Walpole Books

This book was shipped in a timely manner. It is a very easy read with great pictures that young children will enjoy.

I have to agree with the consensus of reviewers here: If you are looking for an excellent Gothic novel to read, this one is not it. If you are studying the history of Gothic literature and aesthetics, this novel is fundamental.

I want to recommend highly the introduction by E.J. Clery to the Oxford World Classics edition. Clery provides a survey of the various ways of interpreting the novel, and amply explains the novel's strengths and weaknesses in the context of the different interpretations. With this approach, the reader finds ways of making sense of the peculiar novel within the context of its time and its author's possible intentions.

This review refers to the Oxford World's Classics edition, edited by WS Lewis, with a 26-page introduction and eight pages of endnotes by EJ Clery. There is a select bibliography and a chronology of the author, Horace Walpole. Importantly, the book includes both the first and second editions' title-pages and prefaces.

The first edition, "The Castle of Otranto: A Story, translated by William Marshal", was published in December 1764 (but marked 1765 on the title-page). It's preface tried - and succeeded for awhile - to give the impression that the tale had been "found in the library of an ancient catholic family in the north of England" and had been "printed at Naples ... in the year 1529. ... The style is the purest Italian."

The style was instead the purest Walpole and he quickly confessed; so that in the rapidly-issued second edition of 1765 (the book was an immediate hit), the revised preface became, as EJ Clery makes clear, "a manifesto for a new type of writing", and the title-page was amended to "The Castle of Otranto: A Gothic Story".

The inclusion of the adjective into the story's title is fundamental to the book's reputation as being the well-spring of much (all?) that followed in subsequent western literature that effected to underscore its credentials with a Gothic - or Gothick - motif. One could argue that that includes 90% of western literature (as much Thomas Pynchon as Stephen King), but this is going too far; for as Walpole himself makes plain in his second preface, his work was an attempt to marry imagination with nature, fantasy with reality, and that he had progenitors in the essay: "That great master of nature, Shakespeare, was the model I copied."

The story itself - a tale of lordly tyranny, supernatural horror, and family feuding that would have interested Shakespeare himself in its dramatic possibilities - is told over five chapters, barely one hundred pages in total, and so can be read in a few hours. As the excellent introduction relates, Walpole himself thought the story a piece of whimsy, and did not attempt to savagely repudiate the criticisms raised about both the style of writing and about the narrative itself. He was aware of the novella's power, however, in creating a new species of romance.

The work today is as much read for its historic relevance than for its terror and sublime effects, but both of these aspects recommend it.

When Horace Walpole published THE CASTLE OF OTRANTO in 1794, his reading public was unprepared for what was to them a floodtide of unrestrained emotion. It had only been recently that the concept of "sensibility" in writing had been in vogue. In novels of this type (later popularized by Austen) the protagonist, usually a well-born female, would be subject to a non-stop series of emotional excesses like fainting, weeping, and otherwise losing all restraint. And lying behind this relatively recent vogue of sensibility lay a much longer tradition of its polar opposite: the damming of all feeling in favor of a carefully controlled harmony between man and nature. With THE CASTLE OF OTRANTO, this harmony cracked into innumerable pieces that manifested themselves into what was soon to become staples of the genre: unexplained supernatural phenomenon, dark and dank castles that hinted at the equally dark and dank recesses of the human psyche, and a series of images that exploded into a cacophony of sound and sight.

The story is slight both in plot and theme. The evil Manfred, the usurping ruler of Otranto, plans to marry his weakened son solely to ward off a prophecy that suggests that unless he has male heirs, he will be deposed. Just before the nuptuals between his son and Manfred's choice for him, Isabella, a colossal helmet comes crashing down, crusahing his son to pieces. This tragedy does not deter Manfred as he then plans to marry the lovely Isabella himself. Isabella, aided by the peasant Theodore, helps Isabella escape. Theodore is captured, but the ghost of the previous owner of Otranto, Alonso appears and incredibly blasts his own castle to pieces, leaving Isabella to marry Theodore. Even for a nonsense story, the plot does not hold water. Further, the writing style is inexplicably formal, with all events, both mundane and preternatural, narrated in a pseudo-classic manner that fits in well enough in the Augustan mode but seems ill-suited to this new genre of emotional excess. Still, THE CASTLE OF OTRANTO is significant in that for those who care to learn the where and the how of the horror genre, then Walpole's innovative surge of novelistic emotion is a good place to begin.

