Joseph Conrad Books

There are several mistakes which might confuse students. The editor really needs to update this book.

I started learning Italian with Pimsleur and I nearly gave it up until I ran across this grammar. I mean, don't get me wrong, Pimsleur is really great, but... Italian is not the first foreign language I've learnt, and I'm used to (or maybe prefer) studying in a rather structured way, learning the grammar of the language while building conversational, reading and writing skills. So Pimsleur, which is based almost exclusively on listening and repetition, didn't work ideally for me...This book, however, was just the right thing that helped me move on and made the whole experience of learning with Pimsleur enjoyable. It is very user-friendly, highly suitable for beginners, and presented in a very clear way, making it very easy to find everything quickly. So whenever while listening to my Pimsleur CDs a "why" question arises in my mind, I open this book and find the answer quickly - really quickly.

Basically, I would recommend it to any beginner who started to learn Italian with one method or the other. Like I said, very clear, quite comprehensive and at the same time beginner-friendly. Even if you started learning Italian this week, this grammar is for you, because everything is laid-out in plain English. I believe it will also provide me with a convenient way to bridge the gap after I finish with Pimsleur to move on to more advanced speaking, reading and writing.

If you want to learn Italian or want to improve your knowledge of Italian grammar you should get this outline. It covers the whole Italian grammar and also includes drills which will help you to improve. However since it does not cover vocabulary I would recommend you the Langenscheidt Standard English-Italian dictionary and a vocabulary outline such as the Schaum's Outline of Italian vocabulary. 501 Italian verbs could also be of good use for you.

Re: SCHAUM'S OUTLINE OF ITALIAN GRAMMAR, THIRD EDITION, 2007.

While checking the accuracy of the book whose copies I have just received from McGraw-Hill, I have noticed three mistakes. The corrections are as follows:

1. The correct number of pages is 353 (not 330)!

2. On the front cover it is stated that there are 389 exercises with answers; NO: the exact number is 480 EXERCISES WITH ANSWERS.

Also, for the reader's benefit, I would like to mention that this THIRD EDITION has NEW FEATURES:

A) A new chapter on Comparatives and Superlatives, CHAPTER 4;

B) For the first time, in any of Schaum's Foreign Language Outlines, this Italian Grammar - Third Edition - offers end-of-book GLOSSARIES that comprise around 2,200 entries: ITALIAN-ENGLISH and ENGLISH ITALIAN, PP. 327-345;

C) A THOROUGHLY REVISED SUBJECT INDEX, PP. 347-353;

D) All CHAPTERS HAVE BEEN UPDATED;

E) A TOTAL OF 70 BRAND NEW PAGES HAVE BEEN ADDED;

F) Because of the recent switch from LIRA to EURO of the Italian Monetary System, the PREFACE has a long PARAGRAPH ON THE EURO detailing its use in GRAMMAR, AND THE WRITTEN FORM OF EVERY COIN and BANK NOTE.

G) On every page of the ANSWERS section appears the number of the CHAPTER
for easy reference.

-THANK YOU.

I've got a lot of Italian books and eserciziari (workbooks), but this one is special in at least 2 ways:
1. a lot of the italian words are marked for stress, which is absolutely necessary for more correct pronunciation; also the stress is done with a dot below which is much less visually distracting than, say accents. It is really easy to integrate the dot into the pronunciation
2. the exercises are interspersed into the explanations, rather than being all at the end of the chapter. This design helps because you know exactly what the exercises are about. Also it provides for more immediate reinforcement, and it keeps the learning in small steps ('baby steps').

Conrad Not at his best but still worth reading. Only downside is that the actual story is only 70 or so pages long. When you read Conrad you don't want the story to end. Half the book is taken up with forwards and introductions.

THE SHADOW-LINE is not one of Conrad's more obscure works, but neither is it among his most famous. It is short, beautiful and very accessible, and deserves to be read. It is about growing up, growing into ones self and conscience, with the understanding that sometimes external events come along to force the maturation process nearly overnight, and if you are lucky, you swim. As he states in the author's note that has accompanied the text since the second edition, his mind was on his son Borys and his comrades who were off fighting in World War I at the time. The landscape of his story, though, comes out of his own youthful experience at sea.

