Browning Books

A werry good book abouat the grrek history.form the mykean time and onward. Its wery good writen. The pictures are mosly in b/w but are OK. The langue is a bit complecaded.

Bostonian Josh Corbett arrives in Napa Valley to plead with Gina Angelini to give him a second chance. Two years ago on the TV reality show Mr. Moneybags he courted and dumped her for a million dollars and Tahoma. The moment he saw a heartbroken Gina leave, he knew he made a mistake and felt poorer for it.

Gina tells him to get lost, but he refuses. Instead he allies himself with her family especially her mother and her preteen cousins. As he learns to "read minds", he fails to persuade Gina that he loves her and wants a second chance to prove it. She insists he belongs to Tahoma, but with his new "family" he begins to assault her heart although she feels surrounded by traitors.

This is a fun look at the aftermath of reality TV on the contestants. The story line could have flopped like many of these shows do, but the antics of the meddling matchmaking Angelini clan keep the tale grounded so that a desperate Josh turns to them for help in his efforts to reach out to the still heartbroken hurt Gina. Readers will appreciate that Josh knows even with the Angelini assistance, the bottom line is that he must persuade his beloved to trust him with her heart as she did two years ago when he failed her.

Harriet Klausner

(...)Okay, so maybe hiring a centerfold stud to remodel my home was crazy. But I, Marty Owens, practical bookstore owner, was a desperate woman, and contractor Cole Stevens was a man with muscles and strong hands and a seductive voice promising me he could get the job done fast. It made perfect sense for him to move in so he could work days and nights. But no logic can explain my wild fantasies about getting cozy with Cole in every room in the house - the bedroom, the shower, the kitchen.... Ladies, I'm in over my head with the man upstairs, but can I tempt him to repair his heart and build a home for us?

Divas Who Dish - These three friends can dish it out, but can they take it?

I enjoyed reading this book from the beginning. I loved that Rourke wasn't perfect and I loved how they were both so willing to admit when they were wrong. This was a couple that I could actually see staying together after the "in love" stage burned out. In fact, the only thing that seemed difficult to believe was that they had worked and traveled together for almost a year before they discovered their attraction. However, that is a very minor quibble in an overall very nice book.

Description from the book back cover:

A daring deception ... This time Natasha Larsen's identical twin sister has gone too far. She's abandoned her fiance, Chase Calder, while he's recovering from an accident! So what else can Natasha do but stay by Chase's bedside? Only, now Chase thinks Natasha is his fiancee, and when he recovers, he's determined to go through with the wedding! Natasha knows she should tell Chase the truth - but she's fallen in love with him. How can she resist marrying him?

Book Discussed:

Iambic Pentameter from Shakespeare to Browing

This is the first book this reader has read from the series "Studies in Comparative Literature" and the twentieth in the series. It is clearly not written for the causual reader who wishes to deepen his or her appreciation for the poetry of Shakespeare, Milton, Dryden, Shelley, or Browning. It is what it claims to be--a study in generative metrics, with the emphasis on "study".

From the first page, the reader will be left with the distinct impression that he has walked into the middle of an ongoing conversation. The author of the book, M.L. Harvey, assumes an acquaintance with prior material and the reader is well-advised to become acquainted with that material. Mr. Harvey has other matters to attend to and proceeds quickly with his own elaborations. If the reader (as I did), chooses not to read from Halle and Keyser's "English Stress, Its Form, Its Growth, and Its Role in Verse" (an earlier exegesis on which some of Mr. Harvey's own ideas build) then the footnotes are central. Read them all. They are hardly asides, being more often essential to Mr. Harvey's contentions.

This is not slight material and the reader may often wish the editors had treated Mr. Harvey's material with similar energy. Mr. Harvey, for example, uses `W' to denote a weak stress and `S' to denote a strong stress along with a variety of other symbols including `N',.'Z', `a' and `b', all of which are mercifully explained in a glossary of terms. The problem arises when these symbols are meant to be placed above their relevant syllables. In some instances, it is difficult to discern which syllable they are being placed above. I found myself sometimes trying to decipher Mr. Harvey's intentions. In one or two instances, the symbols referred to by Mr. Harvey were missing in the relevant example, or the shorthand he apparently used in preparing the manuscript was not converted to its appropriate symbol.

The thrust of Mr. Harvey's book is to create a kind of metrical unified field theory for each of the poets considered. Mr. Harvey refers more than once to the empirical support for his conclusions, including laboratory's in which a number of readers were apparently given material to read (presumably poetry). Based on their reading habits (and presumably his own and those of his peers) a fairly reliable pattern can be discerned as to how English speaking readers scan a line. There is safety in numbers, but this approach is also problematic and reveals a central difficulty. Such research reveals how -twentieth century- readers (including Mr. Harvey) scan a line, but cannot reveal how a sixteenth or seventeenth century reader might have scanned a line, let alone the poets, for whom context was also a consideration. Although it is not clear, Mr. Harvey seems to propose, in a passage called "How to Scan a Line", that his rules, derived from observed patterns of scanning, can in turn be used to "objectively" scan a line.