This book, like Pamela for feminist literary history, is important due to the fact that it was the first gothic novel ever written. The voice is a good one for the story, deep, reverant, dramatic; the writing is of excellent breed as well. With that said, however, so much has been ripped-off from this novel, and into novels that we've already read, that the story itself comes off as a bit cliche, not to mention ridiculous. Although the hyperbole of the novel is based off sybolic intentions, the best that one can say about this piece is that it lit a torch for future great novels--not that it's so much a great novel on its own two feet. Worty of reading if you care about the history of novels in general, but if you're looking for a great gothic novel this shouldn't be a first choice.

The Castle of Otranto isn't the best novel you'll ever read, since its characters are more like "types" than living human beings. That said, it's a breezy example of an early novel, before the Victorians got hold of the form and made the books longer and more "respectable." This is one of the books that Jane Austen's gothic-novel-obsessed character Catherine Morland (in Northanger Abbey) would have read to scare herself out of her wits. For that reason alone it's worth reading--to understand what types of books Jane Austen herself was reacting to when she wrote her books.

Also, it's worth reading simply because the story begins with a character being killed by a giant helmet. What a great, fun, gloriously trashy way to begin a book!

Horace Walpole, incidentally, was the son of the prominent 18th century politician Robert Walpole, who is satirized in John Gay's "The Beggar's Opera" and in a number of works written by Jonathan Swift and Alexander Pope. Perhaps fortunately, however, the father had passed away before his son wrote this book.

Known as the landmark in "Gothic literature", I wasn't too sure of what to expect with this. Things started off well when the would-be husband gets squished under a giant helment mysteriously fallen from the sky. But then...

I believe this book has some bad flaws, and despite it being a readable read, these flaws really don't help. For instance, Walpole very often falls into the "telling" of the story, which makes you feel very distant from the events described, almost as a chronicle, or as a sum-up of what happens.

Another flaw is the supernatural events, which are either ridiculous, or ridiculously put. As a critic wrote, they look like representations of themselves, rather than supernatural events per se. The problem with that is that it entirely kills any fear the reader may have. This reads like a fairy tale or a medieval legend, and doesn't cause enough immersion to create any real fear or concern. It's like a play, over-acted and even cartoonish at times.

As Walpole himself writes in his preface, I applaud the attempt, but am less satisfied with the result. And I'm not even sure that this book is so original: if you know medieval novels like "Mélusine", you know that the supernatural and castles aren't that original in the 18th century, and thus the only originality here seems to be restricted to this very century - the 18th - and to be cast against a classicism of that day. That's alright, but it isn't enough to make a good book.

That said, "The Castle of Otranto" is not a bad book. It is sort of awkward and irrational, albeit on purpose, and you'll end up wondering about these giant knight parts that show up seemingly at random and do weird things. It's close to a dream, and surrealism, in a way, but again, that alone is not enough to make it a gripping story.

As a conclusion: fails to create immersion, makes the reader feels distant and as though watching a play in which actors and actresses over-act, leaves much mystery that the reader will eventually not really care to elucidate. This ancestor of Gothic certainly does not live up to its successors, like "Wuthering Heights" or "Frankenstein" and all those master pieces.

Here it is: the novel that created the gothic fiction genre and paved the way for such works as Frankenstein, Dracula, The Monk, Melmoth the Wanderer, The Shining and Alien (to name just a few). Yet, comparing The Castle of Otranto with the works it helped inspire is like comparing the Wright Brothers' airplane with a Boeing 747. Walpole's novel is certainly an important step in the right direction, yet it clearly lacks many of the features of gothic fiction developed by later writers. There's no real sense of mood or atmosphere, no wickedly evil villain (Manfred comes off like a wishy-washy used car salesman), and little suspense or drama.

At times this novel reads more like a parody of gothic fiction rather than its earliest example. It's filled with fainting ladies, noble princes in disguise, miraculous reunions, graveyard rendezvous, hereditary curses, etc. While some parts are interesting and engaging, sometimes the story feels like a novelization of a Disney movie, that is: trite, contrived and very predictable. Honestly, I wanted to like this book, and kept hoping that a silver lining would emerge at some point. It never did, and this book never rose above the level of just being okay.

Unless you're really interested in learning more about the origins of gothic fiction, I would recommend reading something else.

