Hughes Books

The information and illustrations inside the book are wonderful. Every page you turn to has something that sparks your interest. Only downfall was that I purchased this for my husband for Christmas and the second time he opened the book to read out of it the binding broke.

This is quite simply a magnificent book. It contains an incredible wealth of information, ranging from leptons, bosons and variously flavoured quarks right through to galaxy superclusters. The planets of the solar system are covered in-depth, and every other known type of structure in the universe besides. Apart from this description of the universe on every scale, this book contains pages covering the history and methods of astronomy, space travel, the question of life in the universe, and likely scenarios for the beginning and the end of the cosmos. Even string theory is touched upon. The final quarter of the book is taken up by an extensive collection of star charts, inviting the reader to actively involve him- or herself in some stargazing.
But it's not just the breadth and depth of the information covered that makes this book such a gem, it is also the way it is presented. Every single page is visually pleasing, through a clever merging of text and illustrations. With text often broken up into numerous, succinct, thematic lemmas, many pages almost feel like a book in themselves. The layout and design is stylish as well as colourful. Many of the images are absolutely dazzling. Once you open this visual guide, anywhere, chances are you'll be glued to it for the next hour. A must-have for anyone who likes to be immersed in the endless wonders of our universe.

This book is amazing. Its pictures are beautiful and explanations clear.
I leave it on my coffee table as the pictures are so beautiful and on every page. I would suggest this book for especially persons that have not had previous knowledge of the universe as this explains it all in understandable detail. Good for all ages except the very young.

Exceeded all my expectations. This book draws on the latest photos from the far reaches of our universe. The best possible pictures of the most distant corners of the Universe. The discussion which accompanies each page is science worthy yet not "over the head" of the non scientist. Great to give the adolescent child or grandchild who doesn't yet know if they are interested in science. There's so much material in this one book, it will take you a light year to finish it!

Visually intoxicating! You can learn the secrets of the universe in this one volume. I have numerous DK published books all of which are excellent. However, this is the paragon that all the other books are judged by. Simply, it is the best book that they have ever published. It should be the standard text book for astronomy classes!

Excellent book! A must-read for anyone who works with children. It includes information that I believe anyone around children can utilize. Great information on how to deal with children who have been traumatized but it also has important information about parenting in general and helps us understand how children see the world.

We adopted a son with RAD and worked with an attachment therapist. Adopting the methods in this book made an enormous difference in our lives! Don't hesitate if you are considering this book!

This is a readable and usable book for those who work with children. RAD is under recognized in the mental health field. More focus on RAD needs to occur in the adoption and foster care systems.

I teach At-Risk 4 year olds and in reading this book I was struck once again with the fact that our words have such power with children....with everyone! This book documents a journey of positive, healing language and loving hope between a foster mom and her daughter. It reinforced to me that the best I can do with the limited time I have with my students is to be consistent with "the attitude," always separating the negative behavior I want to correct from how much I value the child. Excellent resource! I will read it again and again and pass it on to my colleagues!

This book is like a step-by-step instruction manual for helping foster/adopted children with Reactive Attachment Disorder. It is told in the form of a fictional story in order to draw from many different real-life cases. It tells the moving story of a RAD child from birth to age 8. You learn how this disorder happens, how it is often misdiagnosed and mistreated. Then, best of all, you learn all the right things to do to help the child find the healing that it is needed in order to have a happy, healthy life. It is thoroughly engrossing from the first page to the last. You are quickly invested in discovering more about this little girl, and her journey of healing. It has helped me to finally understand the puzzling, and extremely frustrating behavior of my own adopted RAD child. Once I understood the motivation behind his outrageous behavior, and learned the techniques necessary to help him find the healing, I began to see improvement right away. We have also found a therapist who has experience wortking with RAD children, which has made a big difference.

Everyone who works in Children's Services, every child psychologist, every foster parent, and potential adoptive parent should be required to read this book. It completely changed the way I viewed my son's behavior, and, therefore, helped me learn more effective ways to deal with his behavior. Until you understand the RAD child, your typical, conventional ways of dealing with oppositional, defiant, deeply troubled children will most likely remain ineffective, and you will become frustrated and overwhelmed.

