Charles Williams Books

This book is a very personal biography of Henry David Thoreau, written by one of his closest friends. Although the book contains many biographical details of Thoreau, it is more a eulogy than a biography. It begins with a chapter on Thoreau's early life, but after this chapter, Channing's commentary is collated more by topic than by chronological order. These topics include: manners, reading, nature, literary themes, philosophy, writings, field sports, characters, and moral. Following the main text are a selection of memorial verses written by Channing.

Channing, author, intimate friend and frequent walking companion of Thoreau, first drafted this work in 1863, shortly after Thoreau's passing. Because he and Thoreau had been friends from young adulthood, Channing was able to provide many anecdotes and details of Thoreau's life. As a result, all subsequent biographers have relied on Channing's text as a source of firsthand information. Channing was also the first person other than Thoreau himself to delve into Thoreau's massive Journal, and he draws heavily on Thoreau's Journal in this volume. When the draft of this biography was sent to a publisher, however, the publisher declared it too short. Channing's response was to insert several chapters of an unpublished work from the 1850s, in which Channing had arranged journal entries from himself, Emerson, and Thoreau into a group of pseudo-conversations. These insertions, while somewhat interesting, reduce the cohesion of the overall text of the volume even more. Nevertheless, the book is quite interesting for the intimate perspective Channing was able to provide of Thoreau, and for the journal entries that he selected to demonstrate Thoreau's characteristic themes.

This collection of "war stories" from seasoned Consular officers makes for interesting and entertaining reading. As far as I am aware, this is the only really thorough exploration of the consular function in the U.S. Foreign Service (William Shepard's "Consular Tales" is thin by comparison.)

I would particularly recommend this title as preparatory reading for any prospective consular officers about to take the State Department's Foreign Service Oral Exam, or for anyone considering a consular career in the Foreign Service.

The book is expensive, but could be considered a worthwhile investment for one's career.

It is a shame that this is out of stock. I recently read this book and it helped me understand the basic tenets of Marxism more clearly. It does this in an interesting way: a dialogue between three people with varying positions on Marxism and history. Very good introduction to Marxism.

This book stands as a valuable resource for studies on Shakespeare as well as Eliot, Swinburne, Browning and Dickens. Sawyer's examples of how these authors borrowed from and used Shakespeare provides a new versatility of Shakespeare's works that has largely gone unnoticed. Many strong assertions are made and each one is supported by a firm foundation of research and knowledge. It is necessary, however, to have an understanding of each of these authors. Without this familiarity, the book tends to be a difficult read.

Im sure this is a great book that no one has ever heard of but i'll give it 4 stars just because im nice

Those interested in the life of William McKinley must read this book. Olcott does a superb job of describing the life of McKinley. While this is hardly a critical biography it is essential reading for those who want to observe McKinley as his contemporaries did.

I quote from the publisher's description: " While Williams and Tolkien apparently thought of women as mythic icons..."

Yes, Charles Williams was rather weird and perhaps thought of everyone as "mythical icons." But I doubt Tolkien, who married young and had five children, including a daughter, thought of women as "mythical icons." Marriage gets rid of those sorts of illusions quite quickly.

Yes, Arwen is remote and pretty, a bit like the princess in a fairy tale castle. But she's also been a spinster for some 2778 years and seems delighted to finally be marrying Argorn for the usual reasons. Then there's Galadriel at Lorien, who is no more a "mytical icon" than Elrond at Rivendell. They're high elves and royalty. They represent nothing but themselves, with Galadriel described as no more than, "a slender elf-woman, clad in simple white, whose gentle voice was soft and sad." Finally, need I point out the firey Eowyn, who's a bit like Xena the Warrior Princess, or Rose, Sam's down-to-earth wife. No, Tolkien's women aren't "mythical icons." They're just like women in real life: complex, interesting and quite varied.

It is true that on the Tolkien couple's gravestone, Edith is compared to Luthien, an elf princess from Middle-earth's mythical period. That's probably where the two authors got their idea. But that same gravestone assigns to Tolkien himself the equally mythical role of Beren, Luthien's lover and husband. Would it make sense to claim that "Tolkien apparently thought of men as mythic icons?" I don't think so.

That said, this book is worth reading because, with a few exceptions (i.e. Dorothy Sayers, who wasn't really an Inkling), the Inklings who laughed over their warm ale at Oxford's "Babe and Bird" pub, were an all male club, with all the rough fellowship that implies. That's a slice of life that's become much to rare in our forcibly unisexed culture. And for that reason I plan to read this book.

I'll do that even though, on the book's first page the authors comment blandly, "but in the case of Lewis and Tolkien, by childhood experiences with minimal female contact." That's a cold and callous way to describe two boys who lost their mothers while still young. In Tolkien's case, his father had died years earlier, while for Lewis, his father was so overcome by grief, he never recovered and never was able to be close to his two sons.

--Michael W. Perry, author of Untangling Tolkien: A Chronology and Commentary for The Lord of the Rings

The book has lots of interesting anecdotes on Thackeray, Hawthorne, Dickens, Wordsworth, "Miss Mitford" and others, many from the author's personal interactions. He seems to enjoy dropping names and letting you know where he has been! He is a bit wordy, and admits as much, himself, in the preface. Few others would have been as well-equipped to offer personal observations on well-known authors of this period.
. . . . some have suggested that his wife, an outstanding literary person in her own right, may have been the source of more of his insights into the authors' thought than he acknowledges . . .

