Robert Frost Books

Love the Sunny Randall series. Easy and fun to read. This is the fourth book in the series.

I love Robert Parker, but think he is a bit less successful writing the female "voice", even though he insists Joan helps him with this! Sunny still sounds a bit like Spenser to me. But I love reading these books anyway.....

I've read all four books in the Sunny Randall series so far. My general feeling is that Sunny's psychology is far more interesting than the mysteries in these books.

In this book, we have sort of a flashback to the first book in the series, "Family Honor," where Sunny takes in one of the characters in her investigation to protect her. In this case, it's 20-year old Sarah who is convinced she's not her parents' biological child despite her parents' assertions to the contrary. Using some of her trust fund money, she hires Sunny to investigate and it isn't long before Sarah's life is threatened along with Sunny's. As we've come to expect, Sunny will draw on her ex-husband's organized crime family to help her out in a tough spot or two...and her pal Spike. And she'll gush over her dog Rosie at least once every page or two.

The mystery in this book gets solved, but not real tidily. We're left with some dangling threads regarding Sarah, Sarah's real mother, Sarah's adoptive mother, and few other characters. The most enjoyable part of the book wasn't really the mystery (that part was actually a bit lame), but rather Sunny finally starting to come to grips with why she can't live with ex-husband Richey or without him. Her shrink, Dr. Susan Silverman, manages to sound like every cliche we've ever heard: "How did that make you feel?" "Let's talk about that." "What do *you* think it means?" Her practice seems to consist entirely of asking 5 or 6 questions comprised of less than 10 words in every 55-minute session, and then listening to Sunny do her own psychological assessments based on those handful of questions.

Out of the four Sunny Randall books so far, I'd rank them as follows:

1) Family Honor
2) Shrink Wrap
3) Melancholy Baby
4) Perish Twice

In other words, we're learning more about Sunny, but the books themselves aren't necessarily getting better.

For Spenser and Parker fans, this latest effort is a bit dissapointing.
The plot seems to drag, none of the characters are a bit likeable, and there are some scenes where you can't help but picture Spenser in a skirt (Ugh).

Parker's writing is a bit too formulaic for him to make the jump from a tough-guy detective novel to a tough-woman detective novel....the characters are too similar.

Boston college student Sarah Markham is convinced that she was adopted and hires PI Sunny Randall to find out the truth. Sarah's parents insist that she isn't adopted but they say they can't find her birth certificate and they both refuse to take a DNA test. The Markham's are so vague and uncooperative when Sunny questions them she is sure they are lying and sets out to find the truth about Sarah's birth. Sunny is also finding out some truths about herself - her ex-husband is getting married and she sees a psychiatrist (Susan Silverman of Robert Parker's Spenser series) to deal with her conflicted feelings about her, her ex, and her parents.

This is the first non-Spenser Robert Parker book I've read and I was a bit apprehensive thinking Sunny would just be Spenser in a skirt. I was pleasantly surprised. Sure, Sunny has some of the same characteristic traits as Spenser, including being a dog owner and having a sidekick she can call on if she's in trouble (gay Spike is Sunny's Hawk). But Sunny is a more complex character than Spenser and her visits to Susan Silverman, interspersed with her search for the truth about Sarah's parents, add a dimension to this book that's missing from the Spenser series. While it's interesting and refreshing to see Susan Silverman from the viewpoint of someone other than Spenser, Parker's a little too in love with his own character and his repetitive descriptions of Susan's manicured nails wear thin very quickly. Parker's writing is mostly dialogue driven and doesn't vary much beyond "I said", "he said", and "she said". Still, Parker has a keen sense of humor and his new character, Detective second-grade Eugene Corsetti, is a perfect example of Parker at his best.

This was a quick, enjoyable book to read.

If you're looking for information about donor insemination, this is not the place to find it. You won't find anything about ovulation, LH surges, or the pros and cons of using frozen sperm in this book. This is a book strictly for heterosexual couples about the "emotional journey" of deciding to use donor insemination when they realize the husband is infertile.