This mess of a book, a semblance of ideas inspired largely by Shakespeare is nothing less than throw-away trash. This book is an inspiration to the art of cheesy writing, with silly visuals (a Monty Python opening involves a large helmet falling from the sky and crushing a weakling boy on his wedding day) and horrid dialog "Alas! Help! Help!" this book had me both laughing and bewildered.

Remember two things when considering this book, Walpole published it himself (we call that "vanity press" now) and he didn't take credit for it! He published under pseudonym and claimed it was a translation of an ancient text, thus twice distancing himself from it. Only after it sold did he admit he wrote it, then claimed his own genius. Though, as a new work, critics that found a translation interesting soon realized this "modern" work was in fact, bad. And it still is today.

Let me quote Clive Barker "Burn this book."

It's bad, really, really, bad.

A nasty accidental death is not a good thing to have happen on your
wedding day, particularly when it happens to the guy you were going to marry.

After this unfortunate event, the father of the dead groom decides
he needs to marry the now did not quite make it to widowed woman. There are financial reasons, for this, of course.

Plenty of supernatural and other sorts of suspense follow.

"The Castle of Otranto" by Horace Walpole, is regarded as the first novel of the gothic genre. Indeed its short and simple story is filled with the supernatural, and what must nowadays count as caricatures for characters. The charm of the story lies within its historical relevance and what it brought to future stories within that genre, not in the story itself.

Immediately the reader is introduced to the tyrannical prince of Otranto, Manfred, as he is about to marry his sickly son to the princess Isabella in a quest to secure his claim to the throne he may not be entitled to. When Manfred's son Conrad is struck dead, with no witnesses to his ghastly death, Manfred is at a total loss. He strikes upon the idea of marrying the young princess Isabella for himself; when he proposes the notion to Isabella, she is frightened and repulsed and runs away, seeking sanctuary within the castle's monastery. Then ensues Manfred's stalking of Isabella while trying to get out of his marriage to his extremely pious wife Hippolita, while all about the castle the servants and ruling family keep having dreadful visions.

In the end these supernatural visions serve to bring justice to the rightful heir, a young man who unwittingly helps Isabella escape from Manfred's clutches only to fall in love with Manfred's daughter, Matilda. The theme is that of the sins of the father being visited upon the children (even generations later) and is not a new theme in modern literature, but an interesting choice and one that works with the supernatural means Walpole employs to bring it about. While "The Castle of Otranto" is a watershed in the gothic genre, it is by far not the best or most notable work of that period; yet without the blueprint laid meticulously out by Walpole, such greater stories may never have been written.

The Insiders' Guide to Reno & Lake Tahoe stands out as an outstanding tour book. What a pleasant surprise. Most books of this sort are dry and boring but this one is filled with goodies that only locals would know about. The Nightlife chapter stands out as a great piece of writing with an authentic Insiders' voice. The book came in handy on our recent visit to Reno. I would recommend this book tothe first-time visitor.

I bought this book because I had used other Insiders' guides before and this was by far one of the best. I found that this guide had more Insider info than the two others I had purchased. The authors give readers places to go off the beaten path. I especially liked the Kidstuff chapter since I vacationed with my entire family. This guide is well worth the money.

I had used the Insider guide to New Orleans and loved it. So when an opportunity for a trip to Lake Tahoe came up I jumped at the chance to use another book from this publisher.

Unfortunately this book disappoints. Lake Tahoe is a big body of water, right? And bodies of water have beaches. Perhaps you might want to sit on the shore of one of those beaches and relax, read, watch the sun set? Not if you're using this book. I found better guides to the beaches around the lake in the giveway newspaper I picked up ata 7-11 than this book.

Or maybe you'd like to take a hike? Look at that beautiful lake, the georgeous hills, and so on? Again, not from this book. The hiking entries were so skimpy I went down to the chamber of commerce booth in I50 and got handouts for free that were more informative.

I could go on and on, but this book was a real disappointment to me, especially after the New Orleans book that showed me neighborhoods and places I was delighted to find. My advice: if you're going to Tahoe, pick another book!

well, as far as a listing of hotels and properties, okay, this book will do that .. but for "insider" information, you'd do better to ask anyone you meet on the street .. there is no help as far as "what's best" or good deals .. the supposedly "inside" secrets tell visitors to be sure to register for casino slot clubs, but not which one is best. It gives buffet prices, but doesn't direct visitors to the best one.

there's little information about what to expect as far a snowfall goes at the lake, nothing to tell you about driving conditions .. there really is just nothing more than a list of properties. And the photographs aren't even original or helpful, they're all provided by outside sources, such as the visitors bureau or even the resorts themselves. The maps are even less helpful .. c'mon, at least pretend like you care!