(I have included below some excepts on the author, from Wikipedia, for the edification of browsers):
Fields was the publisher of the foremost contemporary American writers, with whom he was on terms of close personal friendship, and he was the American publisher of some of the best-known British writers of his time, some of whom he also knew intimately. The first collected edition of De Quincey's works (20 vols., 1850-1855) was published by his firm. As a publisher he was characterized by a somewhat rare combination of keen business acumen and sound, discriminating literary taste, and as a man he was known for his geniality and charm of manner.

In 1862-1870, as the successor of James Russell Lowell, he edited the Atlantic Monthly. In 1871 Fields retired from business and from his editorial duties, and devoted himself to lecturing and writing. He also edited, with Edwin P. Whipple, A Family Library of British Poetry (1878). His chief works were the collection of sketches and essays entitled Underbrush (1877) and the chapters of reminiscence composing Yesterdays with Authors (1871) in which he recorded his personal friendship with Wordsworth, Thackeray, Dickens, Hawthorne and others. He died in Boston on the 24th of April 1881

This book is ostensibly about crime. Specifically the amelioration of crime by a policy of zero tolerance of minor and petty crimes which became famous for the dramatic fall in crime in New York City.

This book has a slightly different focus. Rather than concentrating on what Zero Tolerance is and does, it seeks to place the crime figures and approaches to crime reduction in a broader context of community. The concept of community developed both in these pages and within a wider research agenda supposedly concerned with the development of a civil society in which the state plays a smaller and smaller role has a particular slant to it.

Zero Tolerance is the latest in a line of books from the Institute of Economic Affairs Health and Welfare Unit, now a free standing institute of it's own, CIVITAS, which postulate a decline in morals and behavious which result from a growing tendency in our society to becoming more individualsitic. The model of decency and good behaviour upon which this view is based is a rather idyllic view of the English working class family as portrayed by Norman Dennis in some of the earlier books of this series. Here it's scope is widened to incorporate views on how to tackle crime which involve the wider civil society. Policing in this view is both external and internal and the police forces themselves are seen as a legitimate part of the community, reinforcing the internal rules and moralities forged in the furnace of home and family. Headed preferably, of course, by working father, stay at home mother etc.

You will not find in this book any arguments about drugs save for the superior tone about how the use of drugs has grown in our society and is therefore bad. This cannot go unchallenged. In a passage devoted to the emphasis on education and development of working men's clubs and institutes the book praises them for their contribution to improving the moral fibre of those who participated. These clubs were segregated against women drinking in the public bar and fought hard to retain that position against equality laws and became more well known for the strong and cheap beers that they sold than for moral improvement. Their innate conservatism was a major contributor to why their customers deserted them and caused the closure of many in the North East of England. While the consumption of this legal drug is condoned, other recreational drugs are the cause of much petty crime. The book ignores the setting of the laws and blithley makes assertions about theft while ignoring the basic point that laws against drugs make them more attractive to the purchasers, more profitable to the suppliers and lead many who consume them to do things out of character in order to get their drugs. I could go on but this would be a book of it's own.

Zero Tolerance is a one sided book. It excludes any consideration of the diminishing role of the church in society as one of a number of relevant institutions, and it excludes any treatment of what changing structures in our society mean for those individuals who have previously been imprisoned by those structures, in particular, for women. The supposed golden age of the working class family is a modern myth, a sociological urban legend, which did not exist for many.

Ultimately, this is yet another attack on growing individualism in our society which begrudges any positive changes and which harkens back to an age which never really existed. The causes of crime run deeper than one parent families and tower blocks. The harsh reality today is that women are valued more by society than they were which is the real reason why female wage rates are increasing while male wages rates decline overall.

Perhaps we should be looking forward and not backward to see how a healthy individualist society might develop.

It's Peter Benchley in Jurassic Park, inventing a long-extinct giant shark that comes back to munch on the unwary. The idea is great; the book starts out immensely well, and then falls back into the water, having exhausted its momentum on the five or so scenes that would make an awesome trailer. If the giant monster you're trying to kill can be killed with regular methods if just a little discipline gets applied, don't you think the authorities will finish it off first? Yes, well... awkward silence... the characters are somewhat one-dimensional, and there are several arduous scenes of splashing around hoping the giant shark won't come back that put me into a coma. I wish he'd rewrite the whole book in the style of the first two chapters, with a similar amount of action or at least real terror.

I enjoyed this book. It's exciting and if you like stuff about sharks, I'd definitely recommend it!

Charles Wilson's book was supposed to have been made into a miniseries for NBC-TV. While that didn't pan out, the SciFi channel would have a field day making this novel into a film featuring totally CGI sharks that are 100 feet long.

The book starts with a shark (there's more than one) attacking and killing two small boys. One of the witnesses to the attack, Paul, is the only child of Carolyn, a charter boat captain on the Mississippi. She is joined by Alan Freeman, a marine biologist to try and find out what killed the boys with the help of a U.S. Navy admiral who knows exactly what they're hunting...but doesn't know how to stop it.

Is this book better than "Jaws"? No. "Jaws" was a masterpiece of fiction; this is an escapist read for a beach day in August. The details regarding the Mississippi Delta and megalodons are accurate and the characters are realistic and likable.

I highly recommend this book as a fun and exciting read. The characters are good, the action in the story is just that, and the length of the book is just right for it not to seem too drawn out by any means. Good job Charles Wilson.

I liked the fast pace of the book and was just a little dissapointed with the end. I still prefer Meg by Steve Alten.