Blake Books

This is an excellent book with a compelling story - unique, original and full of irony. It's about an American citizen who was forced to fight for an enemy during World War II--and then became a prisoner of war. The theme is like that of Angela's Ashes, in that it recounts hardships that most of us can't imagine enduring. The writing is straightforward and honest, and paints a fascinating picture about another time. It's a page-turner until its happy end.

Everyone's personal story is interesting, but this story is one of a kind. A true account, it's full of irony from beginning to end. The protagonist, an American citizen, is forced to fight against his own country in a world war. He's captured by the Allies and spends seven years in p.o.w. camps. Finally he returns to America on "the best day of his life." A great read!

This is the necessary companion to the highly-praised Michael Rosen's Sad Book. Michael Rosen is the consummate children's poet -- there is not a single clunky line in this entire collection of story poems.

If you have ever had children, have children or have taught children, this book will truly have you laughing while it melts your heart. I heard my first Michael Rosen poem at a literacy conference almost ten years ago. It took me almost as long to find an edition of his poetry. His story-like poems about his adventures growing up and about his young children are incredibly touching and hilarious. If you are a teacher, sharing these poems with your students will garantee you a rapt audience and give them a whole new slant on what poetry can be. Now, if only the rest of his books were available.....

This book is extremely well written. It tackles a difficult subject tastefully and factually. The level of detail is impressive - the author was obviously very close to the whole sequence of events, as well as carrying out in-depth research.

Particularly compelling is the account of the interview Yates conducted with Maxine Carr in the very house in which the girls were murdered. Only days after the interview the truth came out; it is easy to sense Yates's shock at seeing the story unfold right in front of him, as one of the main reporters on the scene.

Yates delves into Huntley's past, trying to discover how someone could grow from being a child himself to becoming a child-killer. We are left with the sense that there is no easy answer, that his life story doesn't really explain it all, that maybe some people are just born that way. A chilling thought.

This book is extremely well written. It tackles a difficult subject tastefully and factually. The level of detail is impressive - the author was obviously very close to the whole sequence of events, as well as carrying out in-depth research.

Particularly compelling is the account of the interview Yates conducted with Maxine Carr in the very house in which the girls were murdered. Only days after the interview the truth came out; it is easy to sense Yates's shock at seeing the story unfold right in front of him, as one of the main reporters on the scene.

Yates delves into Huntley's past, trying to discover how someone could grow from being a child himself to becoming a child-killer. We are left with the sense that there is no easy answer, that his life story doesn't really explain it all, that maybe some people are just born that way. A chilling thought.

Many thousands of books have been written about William Blake. Three quarters of them should be hurled from the top of 60-storey buildings then trampled on by herds of rogue elephants. Most of the rest should be replaced with care on library shelves and quietly consumed by silverfish.

Here is a book that is not only Not an abomination but is actually worth buying. It was first published back in the happy sapphire days of 1965, when even an academic could still read a poet to find out what he or she had to say; and could write about a poet without quoting from a single unreadable French intellectual.

I have learnt more from William Blake than from anyone else writing English; but his longer poems are notoriously difficult, and at first they can appear overwhelmingly confusing. One of the major obstacles is the quantity of strange and uncouth names, of imaginary people and places, of home-made concepts, that speckle every page.

Eventually you'll find out that they mattered less than you thought, all those names. But having this book at hand to allay name-anxiety during the early stages will help you relax and just read. Blake never presents theories, or things that may or may not be true: only what he himself has Seen. What he saw was so uncommon he had to create his own way of expressing it. When you can swim in the ocean of Blake's thought - when you can make out what he's talking about - this Dictionary will have served its purpose.

I don't always agree with S. Foster Damon's interpretations. Freud and Jung should not be used to interpret Blake. He was well aware of what we call the Subconscious; but what he calls Eternity is Not, repeat Not, Jung's Collective Unconscious. Still, no two people will read Blake in exactly the same way. If you plan to explore Blake (and you should) this is the one essential guide.

Prophet? Madman? Or philosopher? The mythological characters in William Blake's prophetic poetry present a conundrum for the reader who confronts these characters with the traditional literary expectations of a symbolic reading. Indeed, the vanguard of contemporary criticism would argue that the very complexity of Blake's mythology precludes an all inclusive schemata.

Yet S. Foster Damon's A BLAKE DICTIONARY offers compelling testament that there was methodology in Blake's madness. In addition to providing a detailed enunciation of virtually every character in Blake's poetry, Damon further offers an exposition of the major themes and symbols which Blake repeatedly returned to in his longer prophetic works. Along with both Northrop Frye's FEARFUL SYMMETRY and David Erdman's PROPHET AGAINST EMPIRE, Damon's meticulously cross-referenced dictionary is an essential reference work for anyone who dares delve into Blake's complex mythology.