The unnamed first person narrator of THE SHADOW-LINE has already distinguished himself at sea but is still a young man given to youthful emotion and brashness. He has decided that despite friendships, his love of the sea and his skills, that there is an absence of meaning to his career and he is emphatically throwing it off at a South Seas port with the intention of going home. But then he is made the one offer he cannot resist: his own command of a full-masted commercial barque that has come to port after the captain had gone mad with disease and was buried at sea. The narrator quickly pushes to get back out on the open seas despite the fact that the first mate seems to be growing increasingly sick. Suddenly stuck out where he had originally wanted to be, the narrator is faced with the spread of illness across the crew and the discovery that his deceased predecessor had destroyed the ship's pharmacy in his derangement. The responsibility of the situation would be terrible in any circumstances, much less a first command.

The Penguin edition contains a lengthy critical introduction (ridden with spoilers, by the way), an annotated critical bibliography, and text notes. The latter define technical and arcane terms but also note where the story dovetails with facts of Conrad's own life. All of these are useful, but the novel itself is what is valuable here, with its memorable characters and honest descriptive passages of both exterior and interior worlds.

I enjoyed reading about the main characters experience of crossing the line from youthfulness into true adulthood. Conrad's eloquent, descriptive, and almost surreal writing style allows the reader to almost experience the stagnation, heat, and frustration that envelop the characters in this book. Perhaps not Conrad's best book, but certainly a good read, and it is quite short and to the point. Especially if you have an affinity for sailing and the power and majesty of the sailing vessels of old. I have always felt that there is a certain amount of effort required to enjoy Conrad's books, but I also feel that this, in a sense, is directly proportional to effort in life. The more you put in, the more you get out.

One of Conrad's best novels, less profound than Heart of Darkness, certainly, but more economically written and featuring a narrator that more readers will identify with.

The Shadow Line is a nice sequel of sorts to Conrad's great story "Youth." In that, he showed how we often interpret events differently as youngsters and years later as adults. In The Shadow Line, the young protagonist has to improvise under stress to deal with the big world he's grown into.

Like all Conrad's works, this is wordy and slow by current standards, but well worth the time and effort to read it. Great practice for high-school seniors and college freshmen who want to step up to real literature.

If you are ever aboard a ship with Mr. Conrad as it's captain, and you happen to notice a dead madman playing a violin while frantically following the vessel from beneath the stagnant waters of the South Asian seas, then get the H#ll off the boat before you and your crew start dropping like flies.
To me this novel was leagues better than Heart of Darkness. It's obvious that Joseph knew a thing or two about Human behavior as well as how to frighten the trousers off readers.

So well-crafted, so engaging, so powerfully written - it's hard believing "Chance" was written by Joseph Conrad. Not that Conrad didn't write great books, just that nothing in "Lord Jim," "Heart Of Darkness," or the rest of his tough, unsettling oeuvre prepares you for the wry warmth and hidden sunlight of "Chance."

Well, you do have Marlow again. The narrator of "Jim" and "Darkness" is back here telling another story about people he doesn't actually know first-hand. This time the central character is young Flora de Barral, set adrift in England by her father's scandal-plagued financiering. Haunted and helpless, her wide blue eyes giving her the look of "a forsaken elf," Flora takes what comes in life, seemingly unable to function for herself. Can she find her own way? Will she become ruthless if she tries?

All this may sound precious and twee, very much in the style of period romances more suited to Henry James than what you expect from the shamelessly macho Conrad, with his damned souls sailing heedless into typhoons. Yet Conrad makes this odd Merchant-Ivory production work by making you care for Flora in a way that draws you in more deeply than even the classic "Lord Jim" ever did. "Jim" was a philosophical novel; "Chance" is a uniquely intuitive one, more about feelings than ideas, yet quite brilliant in its concept all the same.

Published in 1913, one year before World War I would change forever the genteel world it so painstakingly describes, "Chance" was the one book by Conrad that clicked with readers in his own lifetime. It's been disregarded since, as modern readers embrace more dour Conrad fare like "The Secret Agent" and "Nostromo."

It's our generation's loss. Missing "Chance" is missing the other side of Conrad, the bleak nihilist discovering for once "the precise workmanship of chance, fate, providence, call it what you will." Other Conrad books feature broken-up narratives and odd framing devices, but the structural convolutions in "Chance" actually propel the story rather than hold it back.

Marlow's narration is a marvel of storytelling economy, carrying you across windswept moors and the high seas, not to mention a source of much dry wit as the rather mysterious misogynist fires many shots across the bow of womankind. "Mainly I resent that pretence of winding us around their dear little fingers, as of right," he snorts.