Honestly, I felt this book was "just okay". It was informative, but a dry read. Also, it focuses mostly on couples.

My wife and I have read this together as we started our journey with DI. Yes, the book does concentrate on heterosexual married couples, but it states that in the forward. Even if you aren't the norm, there is plenty of general info on DI that is useful for anyone using this method to create a family. Our favorite parts were the personal stories and experiences. They are sprinkled throughout the chapters and really gave us a chance to talk out some of our different thoughts and emotions.
There is technical/medical information, but it is not very in-depth. Most of the book deals with the emotional aspect of DI. Overall I highly recommend it.

I am a DI adoptee and I recommended this book to my mother. She really felt validated by the book. As an DI adoptee I also recommend "Adoption Forum" by Kasey Hamner. It covers DI from all angles. And those touched by DI are represented in many of the other topics. Oh, and remember, always disclose!!

This book was a wonderful tool for my husband and I when we were exploring DI as an option. This is the one book that truly addresses our unique infertility situation. None of the other infertility books spend more than a page talking about using donor sperm. This was wonderful!

The few finished essays that Robert Frost offered to his public ("The Figure a Poem Makes," e. g.) are so extraordinarily memorable, so full of canny, down-to-earth shrewdness and overall scintillation that I picked up his _Notebooks,_ edited by Robert Faggen in this attractive, 809 page book from Harvard with anticipation.

I am sorry to say that I was disappointed. The drafts or starts of poems seemed to me mostly flaccid and unfocussed. Of course, these are drafts; they were never meant to be read. Frost seems to have used most all his best lines in his published work. The work here never breaks into the dead-on, stunning revelations, the suggestive aphoristic brilliance of the crystallized Frost. Moreover, there are pages and pages of fragments like "A few words of policy now and then A stroke of policy now and then." That is either obvious and not with saying, or obscure in reference. There are thousands of phrases here that hold no meaning by themselves--e. g., "Not fantastic." So what? What is not fantastic? "What is philosophy. Education as inuring. Tom-tom in poetry." What is that all about?

Faggen has dutifully chased down everything an editor could be asked to chase down--references, dates, connections to other Frost material, sources of quotations. He has reproduced these notebooks with all their cross outs so indicated (and faithfully crossed out), and indicated when Frost switches from pen to pencil. On occasion there are nuggets--blasts against Roosevelt and the New Deal, bracing comic flashes ("And oh but it was fetching / To see the wretches retching"), and insight breaking through obviousness or obscurity every seventy pages. However, as a whole I don't think all this is worth it by itself, nor am I sure how much it helps read the Frost that is worth it, which is the Frost we already had.

This volume includes the forty- eight notebooks which Frost wrote during his lifetime from the 1890's to the 1960's. It contains much about Frost's credo as a poet, and much of his aphoristic thought about a whole range of matters from the political and educational to the philosophical and poetic. Meghan O'Rourke in an outstanding review of the book in the 'Los Angeles Times' points out its inherent contradictions in bringing together two sides of Frost the popular public poet and the dark and difficult skeptic.
" The author was a set of inconsistencies: a Romantic bent on critiquing Romanticism; a pragmatist and quasi-Social Darwinist who wasn't quite convinced of his own views. As Faggen points out in an insightful introduction, Frost returns again and again to the feeling that life "can consist of the inconsistent."

Frost defined himself as an exception in all things, and he truly made a difference by taking the road not taken.
There is a stubborn recalcitrant quality to both his personality and prose which often give the reader a hard-won pleasure in struggling to understand his often deceptively simple sentences. Often only through indirections could his directions be found out.
This is an invaluable work for all students of Frost and all lovers of his poetry.

