Clarke Books

My first introduction to Susanna Clark and I must say I thoroughly enjoyed her book. Some clever wit likened the prose to 'Jane Austen meets the Grimm brothers' and I have to agree.

This is a collection of eight good old-fashioned English fairy tales, written in a style and language that many Austen fans would recognise. Lovers of faerie and fantasy would appreciate the almost historical manner of their telling. Clark gives a new twist to the Rumpelstiltskin tale and Shakespeare's Queen Mab. She even sets one in a Neil Gaiman universe.

Not everything is sunshine and rainbows; like Grimm's tales, there's a darker undercurrent afoot. Fairies are not the 'little people', or 'fair folk' we remember from childhood tales. They are lustful, mean-spirited and cunning. Their interactions with humans nearly always spell disaster for ordinary folk. But this book is far from that. It's a quick easy read, done in one long afternoon.

The Ladies of Grace Adieu is a collection of short stories that Susanna Clarke released as a follow-up to her first novel, Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell. Clarke delivers a variety of tales in this collection, some based on previous tales (such as Rumpelstiltskin) and some of her own creation, all based on the land of Faerie. In this collection, she revisits Johnathan Strange, the Duke of Wellington, and even has a story that takes place in the world of Neil Gaiman's Wall.

I recommend reading each story separately, as opposed to reading the book in one sitting. I give the book 5 stars, but only based on reading my copy in this same fashion, through a recommendation from someone else. I feel that the stories may loose something of their value if all read at the same time, as each of the stories basically deals with the same subject: the creatures of Faerie versus the people of the "real" world. While each story is unique of itself, since each story does in fact deal with something of the same subject each time, reading them altogether may be somewhat tedious.

I enjoyed Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell and felt that this was a suitable follow-up. After reading The Ladies of Grace Adieu, I anxiously await Clarke to whisk me away again to land of Faerie with her next novel.

Susanna Clarke made a dazzling debut with "Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell," which was the sort of fantasy story that Jane Austen would have written, had she lived around magic and fey.

Still fresh from her first bestseller, she presents a new array of captivating stories in "The Ladies of Grace Adieu." But expect it to be more whimsical and varied, rather than a sprawling fantasy-historical epic -- these are more like nuggets.

The title story takes place in the magical Regency period of her debut: dull Mr. Field remarries after his wife died, and his pretty second wife, his niece, and a friend soon become good friends. When Mr. Strange passes by on a family errand, he discovers that there is more -- these ladies are all magicians, and have quietly escaped the boundaries placed by society.

From there on, Clarke trips through a series of strange, fantastical stories: when a young newlywed finds that her rich hubby expects her to spin flax, she asks for help from a nasty little fairy, who will kidnap her if she doesn't guess his name. Think a Regency "Rumplestiltskin."

Then a young lady tries to regain her boyfriend from the mysterious "Mrs. Mabb"; a Duke changes his destiny with a pair of scissors and a needle; a Jewish doctor and a fairy nobleman travel through England; the Queen of Scots becomes fascinated by an embroidered figure; and a young pastor finds himself enmeshed with a cruel fairy lord. One of the stories is even set in the world of Neil Gaiman's "Stardust."

"The Ladies of Grace Adieu and Other Stories" is more fantasy and less history than the full-length novel, although it leans more heavily on history. But then, most of these short stories may not be in the same universe, and they range from whimsical little fluff pieces to almost-horror.

Clarke still writes with the solid nineteenth-century style, flavoured with shimmering descriptions of "Pharisees" and odd creatures, although Clarke occasionally skimps on the more exotic descriptions -- just what do "goblin babies" look like? The second story is also amusingly written in much-mispelled English ("...lookes at me with his bewtiful Eyes..."), and Clarke peppers the other stories with older words like "shewed."

There are also some deeper moments, where Clarke approaches the lack of freedom given to women (magical or not) where they only have marriage to a well-off dullard to look forward to. And though the shorter stories are not much more than fables, the longer ones have intriguing characters who are likable in an understated way -- including some very familiar, quirky ones.

"The Ladies of Grace Adieu and Other Stories" is a solid little collection, more whimsical than Clarke's first book. Very pleasant Regency "Pharisee" tales, from a modern master.

Holt's Magna Carta is an interesting study of the politics behind the formation of Magna Carta. The author's exploration of the political and legal crises in medieval times conveys how this charta was a result of war and injustice. The author connects many legal principles, such as individual rights, of the modern era and roots them in their medieval past. This book is detailed and long, but worthwhile to students of legal, medieval, or English history.

Many Magna Carta scholars, including A. E. Dick Howard and Ralph V. Turner, rate this book as THE definitive work on the historical background and events leading up to the Great Charter, as well as its immediate consequences. No serious student of Magna Carta (1215) can afford not to read this book, and to read it carefully.