Is Flora exhibit A in this case against? Certainly she winds the helplessly infatuated Captain Anthony around her finger, despite her apparent total lack of reciprocal devotion. Flora does love, only it is in a flawed way, for her crabbed, corrupt father who believes the two of them too good for the rest of the world. Yet love can be a form of redemption despite itself.

Women, Conrad writes, can be fiendish and dumb, yet they are "never dense." "There is in woman always, somewhere, a spring." Realizing that spring here is at the heart of "Chance," and makes for Conrad's strangest triumph, the one book of his that not only makes you feel smarter for reading it, but happy to be alive.

My first Conrad read was Victory, and I have been hooked ever since. I chose Chance because it was Conrad's first commercial success, and I was curious to see what the public liked better than so many other great novels such as Lord Jim. As other reviewers have suggested, the ending must have been the difference. There is far more sweet than bitter, and it's usually the other way around in his books, especially the love stories. I suspect we may learn more from sad stories than from happy ones, but in any event, Chance is not without pain and suffering. As the capable narrator Marlowe repeatedly emphasizes, the novel's heroine, Flora, leads a difficult life. Her father is one of the great villans in literature. He really steals show from Marlowe--well, almost.
What I like most about Conrad's use of the narrator, particularly in Chance, is his role as an interpreter. In most novels, the reader must examine the story itself for the life lessons Conrad so uniquely presents. Marlowe enables Conrad to speak more directly to the reader, and I found him doing so more in Chance than in Lord Jim. There are a few arguably gratutious digressions--one about the differences between men and women comes to mind--but that's Marlowe.
The bottom line: if in reading Lord Jim, you really enjoyed Marlowe's character, you will love the extra depth and insight Chance provides. If you love Conrad, then I expect you will find this to be one his most enjoyable books. And, if you have never read Conrad, but are curious, this is an excellent novel to start with, for it cannot be sterotyped as a South Seas adventure novel full of Pacific atmosphere and nautical terms.

From the author famous for seminal works like The Heart of Darkness, The Secret Agent and Nostromo this novel is often left unmentioned within his repertoire of books. This is unfair. I would say Chance is Conrad's most beautiful story, the construction of the plot masterly from start to conclusion, and probably the only novel of his which genuinely leaves a good feeling and makes the reader smile. His handling of the material from Marlow the teller of the tale, the way the novels flits from present to the past and back again flawlessly, surprises one how so far ahead Conrad was compared to the standard straight-line story telling that dominated writing of that era. But bottomline is despite the technical perfection, a story would only succeed its telling if it has heart. Here Conrad never faltered and one feels for the heroine in the story, and it would be hard not to let out a whoop of bemused joy once the final page is turned. Simply sublime.

Chance is a wonderful Conrad novel that no one really pays attention to nowadays. True, it does not have the same magic as Lord Jim or Heart of Darkness, but it is brilliant in that Conradian way. It features the return of Marlow, so it is an especially interesting read for Conrad fans who have been with Marlow through other novels and stories. His role in this book is less hands-on. He does not have a very strong tie to the two characters he most discusses. He does, however, have a more active role in the actual narration. His audience this time is not passive, but questions his analyses and puts in their own ideas. A hilarious example:
"You are the expert in the psychological wilderness. This is like one of those Redskin stories where the noble savages carry off a girl and the honest backwoodsman with his incomparable knowledge follows the track and reads the signs of her fate in a footprint here, a broken twig there, a trinklet dropped by the way."

For those unfamiliar with Marlow, the commentator is refering to his capacity for putting together pieces of information to create a sketch of a person, and we have to filter through some of Marlow's pretensions to get a real view of what is going on in his story. At one point, he compares women to electricity. Both have been captured, "but what sort of conquest would you call it? (Man) knows nothing of it. And the greater the demand he makes on it in the exultation of his pride the more likely it is to turn on him and burn him to a cinder." Ah, Marlow, you rambling fool.

This is the novel that brought Conrad popular success, rather late in his career. It is one of his only female characters with a dominant role, but don't expect a strong feminist type. Flora de Barral is naive, at the mercy of others and their wills. I didn't feel quite as close to the characters, and Conrad tries a little too hard to philosophize on the role of chance and circumstance in our lives. Still, very enjoyable, witty, pure Conrad that you shouldn't miss.

