Butler Books

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!

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.

"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.

Yes. This book was my first entrance into pie making. Between the "never-fail" dough recipe and the many delicious pie making options, I tell you, I have swooned groups of friends and strangers alike with the deep-dish apple crumb pie. Unbelievable. Everybody thought I had been baking for years... Come summer, I whipped out the Farmhand's cherry pie, and oh my goodness, the party throwers I gave it to never got a slice! The entire pie vanished they never got a chance to see it! It was just that good... I highly recommend these delicious homemade recipes. Obviously a lot of delicate care and fine tasting went into creating these spirit-enhancing gifts of wonder.

This is the only cookbook that I have ever had that had 100% good recipes in it. The procedures are easy-to-follow and the results never fail. I had trouble making meringue before I bought this but it taught me exactly how to make it work every single time (even on cloudy days).

The pie crust recipes are really "never-fail" since they are easy to work with and don't stick to everything unlike most other recipes. The fillings themselves are well thought out and tasty while not needing many expensive or out-of-the ordinary ingredients.

Although some pies (especially the meringue ones) take time to make you will reap the results 10,000 fold. Once I took a pie to share with my friends and now they ask for them every time I see them!

wonderful book with wonderful, mouthwatering recepies. great easy-to-follow-steps, tips for those of us with numerous misstakes in piebaking behind us. your pies will be appriciated by everyone from grandma' to baby, not only for the delicious tastes but also for the way they put a smile on your face even before you had your first bite!

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.

I have been searching for ways to complete a degree I started some years ago. Unfortunately, family commitments prevent me from quitting work to pursue the degree I have always desired. While a little dated (1993), I found this text did provide a list of degree sources of which I was previously unaware. The alternative methods for earning course credit have the potential to make earning that degree much closer to reality. I have already applied to several nationally recognized universities mentioned in the book to explore their on-line degree options. I think it offers good insight into alternative methods. Finally, The section on detecting and avoiding degree mills is very useful.

I have been searching for ways to complete a degree I started some years ago. Unfortunately, family commitments prevent me from quitting work to pursue the degree I have always desired. While a little dated (1993), I found this text did provide a list of degree sources of which I was previously unaware. The alternative methods for earning course credit have the potential to make earning that degree much closer to reality. I have already applied to several nationally recognized universities mentioned in the book to explore their on-line degree options. I think it offers good insight into alternative methods. Finally, The section on detecting and avoiding degree mills is very useful.

A great source for college degree info

"Let Her Keep It" by Thomas W. Butler is a well crafted exploration of Mosaic oracles known as `semeia' in ritual symbolic gestures found in first century Judaism. Butler applies intuitive detective work, spiritual insight and scriptural scholarship to the Gospel of John, gaining a fresh perspective, exposing a deeper layer of significance and uncovers cohesive connections between elements that have been viewed previously as separate events. His inclusion of directly translated material from the Greek text is a real plus for those struggling with the language barrier and for those who have been taught a prejudice against certain translation editions.

Butler's exploration of John's Gospel is especially ingenious. By removing the artificial constraints of chapter and verse, (which were a later addition to the text),as he presents what are seemingly separate events he unfolds three interrelated acts of a play. With the thoroughness of Robert Eisenman, and having taken cues from such scholars as Allen Culpepper and Raymond Brown, Butler has gone beyond the boundaries of his predecessors with a plausible new slant on the material. If his conclusions are correct, Butler has opened a door of easy access and facilitated a quantum leap for general readers as well as scholars.

His conclusions support a far broader role for women as recipients of the heritage of Christ's promise to make of us a priestly people.

M. E. Bessette

When I wrote Let Her Keep It, I was simply trying to understand why Mary of Bethany wiped Jesus' feet with expensive perfumed oil, then dried his feet with her hair. I found that the Gospel According to John uses symbols borrowed from the five books of Moses. These symbols (I call them Mosaic oracles) are called signs in the Gospel. They point to a hidden gospel, written in symbolic language taken from the Torah. That Gospel tells how Jesus systematically replaced every element of the Mosaic system of worship: the temple, the festivals of sacrifice and the priesthood. Let Her Keep It shows how Jesus replaced the temple priests with his own disciples, including Mary and Martha of Bethany. Jesus says (Jn. 12: 8) "Leave her alone..." (Set her apart)"...that she may keep it for the day of my burial" (that she might keep the tradition of my death.) Jesus sets Mary apart (ordains her) to function as a first century bishop would function- to maintain the Christian tradition.

In this book, Butler, for many years a senior Methodist minister in the Central Valley of California proposes a "two story line" reading of the Gospel of John, in which chapters 11-13 are taken to be keys to Jesus' inauguration of a new form of universal ministry. Mary and Martha are, the author concludes, included in this new form and intent of ordination for all of Jesus' disciples. This unfolds by means of a complicated system of hidden signs which, the author argues, parallel the intentions of the Fourth Gospel with transformation of the priestly caste system of the Pentateuch. The capstone is Mary's intended anointing of Jesus which, by Jesus' words "Let Her Keep It," turns the anointing upon Mary (her odination to ministry), as the sign and seal of the anointing of all of Jesus' disciples.

This book is one of the best I know in the subject. When I first bought it about five years ago I could recognize this fact clearly. Nonetheless, it is my opinion that this book is not for absolute begginers. When I read it for the first time I understood some things, but others escaped my comprehension. The third chapter, for example, on Qabbalah, is quite technical and philosophical, perhaps even too "stratospehrical" for readers without SOME (not neccesarily large) formation on Qabbalah. Re-reading it now, after five years of constant work and study on the subject, all these doubts have been solved... but not precisely through THIS book. There is a good section on de Middle Pillar exercise and the Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram, and an excelentet chapter on talismans which includes the three different and interesting theories regarding the magical charge. On the whole, it is a very good book about magical theory, and in this it is accesible even to absolute new-commers to the subject, although technicalities make it a little dense even to the experienced reader. I would say that this book is a must for students of the occult and arm-chair and practical magicians alike, but I don't give it five stars because even for the sholarly occultist it is sometimes a little hard. Nonetheless, anyone pursuing magical studies seriously should have read this book at least once. I would include it, along with Regardie's, Fortune's and Kraig's books in the list of "10 books a magician should read"

W.E Butler has written a sane, comprehensive and informative introduction to magic and managed to fit it all into a slim paperback.

During his life, Mr Butler travelled and trained in India and was also a friend of Dion Fortune, who he greatly admired.
He was involved with the Theosophical Society and their teachings as well as the Liberal Catholic Church.

He co-wrote the Helios Correspondence Course with Gareth Knight which would later become the Servants of the Light Occult school.

This work is now becoming increasingly more expensive and rare but well worth the effort one might put in to find it.

The book has had several different editions printed including the Melvin Powers edition for sale here, initially quite inexpensive.
There appear to be no new current editions available.

I agree with the previous review, I just wanted to add that I find the initial obscurity one of the great things about this book. It's written in earnest (no pun intended), and it deliberately sets out to avoid presenting the truths of magical thought 'on a plate', as so many of the more recent books on the subject attempt to do - with unfortunate results. The importance of independent thought and study is a maxim for anyone on the magical path - this book is full of useful information, and is likely to be one that the reader returns to periodically, to find that it sheds new light in unexpected areas. Highly recommended.