Holt's Magna Carta is an interesting study of the politics behind the formation of Magna Carta. The author's exploration of the political and legal crises in medieval times conveys how this charta was a result of war and injustice. The author connects many legal principles, such as individual rights, of the modern era and roots them in their medieval past. This book is detailed and long, but worthwhile to students of legal, medieval, or English history.

Mary Anne gives a wonderfully detailed look at England in the tumultuous years right before the Regency. This was the exciting time of Nelson, Napoleon and Jane Austen.

As an armchair historian, I enjoy a well-crafted story that allows me to see the decadence available during this time. And it helps that Du Maurier is writing about her own ancestor, and being rather honest as to Mary Anne's ethical and moral failings to boot.

But as with all such true stories, there is no happy ending. Still, it is well worth your time and effort if you enjoy history.

It's obvious that Daphne du Maurier felt a powerful connection with her ancestor Mary Anne Clarke. Indeed, her characterization of Mary Anne reflects a remarkable perception, echoing both the frustrations of a woman in a world of men and foreshadowing the feminist works that would follow in the years after this novel's publication. At times skilfully, at other times awkwardly, du Maurier incorporates historical fact into the narrative. While this works well at times, there were a number of parts in the book where I felt that details were being skimped, or satisfied with merely a mention, such as the death of Mary Anne's first child. The final part of the novel, set in the House of Commons, is the book's most significant failing. It is dry, dull, and slow, depending entirely too much on dialogue. The novel seems to peter out at this point, although I felt that the final chapter was very well written. I would class this book as average.

Opened in a flashback style, beautiful and tempting, the biography of Mary Anne Clarke, the notorious heroine, unfolded. Based on her great-great-grandmother, Ms. Du Maurier weaved a story of a woman's power struggle and web of intrique played in society dominated by men. Set in London at the time when Paris was being ruled in Terror regime, London was in parliamentary turmoil and both countries are in war at the end of 18th century.

Mary Anne, with her cunning wit and unbeatable Irish blood, was born in London slum neighbourhood. With her resourceful mind, she determined to be a success in men's world by playing the same game, with the same rules. She first tried to find a wealthy husband but got a big-mouthed, good-for-nothing one instead. Not to be beaten by circumstances, she left her husband and started to use her unique beauty to make connection, to be a 'social climber', in order to provide food and shelter for her 3 children, a mother, a half-sister and a brother. As time would have it, she was introduced to The Duke of York, became his mistress and the scandalous dealings began.

Being a mistress to a prince didn't mean she would have unlimited income. On the contrary, to maintain the house, lifestyle and servants, she must do 'side job' by promoting soldiers to the Duke with some amount of fee. This would lead to the most scandalous trial(s) in England concerning royal family.

The dialogs and the statements were beautifully written (but no ramblings) while the characters each had their own strength and weakness. It was said that there are some resemblances between the author's life with the main character which added to the substance of the story. All I can say is I admire her wit and I see the reasons behind her every move.

Feel the spirit, see the dreams and understand the love of life which came from a woman named Mary Anne.

Just a note of caution:
Notice that the title Amazon lists for this book is "Mazda Miata Mx-5: Performance Portfolio 1989-1996", but the cover reads "Mazda Miata Mx-5: Performance Portfolio 1989-1997" (the difference is in the dates that are covered). There are two editions of this book, and they do have slight, but significant, differences in the contents. Although both editions are the same size (by page count), the 1997 edition adds an article or two, and deletes others. I have the 1989-96 version, and I have enjoyed reading it, but I can't help but wonder what I have been missing!

If you have any interest at all in the Miata MX-5 / Miata at all, this is a must have item on your bookshelf. Buy it.

Like Miata's? Then your love to read all the assorted articals in this book. Test drives, comparisons, and after-market reviews from the worlds most respected plublications... Road'n'Track, Car and Driver, many European Articles. Miata vs. Alfa, BMW, and the Monster V8 Miata

This bookis interesting for you only if you are really interested in complex, technical views about semantics or modal logic, or the pphilosophy of Carnap.

If you are jsut interested in Carnap's philosophy, but want to read some interesting stuff, then this is not your book. Try Introduction to Philosophy of Science, or try the autobiography of Carnap.

It's somewhat incredible just how much of the philosophy of language to emerge in the last half of the 20th century was anticipated by Carnap here. Indeterminacy of translation, primary and secondary intensions; there are passages that foreshadow Kripke as well. There is very little to object to. Indeed, just about everything Carnap says seems pretty obvious. Still, this seems to be the really hard thing to pull off, judging by the missteps many other philosophers manage to talk themselves into. One is continually awed in Carnap by his tremendous judgement. Like Russell before him, he sees very clearly that when it comes to the choice of a semantic method, that is, a method of interpretation of utterances (assignation of "meaning"), "right" and "wrong" aren't useful categories. (Almost all philosophers these days speak of their opponents' theories being "wrong", "false", "obviously false" or "demonstrably false", a real disaster not only for the ill will it engenders.) Various theories may be more or less useful for one purpose or another.