This book is just perfect. It's very well written. Conrad shows an understanding of the predicament of women of his time. Conrad advances the plot though the voice of the characters, who tell a story, which involves another character telling a story, etc. At one point the tale is six levels deep; but such is the skill of Conrad that you do not notice and are never lost. One of Conrad's two or three best. A book I was sad to end because I was enjoying it so much.

This novel formed part of my english literature curriculum almost 40 years ago. That was the last time I read the novel. Conrad put much of his own experience into the book. He descibes with great power the life of Peyrol, a brother of the coast, returning home after a life spent at sea. Retirement is planned, but this is not to be through one final call to duty. Brilliantly atmospheric style brings to life the characters and countryside. Well worth revisiting for the first time since my school days.

I chanced upon "The Rover" after having finished all of Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey/Maturin novels. It's a hard act to follow, but after reading "The Rover" one might almost think that O'Brian learned a trick or two from Conrad -- for example, how to describe a captain's state of mind and thought processes during a sea chase.

The course of events in this tale takes some unraveling. Devices employed by Conrad include flashbacks, sudden gaps in the chronologic sequence, and implied dialogue. Consequently, the book reads more like a detective novel than one of O'Brian's straightforward sea adventures. That is to say, it takes a bit of detective work to follow the story.

My only regret is that I read the introduction to this edition first; unfortunately it gives away the ending. That may be the only reason why I didn't rate this book five stars.

The high renaissance of Conrad was Nigger of the "Narcissus", Heart of Darkness, Lord Jim and Nostromo period and what a period that was. These later works are Conrad in his manneristic style. That is to say his strengths as well as his flaws show. Works like Victory, Rescue, Arrow of Gold, and Rover are like the works written by an aging Prospero, but still Prospero. Rover is by far the best of these late works though each exert a unique charm to any lover of Conrad. Rover is like a last and momentary return to glory for this master of sea tales. I bought tha Malay editions of these late works and am very glad to have these hard to find books. Rover is a pleasing meditation on the coasts of France of a mariners return to land after a long life at sea. But looming on the horizon are English ships! The old mariner has one last adventure and it will cost you much pleasure as it unfolds to a final sea confrontation. My favorite thing about this book is the meditation on the bonds and ethics of sea comraderie which here takes precedence over those of nationality.

One of my favorite books of all time. Set in the period following the French revolution and war with Britain, the main character is an old salt "Peyrol" who brings home a prize ship and retires from the sea. There are hints that Peyrol's experiences at sea were more than just as a sailor but that he was a "brother of the barbary coast". The story is about Peyrol's search for place and love, something he had not experienced in his many years of roaming the seas. The book goes to the heart and is not your typical sea story but one once read will be remembered.

I would not have know of this book had I not seen the reference in the Afterward of Dewey Lambdin's book, "H.M.S. Cockerel," which dealt with the British evacuation of Toulon in late 1793. The book was originally published in 1923, and just reissued in 1999. It was the last novel completed by Joseph Conrad. It is the tale of the sailor, Peyrol, but also of poor, mad Arlette, her parents murdered in the massacre in Toulon after the British evacuation, who roams silently about, her shifting eyes forever seeking someone. The story starts in late 1796, after the temporary British evacuation of the Mediterranean, with Peyrol's arrival in Toulon in command of a prize ship. After setting the stage for the story, events jump forward to the 1803-1805 time period when Admiral Lord Nelson was in command of a fleet blockading the port. The story has a tendency to shift from scene to scene, with some flashbacks in time that sometimes make it a little difficult to follow the sequence of events, but overall it is well written and a very good tale. It is a shift from the usual naval adventure, but fills in a part of the events taking place in that time period.

I've re-read this I know not how many times, but it truly remains one of my favorite "classics." This journey through the Congo (and, in turn, through the protagonist's mind) is not only well written, but it truly draws the reader into the delusional stages of consciousness. It is worth every moment.

Conrad is among the most influential writers of our time, and his masterwork Heart of Darkness proves this. The concepts introduced in this book laid the groudwork for a new outlook on humanity, and his predictions to modern society, specifically the business world, are unparalleled. Read this book and it will give you a new view on the world.

