dies on board as they travel, downstream.

Sketched with only a few bold strokes, Kurtz's image has nonetheless remained in the memories of millions of readers: the lone white agent far up the great river, with his dreams of grandeur,his great store of precious ivory, and his fiefdom carved out of the African jungle. Perhaps more than anything, we remember Marlow, on the steamboat, looking through binoculars at what he thinks are ornamental knobs atop the fence posts in front of Kurtz's house and then finding that each is "black, dried, sunken, with closed eyelids-a head that seemed to sleep at the top of that pole, and with the shrunken dry lips showing a narrow white line of the teeth" (57).

I especially became interested in Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness from the movie Apocalypse Now. There is a scene in the movie that shows Colonel Kurtz's nightstand in his cave. T. S. Elliott's poem the Waste Land is one of three books on the nightstand. The other two are Jessie L. Weston's book From Ritual to Romance, and J. G. Frazier's book The Golden Bough. Anyone wanting to understand the movie Apocalypse Now, especially the character of Colonel Kurtz, and what Milius and Copolla are trying to tell their audience need to read these three books as well as Conrad's Heart of Darkness!

As a graduate student reading in philosophy and history I recommend this book for anyone interested in literature, myth, history, philosophy, religion and fans of Apocalypse Now.

I read this book for a graduate Humanities course. Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, written in 1899 is a seminal work about the ills of colonialism, as well as a postmodern look at the subject of mankind. Conrad's book had a crucial influence on five important works of the twentieth century: J. G. Frazier's book The Golden Bough. Jessie L. Weston's book From Ritual to Romance, T. S. Elliott's poem the Waste Land, Joseph Campbell's Hero with a Thousand Faces, and Francis Ford Coppolla's movie Apocalypse Now, screenplay by John Milius, was based on Conrad's book. Another interesting fact is that this work was read by Orson Welle's Mercury Theater Players on the radio and was to be his first movie. After doing some work on it he abandoned the project to do Citizen Kane! I would have loved to of seen what Welles could have done with this story. Conrad's story is so riveting in part, because he himself served as a riverboat captain. High school teachers and college professors who have discussed this book in thousands of classrooms over the years tend to do so in terms of Freud, Jung, and Nietzsche; of classical myth, Victorian innocence, and original sin; of postmodernism, postcolonialism, and poststructuralism.

Just a taste of the plot reels you in! Marlow, the narrator of Heart of Darkness and Conrad's alter ego, is hired by an ivory-trading company to sail a steamboat up an unnamed river whose shape on the map resembles "an immense snake uncoiled, with its head in the sea, its body at rest curving afar over a vast country and its tail lost in the depths of the land" (8). His destination is a post where the company's brilliant, ambitious star agent, Mr. Kurtz, is stationed. Kurtz has collected legendary quantities of ivory, but, Marlow learns along the way, is also rumored to have sunk into unspecified savagery. Marlow's steamer survives an attack by blacks and picks up a load of ivory and the ill Kurtz; Kurtz, talking of his grandiose plans, dies on board as they travel, downstream.

Sketched with only a few bold strokes, Kurtz's image has nonetheless remained in the memories of millions of readers: the lone white agent far up the great river, with his dreams of grandeur,his great store of precious ivory, and his fiefdom carved out of the African jungle. Perhaps more than anything, we remember Marlow, on the steamboat, looking through binoculars at what he thinks are ornamental knobs atop the fence posts in front of Kurtz's house and then finding that each is "black, dried, sunken, with closed eyelids-a head that seemed to sleep at the top of that pole, and with the shrunken dry lips showing a narrow white line of the teeth" (57).

I especially became interested in Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness from the movie Apocalypse Now. There is a scene in the movie that shows Colonel Kurtz's nightstand in his cave. T. S. Elliott's poem the Waste Land is one of three books on the nightstand. The other two are Jessie L. Weston's book From Ritual to Romance, and J. G. Frazier's book The Golden Bough. Anyone wanting to understand the movie Apocalypse Now, especially the character of Colonel Kurtz, and what Milius and Copolla are trying to tell their audience need to read these three books as well as Conrad's Heart of Darkness!

As a graduate student reading in philosophy and history I recommend this book for anyone interested in literature, myth, history, philosophy, religion and fans of Apocalypse Now.

I read this book for a graduate Humanities course. Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, written in 1899 is a seminal work about the ills of colonialism, as well as a postmodern look at the subject of mankind. Conrad's book had a crucial influence on five important works of the twentieth century: J. G. Frazier's book The Golden Bough. Jessie L. Weston's book From Ritual to Romance, T. S. Elliott's poem the Waste Land, Joseph Campbell's Hero with a Thousand Faces, and Francis Ford Coppolla's movie Apocalypse Now, screenplay by John Milius, was based on Conrad's book. Another interesting fact is that this work was read by Orson Welle's Mercury Theater Players on the radio and was to be his first movie. After doing some work on it he abandoned the project to do Citizen Kane! I would have loved to of seen what Welles could have done with this story. Conrad's story is so riveting in part, because he himself served as a riverboat captain. High school teachers and college professors who have discussed this book in thousands of classrooms over the years tend to do so in terms of Freud, Jung, and Nietzsche; of classical myth, Victorian innocence, and original sin; of postmodernism, postcolonialism, and poststructuralism.

