United Kingdom Books

In 1946 the British had once more triumphed against the Germans and the Japanese. Collis here dissects the highlights that led to the "Opium wars", actually skirmishes between Britain and China, where Imperial Britain gained ground over the Celestial Kingdom that had for so long treated them as Barbarians from which they gained some pecuniary advantage.

The Chinese remained conservative in their treatment of the British since the 18th century and had not grasped that by the mid 19th century Britain was a power to be reckoned with. By then, British had taken Opium trading with China to huge heights but her merchants were still greedy for yet more market space and getting shy of selling a common drug to China to enable them to make a profit.

This book is proud and British in flavour, comparing China to some extent with Japan that maintained a similar hubris as the Chinese. It is I think pretty objective and really well written, very gripping and revealing in its details.

The author has structured the work rather like a fantastic story in several acts. There are good maps and enough illustrations. It whets your appetite for more .... and I found this after reading Chris Patten's East and West and Tai Pan. This book was probably a source for Clavell's Tai Pan, Jardine being one of the original Tai Pan's of Hong Kong.

The Opium Wars directly lead to the birth of Hong Kong and was a sign of things going wrong for Imperial China. The British and French shamelessly muscled in on their advantage subsequent to the events of the 1840s. The Chinese always maintained their cool and were incapable of fighting back and as a land power, had to give way to the naval blandishments of the then western powers.

A really wonderful book if you're English, detailing aristocratic China and the elements of British Political hegemony and how they handled the unravelling of a staus quoe in China from which the crown had profiteered without candidly admitting it was from opium.

The author does not defent opium trading but is clear it was not a good thing. It was a game in which as is clear, Chinese officialdom was involved on a large scale.

A fascinating glimpse of the Chinese who normally seem to reveal so little of themselves, their values or their cultures to some of us barbarians.

Foreign Mud -- the phrase means "opium" in Chinese -- is a history of the commercial and diplomatic events that lead to the Anglo/Chinese Opium War of 1839-1842, when England attacked China to open up the latter to British trade. Author Collis tells the story with dry humor and copious quotes from contemporary Chinese and British documents, which document the cynicism and incomprehension reigning on both sides of the conflict. According to the back cover, historian A.J. P. Taylor called Foreign Mud: "A wholly admirable book, admirable as a work of history and admirable as a literary entertainment." For once the blurbs are right.

Carlton, I know you are on the mailing list for the Torch of Remembrance Mile Hi Salute quarterly newsletter. So you know that I let over 800 (42 in foreign countries) people (mailing list) know about your book. My plan is to get to know how to use the Internet because I want to send the quarterly newsletter out on it, under the HMT Rohna Web site. Is there such a Web site? Please contact me at peach2drew@aol.com if you can help me out on this. Thank you, Carlton for writing history ignored, the sinking of the HMT Rohna. The goal, for the Torch of Remembrance is to erect a National Memorial Monument in Denver, Colorado, to honor all the HMT Rohna victims and 236 survivors, of the almost 2,000 soldiers. We are meeting with Colorado Senator Ben Nighthorse Campbell in two weeks to show him the design. He said he wanted to help us. Waiting for you response. Thanks again..

My dad is a survivor of the sinking of the ROHNA. He never talked about it, I think it was too overwhelming for him, and now he is attending reunions and talking, but before that all my sisters and I had was Carlton Jackson's book. It gave us the story he had difficulty telling us. I was overwhelmed and shocked at how lucky he was to be able to swim, and the hell he went through. He was even scheduled for KP on the day of the hit, so I'm glad he wasn't in the kitchen area. Thank you, Carlton, for the story, now if more people could find out on A&E or the History Channel before they are all gone, there are only about 230 men left and they are ages 77-80. Let's go people. These men were heroes! Thank you

This is a wonderfully argued work, combining a defense of formalist criticism with an erudite argument about British Romantic poetry's awareness of the formalist conventions in which it participates. The readings of the five canonical Romantic poets--Wordsworth, Coleridge, Blake, Byron, and Shelley--that Wolfson executes here are highly original and compelling and are certain to affect future considerations of the works about which she writes. Perhaps more far-reaching is her introductory chapter, "Formal Intelligence: Formalism, Romanticism, and Formalist Criticism" which provides a detailed account of the interwoven careers of historicism and formalism in the Anglo-American literary critical tradition. The discussion in that chapter is sure to be useful to students of literary criticism for years to come.

