Simmons Books

Thomas E. Simmons has done excellent research work on this book, "The Brown Condor" I have been doing my own research and found it difficult to get accurate information. But this author has spent 8yrs of excellent work and has managed to tie all the information together so well I thought I was watching an exciting action pack Movie of very high quality. This Book should be made into a Movie. I truly love it.

I found this to be a great read. It is truly a southern tale. Bubba was so real I almost thought I knew him personally.

I was amazed how on one page I could be laughing at something he said and the next page I wanted to cry because someone was mistreating him in such a terrible way.

It was very difficult to lay this book down once I started reading it.

I will certainly never look at a poor person the same again.

I love a book with a end that I am not expecting and this one didn't let me down.

I would recommend it to every one.

The Reader

What a wonderful little book. Even though it is ghost stories - they are tales that are hauntingly heartwarming, sometimes scary but in such a good way. I feel as though I personally know that hounddog named "Midnight". I can almost hear him barking now ! I will read this book over and over for the sheer pleasure and fun of it.

As a law school graduate in the 1960s, I wanted to review this area of the law.I knew what to expect from casebooks and this one is just fine.No regrets whatsoever in choosing this particular one.I was not familiar with any of the casebooks on the market so this was just a random selection but I am very satisfied.I do not practice oil and gas law, I just wanted to learn more about it.

My son teacher read this book to his class and they all laughed and loved it. They had to write a short story about the book we heard some funny ones. He liked the book so much he checked it out and did not want to take it back. So I am buying it for him for Christmas.

This book explains what healing is about and how to become a healer. As a Reiki Master I found it to hold much wisdom and truth!

This book is fun, cute, and not too hard to read for those learning to read English and/or Arabic. What a thrill to see Jean Simmons put her books out there for Bilingual students! Great going, Jean! Thanks for allowing students to continue developing their literacy in one or more languages!

'The enfant terrible of Irish poetry is still at large, still eternally young at heart. Irish high-priest prestigious, joyous celebrant of sex, his mature voice has acquired neither cynicism nor guile. The searing honesty of his poems on marital break-up, for instance, established a stylistic bench mark by which all others on this theme must be measured. His present strength as a poet stems from the breadth of stylistic forms he manipulates with ease: classical and romantic measure, the popular ballad, cabaret forms and the sung lyric. A sometime jarrer of the nerves of critics, he very early made for a marriage of form and colloquialism. One of the most technically accomplished of Irish poets, he is now at the threshold of his greatest work.'
John Ennis in Poetry Ireland Review


James Simmons was born in Derry in 1933. He published volumes of poems regularly since his first book came out from The Bodley Head in 1967 with a welcome from Graham Greene on the cover. He won the Gregory and Cholmondeley Awards for poetry. He was founder editor of The Honest Ulsterman. Four collections of his songs have been issued, much praised by Paul Durcan. His critical biography of Sean O'Casey (Macmillan) is a standard text. He read and sang all over the world from Tokyo to Los Angeles to Belfast. He was co-director of The Poets' House, which was situated in its formative years in County Antrim and is now in Donegal. He was a member of Aosdana. He was writer in residence at Queens University Belfast. He lectured from 1968 to 1984 at The University of Ulster. James Simmons passed away on June 20th, 2001.

Confederate Settlements in British Honduras is a concise but detailed history of the former Confederates who went into exile to British Honduras (today Belize) after the War Between the States. It's easy reading, highly interesting, and provides illustrations throughout the book. The book discusses in depth the conditions in Belize and the South before, during, after the War, explaining the circumstances of the Southern immigration or exile. Many prominent Southerners immigrants are named. It also talks about the trials and difficulties of the exiles in their new country, including the different climate that had such a major impact on their agriculture pursuits, and the clash of cultures. The book also provides information up to the present time regarding the descendants of those Confederates who chose to stay in Belize and tough it out.

I read this book for a graduate Humanities course. Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, written in 1899 is a seminal work about the ills of colonialism, as well as a postmodern look at the subject of mankind. Conrad's book had a crucial influence on five important works of the twentieth century: J. G. Frazier's book The Golden Bough. Jessie L. Weston's book From Ritual to Romance, T. S. Elliott's poem the Waste Land, Joseph Campbell's Hero with a Thousand Faces, and Francis Ford Coppolla's movie Apocalypse Now, screenplay by John Milius, was based on Conrad's book. Another interesting fact is that this work was read by Orson Welle's Mercury Theater Players on the radio and was to be his first movie. After doing some work on it he abandoned the project to do Citizen Kane! I would have loved to of seen what Welles could have done with this story. Conrad's story is so riveting in part, because he himself served as a riverboat captain. High school teachers and college professors who have discussed this book in thousands of classrooms over the years tend to do so in terms of Freud, Jung, and Nietzsche; of classical myth, Victorian innocence, and original sin; of postmodernism, postcolonialism, and poststructuralism.

Just a taste of the plot reels you in! Marlow, the narrator of Heart of Darkness and Conrad's alter ego, is hired by an ivory-trading company to sail a steamboat up an unnamed river whose shape on the map resembles "an immense snake uncoiled, with its head in the sea, its body at rest curving afar over a vast country and its tail lost in the depths of the land" (8). His destination is a post where the company's brilliant, ambitious star agent, Mr. Kurtz, is stationed. Kurtz has collected legendary quantities of ivory, but, Marlow learns along the way, is also rumored to have sunk into unspecified savagery. Marlow's steamer survives an attack by blacks and picks up a load of ivory and the ill Kurtz; Kurtz, talking of his grandiose plans, dies on board as they travel, downstream.

Sketched with only a few bold strokes, Kurtz's image has nonetheless remained in the memories of millions of readers: the lone white agent far up the great river, with his dreams of grandeur,his great store of precious ivory, and his fiefdom carved out of the African jungle. Perhaps more than anything, we remember Marlow, on the steamboat, looking through binoculars at what he thinks are ornamental knobs atop the fence posts in front of Kurtz's house and then finding that each is "black, dried, sunken, with closed eyelids-a head that seemed to sleep at the top of that pole, and with the shrunken dry lips showing a narrow white line of the teeth" (57).

I especially became interested in Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness from the movie Apocalypse Now. There is a scene in the movie that shows Colonel Kurtz's nightstand in his cave. T. S. Elliott's poem the Waste Land is one of three books on the nightstand. The other two are Jessie L. Weston's book From Ritual to Romance, and J. G. Frazier's book The Golden Bough. Anyone wanting to understand the movie Apocalypse Now, especially the character of Colonel Kurtz, and what Milius and Copolla are trying to tell their audience need to read these three books as well as Conrad's Heart of Darkness!

As a graduate student reading in philosophy and history I recommend this book for anyone interested in literature, myth, history, philosophy, religion and fans of Apocalypse Now.