One commentor argued that Delany was misinformed about Cuba and that he later dropped his concept of African American separatism. Neither of these are necessarily true. Delany used Placido as a leader of Cuban rebellion not because he actually was, but because Delany was trying to create hope in African Americans that there was a Pan African world fighting for liberation. Also, Delany's joining of the army during the Civil War is not necessarily reflective of droping his belief that there was no hope for Africans in the Americas. He simply joined the military because he was dedicated to freeing the Africans FIRST, with the hope that later they can create their own state. Delany was a Garvey before his time. Unfortunately he is written off by European Americans and those that wish to please them as a "militant" or a "radical". What's militant or radical about fighting for freedom?
His idea that separatism was better was not about reverse racial prejudice, he just believed (as did many judges in Plessy Vs Ferguson) that Africans had to liberate themselves and build together before they could be equals. In fact his belief is resonate today; though there are African Americans who are successful, the vast majority remain in ghettos. Yes, Delany's message was never about reverse racial prejudice, but about creating an African society that was not the foot stool of a European one.

When Martin Delany wrote this book, he was along with his sometime collaborator Frederick Douglass, one of the two most prominent African American leaders in the country, and like Douglass his reputation extended beyond the United States to England and other parts of Europe. Unlike Douglass, Delany was even known in West Africa from which he recently returned where he had negotiated with AFrican leaders about with his economic and political plans. Indeed, in the months while Blake was published as a serial in the Anglo-African newspaper, Delany toured the US lecturing on Africa wearing African robes!

Delany's book is one in a series of texts written by African American authors in response to Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin. Despite Stowe's assistance to this project by writing small poems introducing it,one of the sub texts of Blake is to show the difference between the realities of Slavery and the picture Stowe painted in Uncle Tom. Indeed, Daleny's hero Henry Blake is placed in the exact same place time and position as Uncle Tom, but instead of heroically suffering and dying and inspiring while refusing to physically resist slavery, Henry Blake runs away from slavery to organize an international revolution against slavery.

(To be fair, Stowe admits in Uncle Tom's Cabin her book made slavery seem nicer than it really was because she believed slavery was so awful that the white Northern readers she targeted would be too disgusted to read a book that accurately described it. Moreover, by the time Delany wrote Blake, Stowe's views had become more militant. She had written Dred, a book whose Black hero leads a slave revolt.)

Blake reflects the deep pessimism of the period, ironically only a few years before the end of slavery. In fact, though he was born free and had no fear of the fugitive slave laws, Delany had left the United States and moved to Chatham, Ontario by the time he wrote Blake, so despairing he was of the future of Black men. Delany urged Black people to leave the United States and proposed building an independent Black nation in Central America that could be a base for liberation of the slaves in all of the Americas.

This task is taken upon in fictional guise by Henry Blake the hero of this novel. He escapes and goes on a travel through the slave and free states of the US, in a round based on the travels in Uncle Tom, on an itnerary that had become standard for books about slavery in this period. Blake's conclusion is that the slaves and even well-off freed blacks lack the leadership, culture, or education to lead a revolt of their own.

The solution to this problem is found by Blake when Blake reveals that he is actually Henricus Blaccus, a distinguished, cultured Afro-Cuban captured into American Slavery. He leaves the US for Cuba and rejoins a company of similarly well off, cultured, and artistic Afro-Cubans conspiring to overthrow slavery and Spanish rule and make Cuba into a base for African liberation. What is interesting is that Delany depicts these Afro-Cuba conspirators holding opulent cultural evenings rich with poetry and with artistic playing of the "African Banza." Possession of our own culture, and a distinguished and even aristocratic elite, seem to Delany to be the prerequisites of a successful revolution.

We don't have all of the copies of the Anglo African which published this as a serial. What we have ends when the conspirators appear to be about to launch their revolt in Havana, but we do have a fascinating look at Delany a Black leader of the 19th Century whose ideas and outlook was quite similar to that of Black militant leaders of the late 20th Century.

Besides its message, the descriptions of life under slavery in the US, make this book a central text to truly understand slavery and the AFrican American response. Delany's journalism in anti-slavery publications about Cuba and the Poet Placido who he fictionally places at the head of the Afro-Cuban rebels, indicates he was misinformed about the opportunities for Afro-Cubans, the severity of slavery in Cuba, and the degree to which Placido's poetry identified with his African, as opposed to European, lineage. Yet, Delany's fictionalization of a revolutionary cultural nationalist upheaval launched in Cuba makes his plan for Pan Africanist revolt against slavery seem vivid exciting and unique.

It is also a testament to Delany's leadership, that once the Civil War began, he dropped his belief there was no hope for freedom in the United States. He militantly campaigned for African Americans to join the Union Army. In fact, Delany became a Major in the US Army, the highest ranked African American during the Civil War other than a few doctors who severed in all Black hospitals.

Recently re-read THE BLAKE STREAK and enjoyed it as much this time as I did the first. The action and suspense took me back in time to the period when all Americans were concerned with winning the war--not with making political statements. There has been no other period in our time when the camaraderie of the 1940's united so many. STREAK captured the essence of that unity along with the protagonist's adaptation to the changing mores of a later period in time. I haven't had such a great read and a good cry since GONE WITH THE WIND! Gee, George, you really must have been a swell guy!