Now, there are some well known objections to much of what is here. Carnap does make a point of separating the meaning ("intension") from the truth ("extension") of an utterance and hence views interpretation as being analyzable into two dissimilable components, one a sort of armchair process and the other empirical. Quine's objections to this are legendary but not particularly useful to science. Indeed, if one were to do a probabilistic analysis of Quine, one would find that what he's worried about are events of asymptotically vanishing probability. This sort of theme is common in mathematics; there are notions of stability and instability that are second-nature to most scientists that ordinary philosophers don't seem to really have. All of Quine's imagined "alternate conceptual schemes" are almost certainly wildly unstable; all of the aliens *we'll* ever meet are tremendously likely to see and discuss the same sorts of everyday objects we see and discuss; this is because natural probabilities are a much different lay of land than "metaphysical possibilities" or "logical possibilities". In truth, of course, you only need to know that other humans have similar conceptual schemes. Searle was onto this in answer to Quine, though he didn't really have the resources to say it very well. (He speaks of a "background" or some such nonsense when he really should be talking about brain architecture.) On the other hand Carnap (shockingly) was really ahead of this all along if you read him closely; he properly sidesteps the issue of ontology altogether.

Reading back over the paragraph I just wrote, this is probably the most disjointed review I have ever written. Partly this is because I haven't fully digested Carnap's achievement in this book--which is a vast one.

Though Willard van Orman Quine taught a generation of analytic philosophers to disparage Rudolf Carnap's *Meaning and Necessity*, in reality (as in Carnap's private helps to understanding this period of his work) there is very little to dislike about this book. Carnap's "assimilation" of Tarski and Goedel's limitative results with respect to the logical syntax of language did not cause him to completely abandon the habits of mind he had accustomed himself to, but led him to write a series of books on semantics. And in this third volume, his last major work on the philosophy of language, Carnap extends his analysis to include modal phenomena (possibility and necessity) which were formerly intellectually distasteful to the Vienna Circle. The volume is rounded out with a number of papers, including Carnap's famous "Empiricism, Semantics and Ontology" and a discussion of Charles W. Morris' tripartite division of semiotics.

Although Quine (whom Carnap engaged in a spirited correspondence with concerning these topics) spent a great deal of time during the '50s and '60s demonstrating the logical inconsistency of Carnap's analysis, this book is very much an "implementation" of Carnap's Principle of Tolerance concerning modalities and their role in semantic analysis: although Carnap is usually understood as a slightly lax Fregean, here he presents a formalization of Frege alongside multiple theories of his own. Furthermore, all subsequent work in intensional logic and the semantics of modal logic owes something to Carnap's treatment of "possible worlds" in terms of state-descriptions: contemporary modal logic has rather less to do with the metaphysics of modality than with the issues of descriptive adequacy raised by possible-worlds semantics and addressed at length in Barwise and Perry's *Situations and Attitudes* (a book which would not have existed but for this one, as perhaps could be honestly said of many linguistic works informed by "generative semantics"). All in all, an important document of postwar intellectual life and a model for genuinely critical analysis -- an excellent buy.

This is a great book for Mosaic lovers! It is very informative and gives detailed step by step instructions on creating beautiful masterpieces! I highly recommend this book!

The beautiful wall plaque on the cover of this book was what sold me on it, but disappointingly for me, it's probably only one of two or three projects in the book I would be interested in doing. There are photos of incredible work others have done such as pool bottoms, floors, kitchen cupboards, an outdoor monument, fountain, grottoe, patios, pillars. They make your mouth water, but there are no directions for them...not that most of us would attempt them anyway! The projects for us mortals are spaced in between these grandiose artworks and include a casket notable for its artistic design, some jewelry items, frames, a beautiful birdbath, pots, a small shelf. One important factor in keeping me from trying any of these is that although the instructions are adequate, they are not very inviting to read due to their tiny print size, and the photographs could be larger and reveal more of the process. This would not be my first choice in a mosaic book, but I'd still be tempted by that gorgeous wall plaque!

This is a wonderful book for learning to make a wide variety of mosaic tile projects. Clear, step-by-step instructions are both written and demonstrated with full-color photographs.

Sixteen projects include tables, frames, jewelry, containers, floors, and walls. There are also designs for outdoor areas, as well as the kitchen & bath. Numerous pieces of other magnificent artwork are also displayed throughout the book.