An oddly conspicuous example of where this method can go wrong, is one he returns to repeatedly. Mr. Harvey, for example, finds that the line: "Let me not to the marriage of true minds" contains two anapests followed by two iambs. Because, in his opinion, a stressed syllable occurs in the third and sixth position, the line must adhere to the abstract pattern "WWSWWSWSWS". This conclusion is almost unanimously counter to the accepted reading of this line by Shakespearean scholars, and by inference, Shakespeare himself. Although a modern reader (the nub of the problem) would read this line as containing two anapests, one need only refer to the most recently published examination of the complete sonnets (an outstanding book by Helen Vendler called "The Art of Shakespeare's Sonnets") to see where and how Mr. Harvey's methods can go wrong. Ms. Vendler writes: "It is the iambic prosody that first brings the pressure of rhetorical refutation into Shakespeare's line: `Let -me- not to the marriage of true minds/ Admit impediments.' [Ms. Vendler italicises "me"] The speaker says these lines schematically, mimicking, as in reported discourse, his interlocutor's original iron laws." The context of the line [it is not clear that Mr. Harvey's methods of scanning take into account the dramatic context of any one line] contradicts his methods. Another example he chooses comes from Lear: "Bids the winds blow the earth into the sea". He again reads this line as beginning with two anapests. Given the context of the line, it is more likely and more accepted (according to sixteenth and seventeenth century habits of speech and prosody) that the line is iambic throughout, the first foot being trochaic and the second a spondee. This is a reading that can be applied to many of Mr. Harvey's double anapests and one which argues that his `rules' (such as the successive S constraint) need further refinement. It is this reader's experience, for example, that a spondee in the second foot, while creating a minimal stress, paradoxically serves to further enforce the stress value of the fourth position, often imparting to that position the highest stress of any other syllable. In Lear's line above, "blow" would therefore receive the greatest stress of any syllable in the line, a reading which, contextually at least, makes more sense.

A more egregious example of misreading, due to changes in habits of pronunciation and even to present day differences between the continents, comes when Mr. Harvey examines Milton. Words like "contest" and "blasphemous" and "surface" (all taken from Paradise Lost) were still accented on the second syllable. "Which of us beholds the bright surface." (P.L. 6.472 MacMillan. Roy Flannagan Editor.) Mr. Harvey, offering an example of a "very rare `inverted foot'" (the credit for its recognition he gives to Robert Bridges) gives the following line: "Of Thrones and mighty Seraphim Prostrate (P.L. 6.841) In fact, Robert Bridges and Mr. Harvey are both mistaken in reading the fifth foot as inverted and one need not be a seventeenth century scholar to recognize it. Webster's International Dictionary: Second Edition, in fact, provides the following pronunciation key. (pros [stressed] trat [unstressed]; formerly, and still by some. Esp. Brit., pros [unstressed] trat [stressed]). Any laboratory of Americans, nearly without fail, would also misread this line, and so the danger of overwhelming empirical evidence!

This misreading (due to changes and differences in pronunciation), along with contextual misreadings, is symptomatic and reveals the flaws yet to be ironed out by Mr. Harvey. For the time being, his methodology fails to take into account context, as demonstrated by the sonnet, as well as changes in pronunciation, as demonstrated by his extracts of Milton, and therefore can still only be used as a semi-reliable presentation of how these individual poets created and scanned their lines. Rather than using Mr. Harvey's methodology (if such should be the temptation) the modern reader of these poets is still advised to purchase a well-annotated edition where the proper scanning of a line is a concern.

That being said, I do not wish to discourage anyone from reading Mr. Harvey's work. Objections like those mentioned in this review are inevitable when dealing with something so subjective and changeable as the pronunciation of the English language. Mr. Harvey's undertaking is not an enviable one and the objections so far raised are less than his successes. Mr. Harvey's reasoning is, for the better part, solid and insightful. In fact, to be fair, one should spend as much time sampling his successes. This, however, would only restate what is already well-stated by Mr. Harvey. Most notably, he convincingly answers (in this reader's opinion) why poets prefer iambic verse to trochaic verse-no mean feat and a question which clearly fascinates Mr. Harvey.

Great story addition to Dixie Browning fans. We thought, our reader's group, that the middle needed a little tightening up---get quicker to the gusto of the romance. However, a romance
it is, outside the fairytale illusions. A woman has spent the last ten years, slimming down to a size and figure she can adore.
Part of the reason for her success has been a dream to be with
a handsome man she met at her cousin's wedding. But now she
had to do more than "be there," she had to meet the real person
with the same determination that helped her lose all that unwanted weight. A very good spin on the old Ugly Duckling story.

Maybe it was the hormones of early pregnancy doing a number of her, but one munute Maggie Macinture was paddling her canoe downriver and the next a half naked man seemed to fall from the sky, toppling her into the churning water!

Before she could panic, the dardevil with the hard bronze body and long raven hair wrapped his arms around her in a lifesaving embrace. The minute they touched, though, she responded to him as if her were her longtime lover, and the new life growning inside her stirred as if he recognized his daddy. But how could that be, when she'd never seen this stranger before in her life.

This one is just an average issue, with a story average of 3.40. Di Filippo's Feynman bit is interesting, as far as the rest goes, with the usual book and movie stuff, the latter related to graphic from derived movies, the reviewer admitting she is rather wobbly on the source material.

FSF658 : Brain Raid - Alexander Jablokov
FSF658 : Stone and the Librarian - William Browning Spencer
FSF658 : The Helper and His Hero Part 1 - Matthew Hughes
FSF658 : Red Card - S. L. Gilbow
FSF658 : Fool - John Morressy


D-level intelligence problems.

4 out of 5


Knowledge Based reality.

3 out of 5


Dreams come to nonaut.

3 out of 5


Her assignment shot through.

3.5 out of 5


Hitperson choices, occult or not.

3.5 out of 5




3.5 out of 5

I recently purchased this book, and upon a more thorough review at home, discovered just how marvelous it was! The book is great because it gives you a diverse selection of projects from using herbs, to pressing flowers, to making oils, to making gifts from things in your garden, to culinary crafting...I could go on and on. Also, the instructions are very simple and easy to follow and there are very nice, very clear photos for referal. This is the book for the person who likes to do more than one thing, not just focus on one type of craft.