Published in 1899, Joseph Conrad's HEART OF DARKNESS is like a fingerpost for its time, pointing the way of human preoccupations as they probed the final frontiers left in the world to discover, both geographically and intrapersonally, equipped only with a 19th century worldview. Where fear and discomfort with the unknown had once been associated with leaving land and heading into the open sea, Conrad now placed it in turning inward, turning from the sea up a river that penetrates an unknown land.

This is the story related one night to a group of London dwellers gathered on a dock boat in the safety and familiarity of the Thames. The speaker, a garrulous veteran seaman named Marlow, remembers how as a younger man he had pushed for the adventurous assignment of taking a steamboat up the Congo in search of a company's missing agent, Kurtz. His is a tale of horror, of what can happen to a person disengaged from civilization as it is known. This is an atmospheric exploration of knowledge, experience, innocence and morality. Conrad's language is complex but not opaque, has action but also a lot of description. As Virginia Woolf once said, Conrad could not write badly to save his own life.

That his vision requires rooting the horror in a hostile jungle culture and its customs can present a problem for a contemporary audience. The Modern Library has done a good job in introducing this edition with notable criticism, positive and negative, excerpted from across the 20th century, including pieces by Mencken, Virginia Woolf, E.M. Forster and, more recently, Chinua Achebe. This edition also includes passages from Conrad's 1890 journal when he was traveling in the Congo. Several different publishers are publishing this novel, but this edition is the best I found.

Heart of Darkness is a novel focused with strong imagery and the concepts of darkness and light as "darkness" is the heart of man while the "light" can be civilization as a whole. I found this book somewhat discriminating in the beginning but as a whole it has a very clear statement. I can see how it is one of the greatest novels but to me Marlow, the main character, has no character as he becomes obsessed with Kurtz and can instantly become him but does not. After finding what he is looking for, Marlow is still filled with the darkness. Even though I thought this book was somewhat interesting, I would not recommend it because I did not agree with Marlow's or maybe even Conrad's view of the Congo jungle and life in it with the darkness.

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.

The Rescue is another of Joseph Conrad's oft-overlooked later novels. It is significant because Conrad started it early in his writing career, but set it aside until much later, when as some critics have charitably characterized the great writer was in a creative decline, no doubt emboldened by Conrad's own words. Also noteworthy is the prominence of Tom Lingard, a familiar Conrad character from Almayer's Folly and An Outcast of the Islands. If you are a dedicated Conrad reader, then these attributes alone probably justify reading The Rescue. Could The Rescue explain old Tom Lingard's actions in Almayer's Folly? Probably not because the latter was Conrad's first novel, but it is interesting how Lingard's character evolves from the two stories. I have not read An Outcast of the Islands, so I cannot comment on Lingard in that novel.
In any event, there are more compelling reasons for students of Conrad and life in general to read this novel. It tells a tense adventure tale, or rather, a brooding love story set against island adventure (compare this to the magnificent Lord Jim, which tells a powerful, triumphant psychological story against an adventure backdrop). In The Rescue, the reader is treated to a complex male protagonist in Tom Lingard--a man of action who finds his characteristic resolve paralyzed by love's intense passion. Will he end up like the ethereal Captain Jorgenson? The object of his obsession is more inscrutable. Flora, the female character in Chance, seems more realistic than Mrs. Travers, the female in The Rescue, but I am just a man, and like Conrad, I suppose, can never really know what I have no way of experiencing. Somehow I got the impression Conrad felt this way about Mrs. Travers--ultimately unable or perhaps merely unconfident to visualize her completely. She is, like the love story itself, very unsatisfying.
In The Rescue, Conrad raises many questions about love. It was only after I just finished Conrad's "The Planter of Malata" short story (in Within the Tides) that these and other questions illuminated themselves in my thoughts--so much so that I felt compelled to post this review. The Rescue tediously builds to a consuming climax, after which the story abruptly ends in classic Conrad style. Without spoiling the ending, I tease only that it raises the quintessential Conrad themes of isolation and redemption. It does so, though, very obscurely, and only after reading other Conrad novels such as Chance, Lord Jim, Nostromo, Under Western Eyes, and Victory have these themes become apparent. Surprise, there is a complex psychological story here!
"The Planter of Malta," coupled with The Rescue, allows a short cut to discern Conrad's vision of isolation's certain death. Despite both being men of action (compare the thinker Decould in Nostromo and his end), the fates of the male protaganists in The Rescue and "The Planter of Malata" stand in stark contrast, and their differing abilities to deal with the consequences of their love affairs seems to have been determined by their respective social isolation/integration). While love paralyzes even the most resolute actors, at least they are in the game, unlike the thinkers who watch life go by around them. And, when love's cataclysmic confrontation ends in disunion, as it so often does, how will the misanthrope and the humanist each react? The Rescue and "The Planter of Malata" answer these questions, and offer a compelling lesson to act within human society. Make sense? Well, read both stories and I think you'll understand. If nothing else, Conrad will give you a fleeting, but clear glimpse into his philosophy of life.
The Rescue is neither Conrad's best adventure story, nor his best love story. It is long, tedious, and ultimately unsatisfying. Nevertheless, when paired with "The Planter of Malata," or even a few of Conrad's better know and regarded novels, the veil is lifted and attentive students will be rewarded. And, the ending, at least, is somewhat hopeful by COnrad's standards, though it is no fairy tale. For that, you must Chance.