Why am I skeptical about "the dark side of Frost". Academics need to get their work published to get tenure or to get promoted--why not claim that one of America's greatest poets had secrets and a shady past?
However, having heard about academics who studied the Frost material at UVA and Pinkerton Academy, I challenge other scholars, poets, and experts in handwriting to compare Robert Faggen's work with the original sources. The Financial Times said that Faggen "meticuously catalogued and cross referenced Frost's thoughts." If this is true, why did Faggen claim that Frost's handwriting was "abyssmal" and utterly illegible in places, and therefore had to do a lot of guessing as to what Frost had written. Other scholars have found the handwriting legible. Also, Faggen's friends assert that he reprinted all the Frost material in its entirety. I beg to differ--having noticed some glaring ommissions. I hope that a competing publisher will give another scholar or starving graduate student a chance to present an alternative transcription of this material to the reading public. With no other text to compare it to, we are asked to accept it as the gospel according to Faggen.

Robert Faggen has forever changed the course of poetry scholarship with this finely tuned and sensitively annotated collection of all the known notebooks of Robert Frost, arguably America's most famous and controversial poet.

Faggen's comments are helpful without being intrusive and the material itself is all Robert Frost without interpretation or added punctuation. Previously this material would have only been accessible by visiting the special collections of the major institutional libraries that keep it under archival lock and key.

It's the kind of book you can open at random and find something fascinating to read. However, if you take advantage of the well organized and cross-referenced notes, the context in which Frost created these notebooks becomes much clearer, and the poet's creative process is revealed.

Recently, a great deal of publicity was generated when the Barrett library at the University of Virginia uncovered a previously unpublished early poem by Frost in their archives - here in this one collection are 688 pages of material that only a few scholars have ever seen. Frost fans should be lighting some serious fireworks in celebration of such an important addition to the Frost canon.

I had read and heard Frost too often and had come to think of him as an old poet, too familiar, too crotchety, too tired. This volume re-ignited my interest in his life and his poetry because more than any other volume it reveals his thinking. He thinks all sorts of ways other than poetically, and thinks about poetry as well as anyone ever has.

He acknowledges that the poets "at whose metric feet we worshipped and bowed down were Arnold Keats Browning Tennyson Kipling (wooden music xylophone) Emerson Longfellow" and declares "Poetry is that in us that will not be terrified by science." In Notebook 17 (26-30) he lists 39 things that can be done with a poem besides read it.

For me, this volume makes him more intriguing and much more exciting than he has ever been before. I have gone back to the poems with enthusiasm. Readers are advised to sample back and forth to get a sense of the whole before starting from the beginning and reading through: the first notebooks are by no means the most interesting, or even typical.

As Robert Faggen's introduction emphasizes, this volume presents Frost as a first-class aphorist, comparable to Francis Bacon and Friedrich Nietzsche. Faggen's intimacy with Frost's life, poetry, and other works adds much to the introduction and notes. This must have been an exceedingly difficult task.

A prior reviewer objected to the "dark" Frost. Faggen explains that by "dark" Frost meant a great deal, not least the need to grope in the dark in order to advance. The notebooks have meditations on the dark, including this from Notebook 23:
"Dark darker darkest.
"Dark as it is that there are these sorrows and darker still that we can do so little to get rid of them the darkest is still to come. The darkest is that perhaps we ought not want to get rid of them."

I have two complaints: (1) I wish the book had a better index. Only names and book and poem titles are indexed. Of course, any kind of subject index would have been laborious, but it would have added greatly to value of this very rich book. (2) The proofreading for the editor's introduction and notes is atrocious, so plainly bad that I worried about the accuracy of the transcriptions. For instance, this note: "Enoch Lincoln (1788-1829), a Congressman for Massachusetts and Maine when the two states were one. When Maine was made separate, he represented that state from 1921 to 1926."

Even so, a huge book, hugely wonderful.