In this meticulously argued book, Susan Wolfson pursues two distinct but closely related projects: a defense of formalist criticism and an argument about Romantic poetry's awareness of the formal conventions in which it participates. While both projects are fully developed and expertly argued, the second is a result of the first, an example of the insights that might follow from the evolved formalism Wolfson outlines in the book's introduction and brief afterword. The first project, therefore, most immediately commands our attention. Wolfson's defense of formalism also commands our attention because of its courage and polemical fervor. In the contemporary critical climate, the formalist critic receives little respect, viewed by its most generous detractors as retrograde and by its harshest as reactionary and inimical to social progress. The title of Wolfson's book, Formal Charges: The Shaping of Poetry in British Romanticism, slyly alludes to the outlaw status of the formalist critic. Formalism's stained reputation can, no doubt, be attributed to the excesses of its most influential and controversial incarnation, New Criticism; but, as Wolfson notes, New Criticism is not the whole story of formalism. Despite attempts by later theoretical modes to move beyond formalism, form has proven tenacious, if only because form defines the object of study. While it has persisted, formalism has also been severely weakened as critical attention has shifted from the intricacies of poetic formings of language to the social and historical contexts in which works are produced. If Wolfson's title alludes to the outlaw status of the formalist critic, it also suggests that form is the "charge" or obligation of the literary critic, a charge to which criticism of the last twenty years has been derelict in attending. In her introductory chapter, "Formal Intelligence: Formalism, Romanticism, and Formalist Criticism," in which she provides a thorough account of the interwoven careers of formalism and Romanticism, Wolfson takes aim at the anti-formalist reactions that have leveled the most serious blows to formalist theory and practice. These reactions can be generally classified under the rubrics of deconstruction and New Historicism. While deconstruction was certainly a potent force in the dissolution of formalism's hold on critical practice, it has too been supplanted, leaving the now-dominant New Historicism as Wolfson's most formidable opponent. Under the umbrella of New Historicism, one finds such familiar figures as Jerome McGann and Marjorie Levinson as well as others, such as Terry Eagleton and Pierre Bourdieu, who are usually classified in other categories. Uniting this disparate group of theorists is an interest in the ways in which literary form resolves social contradictions on the level of aesthetic experience. There are two main objections that Wolfson has to this account of literary form. First, the historicist declares a healthy suspicion of aesthetic forms that mask and that are complicit with prevailing ideologies, thereby liberating himself or herself from the "forms of fetishism" (Bourdieu's phrase) that manacled and blinded the New Critic. But, as Wolfson notes in a consideration of Bourdieu's "Censorship and the Imposition of Form" in the book's afterword, this method only replaces a fixation on literary form with a fixation on social form: "What is curious about these stories is the way the (purported) New Critical reification of aesthetic form, overtly despised, returns as a more pervasive ideological formation. This is still formalism, shifted from aesthetic agency to social determination" (229). While the consideration of Bourdieu's essay is fair, it is noteworthy that other arguments in his oeuvre-arguments that support Wolfson's theses-are left unexplored. In his anthropological writing, such as Outline of a Theory of Practice and Distinction, Bourdieu has seemed willing, at least in theory, to grant some agency to the object of study and to divest the critic (or, in the case of these works, ethnographer) of some of his or her interpretive authority. This directly relates to the second objection that Wolfson has to New Historicism's interest in "resolvable form" and its corollary emphasis on organic form in its treatment of the Romantics. By viewing aesthetic form as the site where historical and social contradictions and conflicts are resolved, critics like Eagleton and McGann afford form no agency in the critique of culture. Only the critic is allowed the opportunity to address the contradictions that literary form is alleged to resolve. Form itself can only register these contradictions when it ruptures or collapses. Attention to the devices of form, in this anti-formalist account of its workings, becomes an empty, almost tautological gesture. For Wolfson, this view is myopic and incites her most vituperative remarks about New Historicism's regard of form: "Too many readers today accept Eagleton's marginalizing, simplifying, or simply dismissive attention to poetic form as a labor of `reductive operations,' an exercise `preoccupied simply with analyzing linguistic devices'" (19). The bold labeling of Eagleton's approach as "simplifying" and "dismissive" is atypical in an otherwise even-handed treatment and is perhaps attributable to the sentence's emphasis on readers. If contemporary readers cause the strongest response in Wolfson, the response seems to be motivated by a genuine fear that attention to form will continue to atrophy as a generation of critics and scholars who reached maturity without a rigorous formalist background continue to pursue social context over poetic event. Although Wolfson strenuously challenges several forms of anti-formalist reaction, she ultimately does not dismiss them entirely. New Criticism's one unforgivable sin in these pages is its ahistoricism. In a brief consideration of Cleanth Brooks's The Well-Wrought Urn, Wolfson argues that anti-formalist critics and New Critical practitioners "usually elide a dialectic with historicism" that Brooks gestures toward (6). Wolfson's project seems determined to foreground this dialectic. One could argue that the "refreshed formalism" for which she argues is actually a refreshed historicism. Indeed, one of the ironies of the book is that the most compelling and far-reaching chapter, the introduction, is one that historicizes formalism rather than enacts the formalism it advocates. The refreshed formalism for which she argues is relatively and intentionally under-theorized. Wolfson proposes a focus on "poetic practices" and "poetic events," which are defined as "those stanzas, verses, meters, rhymes, and the line" (3). Focusing on these events in the performances of Romantic poetry, Wolfson contends that "Romantic poems reflect on rather than conceal their constructedness (not only aesthetic, but social and ideological)" (14). On the surface, this thesis shares much with Stuart Curran's now seminal Poetic Form and British Romanticism (1986). But, by focusing on the particular and local event instead of broader issues of genre and reception theory, Wolfson distinguishes her contribution from Curran's. She offers her formalism as a "theory in action," a decision that may leave some readers wishing for more theoretical development but one that saves her from making the types of totalizing claims she seems determined to resist. In the six chapters that follow the introduction, Wolfson deploys the unarticulated theory in thorough, highly original considerations of each of the canonical Romantic poets: Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, and Shelley.

