Wagner Books

This book was a bit disappointing because there really was not a lot of in-depth background information on Honus Wagner the man. Seasons were covered in five pages and, in one instance, the text reviewed one game by stating that Honus had hit, "a three-run double, but the Pirates lost 5-2." How can the Pirates lose 5-2 if Honus hit a three-run double? There seemed to be many errors of this nature in the book as the editing was not very crisp.

I tried not to be too harsh in my review as I know the material on Honus is not easy to find, but even the material that is available in the text is not presented very well. Honus Wagner was arguably the greatest player of his time and a simple, interesting person off the field, so his story is indeed an important one to baseball fans. Unfortunately, I don't think this biography is the one you want to read if you want a well-written, in-depth portrait of Honus Wagner.

I thought this book was a great biography of one of baseball's least appreciated stars. It starts with his beginnings in the mines to his death in 1955. I thought this book had too many minor details in his retirement ventures. I think this is a book that all baseball fans will enjoy.

Professor Cord's book proved very useful to me when I attended the Ring cycle at the S.F. Opera in June 1999. I had watched the N.Y. Met video tapes, and read up on the four operas, but Cord's book gives extensive background information to help you understand the context in which the operas were created and first performed. The S.F. Opera was selling this handbook to its patrons and it turned out Professor Cord was sitting two rows ahead of us. His enthusiasm, love, respect and knowledge of Wagner are clear.You can read the book before attending or, if your prefer, after the experience to clarify questions and insights you have had. I recommend it as a wonderful starting point for anyone exploring Wagner's Ring.

I am a true Wagnarian. Der Gotterdammerung is my favorute opera. The Rhine Madiens in this book where not described acuretly.

This book wasn't very good, but it wasn't horrible. It could have been MUCH better and it is much better than some of the other Black American Series.

The book molcom X was a very good book. Im telling you if you havent read this book you need to check it out.The book tells you about when he was younger malcom X was in and out of jail he studed Islam. Malcom X met all kinds of people including dr.martin luther king jr. they both stood for the same thang.He met cassius clay a.k.a. muhammad ali on february 21,1965 he was shot while speaking at a rally. I recommend this book because it was realy good and its lets you and me know more abuot him and how he lived and the thing he did to make this world a better place for you and me.

If you're looking for a book to guide you through the thicket of self-publishing in ebook and print on demand formats, this book isn't it. It's full of facts but not very much nitty gritty know-how from those who have gone through the process, learned from their mistakes and now are sharing their wisdom with others.

Overall, Poor Richard's Creating E-Books is an extremely detailed look at how an author can create e-books using the vast amount of online resources available. Van Buren and Cogswell begin with an excellent explanation of what an e-book actually is, followed by an overview of the different e-book file formats, software, and hardware.

The step-by-step guide on converting manuscripts into e-books for the various reading devices contains valuable tips for self-publishers. The authors stress the importance of publishing a quality product and advise on how to maintain digital rights and register for ISBNs. In addition to crucial tips on how to effectively market your finished e-book, Creating E-Books wraps up by showcasing success stories and examining future trends in the industry. I definitely recommend this book -- I believe it would be a powerful addition to any e-publisher's resource library.

I bought this book and the microsoft "step by step" manual. I thought the Microsoft book was a little more in depth. I think this is a good book for people that are going to do one web page and want to "follow a map" that will result in their creating a decent if not spectacular web page. I would rate this book as worth the money. You can with nothing but this book make a web page. If you are considering learning web design as a trade then thid book will be to "lite"

I produced a medium-size web site based on the manual that came with Front Page 2000. This book doesn't go much further than the manual. Even at that, it left me scratching my head due to lack of further explanation as to why I was told to do certain things. Very frustrating. Some explanations as to how to do something take you down the LONG road when a click of the right mouse button would have you there much sooner. If you're looking for a book that really gets under the hood of Front Page 2000, look elsewhere!

I am a web designer and an instructor. I've been looking for something to introduce FrontPage to beginners. When I read this one, I was surprised by the overall poor quality of its instruction and numerous basic errors and omissions.I had to return the book because it really belongs to the trash bin. I would not advise anyone interested in learning FrontPage buy it. Any book published by Microsoft Press is better. I hope those friends of the authors who had given endorsements would have been ethical enough not to mislead readers.