Marthe Bibesco was member of the Romanian nobility. Acquainted with the vast network of aristocracy that existed before its demise in World War I, she was celebrated in the pre-war Salons of Paris for her literary talent and her beauty. Marthe partook of Proust's world and knew many of those who influenced characters in his great opus. During the first world war she worked as a red cross volunteer in Bucharest. She became a friend and advisor to British Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald and supported Romania's support of the Allied forces in both World Wars. In later life, she lost her wealth and her family in the communist take over of Romania. Marthe continued to support herself through her prolific writing and became a confidante to De Gaulle in the last part of her life. Marthe's life is worth a close examination because it spans the decaying world of monarchy and princelings to the Cold War of communism and democracy. Despite the turbulence of her life, her literary fame and awards, and her involvement with European politicians she is virtually unknown today in the West. This book is the first English language biography of her and will, with hope, redress that problem

In November, 1920, my grandfather was born, son of the cousin of Princess Marthe's husband, Prince Gheorghe Bibescu. I found 'Enchantress' an absolutely fascinating book, as Sutherland has managed to open a gateway of knowledge about my family history, much of the personal details peviousely inknown to me. I never truely realised the fame in literary circles that my grandfather's aunt held.
Princess Marthe Bibescu led a fascinating life. She experienced extreme wealth, power and fame, as well as that where she was forced to write to earn a living for her family, under the devastating regime of communism. Brought into a world of glittering jewels and fine titles by her fun loving princely husband, Marthe had to dismiss her natural humbleness, but failed, leading to a stormy marriage. Christine Sutherland's work should be commended. She has entered the minds of Romanian elite, and brings to us a look in af the lives of some of Europe's most influencial people. The details within the book are astounding, everything is described as if the author was standing with the princess, almost as a hand maiden every step of the way. Only she has the ability to provide us a gateway into a life of desperation, a life of privelage, and a life wasted with a quest to find eternal happiness. A truly dramtic life, both blessed and cursed, is uncovered within 300 pages of prose that intrigues the mind. After the first magical page, you would be mad to not see why the book is titled "Enchantress".
I'm not a critic. I'm just a relative of this extraordinary princess, who thuroughly enjoyed a compilation of humourous, dramatic, and tragic tales of a life of one of Europe's most substancial ladies. A book that will open the eyes and the mind.

The life story of this remarkable roumanian writer, Marthe Bibesco - a muse present at the theater of major events in 20th century Europe - unfolds a vivid picture of the aristocracy, the refined belle époque and the exquisitely cosmopolitan intelligentsia to which she belonged and in which she flourished. The reader will certainly relish the impeccable account of events, the love stories, the war stories, the society gossip of celebrities and the descriptions of social and political gatherings where history was shaped and, although he might come to love and admire this intelligent, courageous and successful woman, he will not get to know her as a writer who covered a vast range of subjects (and at times wrote under a different name for a different public) because very few quotes from her work are to be found in this biograpfy and excerpts from her diary and from her letters reveal more facts than feeling. It remains to be seen whether the nostalgia of the old or the curiosity of the young are sufficiently roused through Sutherland's book and whether Bibesco will be read and acclaimed again.

Like Romania, her country of origin, Marthe Bibesco was beautiful, complex, and hard done by. A truly gifted intellectual, adored by aristocrat and adventurer alike, she also inspired loyalty with her courage in wartime. Yet as I read through this pleasant, well written biography I realized that perhaps the lion's share of Marthe's charm was her privilege and access. It isn't that her life isn't interesting, although she herself at this remove of time can only come through as a whisper of her full force. But take away the palaces and noble lovers and this tale loses a deal of its individual flavor. I'd have enjoyed more excerpts from her writings; perhaps it's time for those to be rediscovered, and she can be celebrated as writer not princess. They're both hard lives to lead, in a way, and at least the former role wouldn't smack of fairy-tale.

Robert Frost came into public view with "A Boy's Will" and "North of Boston," his first short collections of poetry. While Frost's "voice" is a bit unformed in these poems, the rich ponderings of nature and love are never stronger, full of "sun-saturated meadows," melancholy looks at life and death, and pearly streams.