A very worthy title, examining the topic concisely yet in detail. Fortifications are not really my strong point, but as far as I could tell the information was accurate. The color plates are also pretty good. The book reads as follows:
Introduction
Chronology
Types of fortified sites
Design and construction
Tour of a fortified site: Danebury
The living site
Celtic fortifications in operation
Afermath
The sites today
Biblography
Glossary
Index

Angus Konstam's THE FORTS OF CELTIC BRITAIN is also a spectacular addition to the reference series, packing photos, color maps and color artwork into a historical survey of the Iron Age Celtic fortresses whose remains still pepper the landscape of Britain. From types of fortifications to how they evolved and differed between regions, THE FORTS OF CELTIC BRITAIN will reach beyond military readers to earn a place in general early history collections.

This book was in perfect condition when I recieved it and it was delivered promptly. I have no complaints and I plan to buy more books off of Amazon. Thanks!

This book was required reading for a class I took, and I think it is a great introduction to bilingual education. Even if you think you have the basic idea of what bilingual education is, this book provides everything from the history of bilingual education to its legal basis to teaching strategies. A great book that should be read by anyone interested in education, even if your focus isn't dual language instruction. The odds are that most teachers in the U.S. today will work with English language learners at some point, and this book will give any teacher a greater understanding of the role of language in the classroom.

Frank Wooton is a long way from being the first aviation artist, but he will be remembered as one of the pillars of the first generation to bear the title "aviation artist". This book brings together some of his most popular work in a thoughtful collection. The biographical intro and the pencil sketches are a very nice touch. Frank Wooton's strong landscapes probably had a great deal to do with pushing aviation art over the top and gaining serious recognition as "art" instead of meerly "illustration". This is a very generous collection of his work through the years, with heavy emphasis on his WWII combat art. The book is nicely done. One quibble! The dust jacket displays art (Mosquitos in flight) that is not to be found anywhere inside the book. I find this very annoying. The dust jacket is the first thing to go, and I find myself taking great pains to protect it so that I can continue to enjoy this painting. J. Campbell Martin

Frank Wooton is a long way from being the first aviation artist, but he will be remembered as one of the pillars of the first generation to bear the title "aviation artist". This book brings together some of his most popular work in a thoughtful collection. The biographical intro and the pencil sketches are a very nice touch. Frank Wooton's strong landscapes probably had a great deal to do with pushing aviation art over the top and gaining serious recognition as "art" instead of meerly "illustration". This is a very generous collection of his work through the years, with heavy emphasis on his WWII combat art. The book is nicely done. One quibble! The dust jacket displays art (Mosquitos in flight) that is not to be found anywhere inside the book. I find this very annoying. The dust jacket is the first thing to go, and I find myself taking great pains to protect it so that I can continue to enjoy this painting. J. Campbell Martin

For decades now books and articles have theorized on british industrial decline (or "relative decline"). Culprits have been pointed: unions, poor management, nationalization, the education system and more. Geoffrey owen names all them but with the insight of distance he presentes a more balanced view. Failure to enter the EEC with consequent focus on the commonwealth and government mismanagement of nationalized industries and constant bail out of lame ducks drove to a loss of competitiveness on the world stage with consequent market loss. The entrance to the common market in 1973 and the thatcher reforms of the eighties forced firms to adapt and become international players on a globalized economy with the success we today now. But what makes this book stand out most is its analysis of industry by industry, ilustrated with real stories of dozens of firms, wich gives a vivid picture tha lacks so much in other texts. A good book, lucid, concise, recomended.