I worked the book. It took dilligent effort to get through it in a weekend. Now, I use it for a reference. I have a big book that says the same thing this one does. This one was more helpful in the area of publisizing the websight.

This book is a really good buy. You can use it to start or advertise a small business on the web. Microsoft has a sight dedicated to advertising the great sights created with frontpage. That means that this book can help with very large sights also.

When I bought it it had five stars. In my opinion it should still have all five. The author went out of her way to show her readers short cuts, I did not find the shift-enter one, however.

Buy this book - Sell a web sight - buy a book - Come back to this one as your favorite.

Mike

I purchased this book because it was one of only 3 references in the store on Frontpage 2000. I thought to myself that at least the CD that comes with it should be worth the price.

After working through the book during the process of doing a medium sized website, I found that many of my questions were unanswered. This a good book if you have never done anything with the web at all, and are not interested in more advanced manipulation of your site.

A HUGE omission from this book is the topic of Cascading Style Sheets. For those who are considering this book and don't know, having knowledge of how to work with these is crucial, and this topic is completely left out.

Other than that, it was an OK introduction to the most basic of topics. If all you want to do is know what the basics are to put up a home page, this book will do the job. If you want to really dig into intermediate to advanced level features using Frontpage, this book is not for you. I will now buy The Complete REference book hoping for more complete coverage of advanced topics.

As for the CD, there isn't much on it that couldn't be had by surfing around the free sites on the web yourself, finding material that is actually relevent to your project.

It's sad that this book has gotten such poor reviews. I tore through the entire thing cover-to-cover and was riveted the entire time. What others see as weakness I see as a strength of the book: you come away knowing not only Johannes Peter Wagner but also Fred Clarke, Deacon Philippe, Tommy Leach, Barney Dreyfuss, and many others. The book takes you on the journey of Honus The Ballplayer, from the early days through each year he played, chronicling not only his ups & downs but also the fortunes of the Pirates teams of those early years along with the city itself. If people were expecting some tabloid revelations about illicit dealings or some scandalous dirt it reveals their own failings, not the book's. Remember, this is the guy who insisted his tobacco card be pulled (the famous T206) because he had moral objections about peddling cigarettes to kids. So enjoy the book as a great period-piece about the people, places, and times of that early 20th-century baseball era. It really is a treat.

Wow, reading the reviews, this is a tough crowd! Too much detail, not enough detail. For me, the detail was just about right. I have been listening to the unabridged audio edition while commuting. The book covers Wagner's career starting in his teen-age years. It provides a good illustration of American life at the turn of the century particularly as it related to baseball. I was especially interested to learn how many of the western PA towns I grew up around had had their own minor league ball teams back in the day - Sharon, New Castle, Warren (PA), etc. I think the authors did a good job of marching the reader through Wagner's career including the highs and the lows while also teaching about the early days of professional baseball and how the sport quickly became America's pastime.

I see some tough criticism on this page, but I cannot accept that the book has too much baseball detail. When I think of other, more recent biographies of Whitey Ford, Gabby Hartnett, and others that read like a series of several hundred box scores in prose, I think of this book as just the opposite. It paints a good picture of Wagner the man and his family, and how he spent his non-baseball hours and seasons. It retells good anecdotes in proper context, and as my fellow reviewer, Eddie Waddell notes, it doesn't try to gloss over any weaknesses the man may have had - a fault of so many baseball biographers whose goal is to get their man into the Hall of Fame by their book's building up his stats.

The de Valerias obviously love their man, and you will too before you are done with the volume. Just the right amount of baseball detail, I'd say. And not just about Honus. You learn a great deal about his lesser known teammates. And the stats are almost always on target. The de Valerias may not have included a Wagner stats sheet, but at least they seem to have researched all stats they use in the book well. Yes, I wish the footnotes were more specific to the quotes, but that shouldn't deter the majority of readers.