"I should not be withheld but that some day/Into their vastness I should steal away," Frost announces in the first poem of "A Boy's Will." He follows up this statement with everything from eerie story-poems ("Love and a Question") to exultant ("A Prayer in Spring") to melancholy meditations on nature's beauty, love, and broken hearts.

"Something there is that doesn't love a wall," is the first line of one of Frost's more typical poems in "North of Boston," a nuanced work about neighbors rebuilding a wall between them. But then there are poems like "Death of the Hired Man," a long conversation between a man and his wife, about a former worker who has returned home to die. Another is just about a mountain, as told by a farmhand.

Poets take awhile to reach their peak, and Frost was still starting out in these books. That said, it's astounding how good he was even in his first volume of poetry (though at times the rhymes are a little too simple, and the subjects don't vary much). Most striking is Frost's passion -- his enthusiasm, sorrow and thoughts seem to spill off the page.

"A Boy's Will" and "North of Boston" are pretty different, though. The first collection is far less grounded, more ethereal and almost dreamy. Both possess Frost's exquisite phrasing ("A bead of silver water more or less/Strung on your hair won't hurt your summer looks") but the second focuses on more mundane things like hotels, farms and strangers. And more of the poems are long conversations, instead of meditations on nature and life. The first, however, has a poem about a moonlit search for a brook, the God Pan, and the stirring historical poem "In Equal Sacrifice," about Douglas carrying Robert the Bruce's heart to the Holy Land

On an emotional level, the poems are about equal -- "A Boy's Will" is beautifully written, while "North of Boston" is powerful. Some readers might not be thrilled about the conversational poems, which are mostly composed of two people talking in a rather grounded fashion. ("Stark?" he inquired. "No matter for the proof."/"Yes, Stark. And you?"/"I'm Stark." He drew his passport.) But it is quite intriguing to see Frost expanding his poetry and seeing what else he was capable of doing.

"A Boy's Will and North of Boston" encompasses the first two volumes of Robert Frost's classic poetry, and give a look at a poet expanding his talents and finding his unique voice.

The first half, "A Boy's Will," was better than the second, "North of Boston." ABW are romantic poems, about nature, love, and death, in the grand tradition of Wordsworth et al. They ostensibly follow the couse of a boy's life/coming of age.

The second half, or second book, I didn't like much. Most of the poems are hardly poems at all; they're more like short stories written with line breaks. Some of the stories/poems were interesting, some I just couldn't care about. There were a few more "poemy" poems, like Mending Wall and After Apple Picking, but they're the same poems you find in anthologies, so nothing much gained here.

I would guess that Frost published better books than these later in his career.

Many budget-priced classics are poorly edited, with a forward or introduction that is little more than a token gesture. This edition of Frost's early work, comprising his first two publications, is a notable exception. The introduction by William Pritchard and the afterword by Peter Davison are both first-rate. The poems themselves are very fine and if you read them in sequence they give a real sense of the poet's development. It is also nice that they are in their original forms, including the glosses that Frost later removed.

With such fine editing, and at such a low price, this book is well worth having.

The book is a collection of poems by Robert Frost. It combines the collections of A Boys Will, and North of Boston. Many of the poems were about nature, and love. I selected the book because I had read Robert Frost before and I liked his style, and I felt I could relate to some of the poems. Most of them had no riming scheme, and were written in sentences, or stanzas. There was one poem about Blueberries that I particularly enjoyed because I like picking them. I also liked it because some of the poems seemed to have a hidden meaning. I thought that Frost wrote discriptive ad imaginable language. I would recommend it to readers that are older than 13. I would also recommend it to readers who like reading about nature. And finally I would recommend it to anyone who has read Robert frost, and enjoyed his work.

Okay, the story has been told better, but having studied this, I can assure that Hansen has captured the dialog perfectly. I am reviewing this obscure work because few books have captured period dialog better. Enjoy.