I first came across Sylvia Plath in an anthology of modern poetry. Her poems "Daddy" and "Lady Lazarus" blew me away. The former may well be, in my opinion, the best poem ever written by a woman, and one of the five best written by anyone in the last two centuries. Buying this book, I expected more of the same. Unfortunately, I found most of her early work to be dissapointingly typical. The reason Plath is so controversial is that her greatness is linked inextricably to her darkness. Before the latter manifested during her divorce and subsequent depression, there just wasn't that much to her. In other words, much of her early poetry is that of a reasonably intelligent woman- entertaining, even a little intriguing, but lacking the fury of "Lady Lazarus", the darkness of "A Birthday Present", or the fatalistic beauty of "Ariel". And while there are some glimmers of the genius that is to come (The Colossus, I Am Vertical), they aren't many. My advice to any prospective reader is to save some time and money and pick up her collection "Ariel", which contains 90% of her essential work.

Sylvia Plath - The Collected Poems has to be the best book of poetry in the world. I love Sylvia Plath, she was a genius. Her poetry moves me, everything she has ever written is gold. The first poem I ever read by Plath was Metaphors, "I've eaten a bag of green apples, boarded the train there's no getting off." Something about that line just struck a cord with me, from that moment on I was determined to read all her poems. Another poems I love include: Soliloquy of the Solipsist, I am Vertical, The Other, The Rival, You're, The Rabbit Catcher, Lady Lazaurus, Stillborn, For A Fatherless Son, Leaving Early, Morning Song, Cut, A Birthday Present, Fever 103, Gigolo, Daddy, and The Disquieting Muses. She writes about her father a lot, he died when she was nine and his death left her with depression for the rest of her life, from The Colossus, "Counting the red stars and those of plum-color. The sun rises under the pillar of your tongue. My hours are married to shadow." The Jailer is a poem I just adore, "My sleeping capsule, my red and blue zeppelin drops me from a terrible altitude." The poem, Poem for a Birthday- Witch Burning is gorgeous and frightening real, "I inhabit the wax image of myself, a doll's body. Sickness begins here: I am a dartboard for witches. Only the devil can eat the devil out." Plath left a legacy of timeless poems, short stories, and a novel, The Bell Jar. I have enjoyed reading The Collected Poems and so will you, Enjoy!

I love poetry, and this every poetry lover's fantasy. Having a volume of one of the best poet's ever almost complete collection. This is a book that I treasure, all the poems are masterpieces, and so beautiful. No one will ever write or think like Sylvia Plath again. This is a must-have for all of her fans. I own many poetry volumes--and this has to be my favorite. I would definitely recommend this--it was well deserving of 5 stars, and even people who aren't big fans of poetry have no choice but to love "The Collected Poems" by Sylvia Plath.

I originally bought this book seeking one special poem. What I have got now is a the key to the richest of treasure chests!

Anyone who has not discovered Plath's poetry-- distinctly superior to her prose-- would be greatly served to seek out a slim volume called "Crossing the Water." This haunting collection features most of her greatest poems from what I think to be her most creative years: 1957-1959. If these don't grab you, then give up on her altogether. However, the Collected Poems are the inevitable place to continue since they include her early promising works, as well as those dark pithy gems that characterize her bitterly twisted slide into the furthest reaches of her capacity for cynicism and despair.

A superb collection.

DOI is a hilarious odyssey into the twisted, troubled mind of Patrick "Bad News" Hughes. Some of the situations he describes would make me want to live underground and eat canned food for years until it all blew over. But not Pat. He wears it on his sleeve in this no-holds-barred autobiography.

Organized into a multitude of short stories, this is some great light reading. Pick it up now (or Patrick will invite himself into your life and screw it all up for you!).

Patrick Hughes' stories, told by anyone else, would make the average reader wince or vomit, or both. There's more wall-to-wall depravity here than in the average Bukowski story. And you will laugh until you cry. His Ren Faire photo essay alone made me laugh until I thought I'd injured myself.