This work is useful for the baseball fan interested in the game's history. An enjoyable read but it falls prey to a critical error in any baseball biography -- it fails to include Wagner's career statistics. Not that you can't find them elsewhere, but most folks reading baseball history (such as myself) will want to leaf through and check out the stats as they read the narrative.

One lapse in the DeValerias' work is the preparation of their bibliography, which is incomplete, failing to list many works cited later under chapter sources. An examination of the bibliography, therefore, provides future researchers with a very incomplete picture of the extent of their work. Moreover, they eschew footnotes in favor of a general listing of sources for each chapter. Trying to pinpoint the source of the authors' conclusions or a particular quotation, consequently, is virtually impossible, and weighing the number of sources they used to establish a point even more frustrating. The result is often the impression that a thin foundation of a single quotation or story supports many of the DeValerias' conclusions.

Any serious student/lover of nineteenth century Russian literature must be aware that despite the dearth of artistic merit "What is to be Done?" possesses, it nevertheless is absolutely vital for a greater understanding of the ideas of the period. Without proper knowledge of Chernyshevsky's work, it is almost impossible to fully appreciate the nuances of other, more artistically gifted writers, of the time, such as Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Turgenev and Goncharov. As such, while the reviews here criticising the style of the novel are well valid, they nevertheless must admit its overwhelming influence on the other writers of the period, and that alone must make the serious reader "plough" through the pages of this book.

This book is the moral and intellectual equivalent of "The Turner Diaries" as written by a 19th century Russian radical--Utopian idealism combined self-righteous hatred, a lust for power and a thirst for blood. If you want to understand the vicious mentality which lead to tens of millions of deaths in the Soviet gulags, this is the book to read.

This has been called "the worst novel ever written", but it's far from that. Older translations might be partly responsible for that reputation; this new translation is very readable. An excellent introduction is provided, as well as helpful footnotes throughout. The book is blatantly didactic, art in the service of ideas, and you have to be awfully good to make literature that way -- Chernychevsky freely admits that he's not that good. But his plot is actually pretty clever, and the book goes rather quickly. If you want to understand what Dostoevsky's Underground Man was railing about, read this first. The didactic sections are interesting for what they say about the hopes of the 1860s radicals, hopes that we can easily recognize today as fantasies. (Vera's 4th dream is particularly poignant.) Hindsight is a wonderful thing for feeling superior and dealing out the 'told-you-so's'. But the naive faith and doomed optimism of the author is extremely touching. Only 35, he wrote this book from prison, and he could have had no confidence that it would ever see the light of day; yet there is no hint of despair anywhere in it. He was subsequently destroyed by Siberia, and nothing turned out the way he had hoped.

The radicals of his day were not wrong to seek fundamental change in the oppressive and autocratic system under which they lived. They were not alone in being enthralled by the ideas of Robert Owen, and their goal of seeking earthly salvation through reason and the reform of institutions does not make them clowns and fools. Their moral critique of Russian society was valid; their solutions turned out not to be. Not being omniscient, they did not foresee the ways that the flaws in their ideas would be seized upon, utilized, and magnified by men who were power-mad and malevolent, and what Russia's future would thereby turn out to be. They were far from alone in that, also. To flog idealists like Chernyshevksy with the horrors that were perpetrated by others a half-century or more later, is very easy to do. It is also unfair, mean-spirited, and foolish.

Nikolai Chernyshevsky was a genius in his own right. If you are going to read this book for its `novella' qualities - don't. But if you are looking to explore the explosion of social thought in the late nineteenth century Russia, then "What needs to be done?" is perhaps the best work on the revolutionary changes in society at the time. Vera Pavlovna (the main character) stands for everything Russia was going through at the time and everything it aspired to be. It is said that Lenin called his own "What is to be done" after Chernyshevsky's work.

the only good thing about this book is that it exposes the crackpot logic of the russian radicals. chernyshevsky is an abysmally bad writer. and even though he admits it in the preface, he still somehow thinks that his sheer intellectual brilliance will redeem him. it doesn't. this book is important only in that it was extraordinarily influential (a source of inspiration for both stalin and lenin - the latter which deemed chernyshevsky his favorite writer, while calling dostoevsky a "superlatively bad" one - ha!).

anyhow, his analysis of cooperative unions is not entirely without merit, nor are his reflections on women's rights. but insisting your best friend take your wife as a lover? rakhmetov as the "extraordinary man," who eats 5 lbs of beef in one sitting and sleeps on a bed of nails? unconvincing and stupid. his narrative technique is so obnoxious (oh, my perspicacious reader!) and he interjects too often to "add" insight to the story that he himself is creating. also, no matter how much of a hard determinist you are, becoming an apologist for "wickedness" by ascribing it to one's environment is simply absurd.

