Butler Books

This new, standard edition is the first to provide explanatory notes. The text has been rigorously checked against earlier editions and manuscripts. The index usefully includes both the text and the notes. (I am editor of the book.)

Yeats is without doubt one of the great English language poets of the twentieth century . His greatest poems and lines are in the hearts and minds of most lovers of poetry. How disappointing then to feel that the person is in many ways so mediocre in both his thought and his personal relationships. The whole business of automatic writing is one part of it. But also the whole search for some kind of mythic system smacks of superstition, and perhaps makes Yeats suitable for an age where the 'New Age' sections of bookstores are far larger than the Religion of Philosophy sections.
As a person Yeats seems a somewhat remote husband and distant relative even to his closest family members. This autobiography has no great moving intellectual center, no ideas which truly make sense in understanding our world . " Things fall apart the center does not hold, " the great lines which describe our condition are unfortunately not complemented by a true and deep understanding of the human situation.

The more I have learnt about Yeats and his life the more approachable and enjoyable I have found his poetry.

I bought this book for a close friend and fellow lover of Yeats poetry and read it after she did. Yeats writes about his life and philosophy with the same skill and breadth he brings to his poetry. I found the notes added for this edition both useful and interesting. I would recommend this book to anyone with an interest in Yeats, his philosophy, life and poetry.

Right from the start, Butler hooks you into his tale of Cold War intrigue, and he keeps you hooked right to the thrilling climax. The characters are deftly drawn, and the details nail down the plot's ring of authenticity. This is a book you'll remember, whether you've served in the military or not.

It seems so strange that the events described in Border Duty only took place a short time ago. Butler really brings back this world of intrigue, battle, and suspense--a thriller that many of us who read the news can really understand. The descriptions in Border Duty are very vivid, as if Butler himself had once been a border guard and had walked those same paces himself. I highly recommend this book!

The lives of two young soldiers from opposite sides of the Iron Curtain intersect in a tangle of blood and intrigue in Robert Butler's new book Border Duty. When an East German border officer attempts to defect on Christmas Eve during the winter of 1988, he unknowingly sets in motion a series of tragic events. As a witness to the defection, a young American cavalry officer finds himself bound up in his enemy's fate. When East Germany implodes just months later, the German soldier vows revenge against the only person whose involvement he can identify: the decorated American officer.
Robert Butler weaves an intense and multi-layered story about the conflicting loyalties of the military: duty to country and faithfulness to oneself-and the lengths one has to go to preserve both-in this heart-pumping military thriller. This was great read and should be a movie!

The hero and heroine are smart, likable, and fun. Their attraction is convincing, circumstances are amusing...

A duke's daughter who prefers the warmth and humanity of her servants, and a duke's bastard who was raised by servants meet at a summer house party. She is being married off to his best friend, and through a lot of ingenuity he, she, and 'the other he' make themselves hilariously unacceptable. There's wonderful use of poetry to spark dialog and discussion of actual events of Wellington's battles show us many dimensions of character. These characters and this author are worth knowing

Having not found a suitable husband during the three years since her come-out, Lady Sarah Thorndike must suffer the consequences. Daughters of the Duke and Duchess of Somerton have, in the past, never married less than an earl, and this daughter will be no exception! In their haste to have her married, Sarah's parents, the present Duke and Duchess, find what they consider to be a suitable candidate -- Fitzwilliam Hornsby, Viscount Lyleton. Actually, they found his parents, the Earl and Countess of Lavesly, who were, coincidentally, also looking for a marriage partner for their recalcitrant child.

Unfortunately, this young man is much more fond of clothes, the ton, gaming, and any number of other things than he is of the idea of marriage, let alone the actuality. It was something he knew he'd have to do someday, but preferably not for another ten or twenty years.

The two sets of parents contrive a summer visit of some two dozen acquaintances at the Viscount's own estate, Charlisle, so that the two young people can meet, get accustomed to each other, get betrothed, and then get married a month later. Nothing to it!

Neither set of parents nor the young people themselves, reckon on the disruption caused by the butler. John Rawlins is the son of a Duke, but from the wrong side of the blanket. In aid of his friend, Fitz, he assumes the office of butler for the duration of the summer party at Charlisle.

As the young couple contrive to become un-betrothed, the butler is not the ONLY one who laughed!

How sad for the rest of us that the author is no longer writing these books!

This man was very special to me and I could only find this book on Amazon. Your a life saver.

Mac Butler was a citizen soldier, an ordinary guy who was called to active duty. He served in the tradition of his forebearers, including General John "Mac" Alexander McClernand who was commissioned by President Abraham Lincoln. He served and inspired his men, and this book tells the story ably and humbly. That their unit was the only one not to give ground during the Battle of the Bulge is ample testimony of Col. Butler's leadership. (The book reports that at times enemy artillary came in from nearly all points of the compass.)