This excellent, thorough and generally very readable study of Britain's manufacturing industry since World War II well exceeded my expectations of it on first picking up the book at the library. This book attempts to analyse the reasons for the failures and successes of a variety of industries, and puts all the case studies in a historical context which is meticulously researched. Given the subject matter, the author could easily have opted to grind the axe for one political ideology over another, but refrains from doing so, which I found refreshing. All-in-all I came away from reading this book with a much clearer understanding of why manufacturing in Britain has fared as it has since 1945. This book is impressive, and I recommend it highly.

This book is very useful for practitioners interested in using economy wide models for planning or in particular for the energy sector. Explanations are clear, there are many practical data and analysis and the application is elaborate. There are many scientific and economic details which will be useful for most readers. The survey of literature is still very useful.

The book consists of the following chapters: 1.British Energy Problem and its Solution; 2. A Discovery Model of Oil Reserves in the UK Sector of the North Sea; 3. The Multisectoral Econometric Model including the energy system; 4. State-Variable Form of the Econometric Model, Stochastic Simulation and Control; 5. Stochastic and Deterministic Solution of the Model.

Given the lack of reviews I suspect this book has not been given the attention it deserves.

Tony Thompson is a fabulous author, and writes very candidly and openly about the gang issues plaguing Britain. However, these issues are not just the UK's problem, rather, it's a microcosm of what's happening everywhere on the planet! Tony delves right into the thick of things, interviewing many criminals and researching many events -hands on - to bring together an excellent book covering many gang issues (listed below). Each event is told to us through vignettes; interesting stories that could easily spin off to be books of their own, or movies even!

I really encourage people to read this book. It's a fascinating fast read that keeps you glued from beginning to end. I was particularly fascinated with the Nigerian 419 Scam; if you can't relate to any of the other issues, you can probably relate to those annoying e-mails received trying to get you to assist some helpless soul (typically from Nigeria) with retrieving their non-existent money from a foreign bank. The author recounts a first hand experience that's quite interesting.

Unfortunately this book does leave you feeling a bit unsettled with no resolutions to the crime problems.

1. Introduction
2. Armed Robbery
3. Cocaine
4. Crack
5. Fraud
6. Hi-Tech Crime
7. Bikers
8. Cannabis
9. Money-Laundering
10. Heroin
11. Synthetic Drugs
12. People-Smuggling
13. Kidnap
14. Guns
15. Index

This guy has to be nuts. He researched all his material by going face to face with real criminals who have ties to the underworld. He even smokes crack with a prostitute..

By far the most interesting section was the weed smuggling chapter. I am fascinated by the drug trade in general, and its interesting to see just how similiar things are over here in the states.

There's a chapter on crack, and how it was created to market to lower class society as cocaine sales were declining. Its interesting to view crack by a business standpoint, and as someone who has come from a troubled past and having grown up in a lower income San Antonio neighborhood, it really is quite frightening.

Overall, this was indeed a good read. I bought this book for about 15 USD in the Hong Kong airport, and it has been worth every cent. I have to admit I was surprised by how many things are linked to the underground.

I first viewed this book at my local library and after going over it, decided to purchase it for my own personal library. The book covers a wide expanse of gardens in Britain, Ireland and not mentioned in the title, Scotland. Book does not give in depth information about layouts of gardens and such, but does contain one or two pics of mentioned gardens and locations in write ups. The photographs are simply beautiful.
The gardens in England are broken down into sectors, such as south-east England or North England for those who may be going to visit. Often, they contain pictures of the manor houses, cottages, castles or architectural elements in the gardens.The book also includes antedotal information about past occupants of houses, gardens or historical events surrounding the houses and gardens. For me, that added immensely to the overall enjoyment of the book. It's a winner.

This large and attractive book is a reference book on over 1,700 of the most beautiful gardens in the British Isles. The largest part of the book is the Guide, in which public-available gardens are discussed, complete with colorful pictures. Grouped by region, each of the gardens is given a quick introduction, a more in-depth description, and important information, including location, size and when open. After the Guide comes the Gazetteer, in which the author looks at many different gardens, including some still privately held and those belonging to cemeteries and hospitals.

Overall, I found this to be a very enjoyable book. I really liked reading the descriptions of the gardens, and the interesting historical notes. The one thing that would have made this book better would have been more pictures. But, it is already a pretty hefty book, and I do realize that adding more pictures would have made it huge.

But, that said this is a very interesting book, especially for anyone who plans on being able to visit these wonderful gardens themselves.