At the same time, Hughes has a sharp eye for detail and reserves of compassion and decency that you generally don't expect to find in what's basically a book of drinking stories gone horribly awry. He's a talented and thoughtful writer whose subject matter just happens to be growing up poor, dumb, and horny in the American South.

If you read a funnier book this year, I want to know about it.

DIARY OF INDIGNITIES first came to light on the blog Bad News Hughes, documenting indignities generated by the author's life and talent for personal failure. Anticipate a good deal of foul language and a whole lot of laughter: while the former might put off a conservative library holding, any collection strong in humor needs DIARY OF INDIGNITIES. From strange relatives who show up at a wedding to the ironies of hippies and nature, it's a winner.

Diane C. Donovan
California Bookwatch

A funny thing happened while I was reading "Diary of Indignities". My husband said to me "you're not laughing out loud as much as I had expected" and at first it was dissettling. I should have been seized with hilarity... but then I realized why. My ear-to-ear grin wasn't just from reading the absurdities of fried turds or being relentlessly arm-molested by a retard. I was smiling because it felt like coming home. In some other galaxy or perhaps Seinfeld bizzarro universe, you and I were part of the same gang, my friend. I was that girl. The one on the periphery of the group, the brazen get-away driver, the alibi-creator, the conscious one who would drive you home at 5am. Even when you lived 8 hours away. The one who paid for your stitches and lied to the cops for you. In so many ways, I was right there with you. Dick House? I know that place! Some family bought it and is raising their kid there! Hope they know how radioactive it is. The squatter house? We had a corporate development with no security. Minnesota Wristwatch? I actually saw a guy do the "rodeo" stunt at a frat party.

It made me smile and fondly reminisce. Probably the best part of these indignant stories is that it gave a little... how to phrase it? Validation? to all all of the craziness of my past. The mental scars of a jack-off party and peeing on a trampoline. For once, it felt like finally someone else knew, understood. It freaks me out sometimes being Ms. Corporate America and my co-workers having NO IDEA. And knowing that not only could they not understand, but that their minds would melt with the knowing. Like all "regular" people who didn't spend their formative years hanging around inside freshly dug graves.

So THANK YOU, Patrick Hughes. By sharing your indignities, you made me feel a little better. And not because I'm any better off than you. But because at least I don't have an anal fissure.

xoxo

Mia

This may well be the funniest book ever written. There were times I had to put it down because tears of mirth were streaming from my eyes and I was afraid I'd have trouble seeing clearly enough to land the 747 I was flying. Even thinking about some of the wickedly twisted episodes Hughes describes is enough to give me the giggles. Thanks to Hughes, my family thinks I'm on nitrous oxide again and they're arranging an intervention. But I don't care! This book is so funny that I don't care about anything anymore except reading it and talking about it and urging other people to read it. Oops, gotta go. The flight attendant just told me the oxygen masks are all dropping and the passengers are screaming. If it's not one damn thing it's another.