In my opinion this book describes in vivid detail why our citizen-soldiers won the war against the professional soldiers of Germany. This is a great read for an up-close perspective on one ordinary man's willingness to give all for his men and his country.

In reunions after the war, the men showed their continued loyalty and respect for Mac when they presented him with a plaque commemorating the "Battlin' Blue Bastards."

The book has a good story to tell..about a unit that won the Presidential Unit Citation for its activities during the Battle of the Bulge. He makes extensive use of quotes from individuals from the unit but within the official historical view of the activities of this battalion...good read!!!

When a friend arranges for her to set sail from the coast of Devon, Lydia Peartree is expecting a one-day joyride. She is also expecting something different in the captain, who she accidently mistakes for a scarred old seaman.

But Captain Matthew Frobisher is much, much more than she expected. She becomes intrigued by Matthew's pirate-like appearance and adventurous spirit. And it's a big surprise to learn he's a schoolmaster... he's training young men to become spies!

Lydia, the daughter of a Russian princess, is also something of a surprise to Matthew. She is much more willful than he ever expected. Together (with the young spies-in-training), they embark on a venture beyond their wildest dreams.

I was really looking forward to this book, because Nancy Butler is one of my favorite Regency writers. ...And I stress the word REGENCY. There is a big difference between a "mainstream historical romance" and a "regency romance." I have read many books from both genres, and I've come to appreciate the charm and sweetness of a Regency more than I enjoy the escapades and (for lack of a better word) smut of a Historical. Despite the time period similarity, this book, "Castaway Hearts" is definitely more like a mainstream historical romance. I've read a few Signet "Super" Regencies, and the "Super" usually refers to the extra 80-or-so pages. That is not the case with this book.

There is also a pointed difference between these characters and the typical charming, society-minded Regency characters. Matthew Frobisher is an often-overbearing Alpha male who intrigues Lydia with his brusque attitude. Lydia is a former darling of society who COMPLETELY shirks proprieties. These two fall in love very quickly, and their romance heats up very fast. In terms of romance, it left something to be desired.

I suppose it all amounts to preference. I prefer Regencies. This book did not transport me to the Regency world, nor was it enfused with the depth and insight I've come to expect from Nancy Butler. If I judge it against the mainstream historicals I've read, this book gets 3 1/2 stars. There were enough fights and rescues to satisfy any adventure fan. ...Personally, the thing I liked about this book the most were the young spies-in-training. One, in particular, stole my heart. If Gilbert Marriot isn't the star of his own story, I will be distraught.

Lydia Peartree, daughter of a princess, is a composed, capable young woman and used to a comfortable life. Twenty-seven years old and having never fallen in love, she decided to marry her good friend, Donald. Her betrothed had the misfortune to catch measles when she came to visit his family. So a good friend arranges a day trip on Captain Frobisher's sleek black ship, while she kicks her heels waiting for her fiancé to get well. The chance for a nice afternoon on the river beckons her and the trip changes her life!

Although she sails her little boat on the lake back home, it cannot compare with the sea. She is thrilled by the fury of the sea when a squall blows up, sending the Captain, Lydia, and a crew of adolescent boys to the coast of France. The Captain and Lydia find a connection neither was looking for. The story takes a dangerous turn when some of the travelers are recognized even in the tiny coastal French town.

This wonderful Regency romance, set far from London and its drawing rooms, includes spies, power hungry villains and the shifting political atmosphere in France near the end of the Bonapartist rule. Nancy Butler has included a peek into the irresistible passion and developing intimacy between two adults who feared they would never find love.

I've never been disappointed by a Nancy Butler book. And "Castaway Hearts" is no exception.
I appreciate the fact that she rarely follows the typical regency formula. Her characters have such depth and this is a touching and beautiful story. The hero, Matthew, is not the usual gentleman. He's human, with faults and fears. Lydia is not the usual 18 year old debutante, but a woman with courage who's determined to follow her heart.
The two find in each other something deeper and more precious than either thought possible. And they refuse to let anything, including a horrid villian, keep them apart.
We also get to revisit Arkady Pelletier and Gilbert Marriott from "Lord Monteith's Gift". Perhaps Ms. Butler will give them stories of their own some day.
Thank you Nancy Butler! This book is a keeper!

"This cookbook/memoir by a beloved black Oklahoma cook was ahead of its time for in the twenty years since it was first published books that combine recipes with autobiography have become a distinct genre...it is my favorite in the Schlesinger Cookbook collection because it expresses through food...joy," says Barbara Haber in the Boston Globe. This cookbook is wonderful, joyful and a delight to use....and the famous baked fudge is the best chocolate desert in the world.

