Dean Books

I was very satisfied to be hammered by nailbiting Koontz stuff...thrilled and excited to experince this new feature which I now regard as one of my best top 10 books - Thank you Mr Koontz

I was very satisfied to hammered by nailbiting Koontz stuff...thrilled and excited to experince this new feature which I now regard as one of my best top 10 books - Thank you Mr Koontz

A good collection of music notes and lyrics for a good price. Of all Dino's classics in one single book. Good deal!

I am a big Dean Martin fan and have several of his cd's. That got me thinking about playing some of his songs on the keyboard. Of the 30 songs in this songbook, at least 18 were ones that I really liked and wanted to learn to play.I really enjoyed "You Belong to Me", "Volare", "On an Evening in Rome" and "Ain't That a Kick in the Head". I have been looking for some of these songs for a while so it was nice to see them in one spot.
It has the chord symbols above the staff for those who can't read piano sheet music.
I have found some songbooks have a lot of songs that I don't like, just to get to the ones I do like. In this case the book was well worth the money as I enjoyed well over half the songs.

Elizabeth Gouge is one of the finest wordsmiths I have ever read. Her stories are gentle, compassionate - showing her abiding compassion for human kind, with our flaws and our nobility equally recognized. A woman of faith, she weaves a magic through her tales--a twisting of earthly realities with spiritual mysteries, and she denies any limits on reality, knowing that there is more to this world, and to our being in it, than the "reality" many people insist on defining. There is humility in her work, but tremendous greatness. And her writing is as lovely as a Japanese ink drawing - deft, smooth, simple, evocative. She can handle a sentence like nobody else in the world--words sweet and rich as butter, a complete pleasure to run through the mind and the imagination. I wish she were still alive and I could write to her. I wish I could know her better. I'd love to hear what she might have to say about quite a few things, these days. This is my favorite book in all the world. That's the greatest praise I can offer.

The setting for the story is a cathedral city in the fens. The city is populated with charmingly depicted characters that ooze quaintness from every pore. The main character is the old Dean, known in the town as a fierce and relentless man due to his hunting down of the city's corruption. And yet, the Dean is a misunderstood man. His love and fidelity are often met with indifference in the town, and this is even more true of his own wife who is deterred by his ugliness and who finds his devotion to her repulsive. Yet help is at hand, for the Dean owns a beautiful watch: a watch that becomes the starting point for a new friendship for the Dean, and new hope.

This little book is great. Easy to understand simple text with illustrations to match. I highly recommend this little gem.

Diabetes is a complicated disease. I know. I have it, and I've tried to explain it to people (no, I didn't get it from eating too much sugar). This book gives an easy-to-understand explanation about diabetes and its treatment--and the illustrations are great. I'm giving copies to my friends.

This book has all the elements of a great story. Action, suspense, well-defined characters, and an ending that ties up loose ends makes Dishonorable Duty a recommended read.

I loved this book from the first page to the last. This look into a military police dog handler and her love of duty and personal life. A fantasy love comes to reality during an OSI investigation in the Korean theater. Great characters move this story rapidly to a climatic but happy ending. Cadence gives us a superb job of narrating a fast moving tale. Enjoy this remarkable read immediately!

Dizzy and the Gas House Gang was one of the best books I have read in years. I am an avid fan of baseball, but not quite enough of a fan to wade through some of the typical baseball books on the market--mired with statistics and uninteresting details about flavor-of-the-month players. "Dizzy," however, is a rich account of one of the most interesting and arguably the best pitcher in baseball. A true gem for history buffs, sports fans, and romatics alike.

The best St Louis Cardinal book I've ever read. It is so detailed and fun. The writer - Doug Feldmann - does an outstanding job of covering all the bases in this wonderful release!

glad to be a sportsman in the Tarheel state. Eagerly anticipating "The Secret Lives of Fishermen".