Occasionally in life one encounters a biography so insightful, so rich in detail and so beautifully written that it nearly transcends its subject and stands as a work of art unto itself. It is in this category that Gutman's masterpiece belongs. There is so much to learn from this historiographical account of the great composer's life that one scarecely knows where to begin praising it. Best of all, in the Ernest Newman tradition, Gutman shows us the real Wagner, warts and all, and traces the all-too-tangible line leading from the composer's pen to the Nazi nightmare. At times shocking, Gutman's work "opens the kimono" on the breeding ground of hatred and racism that Bayreuth became, and the composer's steadily increasing obsession with the Jews. He offers incontrovertible proof, now widely accepted and expounded on in the indispensable works of Rose and Weiner and Zelinsky, of how Wagner incorporated these racist ideal into his operas. At the same time, Gutman recognizes the incredible genius of his subject, and praises the works mightily. His account is always balanced, fair and backed by evidence. It is no wonder the Wagner apologists have criticized this book heavily, while the leading musical journals and book reviewers have blessed it with near-unanimous acclaim: Many simply cannot bear the fact that their favorite composer directly influenced Hitler and had a streak of true evil in him. Gutman bravely shatters myths and shows us Wagner for what he truly was: a composer of incomparable gifts and a human being of precious few qualities. If you haven't read this book yet, I strongly recommend you explore it now.

Gutman has an axe to grind. He despises Wagner and sets out to discredit the composer whenever possible. While it is true that Wagner had many despicable traits (antisemitism, mendacity, oportunism, megalomania, womanizing, etc.), Gutman creates a wholly unsympathetic picture of this musical genius. Gutman sees the influence of Wagner's antisemetism everywhere, similar to the way UFO enthusiasts see the influence of space aliens everywhere in our culture. As a result this biography is not fair and balanced. Gutman's goal seems to be to get the reader to despise Wagner as much as he does. Laon, in his review, gives many detailed examples of Gutman's intellectual slipperiness as a biographer. Gutman maintains that Parsifal is Wagner's antisemitic magnum opus and the fact that Wagner's text does not support his argument, Gutman regards as proof of how clever Wagner was in hiding his antisemitism in his artistic works. He hid it so well that only Gutman can see it. Give me a break! How could the fact that there is no evidence be proof of the agrument he is making?

Regarding the "ihn" versus "ihm" controversy in Tristan, Laon does a good job in elucidating Gutman's silly inuendoes. There is another possibility, which is that Wagner was trying to emulate an archaic German, so he may have deliberately chosen the "wrong" grammar (by modern standards) to make the sentence sound like an older pre-modern Germanic tongue. Native German speakers sometimes have difficulty understanding Wagner's texts for that reason. I agree with Laon that Gutman's book is decent on the facts of Wagner's life but is biased and misleading on the interpretation of those facts. It's too bad that such a knowledgeable writer as Gutman could let his personal biases mar what could have been a balanced and thoughtful biography of this controversial musical genius. Gutman's logic appears to run as follows: Wagner was anti-Semitic, Hitler liked Wagner's music and ideas, therefore Wagner was responsible for the Holocaust.

I read this book hoping to understand how Wagner, with all his character flaws, could write such beautiful and psychologically insightful musical dramas. Gutman did not answer my question, except to say that what appear on the surface to be works of genius are really clever attempts by a scoundrel to indoctrinate others into his antisemitism. How is it then that I come away from listening to Wagner with a loathing of anti-Semitism and a overwhelming experience of comapssion for the human family?