There are over 30 great templates featuring many designs. Some include flowers, celestial elements, a large angel & a mermaid. There are several animals including a unicorn, butterfly & dragon as well.

My only wish is that a list of suppliers was included, I found some of the materials difficult to obtain.

I purchased this book for my nephew who just turned two years old. My brother and I had a different version of this book when we were children and it had wonderful pictures that I can still remember 40 years later. My own visions of the perfect Christmas came from this story. I wanted my nephew to have the same feeling toward Christmas and this story as we did. I looked at a number of illustrated versions of this book and this particular one had the best pictures. They are large and realistic, with beautiful with candy colors. You can imagine yourself in the scene and feel the soft fluffy snow on the ground and taste the sugar plums.

This book is a classic. Just as I remember from when I was a kid. I'm glad I chose this for my son's second Christmas. He loves it.

A have to have book for Christmas, one that every child should have read to them, just like in the movie "National Lampoon's Christmas vacation", when the family finally settles in for the night and grandpap hands the reading over to the the children's dad, passing down the tradition.

While this book features fabulous artwork, I was disappointed that the pictures inside the book are not as bright and colorful as the cover (and as I expected).

Ages 4-8 will relish a new spin on Clement Clarke Moore's classic, which uses Gennady Spirin's lovely, artistic panels to illustrate the simple holiday classic. While the story's been reprinted hundreds of times so undoubtedly you have at least one version in your library, this NIGHT BEFORE CHRISTMAS provides some classic, lovely embellishments perfect for libraries seeking something fresh and appealing.

I have several versions of this wonderful old tale---even those saved from my own childhood. But when I saw this for sale at Union Station, I had to have it. The illustrations are breathtaking! Look for the shadows that Mr Spirin, a prize winning Russian artist, paints into his scenes. Have you ever seen the underneath of Santa's richy embellished sleigh as it is "parked" on a rooftop? Look for the cats who are also coming downstairs to "see what was the matter". My kids are teens now, but I bought it for them for when they have kids. It is the very essence of the Spirit of Santa's yearly wintertime journey!

As always, Will Moses (as did his Grama before him) has hit the heart of rural America in his enchanting scenes. Don't forget to look for the full moon in each of his paintings! Silent Night and the Night Before Christmas were no exceptions. We sent one to our friends in Scotland who loved it!

I bought this as my wife and I didn't have one, she really liked it. Its got nice illustrations and is a good choice.

Wonderful book.
I buy my daughter 'The Night Before Christmas' book every year with different illustrators.
The folksy artwork is a nice variation.
Loved reading the personnel reflection of Will Moses' childhood Christmas memories.
The ornament included in the back of the bok was a nice surprise.
I ordered another for my grandson.

This is Groff Conklin's fourth anthology, and it was published originally in 1952. It contains 43 stories, 22 of them from 1950-1952, and the rest from the 40's, 30's and 20's, and one by Jack London from 1912. As one might expect, with the surge in number of anthologies in this period, they draw more and more on the stories which were published more recently.

Two of these stories have been nominated for Retro Hugos: "What You Need" by Lewis Padgett was nominated in 1996 for the Retro Hugo for Short Stories written in 1945, while "A Subway Named Mobius" by A. J. Deutsch was nominated in 2001 for the Retro Hugo for Short Stories written in 1950. In addition "The Colour Out Of Space" by H. P. Lovecraft is included, which tied for 12th on the Astounding/Analog All-Time Poll in 1971 for stories written before 1940, and tied for 26th on the Locus All-Time Poll for Novelettes in 1999.

Other noteworthy stories include Jack London's "The Scarlet Plague", and end of civilization story, André Maurois' "The War Against The Moon", Ann Griffith's "Zeritsky's Law, and many others. While this collection is not as strong as the previous ones, it is still a very good collection of stories. This is definitely worth picking up if you have the chance and enjoy early science fiction.

A lot of fun stuff from the fifties and earlier.
Some very thought provoking and well-written, some forgettable (or a little, um, outdated), but still fun the read. Everything from Lovecraft's amazing "The Color Out Of Space" to a forgettable "Counter Charm" by Peter Philips.
There's a story about excessive hair growth, one on killer bees, a horror type on a doorbell, a very good "Recruiting Station" by Van Vogt... involves some time travel... Bradbury's "Kaleidoscope"... basically 560 pages of old sf to keep you busy... I enjoyed it.

Although he has since been overshadowed by John Campbell, Groff Conklin was an influential editor who produced several collections of science fiction short stories long before SF was fashionable. This book contains a treasure-trove of stories by authors whose names are still familiar as well as a few who may be new to the younger reader.

I certainly hope a new publisher decides to reissue some of Conklin's collections. It has been too long since we were able to enjoy stories by Kris Neville and Ross Rocklynne.