An old university friend who taught creative writing told me about this book several years ago. I'd never heard of Hansen, but once I started this I couldn't put it down, and I've made a point of finding and reading every new thing he writes. Every one of Hansen's books is different, he doesn't stick with a particular "type" when it comes to his fiction.

I told friends about this book, and those who read it were blown away with the way this story is told. I was never so glad that a book was reprinted as when this one came out. I bought several copies and sent them to friends.

Location in Space - This is a very educational and interesting book about economic and urban geography. This book is a MUST for all Culture Geography students in University. It is very detailed in it's explanition that does it easy to read and understand the subject, which mainly economic geography.

I am a huge Robert Frost fan, and having this book lets me take time in my busy schedule to visit his world. I especially enjoyed the broad collection contained in this series. It was, well, wonderful.

Robert Frost took a very different direction in "North of Boston," his second collection of poetry. Rather than the otherworldly naturescapes and human fears, he seems to focus on how people communicate this time around. Unfortunately, he sacrifices some of the poetry's power in the process.

"Something there is that doesn't love a wall," is the first line of one of Frost's more typical poems here, a nuanced work about neighbors rebuilding a wall between them. But then there are poems like "Death of the Hired Man," a long conversation between a man and his wife, about a former worker who has returned home to die. Another is just about a mountain, as told by a farmhand.

Robert Frost even in his more lackluster writings is still a great poet. Unfortunately "North of Boston" is a bit less engaging than his first collection. It's laced with Frost's exquisite phrasing ("A bead of silver water more or less/Strung on your hair won't hurt your summer looks"), but is more mundane and grounded.

In the emotional sense, the conversation poetry is quite striking. In a quiet way. Frost seems to have been studying people's interactions, such as the gradual softening of a woman when she finds that someone she had formerly considered worthless is only there to die in a place he loves. On an emotional note, it's beautiful.

In the technical sense, some readers might not be thrilled about the conversational poems, which are mostly composed of two people talking in a rather grounded fashion. ("Stark?" he inquired. "No matter for the proof."/"Yes, Stark. And you?"/"I'm Stark." He drew his passport.) But it is quite intriguing to see Frost expanding his poetry and seeing what else he was capable of doing.

"North of Boston" is not Robert Frost's best collection, but it is an interesting and very well-written one. Just don't expect anything like "A Boy's Will," his first poetry collection.

This is a remarkable work by the author that originated the `End of History' debate. Kojeve is perhaps most famous (in the English-speaking world) for his argument with Leo Strauss in `On Tyranny' and also his interpretation of Hegel in his `Introduction to the Reading of Hegel', which was a collection of notes to a course given by Kojeve in the thirties. This work (the `Introduction') can be correctly described as one of the first exercises in existential-Marxism thanks to its groundbreaking mixture of Hegel, Heidegger and Marx.

It (the `Introduction') is a very `dramatic' reading of Hegel in which Masters rise to mastery thanks to their willingness to fight, kill and die while those not as willing sink to the level of Slaves. The driving force in this struggle, btw, is neither Reason nor mere animal need but the all-to-human Desire for Recognition. But this is not the last word: mastery is an impasse; it goes nowhere, it can only reenact endlessly the Fight that created it. Slavery, however, through Work changes both the world and the slaves themselves. Thus Kojeve is correct to say that History is the history of the working slave. This struggle between Masters and Slaves dialectically unfolds until the appearance of the French Revolution, whose `Freedom, Equality, Fraternity' goes forth to change the world by bringing Recognition to all. It is Kojeve's contention that we have been living in post-history since that Revolution - in which History technically ended - with nothing happening except the rest of the world being brought into line with the Ideals of the Revolution. Thus Kojeve says (of Hegel, though he could have said it of himself too) that Hegel "definitely reconciles himself with all that is and has been, by declaring that there will never more be anything new on earth."