As an avid Conrad fan, I found it refreshing to come across a book which I didn't know existed. Not his best work, but well worth reading because Conrad always comes through with descriptive scenery, and interesting character interaction. KLM

Author writes about true piracy in Caribbean ca. 19th cent. Conrad writes with historical and experiential knowledge.

The familiar Conrad hero Captain Tom Lingard(Outcast of the Islands) comes to the rescue of an English pleasure yacht that has foundered in the shallows just as war is about to break out between Malay tribes. Tom has war supplies including gunpowder stored in his own boat that has been turned into a fort and Tom's decisions will greatly effect the outcome of the war. Meanwhile though there is the English problem which Tom sees as being just that until he spies on board a lovely woman. Thats enough to distract our hero from his more pressing war time duties. Romantic Tom recalls Lord Jim and is in fact Jims brother, but he is not as complex or as troubled as Jim was so this is more a tale of pure adventure. External events take precedence over internal conflicts and so the adventure can be enjoyed for just that. Not one of Conrads most important works but still it exerts a lot of appeal. Anything by the best writer ever of sea and island tales is worth my time.

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.

Wow was I surprized at the flimsiness of this book. Not only is it touted as the inspiration for the Coppela film, Apocalypse Now, but it is viewed as the precursor to the truly great novel by VS Naipal, Bend in the River. So I thought it would be worthwhile to read this book carefully.

What I found was an obscure story about a guy who goes nuts in deepest Africa and indulges in unspeakable atrocities to create some kind of order, at the least in his deteriorating mind. Alas, that synopsis might make it sound interesting, but the execution is so poor - and not even the writing is particularly good - that is isn't even fun to read.

It is pure nihilism, beyond atheism, beyond hope or even existentialism. Maybe this was viewed as original at the time it was written, but there is so much better that has been done on the subject since the 19C that this pales by comparison.

So I would not recommend this book except as a scholarly exercise. Indeed, there are few people I know who count themselves among the "well read" who have in fact read it. So many classics are like that!

I'm sure many readers will find this a difficult read, the prose almost as dense and impenetrable as the jungle that Marlowe travels down in order to find his truth. Still, having only read it through once, I did get enough out of it to believe that further study will reveal some profound light in the heart of darkness. At only 100 odd pages, it does seem to have been designed by the author to be returned to again and again, small enough to swallow, but needing longer to fully digest.

Some passages are genuinely quite unnerving, with a sense successfully conveyed of a man who has cut away the veneer of civilisation, looked into the soul of humanity, and seen something truly disturbing. In short, this book is about nihilism, about the flimsy and shifting world of language that alone seperates humanity from the other animals (but only in a delusory sense). As the previous reviewer noted, Kurtz's power is almost wholly cast by his words, a potency maintained even whilst barely existing as a decaying, dying body. The story juxtaposes the power of language, through the dense tale spun by Marlowe of the mythical but ultimately physically insubstantial Kurtz, with the raw natural savagery of the African jungle and its muscular and visceral inhabitants. Language is what seperates the human from the animal, but in the heart of darkness, language, and through it civilisation, is revealed to be a false god created ultimately to serve animal passions.

Moreover, the novel contains the message that when man tries to shed his 'civilising' light on those judged to be savages, he merely succeeds in laying bare the moral emptiness of his own soul. Something to think about and to fruitfully connect with the war in Iraq, just as others did with Vietnam.