"The book was better." Moviegoers are always saying that.
Back in 2005, *Los Angeles Times* columnist Steve Lopez wrote a series of stories about a homeless man who turned out to possess orchestra-level talent on several stringed instruments.
Lopez turned his columns into *The Soloist* -- and now it's being turned into a movie (an early Oscar contender, no less, to be released Nov. 21) starring Robert Downey Jr. as Lopez and Jamie Foxx as Nathaniel Ayers, the musician who suffers from paranoid schizophrenia.
So why not just wait for the movie? Downey Jr. is a great actor, and Foxx, having played another gifted-but-disabled musician in Ray, just might pull off the mix of inspiration and delusion.
Because books provide detailed, verbal pleasure, that's why. In real life, fore example, Lopez is married and very much involved in the life of his young daughter; in the movie, he's divorced. OK, so screenwriter Susannah Grant (*Erin Brockovich*) needed to streamline the narrative.
But scenes recorded for the movie won't capture the author's commentary. Movie directors can compel our focus, but they can't enter into the characters' interpretations. At one point, for example, Lopez decides to spend a night on the streets as a homeless person alongside Ayers, who demonstrates how he taps a stick on the sidewalk at night to scare off rodents. And Lopez observes: "He's a classical musician who has taken a great fall and now finds himself fending off sewer rats, but when I look into his eyes, I find no hint of regret, no recognition of this nightly collision between beautiful thoughts and ugly reality."
Most important, the process of reading through the months and months of coordination it took among several people to get Ayers off the streets and into treatment (tentatively, provisionally) -- the reader's act of setting the book aside, then returning to it days later -- mimics the one-step-forward, three-steps-back hassles that Lopez endured just to make Ayers' life a little better. Movies accelerate problems, then "solve" them in two hours.
Director Joe Wright allowed us a glimpse, in *Atonement,* of a happily-ever-after ending that's severely undercut by stark realities. Reader-viewers of *The Soloist* will anticipate an ending that offers the hope of continued treatment for Ayers, not a cure. Lopez's book ends with the question of whether Ayers will be able to continue attending concerts at Walt Disney Concert Hall, let alone performing in them. No sentimentalized Hollywood endings are welcome here.
If they intrude, then this Thanksgiving, you can stroll out of a cineplex somewhere and justly say, "The book was better."

Steve Lopez has written a moving story of a talent musician and, in the process, written an illuminating two-year autobiography.

Great story line. Towards the end, I began to read slower, then pick the book down for a few days, because I did not the story to end. I think this fall around October, November the movies based off this book is scheduled to come out, Starring Jamie Fox. Might not be a bad idae to pick this box up and read it before the movie comes.

Steve Lopez writes an eloquent, very personal story of a homeless, mentally ill man with a brilliant, talented past. It is totally by chance that Lopez meets Nathaniel Ayers along Skid Row in downtown LA. Captivated by the music Nathaniel plays on a beat-up violin that is missing two essential strings, Lopez steps over the threshold into a world very unlike his own.
As a reporter, Lopez's style is rich, tactile and complete. We follow Nathaniel's trail of breadcrumbs from humble beginnings in Cleveland to Julliard to the tunnel in LA where he sleeps.
Lopez's visually evocative language creates a spell that shows us how the mentally ill are marginalized and along with him, we ride the magic carpet of great hopes for recovery and change and then plummet into the depths of Nathaniel's delusional brain chemical mania.
All the while, Lopez allows us to experience his personal emotional struggle of managing a reporter's tettering job, a wife, a two year old daughter and his commitment to helping Nathaniel, once a musical prodigy, now brought down by schizophrenia.
Poignant and touching, this book is a true story of people so real, you will wake from the page with music in your ears and in your heart.

The Soloist by Steve Lopez was such an excellent read. I related to the music side because I am a pianist and the mental illness side. I've never had Schizophrenia, but when feeling down I know how revitalizing music is. This was a warm, touching story that pulls you in and makes you care about Mr. Nathaniel Ayers. I could feel and understand his love for the music. I would like to know how he's doing and what became of him. I have never felt that way after reading a story. The story just touches the humanity in me and I think in everyone who reads it.

The book is worth purchasing for the biographical background. His youth and adulthood were extremely tough and lonely. Hughes seems to have lost his religion early in life.

Excellent book and historical treasure that I intend to pass down to my grandchildren in the future.

I prefer his earlier stuff but there are poems in this book that make the entire thing worth it. Nude Young Dancer, Minstrel Song and countless others made me want to weep and smile. What can I say, I felt this guys pain...

If you haven't heard of Langston Hughes, I suggest that you purchase this, THE COLLECTED POEMS OF LANGSTON HUGHES, as an introduction to his style. Hughes was part of the definitive Harlem Renaissance Movement of the 1920s through the late 1940s, that was a very important period of time for African-Americans in the United States. For the first time, their voices were really being heard [and recognized] in the genres of music, writing, and sculpture, in this country.