I came across this book while looking for something to read on a rainy day. The title was amusing and I was somewhat aquainted with Jim Dean's work as editor of "Wildlife in North Carolina" magazine. This is a truly remarkable collection of stories that celebrate the outdoor life. These stories are not just about hunting and fishing, although hunters and fishermen would certainly enjoy them. Mr. Dean has captured a unique way of approaching life. His stories are quite entertaining and will remind you of a time that many think has passed away. A time when life wasn't so complicated and things didn't seem to move so fast. The stories with names such as "The Summers Before Air," or "Dogs Are a Better Class of People" should make you wonder what this man considers important. I highly recommend this book. You will be glad you bought it. These stories will make you feel good, especially on a rainy day. It also makes a great gift for anyone who enjoys the outdoors.

This is one of the finer books of recent poetry I have found. While surreal, it also gives the reader something to think about. It's sometimes whimsical, but not completely inscrutable, as some postmodern poets are. Highly recommended.

Elegy On Toy Piano is the sixth collection of poetry from Lenore Marshall Prize finalist Dean Young. The brief, free-verse wordplay mourns the tragedies of life, from the loss of a beloved family pet to the end of a lovers' relationship, but also stretches beyond grief to portray a wide range of mixed of emotions, acknowledging the bad with the good. A serious-minded reflection on the mysteries of life, death, and everything in between. Elegy on Toy Piano: You don't need a pony / to connect you to the unseeable / or an airplane to connect you to the sky. // Necessary it is to die / if you are a living thing / which you have no choice about. // Necessary it is to love to live / and there are many manuals / but in all important ways / one is on one's own. // You need not cut off your hand. / No need to eat a bouquet. / Your head becomes a peach pit / Your tongue a honeycomb. // Necessary it is to live to love, / to charge into the burning tower / then charge back out / and necessary it is to die. / Even for the grass, even for the pony / connecting you to what can't be grasped. // The injured gazelle falls behind the / herd. One last wild enjambment. // Because of the sores in his mouth, / the great poet struggles with a dumpling. / His work has enlarged the world / but the world is about to stop including him. / He is the tower the world runs out of. // When something becomes ash, / there's nothing you can do to turn it back. / About this, even diamonds do not lie.

This book is vital reading for anyone and everyone interested in thinking about Hardt and Negri's "Empire." Most of these are new essays--not recycled book reviews. And, the topics and contributors are amazing--top people in law, feminism, environmentalism, sociology, philosophy, new technologies, international relations etc. There are chapters by Ernesto Laclau, Slavoj Zizek, Saskia Sassen, Peter Fitzpatrick and a host of others. There is also an interview with Michael Hardt. In a nutshell, this book establishes THE debate over Empire.

"Empire's New Clothes" is a scholarly collection of essays that critique and comment on Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri's influential book "Empire". The analysis is consistently incisive, penetrating and thought-provoking; many of the contributors offer their own theories and challenge Hardt and Negri's interpretation of the works of Deleuze and Guattari, Foucault, Marx, Spinoza and others. The result is a book that pushes the debate about "Empire" to a new level of philosophical sophistication.

Interestingly, each chapter focuses on a particular theme found in Hardt and Negri's "Empire". For example, "Immanence", "Transcendence" and the "Market" comprise the subtitles of the first three chapters, respectively. I found this helpful as it provides value when using the book as a research tool.

In several essays, Hardt and Negri's concept of the 'multitude' is critiqued. Instead of a multitudinous and spontaneous 'being-against' Empire as envisioned by Hardt and Negri, Ernesto Laclau argues that "any 'multitude' is constructed through political action - which presupposes antagonism". Because Laclau believes that "political articulation" will be needed to coordinate struggles among diverse groups to achieve liberation, he concludes that "Empire" offers "incoherence" between mobilizing the multitude and achieving specific political objectives.