I've just re-read this book, after first reviewing it over two years ago. I noted Gutman's unreliability then, but on re-reading I can only report that my opinion of Gutman has fallen further. I originally awarded it two stars; I now think that was generous.

This book is more careless of source material than any book has right to be, but it's not ordinary carelessness. All errors and misstatements happen to support Gutman's case for a proto-Nazi Wagner. When a book's errors all support one thesis, that pattern must raise questions not just of competence but also of integrity.

For example Gutman claims Wagner was "sympathetic" to proto-Nazi Bernhard Förster's attempted German community in Paraguay. But Cosima's Diaries show that Wagner held Förster in general and the South American project in particular in contempt. Why this "mistake"? Because it suits Gutman's thesis.

Or take Wagner's late essays. If you read the essays themselves rather than Gutman's profoundly dishonest exegesis, you find a man wrestling with his own racism.

In _Heroism and Christianity_, for example, Wagner does take it as a given that white people are superior to other "races". Wagner, like many other European and American artists, was the product of a racist culture and it is unhistorical to pretend otherwise. But then Wagner writes that although people find the idea of the commingling of all human "races" into "a uniform equality" distressing, this is because of their cultural blinkers. "It is only looking at it through the reek of our own civilisation and culture than makes this picture so repellant," he says.

Christianity, Wagner continues, is superior to other religions because it is aimed equally at all "races" while Judaism and Brahminism, for example, include noble ideas but are aimed at only one "race" or caste. Although (he writes) it is "natural" [meaning "likely to occur in nature"] for strong "races" to rule weaker "races", the rule of one "race" by another has led to "exploitation" and an "utterly immoral system". Wagner's answer is equality of all "races" under "a universal moral concord", something Wagner suggests that Christian doctrines could bring about. (Wagner was not a Christian, but in later life admired Christian rituals and doctrines.)

The essay is not enlightened by modern standards, but in its historical context it stands as Wagner's rejection of the proto-Nazi ideas of his own day. Gutman's systematic distortions are regrettable not just because they go beyond mere inaccuracy but also because they are much less interesting than the truth.

A passage recently cited as an example of Gutman's merits provides another example of Gutman's method:

"Monsalvat was Wagner's paranoiac concept of a small self-contained elite group, uniquely possessed of the truth, obsessed with its 'purity,' and struggling with an outside world it held worthless. Redemption was promised the hard-pressed knights, but, obviously, the Wagnerian redeemer was not to be found among Jewish craftsmen or lepers. Not by accident did Guernemanz almost immediately remark upon Parsifal's noble, highborn appearance. He knew what signs to read. Racial heredity and strict breeding, not natural selection, formed the new mechanism of salvation. Wagnerian eugenics had come into being; in his latest writing the composer had embraced the darker implications of Darwinism."

Problems? First, Gutman misses the way _Parsifal_ shows Montsalvat critically and ironically (our first glimpse is of its watchmen sleeping on the job), as a damaged community that fails to live up to its ideals. An example is the knights' and squires' rejection of Kundry as Outsider, a moral fault for which the saintly Gürnemantz, clearly Wagner's mouthpiece, reproves them.

Second, the reference to "Jewish craftsmen and lepers" is Gutman's invention. Neither are mentioned, let alone disparaged, in _Parsifal_.

Third, Gutman must know that the remark on the hero's "noble appearance" is standard in Wagner's source material, and referred not so much to race as to "gentle upbringing", meaning having "courtly" deportment as opposed to the gestures and manners of a peasant. Example? In Wagner main source, von Eschenbach's _Parzifal_, similar observations are made about Parzifal's half-brother Fierafiz, whose mother was black.

Fourth, the Montsalvat community is not "self-contained". Wagner's text mentions that Gawain is a member of the Montsalvat community, though that character is also a member of Arthur's court. And Gawain, like the other Montsalvat knights, spends as much or more time out in the world than at Montsalvat.