This book is an amazing collection of five decades of his most powerful, intelligent and sensitive works. The poems start in 1921 through 1967. There are also several poems, written for children, that I didn't even realize Langston had penned! So beautiful and unexpected. What's more, one of his most well-known poems is featured, here, "What Happens to a Dream Deferred." Langston Hughes' views of race, society and social issues are truly timeless and compelling. For me, reading his works is like listening to a quiet, constant patter of rain on the rooftop, gradually growing with intensity, until the raindrops start flowing like teardrops from the great sky. That is how Hughes uses language. Essentially, he derives his beautiful rhythmic poetic language from an infinite river of words, he then pours them over on another and tells stories. This is truly the book to add to your poetry collection.

More than the exiled Eliott, greater than Walt Whitman, consistently clearer than Ginsberg, more powerful than Pound, freer than Frost, more American than Wallace Stevens, moreso even than the mighty Merton, here at long last is our greatest American poet receiving over-due respect.

A thick tome I purchased for my English learners which will instead fill my bed and my head for many cold and lonesome months ahead. Like the collected Poe, the collected Giovanni, an essential element to any American literature shelf, here for the first time meticulously researched and reported, with promise for more should any further works emerge. This is our American voice, clear and strong. This is the consummate volume of this great American poet, the one who wrote:

"( . . .) I've known rivers, ancient dusky rivers.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers."


May we once more grow deep with him, and by him. Read him, once more, here, complete and correct. Read him, and recall our America. Read him.

I loved the first two in this series but havn't been able to get through this one. Somehow the story just slows down. After the one boy gets married and the other dies, two of the main charecters are settled and I stopped caring as much about them. I guess I should try again since I liked the other ones.

Hughes writes a great book children of the promise, but i don't he is any better than Lund because i loved The work and the Glory they are both good books.

Take my advice, just buy the whole series now. As I turned the last page of this book, I jumped up, ran down to the store and bought Volume 4. I was late to this series, hearing people rave about it for several years before I purchased the first one. Now I can't put them down. In Far From Home, Alex is still fighting the Nazis, holding down a command and wondering daily how he will survive and keep his men safe. Wally is still a prisoner war in the infamous Japanese P.O.W. camps. As his health violently deterioates, and the torture exceeds what he believes he is able to withstand, he wonders how he will make it to the next day, let alone to freedom at the end of the war. As the other family members face their hardships, we are once again drawn so deeply into this family we feel they are our family. Another brilliant job by Dean Hughes. Go ahead, click the BUY NOW button and save yourself the trouble of waiting for these books to come one at a time.

The third book of the series Children of the Promis is called Far From Home. The author, Dean Hughes, wrote an excellent book. I like it because it contained several different point of views during Word War Two. Also, Hughes writes in a way that lets you know exactly what each character is thinking and what tribulation they are going through. The author stated that even though the characters didn't really exist, the events really did take place. Even down to the simplest detail. For example, when the family goes to see a specific movie, the show was actually playing at that period of time.
The Thomas family are natives of Salt Lake City. Mr. and Mrs. Thomas are running a weapons plant. It gets busier and the work more strenuous. They have to keep working while trying to raise a 15-year-old, Larue, struggling to be more independent from her parents. Alex, the first son, has paratrooped into Germany. He tells the struggles of dealing with the cold and death. Alex had served a religious mission in Germany previously, and is having difficulties fighting against the people he loves. Bobbi's the next oldest. She's a nurse in the Navy at Pearl Harbor. She's waiting to hear from Richard, her boyfriend, when she learns of his ship sinking. Bobbi doesn't know what she will do if her love never returns. Next, Wally is a prisoner of war in the Phillipines. He strives to emotionally fight the hatred between the Japanese and his standards for not hating his others. While also striving to stay alive, to go home someday. Last of all is Henry Stoltz. Alex taught him and his family on his mission. So he's a friend of the family. He is back in germany working for the British Intelligence, looking for his son Peter who got lost during a refugee escape. Henry's wife and daughter are in London waiting for any news of him or Peter.
I enjoyed this book very much and I am eagerly waiting for an opportunity to read the next in the series. Again, the author has a great knowledge of everything that went on during World War Two. He wrote excellently on each of the characters and their individual trials.