The "conquest of the earth," which is the exploitation of one people of color by another, "is not a pretty thing when you look into it." These words, among the first spoken by Marlowe, prepare us for the actual experience of seeing into the "truth of things," which for Marlowe and Kurtz will be "the horror." But Conrad's fable is far more than an exposing of colonizing ways. Marlowe makes it clear that the real horror exists within the human soul and that our failures to recognize and enunciate its existence is the difference between being saved or damned in a world whose bright shining lies continually lead us astray.

In reading the story the first time, it's probably best to go for "content," extracting as much plot and characterization as possible from Conrad's multi-layered, impressionistic narrative. Marlowe says his mission is to make us "see," perhaps the motivation for Coppola's film adaptation, "Apocalypse Now," which like Marlowe's narrative is centered on three stations that mark Marlowe's trip up the river, his journey into the heart of darkness.

When reading the narrative a second time, ignore the plot as well as the "sights" Marlowe provides. Listen very hard to the words of Marlowe's narration. Notice the "tone." Marlowe will vary it, even in a single sentence, from amusing understatement to biting irony to sarcastic overstatement. When Marlowe encounters Kurtz, he finds less a visible human speciimen than a sound. And finally, in the last 5-6 pages of the novel, as Marlowe prepares to tell Kurtz' story to the'"Intended," the darkness will become so pronounced there is nothing left to see. It literally "screams" at Marlowe who, in spite of its injunction, can pronounce only a lie.

For many readers of the book, as well as apparently Marlowe's listeners in the narrative, the story will amount to little more than a lie, or an impenetrable narrative of foggy incomprehensibility. Sadly, literary art this complex, obscure, and disturbing will rarely reach the "intended," whether it's Marlowe's fiance or his audience on board the ship or the readers the author might wish to enlighten. But for the attentive listener who becomes caught up in Conrad's insistent and compelling music, the sound of the "horror" will take up permanent residence in consciousness, resonating with each new reading of this inescapably archetypal text--whether it's Conrad's version of the story or one by Sophocles, Dante, Shakespeare, Coleridge, Hawthorne, Tolstoy, O'Connor, Welles, Coppola or, recalling even George Bailey's confrontation with the nihilistic abyss, Frank Capra.

Ok, so I usually give books a chance, even if they are a class assignment but this book just made me aggravated. I mean it seems to enforce the strategy of using 40 words when 1 will do and just goes on and on and on. I mean I know that this book is classic and Conrad is an acquired taste but I just couldn't stand having to get through it. The only reason I was able to finish it at all was because I had the flu and was half delirious so I wasn't paying attention to what I was reading anyways (although this was only for the last 50 pages of it and my edition had like 180 pages). Anyways, I understand this is supposed to be a classic. It just isn't my taste.

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.

Conrad's language is impeccable. He writes in a crisp, precise and succinct manner. And this novella is perhaps one of his grandest works. It served as the backbone of the plot of "Apocalypse Now." This epic Oliver Stone movie about Viet Nam was fully adapted from Conrad's tale.

The book is highly autobiographical. Conrad was a river boat captain in the Congo during the time that the area was being highly exploited for its Ivory. He observed cruelties and horrors that were not fully comprehendible by modern man. He endured sickness and hardship; which ultimately destroyed his health to the point that he had to give up his river runs in the Congo. But his memories and his hatred of what he saw was intact.

In Heart of Darkness Conrad describes a man who has looked deeply into his soul. This deep introspection and understanding into the deepest depths of human depravity had been seen by Mr. Kurtz. He had looked at them with eyes wide open and integrated the most horrible of humanity into his experience. The book drips with references to death. Yet the references are not superfluous.

The book shows the horror of the exploitation of the Europeans. They did all and more than the Americans did in the era of slavery. The cruelest of cruelty. The most abominable conditions. The death and destruction. All of it was present in the Congo as well. And Conrad saw it, up close and personal.

The book is truly a classic. It is nice to have a hard cover edition around. It is recommended to all serious readers of English and American literature.

Those not familiar with Exalted, please seek out the Core Rulebook first.

The Second Edition update of the Sidereals is a superb book, made much more readable, understandable, and enjoyable by the removal of information on Yu-Shan to the Compass of Celestial Directions book of the same name. A few of the charm mechanics need fixing, but errata can be found on the White Wolf Exalted Forums or the White-Wolf Wiki.

It is what I was looking for, and what I wanted. No problems in it's shipping, and it arrived in excelent condition.