Just a taste of the plot reels you in! Marlow, the narrator of Heart of Darkness and Conrad's alter ego, is hired by an ivory-trading company to sail a steamboat up an unnamed river whose shape on the map resembles "an immense snake uncoiled, with its head in the sea, its body at rest curving afar over a vast country and its tail lost in the depths of the land" (8). His destination is a post where the company's brilliant, ambitious star agent, Mr. Kurtz, is stationed. Kurtz has collected legendary quantities of ivory, but, Marlow learns along the way, is also rumored to have sunk into unspecified savagery. Marlow's steamer survives an attack by blacks and picks up a load of ivory and the ill Kurtz; Kurtz, talking of his grandiose plans, dies on board as they travel, downstream.

Sketched with only a few bold strokes, Kurtz's image has nonetheless remained in the memories of millions of readers: the lone white agent far up the great river, with his dreams of grandeur,his great store of precious ivory, and his fiefdom carved out of the African jungle. Perhaps more than anything, we remember Marlow, on the steamboat, looking through binoculars at what he thinks are ornamental knobs atop the fence posts in front of Kurtz's house and then finding that each is "black, dried, sunken, with closed eyelids-a head that seemed to sleep at the top of that pole, and with the shrunken dry lips showing a narrow white line of the teeth" (57).

I especially became interested in Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness from the movie Apocalypse Now. There is a scene in the movie that shows Colonel Kurtz's nightstand in his cave. T. S. Elliott's poem the Waste Land is one of three books on the nightstand. The other two are Jessie L. Weston's book From Ritual to Romance, and J. G. Frazier's book The Golden Bough. Anyone wanting to understand the movie Apocalypse Now, especially the character of Colonel Kurtz, and what Milius and Copolla are trying to tell their audience need to read these three books as well as Conrad's Heart of Darkness!

As a graduate student reading in philosophy and history I recommend this book for anyone interested in literature, myth, history, philosophy, religion and fans of Apocalypse Now.

This book contains four stories: Youth, The Secret Sharer, An Outpost of Progress, and Heart of Darkness. All four are very good stories, and the last 2 are absolutely first-rate.

Youth (1902) is a short, somewhat autobiographical account of a voyage to Bankok.

The Secret Sharer (1910) is a short story/novella about a young captain who encounters a fugitive on his boat with whom he identifies uncannily.

An Outpost of Progress (1896) is a short story about two white men living at an ivory trading station. Conrad said this was his best story, and, from compared to the other 3 stories in this collection, I'd say he's correct, although Heart of Darkness comes close.

Heart of Darkness (1910) is a novella about a man who becomes a steamer captain in Africa. A masterful work.

The book is $8 at Borders. There one or two printing errors, but they aren't that noticeable. I think they missed a period and added in a few accidental "I"s. Buy it; its a good collection of Conrad stories, containing both his most famous (Heart of Darkness), and his best (Outpost).

I read this book for a graduate Humanities course. Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, written in 1899 is a seminal work about the ills of colonialism, as well as a postmodern look at the subject of mankind. Conrad's book had a crucial influence on five important works of the twentieth century: J. G. Frazier's book The Golden Bough. Jessie L. Weston's book From Ritual to Romance, T. S. Elliott's poem the Waste Land, Joseph Campbell's Hero with a Thousand Faces, and Francis Ford Coppolla's movie Apocalypse Now, screenplay by John Milius, was based on Conrad's book. Another interesting fact is that this work was read by Orson Welle's Mercury Theater Players on the radio and was to be his first movie. After doing some work on it he abandoned the project to do Citizen Kane! I would have loved to of seen what Welles could have done with this story. Conrad's story is so riveting in part, because he himself served as a riverboat captain. High school teachers and college professors who have discussed this book in thousands of classrooms over the years tend to do so in terms of Freud, Jung, and Nietzsche; of classical myth, Victorian innocence, and original sin; of postmodernism, postcolonialism, and poststructuralism.

Just a taste of the plot reels you in! Marlow, the narrator of Heart of Darkness and Conrad's alter ego, is hired by an ivory-trading company to sail a steamboat up an unnamed river whose shape on the map resembles "an immense snake uncoiled, with its head in the sea, its body at rest curving afar over a vast country and its tail lost in the depths of the land" (8). His destination is a post where the company's brilliant, ambitious star agent, Mr. Kurtz, is stationed. Kurtz has collected legendary quantities of ivory, but, Marlow learns along the way, is also rumored to have sunk into unspecified savagery. Marlow's steamer survives an attack by blacks and picks up a load of ivory and the ill Kurtz; Kurtz, talking of his grandiose plans, dies on board as they travel, downstream.

Sketched with only a few bold strokes, Kurtz's image has nonetheless remained in the memories of millions of readers: the lone white agent far up the great river, with his dreams of grandeur,his great store of precious ivory, and his fiefdom carved out of the African jungle. Perhaps more than anything, we remember Marlow, on the steamboat, looking through binoculars at what he thinks are ornamental knobs atop the fence posts in front of Kurtz's house and then finding that each is "black, dried, sunken, with closed eyelids-a head that seemed to sleep at the top of that pole, and with the shrunken dry lips showing a narrow white line of the teeth" (57).

I especially became interested in Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness from the movie Apocalypse Now. There is a scene in the movie that shows Colonel Kurtz's nightstand in his cave. T. S. Elliott's poem the Waste Land is one of three books on the nightstand. The other two are Jessie L. Weston's book From Ritual to Romance, and J. G. Frazier's book The Golden Bough. Anyone wanting to understand the movie Apocalypse Now, especially the character of Colonel Kurtz, and what Milius and Copolla are trying to tell their audience need to read these three books as well as Conrad's Heart of Darkness!

As a graduate student reading in philosophy and history I recommend this book for anyone interested in literature, myth, history, philosophy, religion and fans of Apocalypse Now.