Fifth, Montsalvat's alleged "racial hereditary and strict breeding" is more Gutmanian invention. Not only does _Parsifal_ not contain any such idea, or anything remotely like it, but Wagner's text rules out the possibility. Gürnemantz tells us that Montsalvat was founded by Titurel, who has had one adult child and is still alive when the opera begins. Gürnemantz was also a founding Montsalvat member. "Breeding program"? When? Instead the Montsalvat community must have grown through that bugbear even of modern racists: immigration. Some of Montsalvat's knights and squires may be children of original members, but that's hardly a breeding program. (By the way, Wagner's Montsalvat is in Spain. Not Germany.)

Can a passage so densely inaccurate be the product of mere carelessness? I think not.

Actually Gutman misses an intriguing possibility about Parsifal's ancestry. Parsifal comes from "Arabia". His father Gamuret was probably Welsh or Cornish, but we are told that Herzeleide was pregnant with Parsifal when Gamuret was in "Arabia". Since knights didn't take wives with them on crusade, the implication is that Gamuret met Herzeleide in "Arabia". (Wagner's text concerning Herzeleide differs significantly from his sources.) It's amusing in this context to consider that Wagner's Parsifal may have been what the media is currently calling "of Mid-Eastern appearance", and quite ineligible for the Hitler Youth. Still, the Nazi thing is Gutman's obsession, not Wagner's. Oh, and far from loving _Parsifal_, as Gutman would have you believe, the truth is that the Nazis banned it.

In short, Gutman's "first casualty" wasn't Wagner, but truth. An irresponsibly unreliable book.

Cheers!

Laon

This is an extraordinary book -- on a par with Maynard Solomon's Mozart -- but don't just take my word for it. The New York Times Book Review called it the "richest and best-accomplished single volume on Wagner in English." The late Paul Hume, himself no slouch as a musician, musicologist, and critic, called it "superb."

In 455 dense pages, Gutman, retired as a university professor and lecturer at Bayreuth, chronicles the comings and goings of Richard Wagner's life, probes the recesses of his often messy mind and his frequently strained relationships with other artists, lovers, thinkers, political figures, and hangers on, examines the development of his ever-changing esthetic, and analyzes the novelty of his music and, more importantly, the sometimes bourgeois, sometimes frightening sentiments of his words. As a reader, it helps to have some prior familiarity with the plots of Wagner's operas and with nineteenth-century European intellectual history.

Gutman's central thesis is that, as a composer of music, Wagner was a genius; as a poet, he was barely literate; and as a human being, he was egomaniacal, boorish, uneducated, greedy, opinionated in the extreme, and racist. In 1968, when Gutman first advanced this thesis, Wagner was enjoying a resurgence of critical acclaim as a poet. Otherwise there is nothing to be surprised by here. The composer's problems with patrons and creditors, his voracious sexual appetites, his meretricious relationship with King Ludwig II of Bavaria, the appeal of the composer's operas to Hitler and hence to the Third Reich, his involvement in the events of 1848, and his anti-semitism have long been well known.

In developing his thesis, Gutman displays an encyclopedic understanding, not only of letters, libretti, Wagner's own vague scribblings (whether in support of revolution or a diet of vegetables), and other primary sources for a biography, but also of the political and intellectual context in which Wagner's life was played out. Nietzsche, Lizst, Kaiser Wilhelm, Metternich, the mistresses of the Jockey Club, Goethe, and Ulysses S. Grant march, leap, and slide effortlessly through these pages. Gutman's writing is lucid, rich, and spiced with urbane humor.

Thus, for example, Gutman writes that the failure of the first Bayreuth festival of 1876 apparently turned Wagner -- previously a romantic rebel and always a staunch atheist -- away from a belief in inevitable advance toward higher forms just as he was composing what he knew would be his final opera, Parsifal. The result was profoundly unchristian. "Monsalvat was Wagner's paranoiac concept of a small self-contained elite group, uniquely possessed of the truth, obsessed with its 'purity,' and struggling with an outside world it held worthless. Redemption was promised the hard-pressed knights, but, obviously, the Wagnerian redeemer was not to be found among Jewish craftsmen or lepers. Not by accident did Guernemanz almost immediately remark upon Parsifal's noble, highborn appearance. He knew what signs to read. Racial heredity and strict breeding, not natural selection, formed the new mechanism of salvation. Wagnerian eugenics had come into being; in his latest writing the composer had embraced the darker implications of Darwinism."