This book is a fictive account of an actual prison. Two of the researcher-authors, Robert Dellelo and Ralph Hamm -- whose names no longer appear in the Amazon listing for the book -- were of course framed by that amorphous State that always smacks down true revolutionaries. Suffice it to say, both men were convicted of capital crimes and found guilty through numerous appeals. The facts of their crimes are omitted from the book, not that they matter other than as background in helping us understand the characters.

Bissonnette has read her Frantz Fanon, but doesn't seem to realize that the world has moved on from that faux-Marxism. She forgets that the enemy guards are also working-class.

Their ideal of a "peaceful prison reform" is 6'4" Ralph Hamm patrolling the cellblocks wearing a long trench coat and wielding a machete. Rather obviously, he had seen too many films.

For a first-hand and true view of Walpole written at the same time as this book, try to find a copy of "In Constant Fear" by Peter Remick.

Inmate Remick was NOT in fear of the guards.



When the Prisoners Ran Walpole : A True Story in the Movement for Prison Abolition by Jamie Bissonnette, Ralph Hamm (With) , Robert Dellelo (With)

Is the current prison system in desperate need of reform? "When the Prisoners Ran Walpole: A True Story in the Movement For Prison Abolition" is a look at the concept of prisons and how a group of prisoners in 1973 managed to set forth change successfully, by keeping the peace within their ranks as their guards went on strike. An optimistic yet critical to both sides of the debate, "When the Prisoners Ran Walpole: A True Story in the Movement For Prison Abolition" is highly recommended for community library social issues collections and for any prison administrator.

America: less than 1/6 of the world's population - more than 25% of the world's prison population.

The 1971 Attica massacre shocked the world into awareness of the pervasive violence perpetrated by state authorities in our prisons. In Massachusetts, voters pledged to prevent such slaughter from ever happening there, and the governor agreed. The reform initiative that resulted led to the prisoners at Walpole's Massachusetts Correctional Institute winning control of its day-to-day operations.
The prisoners, working with 1530 civilian volunteers, won control of the operation of a maximum-security prison. The book, authored by a prison abolitionist, reveals what can happen when there is public will for change and trust that the incarcerated can achieve it. In the months before they took over running the maximum-security facility in 1973, prisoners and outside advocates created programs that sent more prisoners home for good, reducing recidivism 23 percent and decreasing Walpole's population by 15 percent.
When guards protested the changes they saw as choking their livelihoods, finally refusing to run the prison, the prisoners stepped ably into the void--and all-out peace ensued. They shrank the prison murder rate from the highest in the country to zero. Even more significantly, they worked hard to bury racial antagonism and longstanding feuds so even "lifers" with no hope of going home could find ways to live together, learn, and grow--to regain, finally, the humanity that the system intended to squash.
Critical to the work of prison abolitionists and transitional reformists alike, this groundbreaking history offers a real-life example of a prison solution many see only as theoretical. It not only reminds us why people seek to make prisons obsolete, but also recalls a time when we were much closer to these abolitionist goals.

The history of Walpole, at its grittiest, shows that we do not need a police state to 'help' us live our lives, and that, in the final analysis, we'd be better of without the so-called 'security' measures provided by the state and the entities of enforcement which under the pretense of 'justice' enforce the inequities resulting from the disregard of human value which must be overcome if we are ever, ever to live peacefully in this world. A history and an argument which could not be more timely and appropo. Rather than trusting in the almighty dollar, or the strength of institutions, recognition of our fellow humanity seems like the best place to begin.

This book has great experiments that teach children about science. Each chapter has experiments and sections to read, so by the end of each chapter the reader will have learned something that you would in school but in a more enjoyable way. Be prepared, though, that many of the experiments don't work. Some of the experiments are also very messy and will take a while to clean up.

This book contains not just experiments but valuable reference material and applications of science. Four subjects - Water, Air, Movement and Light - are covered in detail. For example, the two pages on "Disappearing Water" include three experiments, an explanation of how sweat cools the body, an illustration of how evaporation is used to preserve fruits and vegetables, and simple but thorough explanations of evaporation and water vapor. This book is perfect for assigning individual projects and supplements your other science reference materials...from The Science Spiders(TM) Newsletter.