This line of thought is later made famous by Fukuyama in his popular book `The End of History and the Last Man'. Fukuyama reminds us that the `End of History' must mean, thanks to the cessation of Human Desire (struggle for recognition), a return to `animality'. This animality, of course, is the `Last Man' Nietzsche's Zarathustra so memorably mocks - `we have invented happiness' the last men recite, and then fall asleep. The argument between Strauss-Kojeve in `On Tyranny' boils down, after one strips away the exoteric, to the possibility that philosophy will be impossible in the Universal Homogenous State (UHS) that rises at the end of our post-history. Kojeve, in the end, bites the bullet and concedes that the Sages aren't philosophers properly understood; all they (the Sages) can do is reiterate, publicly or in their own minds, the process that led eventually, but necessarily, to them. Philosophy dies in the shadow of an Absolute and Circular Truth (i.e., absolute, unchanging; circular, no matter where one begins ones investigation one always ends with the same Truth) and never rises again.

It is with all this baggage (and doubtless more) that we English-speaking readers of Kojeve then turn to the Outline in the hope of some clarification of the myriad issues we are familiar with. Be prepared for a shock, the `Outline' has pretty much eschewed (or toned down) all talk of animality, tyranny, Sages, Desire and so forth. The translators, Frost and Howse, in their excellent introduction go so far as to characterize, I think correctly, the final goal of the Kojevean History (the full replacement of the rule of men by the rule of law) as a hyper-liberalism! The final state (UHS) rises, not through the dramatic confrontation between Masters and Slaves fighting over their Humanity but through the integration of economies and the syncing up of legal systems that comes along with it, i.e. globalization. It is certainly not the compelling and dramatic story of necessary tyranny and unrequited Desire that Kojeve (in)famously made in both the `Introduction' and the discussion with Strauss. (Kojeve, an admirer of Stalin, was capable of writing sentences comparing (and indeed, justifying) the rise of communism and Hitler insofar as both, in spite of what they intended, led, in fact, to further democratization! See Kojeve's `Introduction', p160, note.) However, this book, the `Outline', does nothing of the sort. It is a brilliant but measured technical study of the forces set loose by modern capitalism that lead, inevitably, to a global State. ...It is seemingly a book for technocrats - and technocrats only. One comes away with the impression that, for Kojeve, the modern world is a system of forces searching for equilibrium. The UHS is that unending equilibrium.

But why is there such a seeming disconnect between (at the very least!) the tone of the Outline and that of the Introduction? While it can be argued that Kojeve changed his mind about these matters I would say that Kojeve, an esoteric writer (like Leo Strauss) himself, intended these two books for very different audiences and very different purposes. The present work, the Outline, is intended to show those of us living in Posthistoire - remember, history `ended' for Kojeve with the French Revolution, our present post-history is the struggle to actualize the Ideals of the Revolution throughout the world; that actualization, when attained, is the UHS - what remains to be done. The `Introduction', by contrast, shows us how to think of this posthistoire. Thus the `Introduction' is propaganda, the `Outline' is plan.

The `Introduction', btw, does not necessarily put forth the `final form' of propaganda in the UHS. As Kojeve told Strauss:

"Historical action necessarily leads to a specific result (hence: deduction), but the ways that lead to this result, are varied (all roads lead to Rome!). The choice between these ways is free, and this choice determines the content of the speeches about the action and the meaning of the result. In other words: materially history is unique, but the spoken story can be extremely varied, depending on the free choice of how to act." (On Tyranny, p 256).

Thus `ideological' differences between the `Introduction' and the `Outline' are not significant for Kojeve. The `Introduction' presented a possible version of what to say; the `Outline' tells us what to do. ...This is Kojeve's strict modernism. The ancients and some moderns would append a cosmology to the system - something to dream about. Hegel has a philosophy of nature and a theology; his student Kojeve has neither. Plato writes a Timaeus, Nietzsche a Zarathustra; Kojeve does nothing of the sort. Only time will tell if this fidelity to the radical, atheistic Enlightenment will cost him everything.

This is a very readable translation with an excellent introduction, kudos to Frost and Howse!