Truxtun Blake is a former fighter pilot in World War II who unexpectedly runs into his wartime sweetheart, Charlene Rungrove. The encounter stirs memories, and unnerves Julie, Truxton's pretty dark-haired wife. It is also the beginning of a series of unexpected revelations about his family, especial his older brother Montgomery, a combat PT boat skipper lost in the South Pacific 30 years ago. Truxton uncovers a family scandal. In early 1943 his brother was delivering a massive gold bribe to a Japanese admiral who had agreed to surrender a submarine to the U.S. Navy. But the money and the brother disappeared. Truxton digs for clues in Washington, Nashville, San Francisco, and the far Pacific. He pieces together a story of brutal mutiny on PT 165 -- all the while his bittersweet relationship with Charlene deepens. Events come to a head on an uncharted island with an untangling complexity that achieves a fully satisfying conclusion. The Blake Streak is an original story with splendidly crafted characterization and a compelling plot that simply will not let the reader go until the very last page.

Serious students of Blake would do well to start here. Lucid, informed and methodical, Bloom's "Blake's Apocalypse" leaves no page unturned amid his exhaustive investigation into the influences, ideas and hopes that comprise Blake's vast and complicated "poetic argument." Though Bloom's erudition can sometimes undermine his clarity, the book glows with the confident understanding and purpose he built his name on. Delving into Blake's main influences -- Milton, the Bible and the ancient Greeks -- Bloom focuses much of his time on Blake's epics while making the good point that these greater works are often neglected in favor of the more managable and straightforward "Songs of Innocence and Experience." "Blake's Apocalypse" is an endless resource comparable to those other masterpieces of Blake scholarship: Frye's "Fearful Symmetry" and Erdman's "Prophet Against Empire." I've been relying on it for months now and can't imagine any session with Blake's mind being complete without it.

Some facts about Harold Bloom. He taught himself to read English (his family spoke Yiddish at home) at the age of 3 or 4. He has a photographic memory for text, and has more or less the whole canon of English poetry committed to memory.

Now granted, these facts don't guarantee genius by themselves, but Bloom has something extra to add to those other traits--an imaginative hunger and an enormous love for poetry and what it can do for the individual, sensitive reader.

Admittedly, this analysis of Blake owes quite a bit to Northrop Frye's "Fearful Symmetry," but there are many new insights that make this book worth much more than its price. Whatever one may think about Bloom's later literary analyses, his early work has, undeniably, the stamp of genius.

Great book for any cat lover

author of "Hobo Finds A Home"

I recommend carouse cat becuase it is about cats and I like cats. I also like the book becuas it is very exsiting. It also has lots of detals.my favorite part was when the cat had kittens and she had 1 more kitten in her mouth but she fell! But the cat fell into one guy's arms and the kitten landed on the strong guy's head!- Josef, aged 7.

As a previous reviewer pointed out; this is not a typical hooligan book its a biography of Cass one of the main members of the IFC one of the most famous hooligan gangs of the 70s and 80s.

The book covers his childhood, being a black child adopted by a white couple and raised in an all white area, the racism he encountered as a kid and how his foster parents taught him pride in who he was and to stand up to anyone. The book then goes into how he got hooked up with the IFC and hooked on the violence that went with it.

The many trials he went through, how he went into bouncing post jail time, how he met his future wife and finaly got his life together metting up with his natural parents back in Jamacia.

Realy interesting read especially his connections with Frank Bruno and Lenny Henry.

Honest book, highly recomended.

When i started reading this book i thought it would be about a MORONIC FOOTBALL THUG that all the media wants us to believe they are, but this is how CASS found true friends at West Ham, who didn't care about his colour but just the love of his team and how he grew up amongs racists,football rivals and police prejedice and came out a proud person and a loving parent. Excellent reading

WHAT A GREAT GIFT THIS BOOK IS. THE RECIPIES ARE EASY, AND I MEAN REAL EASY TO FOLLOW. I THINK IT IS A TERRIFIC GIFT FOR PEOPLE IN RECOVERY FROM ANY SORT OF ADDICTION. THE ENCOURAGEMENT IT OFFERS ON SUCH A SIMPLE LEVEL AS MEAL PREPARTION FOR FAMILY AND FRIENDS IS HEART WARIMING..THANKS!!

Anyone who is familiar with Chris Blake's earlier recipes will know that he invariably stressed vinology and mixology as a complement to his meals, which were of themselves soaked to the brim in alcohol-based sauces and marinades.

Blake has presumably turned over a new leaf and has written a book of recipes entirely alcohol free. (He does not even incorporate the fermented vanilla extract)

If you know anyone who has had a previous struggle with alcohol there can be no more appropriate gift than this book.

Since Blake refuses to fancy himself as a chef, these recipes are remarkably friendly, even for the most inexperienced in the kitchen.