This book has a well-supported point-of-view. It is a great read.

Gutman undertakes the enormous task of writing a Wagner biography and he uses Wagner's ethnic background, biases, and racial views (such as anti-semitism) as weapons against the composer. What I found interesting and even titillating in this accusation of bias on the part of Wagner is the fact that Gutman, who tells us that he was born in New York City of German-speaking parents, does NOT tell us his own ethnic background. His silence on this issue in the midst of so many trivial aspects of a writer's preparation and credentials is highly suspicious. The reader is thus left to wonder if the book was written by an unbiased mind.

There are few people in this world who were more obsessed with Richard Wagner than Adolf Hitler. A good view of Hitler as a young man is presented in the book written by his most important childhood friend, August Kubizek The Young Hitler I Knew. They met at the Opera House in Linz.

It is really ludicrous that some reviewers here seem to deny the connection between Hitler and Wagner. Some facts are in order.

Wagner was more than one man. He and his brilliant wife Cosima built a business and political machine. It was Wagner who was the most important sponsor and promoter of Arthur Gobineau, the founder of intellectual racism in Europe. He's one of the people from whom Hitler got his ideas about race. The Wagner family then promoted Houston Stewart Chamberlain, the leading philosopher of racism in the Kaiser's Germany. In 1923 Hitler would meet Chamberlain when he was welcomed to Haus Wahnfried, the Wagner home in Bayreuth. Chamberlain would then endorse Hitler as the future savior of Germany. The entire Wagner machine would then be set in motion to promote Hitler. Details of this are in the book.

I have a list of German history books on my Amazon profile page that give more information on the connection between Wagner and Hitler.

Did Hitler and Wagner agree on all points? No. Few people in history do. However, the romantic visions of Wagner were of overwhelming power in inspiring Hitler and driving him forward.

The Wagner/Nazi connection has been around for a long time now. and I just don't think there is much direct linkage there. Wagner himself was long dead before Hitler even showed up and cannot be judged by the acts of his family and followers. The most prominent later Wagner family member who was definitely a Nazi sympathizer was Winifred Wagner, and she was British.

Certainly Wagner and the Germans of Wagner's day were seriously antisemitic, but then so were British, Americans, Poles, Russians etc. While he objected to Jewishness in theory, Wagner worked with Jews throughout his life and in many other respects had advanced liberal views. He was a great German composer obviously loved by Germans, not to mention many other nationalities, including that bastion of liberal progressivism George Bernard Shaw.

I struck by the failure of many to realize that far from glorifying war and conquest, Wagner was quite the other way. His major work, the Ring of the Nibelung is a story of the downfall of the gods who seek to consolidate power in their Valhalla fortress. It and they are destroyed at the end of the Ring. So if the Nazis had realy been paying attention they should have been very nervous about what Wagner was saying.

The Nazi's even named their major defence line, the Siegfried line, however, Siegfried is destroyed in the last opera after being misled into betraying his "wife" Brunhilde, so why did the Nazis want to make him a talisman of security?

I think they were blinded by the stirring militaristic music which appears in sections of the opera, and ignored the overall stories.

There is a book crying out to be written about how the Nazi's blinded themselves to the obvious messages in Wagner's work esepcially about the arrogance of power. These were not just incidental matters in his work, but his main story themes and should have acted as a warning and given them pause.

This book is excellent. It lacks the information that Richard Wagner was a SS member and a fanatic nazy party member. After the war he escaped from Nuremberg trials to Paraguay, where he composed his last opera "Parifal". All the other information in this book is absolutely correct and real.