I collect cookbooks (and own about 2,000), and three of my all-time favorite authors are Edna Lewis, Vertamae, and the Darden sisters -- all of whom are African Americans. Their books are written with incredible warmth, and introduce each recipe so you'll know what to expect, and why it is special to them. Although Cleora Butler appears to have been a singularly gifted and accomplished cook, I didn't get the "warm fuzzies" derived from other African American authors. I had bought the hardcover edition, but ended up giving it away ... as a Northeastern WASP
who knew little about either African American or southern cooking, I really missed not having warm intros or descriptions of the recipes. This is a real shame, since Ms. Butler appears to have accomplished wonders in that environment during that period, and I really wanted to love her book.

Cleora's Kitchens begins with a freedman's wagon train ride from Texas to Oklahoma for free land and opportunity in what, at the turn of the 20th century, was to be a Black and Indian state and ends with the story of one woman's remarkable life in food. This is no ordinary cookbook. It contains old recipes that could not possibly be found anywhere else and is a joyful history told in food.

This ambitious evolutionary approach to the vertebrate nervous system gives the student all the tools needed to proceed with the advanced (3-volume)works of Crosby, et al (paleo) and Niuwenhuys, et al(neo). The text is well organized and has only a slight amount of redundancy. Would hope the next edition would have improved and possibly colorful figures. This will become the only "one volume" classic of vertebrate comparative neuroanatomy.

This is one of the best textbooks in neuroscience, although some neuroscience students may have never heard of it. It covers the nervous systems of all vertebrate classes and offers a systematic treatment of all of them, from cartilaginous fishes (sharks, rays) to various mammalian orders. The nervous systems are treated not as a progression from "primitive" to "advanced", but rather as evolutionary adaptions that determine a type of perception and behavior that are optimal for the species' ecological niche. Any nervous system, including the human nervous system, cannot be understood without comparative neuroanatomy, since any new nervous system is a modification of the previous plan and carries with it the load of neural structures that have been used in past environments. This book is truly unique and is likely to remain such for decades to come. The illustrations, although black-and-white, are superb in clarity. This book deserves future editions. (In contrast, "The Central Nervous System of Vertebrates" edited by R. Nieuwenhuys and others, is a marketing disaster and can be afforded only by lawyers dabbling in neuroscience.)
November 2005: While attending the Annual Meeting of the Society for Neuroscience, I was more than thrilled to come across the Second Edition of this book. I bought it with no hesitation. It seems the second edition is even better than the first one. This is my first impression, anyway. I may add more comments later.
(By the way, if you wonder what is happening in the brains of all these creatures at the Georgia Aquarium, this book will give you answers.)

While the title of this reference may sound formidable, it is actually suitable for the motivated general reader, and is far clearer than typical neuroanatomy textbooks. Neuroanatomy across the vertebrate lines is considered, with explanations of underlying neuronal and neuroanatomical principles.

THE DEUCE, originally published in September 1989, was the sixth of ten novels written by Robert Olen Butler. This review is for the Henry Holt and Company paperback edition, 303 pages, reissued in January 1994 after Mr. Butler received the Pulitzer Prize for his collection of stories, A GOOD SCENT FROM A STRANGE MOUNTAIN.

In late August 1974, on Wandering Souls Day, a Vietnam War vet named Kenneth returns to Saigon, bargains with a prostitute and claims his then six-year old son, Thanh, an urchin. Kenneth renames his son Anthony James Hatcher and takes him to Point Pleasant, New Jersey where Tony has his own room with a soft bed, TV and computer.

The wondrous rescue from the rancid and dusty alleys of Saigon doesn't go well; Tony cannot assimilate the affluent American culture or bond with his father. He struggles for an identity. He wants to be Vietnamese, but his eyelids expose his half-breed origin and he feels caught between two cultures, unable to blend into either. And although Tony hears the echoes of his mother's moans with a rotation of GI's, and recalls her mannerisms that he now recognizes as drug addiction, fond memories of mom haunt him. So at the age of sixteen, Tony runs away to become a street urchin again, this time in New York City.

In the first 67 pages, Butler weaves Tony's recollections of Vietnam and the early years with Kenneth into the psychological turmoil of the boy's mid-teens. The remainder of the story centers on Tony's struggle to survive in the environs of sleazy forty-second street and the Port Authority Terminal. Butler's vivid descriptions of that pathetic environment in the summer of 1984 started to depress me and I began to despair waiting for the climax, which I suspect is precisely what the author wants us to feel before he finesses the five-star ending.