I'm amazed at how Dean Hughes keeps these books so interesting. By the time you finish this book, you will have read something like 1300+ pages of the same story, yet its still such an amazing one, and the interest level only increases. This series is the best of any that I have ever read. Volume # 3 involves some of the worst times of the war, and the suffering is painful to read at times, yet it is such a blessing to know the sacrafices of those who lived during those times.

This book is an indispensable companion for huge fans of the ALIEN series, especially those who, like me, think that ALIENS is the pinnacle of the franchise. But even if you're just a casual fan of the series but a major lover of science fiction, this is a great book to have.

The most amazing part of the book is the long essay on combat between capital ships in space. The essay is a very hard-science fiction oriented piece that addresses a lot of the issues with ship to ship combat that are taken for granted in works like Star Trek and Star Wars. It addresses issues like combat between two ships in orbit around a planet, cloaking against a starfield, space mine arrays, directed energy weapons, railguns, and the use of decoys in space combat.

The rest of the book is equally believable in its portrayal of futuristic warfare, and it does an excellent job of giving background information on the world of ALIEN without holding the reader's hand or revealing everything. The pictures, drawings, and schematics are nothing short of amazing.

The book delivered exactly what it was supposed to. The equipment described were mostly from the second movie, which was expected since the colonial marines only made an appearance in that one. I was expecting a few more vehicles and weapons that were not shown in the movie. The arsenal of the marines appeared to be very limited. Whatever the case, this is a good book for fans of the movies and sci-fi fans who like big weapons. The section on the aliens themselves was kind of brief, being mostly accounts from Ripley.

I loved the quotes between the sections. The ones where other Marines are "telling what they heard". You get bits and pieces and everything gets exaggerated and blamed on the Company. It's funny "because we know better." And the descriptions of the APC and dropship are great. Too bad we don't get to see them more in the movie.

Not much more I can add that others haven't other than to push the point home. This book is a technical sci-fi fan's dream come true. The level of detail and realism put into this book rivals that of the Star Trek technical books, and even surpasses them on some levels. This book is painstakingly researched and is an official and authorized explanation of the weapons, ships, tech and much more are covered in this book.

Just about everything you could want to know about the technical aspects of the Alien and Aliens universe are here. You can know exactly how a pulse rifle or a power loader works. You can see the inner workings of a dropship. You can see the full capabilities of the Sulaco. You name it, and it's there. You even get entries for military equipment that was not in the movie, but still part of the Alien universe.

Did I mention Alien? Yeah you get a ton of information on the Nostromo as well as details on the escape shuttle and equipment they used. You also get extensive details on androids as well (from both movies). They even go so far as to explain how faster than light travel works. Not only do you get all this, but you get some awesome information regarding the alien itself.

The book itself is very well made considering it's labelled as a paperback. The cover is a thicker card stock and glossy on the front while the pages are made from a quality paper as well. The book quality is like what you would find on the Star Wars technical books or better. Definitely bigger than those books.

I wish all sci-fi technical books would go into this much detail with their subject matter. This book is pretty much the standard I look for in other technical manuals. If you ever get a chance to find this one and are either a big Alien fan or just a big fan on these types of books I recommend getting it. For some of you even with the high prices (I think the original list price was around $20) you see in auctions and here you might still find this book worth it.

this book provides a great deal of information on the Colonial Marines from "Aliens". all of you potential Aliens video game modders out there must get this book. it has served as an excellent reference book for all my "Aliens versus Predator" modifications. with several illustrations, it also provides the artist with valuable "Aliens" info. even the curious Sci-Fi geek will find this book thoroughly interesting.

Unbelievably inspiring. I challenge you to compare his reading with any one else's or your own in your head. He makes it alive. Not perfect, mind you. You'll find yourself suggesting to him in certain spots that he missed the meaning by putting some emphasis or other on the wrong words. Nevertheless, you know you couldn't do better overall. A real treasure.

Great for a long drive or while driving cross town in Manhattan. You can debate the issues of suffering with Milton in your head.