Peter Fitzpatrick points out inconsistencies in Hardt and Negri's theory of U.S. exceptionalism. The assertion that the U.S. serves as the vital center of global economics clashes with Hardt and Negri's claim that the U.S. 'is not [Empire's] center'. Fitzpatrick goes on to highlight the imperialistic and exclusionary history of U.S. conquest and expansion to contend that the U.S. record has not been substantially different from past and present European empires, in turn implying that historical circumstances have not changed significantly enough to suppose that Hardt and Negri's revolution might occur anytime soon.

Kevin Dunn contributed a very interesting essay about Africa's ambiguous relation to Empire. Challenging Hardt and Negri's assertion that there is no 'outside' to Empire, Dunn describes African power relations to show that the continent does not conform to the Western development model. The militarization of borders in Africa and elsewhere argues against Hardt and Negri's 'smooth space' of Empire. The embrace of a uniquely conservative brand of Christianity among many in Africa also suggests that differences within the multitude pose problems for mobilization as envisioned by Hardt and Negri but may suggest alternative strategies for organizing resistance against Empire.

However, my favorite essay was the feminist critique penned by Lee Quinby, who compares the millennial rhetoric found in "Empire" with the use of dualities (such as good versus evil) in the Christian Bible. Quinby finds fault with the assertion that the revolt against Empire will be an us-against-them event as depicted by Hardt and Negri. Quinby also critiques Hardt and Negri for overlooking Foucault's lesson that resistance against power manifests in many forms and for different reasons. This point leads Quinby to a discussion of Hardt and Negri's failure to locate gender as the predominant source of power, violence and poverty. Ultimately, Quinby cites Amartya Sen's work about women's struggles as offering greater insight into the "intricate gendered relations between sovereign power and biopwer" when compared with "Empire".

Jodi Dean's article about "communicative capitalism" was also informative. Dean addresses the problem of articulating politics in a communications media dominated by large corporations that mainly produce what Hardt and Negri term 'spectacle'. Dean believes that Hardt and Negri offer "hope" but little concrete evidence that the multitude might be successful in constructing a language of liberation in the face of such overwhelming oppositional power.

In a key section, Michael Hardt answers some of the critics in an interview with Thomas Dumm. Hardt states that he and Negri recognize the need to develop a more comprehensive theory of the multitude and its possibility of realizing a political form, which he believes is the book's greatest shortcoming. Hardt also responds to some who objected to the "eclecticism" found in "Empire", contending that "dogmatism" stifles understanding and that communist thought does not necessarilly begin and end with Marx. Hardt defends the idea that the nation-state must be overcome to achieve "absolute democracy"; elsewhere, he explains why he and Negri reformulated Foucault's top-down conception of "biopower" into a bottom-up theory of emancipation.

Other noteworthy articles include Malcolm Bull, who stresses the importance of politics that are founded in hybrid cultural identities; William Chaloupka, who faults "Empire" for offering a weak environmental critique of capitalism; Saskia Sassen, who finds in many political struggles identifications with particular urban locales and disadvantaged populations; Ruth Buchanan and Sundhya Pahuja, who discuss the role of the World Bank and the nation-state in controlling and enforcing the world market system; Slavoj Zizek, who contends that the state is exercising power in the "strongest" terms yet, as evidenced by the war on terror; Kam Shapiro, who envisions a politics of diversity that is "experimental, tactical and provisional", as opposed to uniform; and Paul Passavant and Jodi Dean's concluding essay on the need to resurrect a politics that values life and non-capitalist values in a manner that provides "a more adequate response" to the threat of terrorism than surveillance, oppression and war.

I highly recommend this outstanding book to everyone who has read "Empire" and may want to further their understanding of its key themes and ideas.

The first thing that hit me in this book was its exuberance. It reminds me of "The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony" for its sheer joy in pressing ahead. Miller isn't afraid to let his sense of humor show, either. But, no mistake, this is a serious work of scholarship, deep and detailed.