This biography of Walpole is written by the foremost expert on Horace Walpole, Professor Morris Brownell.

There are interesting anecdotes, witty analogies and rare photographs and illustrations of the English commentator, Horace Walpole and his life and times.

This book is a must-have for anybody interested in English history, literature and monarchy,

I bought the book thinking it a biography of Horace Walpole. A biography it is, but in a very narrow sense. It almost exclusively deals with Walpole's acquisition of art and the pieces themselves. I saw no discussion of his terms as MP. Also, nothing about his authorship of 'The Castle of Otranto' or the memoirs of George II and George III all of which are still in print today. Very little about his friends outside of art collecting. If your looking to find out about this specific portion of Walpole's life then the book is well written and thorough with many photographs of the pictures in his collection. A general biography it is not.

This book is recognised amongst the aviation cognoscenti as something special. So it was that I started reading the book filled with great expectations - you can consider me disappointed. Nigel Walpole makes a fair stab at describing the Swift's early life and the the section on test flying is really rather good, but as soon as we get into the service life of the FR.5 and the antics of Nos. 2 & 59 squadrons, the book quickly turns into a back slapping tale of how much 1950's RAF jet pilots like to drink and behave like public school twits. Nigel never seemed to tire of telling stories of heavy drinking which ended with the line "of course no one remembered anything the next day" ha, ha, ha, ho, ho.

Didn't someone say this was an aircraft book. I expected something a lot closer to the Pilot's Notes on the Swift, not some juvenile skit about pilots getting drunk and acting like idiots. If this was how unprofessional our pilots were in the 1950s, thank god we never went to war, it would have been a shambles.

This is a well writen book. I applaud the author's honesty, who, for the first time, as a pilot, has written not only about the exploits of his peers, but also about the groundcrew servicing the Swift. It was a difficult aircraft to maintain. However, due to the professionalism of those who flew the aircraft, and groundcrew, they helped salvage a hitherto problematic image of the earlier mark 1 aircraft into a measured triumph for the FR5 variant. This book puts the record straight, and is a very good read.

In this novel, Hugh Walpole, through his main character Hajalmar Johanson (Harmer John), attempts to establish a new religion, with Beauty as its god. Harmer John is a Nordic body builder who has studied art in Italy, and has devised a plan to combine the two and save the world. By starting with the body and by making it as beautiful as possible through exercise, it would be only a small leap before all of society could be transformed into the Beautiful. He comes to the town of Polchester, attracted by the town's cathedral, and sets to transforming the town with his utopian beliefs, only the town is not very receptive, to say the least. At novel's end, he is attacked by a group of men and killed. Walpole gives his character many Christ-like traits, from his carpentry skills to his small group of faithful followers, but one thing he fails to give him is the power to move his audience in an interesting way. He falls in love with Maude Panethen, and she with him, and this love interest is drawn well by Walpole. Years after his death, Harmer John is remembered for his "enthusiasm, his eagerness, his hope." But the problem with his plan is that it remains more theoretical than anything infused with flesh and blood reality. Walpole put a great deal of his own personal philosophy into his main character and was disappointed with the books poor critical reception.

Hugh Walpole was, along with such forgotten authors as Priestly and Bennett, one of the most popular writers of middle-brow fiction in Britain during the early and middle years of the Twentieth Century. His biographer, Rupert Hart-Davis, was, for a few years, the publisher of his own imprint that specialized in fine books concerning that soon-to-be extinct literary specimen, the man of letters. Rupert Hart-Davis was also a close friend of Walpole's; and this biography is a labor of love, which, inadvertently, is also a hilarious send up of literary culture. Walpole was a hack, tis true, tis true. And Rupert Hart-Davis knew that in his heart of hearts (a hack cliche if ever there was one). And so, Rupert Hart-Davis writes a brutally honest biography ticking off Walpole's deficiencies while all the time trying to maintain some shred of literary dignity for his subject. There are lots of howlers throughout this book, such as those concerning Walpole's love of Turkish baths, which Rupert Hart-Davis fails to discern played a large role in homosexual culture at the time. Indeed, Rupert Hart-Davis is not too sure what to make of Walpole's homosexuality, although he drops veiled hints here and there about it. As a result, one winds up with bizarre anecdotes concerning Walpole's Woosterish antics to avoid the pressing attentions of various femme fatales. Oh, and Mr. Pooter makes a recurring appearance as well. If you're in the right humor, this is a delightful, and very well written, book. Not for the serious minded.