Within the first three pages of this literary, first-person narrative, I recognized the author's writing voice from THEY WHISPER. But unlike that novel, Butler arranged THE DEUCE into chapters and used conventional paragraphing. THE DEUCE is an engaging, readable story.

Walt Whitman once said: "It is the job of the poet to resolve all tongues unto his own." In this regard, Robert Olen Butler is a true poet in the way he goes inside the head of a teenage Vietnamese American boy to create a living, breathing character that anyone with a heart should be able to identify with. This book should be taught in American high schools. (P.S. For a fascinating non-fiction companion to this book, read "Born to Kill" by T.J. English, the true story of a Vietnamese-American gang.)

Butler has written a great piece on an Amerasian's experience in New York City during the 80's. The author shows the main character's struggle with figuring out his identity and the different types of people who live on the fringes in New York City. A great fusion of 1970s Saigon and 1980s New York.

Yeats is without question one of the greatest English language poets of modernity. But I have also found the great mystical and memorable beauty of the verses to speak musically and poetically in a deeper way than the Yeatsian ideology. The whole Yeatsian world of gyres and perhaps gimbels, of spiraling apocalypses and oujii board seances , of automatic writing and ideas of a New Age Slouching to be Born never seemed to me historically compelling.
The lyrical Yeats( And we shall wander hand in hand, through hilly lands and hollow lands, and pluck till Time and Times are done, The silver apples of the moon, the golden apples of the son,) is what has been most appealing to me.
And here there comes to mind a whole medley of immortal Yeatsian lines from " We must all lay down where the poem starts/ in the foul rag and bone shop of the heart" to " The best lack all conviction and the worst are full of passionate intensity" from " Let us go now to Innisfree " to " How many loved your moments of glad grace, but one man loved the pilgrim soul in you, and loved the sorrows of your changing face" the lines which appear again and again in all the anthologies made of English lyrical poetry.
A great poet is rare indeed and Yeats is one of them. So this collection provides much the reader can read and reread and have in heart and mind, always.

"'Easter 1916' and Other Poems" is a rich and challenging collection by William Butler Yeats. I read this book as a Dover Thrift Edition. The book includes a 4-page introductory note that discusses the life and career of Yeats (1865-1939), who received the Nobel Prize in Literature. A bibliographic note on the copyright page states that the Dover edition contains Yeats' poems from the volumes "The Wild Swans at Coole" and "Michael Robartes and the Dancer."

Although I found many of these poems obscure and hard to penetrate, I also found many of them haunting and beautiful. And many of the difficult poems opened up to me after additional readings. A mystical thread, as well as an attentiveness to nature, runs throughout this collection.

This book is rich in literary, religious, and mythological allusions. Yeats writes of war, death, grief, aging, love, and beauty. Many of the poems are quite musical--Yeats uses interesting variations in line length, rhyme scheme, poem length, and other effects.

Interestingly, I found the most effective poems in this collection to be those that deal with the relationships and encounters between humans and animals: the majestic "The Wild Swans at Coole," the tender "To a Squirrel at Kyle-Na-Gno," the haunting "On a Political Prisoner," the playful and mystical "The Cat and the Moon," and others.

Of course, there are many additional memorable poems in this collection, such as the deliciously satiric "The Scholars," or "The Second Coming," which has a real prophetic flavor. Overall, a remarkable volume by a significant figure in 20th century literature.

"Easter 1916" is one of the finest poems regarding the Dublin insurrection both in its historical account and its encapsulation of raw emotion. Another of my favorites is "The Rose Tree" which relays a conversation between Patrick Pearse and James Connolly, two of the martyred leaders of the Easter Rising. The other poems included are a good cross-section of works from The Wild Swans at Coole (1919) and Michael Robartes and the Dancer (1921)--collections that show the kind of talent Yeats possessed. And there's no arguing with the price; I have found Dover Thrift Editions to be lifesavers in those times when you desperately need to find a poem or short story but don't have $10 or $20 to spend on it. All things considered, this is a fantastic buy.

Written by one of the pioneers in the field, This book encompass an excellent and deep introduction to the fundamental algorithms necessary to deal with permutation groups. The algorithms are clear, concise and accurate.

This book has a lot of pseudo-code. These are of the right detail and are correct. I used these algorithms (with my own modifications) to implement the Schreier-Sims method to solve Rubik's Cube - and found no mistakes or important "side issues" left out. This is a "computational" book, and not an introduction into Group Theory (or Permutation Groups), even though the concepts are briefly discussed.

A very good book on algorithms for permutation groups. The author gives many references for each chapter, which are useful for further study.