Sure do wish it were the whole work.

Contains extensive information in the introduction that is lends an understanding to anyone reading any of Milton's work. This particular version is very inexpensive, and contains everything one would need to understand PL. Excellent!

My review is of the library binding edition released by Buccaneer Books. It is a very plain and small volume which is wonderfully bound. It contains nothing but the poem itself (including the prose arguments) with the original spelling and punctuation. That means no notes, commentary, or introduction, so if you're looking for lots of in-text help, this isn't what you want. The Fowler, Hughes, or Norton editions are all laden with helpful material like that. But if you just want to experience Milton's masterpiece alone, this is a lovely edition. I found that the book could be purchased much more cheaply if I ordered directly from the publisher's website.

Milton in Paradise Lost unfurls a morning star banner heralding the cosmic story of the fall of angels and men in language eminently civil. I am sure that Homer and Dante were Milton's schoolmasters yet Milton almost exceeds them in the slendid language and poetry of this epic creation. Philip Pullman said "No one, not even Shakespeare, surpasses Milton in his command of the sound, the music, the weight and taste and texture of English words". This is a poem of majesty and sublime lyricism as in Milton's description of Mulciber falling: "from Morn
To Noon he fell, from Noon to dewy Eve, @@@+PARADISE LOST+@@@
A Summer's day; and with the setting Sun @@@+JOHN MILTON+@@@
Dropt from the Zenith like a falling Star".
Each book of Paradise Lost is introduced with an argument, or summary. These arguments were written by Milton and added because early readers had requested a guide to the poem. Milton's purpose in this masterpiece is to tell about the fall of man and justify God's ways to man. When the angels battle in heaven at one point they pull up mountains and hills and throw them at each other: "So Hills amid the Air encounterd Hills Hurl'd to and fro with jaculation dire, That under ground, they fought in dismal
shade." After their coup attempt in heaven Satan and the other rebel angels are lying stunned on a lake of fire. Satan rises from the lake and makes his way to the shore. He calls the other angels to do the same, and they assemble by and above the lake. Satan tells them that all is not lost and tries to cheer his followers. Led by Mammon and Mulciber, the fallen angels build their capital and palace Pandemonium. They decide to get at God through his new creation and Satan sets off on this mission. In reading Paradise Lost the poem reads the reader while being read. What I mean is that Milton lets his readers go awry in their affections and he corrects and instructs those misreadings as well as anticipates them. In this way the poem becomes a live text with meaning apprehended through the interplay between the peruser of the poem and the text itself. Milton allows the reader to subjectively question the justice of the current religious paradigm and then leads them back to the perspicacity of deity. Ultimately Paradise Lost is Milton's paean to a vast pattern in the universe, the disruption of that pattern by rebels, and the weaving of those rebellion threads back into an ever more beautiful tapestry.

"Life doesn't just happen to us. There is one spectacular moment when it happens for us," says Mary Gauden Hughes (psychology '81). Her book, The Last Slow Dance, conveys that sentiment in the story of a musician who must decide between his career and the love of a writer who may have found her best story yet in him. These two "not-so-young" lovers must figure out how to balance their dreams and fears when love is involved and when the past isn't resolved.

This is a powerful, poignant and compelling love story of love found and the transforming power of this love. The story is marked by Hughes's simplicity of form and purity of line, comparable to the best selling author, Nicholas Spark's novel, The Notebook. A pleasant and relaxing read.

I certainly have enjoyed "The Last Slow Dance." It would be a great movie as it would be interesting for young folks as well as older folks. It is so nice to read a book that doesn't have unnecessary and unwanted descriptions. It is a book that you can be proud of. Keep more books coming!

This book was great! I fell in love with the characters in the first chapter. Micheal Mcain is such a deep character. I'm sorry that can't write much now, but this book is great!

I read this book in one sitting! What an excellent, uplifting story of life and love. This author's writing style is beautiful and easy - it flows so well - you just can't put it down. If you liked The Bridges of Madison County, you will also love The Last Slow Dance. I look forward to more books by Mary Gauden Hughes.