I read this together with Magee's recent The Tristan Chord and the two together create a funny dissonance, if not a blown gasket, but the twice over left a few question marks next to Kohler's book. This does not subtract from the book's remarkable interest and I would recommend Wagner defenders 'face the music' here to the extent of at least not ignoring it. Wagner wasn't your garden variety shmuck.
However, I felt as if I were left hanging by a text that was poorly documented, and found myself suddenly distanced from the text with some of the speculative takes cut into the footage. No footnotes, no deal, and the question is on hold since tracking down this data is not an afternoon's work. That's a pity since I doubt if this objection will deflect the author's basic point. The interleaving of Hitler bits with Wagner bits was confusing also, better to have simply laid out the sequence. Then it might be clearer that, while Wagner probably cannot be easily absolved here, it is also doubtful if we can establish a full or correct chain of consequence. Finally, blaming all this on the Romantic movement doesn't quite wash, and the fact is, as the Magee book shows, that we are dealing with a very complex figure in Wagner (as Nietzsche well knew)and a very tangled social question involving the sources of fascism in the rightist reaction of the nineteenth century. Indeed, it is sad to see the hothead of 1848 turning into the cultural derelict pursuing the 'aesthetic state', with such a bone crushing opposite result. Important, but sad book. Needs further commentary, however, with some historical backup.

The controversy still rages over the relationship of Wagner's music and writings to Hitler's conception of the Third Reich. It usually comes down to two camps: a. Those who cannot listen to Wagner if he was an inspiration to Hitler, an anti-semitic or both. So, they spend their time ignoring or downplaying any evidence of these "facts." b. Others do not see an problem if the music influenced Hitler philosophy or if Wagner was an anti-semitic in relation to enjoying the music. They can interphet the mythology to exclude anti-semitic interphetation.
And there are anti-semitics and Nazi in the world today.
This book is over 300 pages without footnotes. His arguement is proven in various degrees by a number of sources. But, overall the theory is solid. I can't see how others would think this is not so since the writings of Hitler, Chamberlain, Wagner and others clearly show the relatioship between these three men and others. A relationship based on an anti-semitic mythology.
Read all these reviews, but still read the work on your own.
Then do a web search for additional information.

I bought this book online and didn't realize how utterly unreadable the examples are. I literally have been using a strong magnifying glass to read the code examples (hard to do and type, too). The files are not absolutely consistent with the book either, which can make it difficult in spots to follow along. Sorry, but I also now agree with others that the "makeovers" aren't so amazing. I'll keep it as a reference for a couple of "how-to" topics.

I had high hopes for this book until I started trying to work through the ideas/examples. I was disappointed. For one, the book's illustrations of code examples are so small as to be illegible without a magnifying glass, and even with one the illustration highlights obscure some of the code. For two, having downloaded and unzipped the companion files I found these were often redundant, unnecessary, and/or didn't represent what showed up in the book illustrations. It seemed like the author dumped the kitchen sink from his files into the zipped groups. And for three, too often the background/explanation of why to use this or that code snippet was missing. For instance, essential background information about how to size layouts with CSS was woefully absent. I tried to follow the example in the text on a website I was working on, and failed miserably. Nonetheless, the book did stimulate my thinking, and sometimes provided useful information, about how one might make improvements to a website.

I am only 10 + 1 years old and I managed to create my own site with cool frames CSS and everything from scratch. Great for kids, as it is easy to read and understand, unlike some cheesy guides I've come across. Great price, too!

I am a novice, and a kid. I have my own site, where I parody things and found this book a great tool to give my site a total makeover. This is a must for those web-obsessed kids like me!

I just came from Borders after having flipped through this book and I absolutely agree with a previous reviewer who said the author doesn't provide much, if any, detailed descriptions. For example, he will tell you that fonts are important to web design. But does not goes into code details about size, spacing, color, etc, other than showing that tweaking them can make a difference in the overall look of a webpage. Hence, the "before/after" approach.

Well, duh! Tweaking anything will make a difference but as a reader I want to know not only what to tweak, but how (and how much) to tweak it. It's the "how much" part he often leaves out. When he touched upon a topic of interest I often needed to look through other books to get more information on how to implement it.

This is definitely not a how-to book. Echoing the other reviewer, this book is for inspiration and is targeted to fairly novice users who might not realize that spacing between paragraphs is a good thing. Having had my own blog for two years, I am pretty familiar with the basics and have tweaked them at one time or another. I need a book that will tell me in detail HOW to do things I wouldn't ordinarily think off doing.

Not to knock this book too much. It did point out a few things I could have designed better so I do think it is useful to gather some design ideas.