The book starts off with an evolution of the hero, from the Greeks, through chivalry, the Renaissance, straight on to present day's concerns with the hero as he gets explained by anthropology, sociology, and psychology.

The next chapters deal with elements in the hero's life and adventures: his remarkable birth, strength as a youth, threatening family, problematic sex life and requisite death; his landscape, both exterior and interior, and his relation to the otherworld, to his quest, and to his king. Variations of the quest are laid out, including its structure in time (maturational, sequential, and the effect of the otherworld on times of day and year), and the hero's costars (helper, sovereign and woman).

In a chapter ironically titled "The Hero 'Speaks'" we find the many nonverbal ways the hero is expressed and described, from physique and coloration, to gesture, to weapon and armor, combat, and finally to actual speech, which is generally just as violent as his actions.

Next Miller takes up other characters the hero comes upon (or sometimes is), including the trickster, the smith, and the comic coward. He further discusses color and the hero, with an interesting passage on black, green, and other knights.

The hero exists on the edges of our experience; his relation to the shaman, to the gods, and the line between life and death, are discussed next.

The conclusion draws all this together into a series of graphs that show the connections of different hero types, the hero to royalty or to a trickster, and to the other characters in his life.

I read this book hoping for another point of view after reading Joseph Campbell's "Hero with a Thousand Faces" and other related books. I assume most readers who, like me, are not academics, will find this book for much the same reason. So some comments about the two works might be worthwhile.

Miller is not trying to draw all of human experience and mythology into some single linear form. As he says, he isn't interested in the monomyth. He limits his discussion to epics with Indo-European roots. This is a comforting strategy when set against Campbell's inclusion (and shaping) of many many cultures, with the problems that raises.

He also doesn't limit the discussion to what fits. Some heros, for example, will have childhoods that make it obvious they're something special, but some don't fit that mold, and may be entirely unpromising.

The problem (well, my problem) with Campbell is the limitation of the monomyth; not only is the story line constricted, its psychological meanings are too concerned with Freud and Jung. When you hear someone say that in myth, water represents X, suddenly this becomes a game of finding the correct meaning for the symbol, makes *everything* a symbol, and leaves me feeling like I've been watching a fortuneteller explaining away dreams. Surely by now we can subscribe to a different view of psychology, symbolism and meaning.

Miller, by refusing to create a central character and storyline that will explain all his examples, lets the literature be as vibrant as it wants to be, as problematic and multivalent. I found myself wishing at times that instead, he would create multiple spines for stories, a limited but useful number. This would sacrifice accuracy, but would offer more anchors for the discussion. I suppose I came to his book expecting a multimyth rather than monomyth, but that's not his intention. Then again, he gives the apparatus for constructing that kind of multimyth on one's own, so maybe that need can be fulfilled after all.

This is a lively, bountiful book, scholarly, aware of the possible pitfalls, and exuberant in its pursuit of the hero in all his epic forms.

If you're searching for the definitive compendium about all aspects of epic heroism, this is the one book to buy. The author quotes famous as well as lesser-known epic stories, drawing mainly from Norse, Welsh, French, Balkanian and Persian sources among others, profoundly analyzing and interpreting the cultural specialities of their protagonists as well as their striking similarities, sometimes pronouncing obscure and even humorous aspects and episodes. The book is academical and down-to-earth with a lot of footnotes and cross-references, don't expect an esoterical, over-simplifying Campbellian take on the subject matter. Thankfully, Miller keeps a certain ironic distance which results in a more entertaining read than I expected. For writers, especially in the movie business, "The Epic Hero" can be a real treasure, a source of immense inspiration - not from the structural point of view, but regarding the many details, themes and characters Dean A. Miller puts on display here in his great effort. I consider it the perfect companion (though not a surrogate due to its different scholaric approach) to Christopher Vogler's "The Writer's Journey" of which it sometimes appears to be an accidental yet very valuable continuation.