So far I have read half the book and it is amazing!

Lots of new stuff, amazing intrigues and even more paranoia for the Viziers of Creation, Charms have been adapted to new rules and that leaves em pretty ok, Many of them have been powered down and more of them defined, and the Exalted Curse laid upon them has been redefined and reviewed as to have now a system.

I like the way that now Siderials are not as powerful as in the first edition where they could best a solar with no trouble. Now they are more like a celestial-type Exalted with pros and cons. Lots of stuff to do, YuShan and all Creation at their fingertips. New ideas about the Loom of Fate and a Sixth Maiden.

Just have to finish it soon and I can tell it is a good supplement for a good Exalted chronicle. The only Siderial Martial Art is the Violet Bier of Sorrows. Just one Celestial Sorcery spell. Plenty of names of new gods that work on Yu-Shan (that I guess will be stat-defined in the upcoming book of Sorcery IV)

So far... great book!

One of the best bios on this exceptional writer and very complex man. Stape opens the life of Conrad to those who may not know much about him, but love his immortal stories. I learned so much from this new biography and highly recommend it to anyone interested in this incredible writer.

Joseph Conrad was such an exceptional man. Starting life in very challenging circumstances, losing both mother and father early, he nevertheless found support and adventures more than enough to fill any man's life.

And yet he still had room to change; to stop being a mariner and travel the world, to settle in a new and different country, to write in a language that was not his first - both short stories and novels.

Conrad, it seems, carried injury that rarely left him. And yet he struggled on, often with the driving need for money. Fortunately for us, he did have supportive mentors. Unfortunately for him, not only was it money that drove him - it was also the need to have something to publish that the publishers demanded. And this did compromise his novels - not only in the critics' eyes, but in the author's as well. He just had to drive the thing to completion. When I read 'The Secret Agent' I sensed that the writing was better in the second half of the novel (and indicated so in my Amazon.com review). It didn't surprise when I read in Mr Stape's biography that Joseph Conrad was so dissatisfied with the novel (it was originally published as a serial) that he rewrote the second half of it.

Despite these shortcomings there are few writers who can be so luminous in their writing, and who can hold many trains of narrative in the one stream of story telling.

I liked this biography and yet it didn't rise to the standard of Swafford's biography of Brahms for me. It seemed to be in a bit of a rush, even a summary - could it be that Mr Stape's publisher was ....

recommended other reading:
'Under Western Eyes' - Joseph Conrad
'Heart of Darkness' - Joseph Conrad
'Chance' - Joseph Conrad
'Johannes Brahms: a biography' - Jan Swafford

When you hear Lord Jim, Heart of Darkness, or The Secret Agent, does "Joseph Conrad" come to mind? Reading about Conrad's jinxed life turned those books more intimate and all the more tragic.

John Stape opens his Conrad biography with notes and appendices as you into Conrad's life. Without these pieces, any Conrad non-professional would most likely be lost, as Conrad's world was so vastly different from anything imaginable.

Born to Polish parents, he was exiled to northern Russia before he could read. His father, a Polish Revolutionary, was forced to flee after defying the Tzar. His mother had died in Siberia when he was 7; then at 11 he became an official orphan. At 16 he moved to France and then moved onto England, where he became a sailor with the Merchant Marines. This job fuelled his writing power, though he led such a brilliant life in solitude.

Conrad quickly married working-class, Jessie. As with the sailing voyages, his fragile marriage also gave birth to plots and the passion put into his earlier short stories. Fears that his wife may leave him should he become delusional was one main plot, and in another a wife killed her husband due to his sexual advances-which he wrote on his honeymoon.

Conrad who seemed to attract bad luck. As he was finishing a lengthy novel, a tipped oil lamp destroyed the manuscript, as another was being shipped on the Titanic. Enough said. Misfortune and scarring events gave him material to write fictional portrayals of his own experiences. On a voyage through the Belgian Congo, he produced Heart of Darkness, even though his health and morale were shattered by the experience.

Stape writes an eloquent portrait of Conrad's life. Overall, the book was so intensely in tune with what one could imagine Conrad's experiences to be, that I had to balance out the depressing read with something lighthearted.

Clearly Stape is a Conrad expert. Despite the absence of good fortune during Conrad's life, the literary community was blessed with a writer no less than a genius.

Armchair Interviews says: If you love biographies that paint vivid and realistic pictures of a famous writer, this is for you.