Irish-American Books

Sir Stenton has composed a masterpiece of a history text in his most famous book. A caveat, however, in that the text itself was written by someone who was a professional historian. As such, the text is as dry as you would expect. It is, perhaps, the most comprehensive text on the subject available to the open market, but while it is very name, date, and place intensive, there is little in the way of anecdotal information that might interest the merely casual reader. For someone who is interest in more an introduction than an indepth analysis, I would recommend The Anglo-Saxons, edited by James Campbell.

This book is the single best source of information about Anglo-Saxon England. I would only caution that this books is not for the novice historian. Unfamiliarity with the topic will leave you wondering what your reading and completely lost.

This book is filled with factual information, but because Sir Frank Stenton also lends his sagacious opinions the book is both enjoyable and easy to understand. This book is several hundred pages long with tiny print, and so packed with information, that you'll know everything possible about Anglo-Saxon history. Stenton always prefers the probable to the outrageous and does not seem to go with the popular opinions about kings, queens, or events. You must read this, but only if you're really, really interested in the subject. Otherwise, it'll go right over your head.

I just loved this book. It was perfect for some light reading.

In clear prose, with a distinctive, piercing style, the author addresses the subject and exposes its surfaces and depths. Anyone interested in these poets should be sure to purchase a copy

Sentiment and emotion ride the waves with scholarly precision as Flinn pens the book Dean Koontz wishes he could write but knows he can't. Masterfully ignoring the conventions of the techno-thriller, this book steps boldly where Tom Clancy fears to tread. If you liked "The Bridges of Madison County" or "Trade and Tariff Policy in the Weimar Republic," this is the book for you.

This is the best anthology of Filipino writing I've seen so far. The editors Tabios and Carbo deserve medals for bringing us such rich, diverse, exciting women poets & writers. I love Jessica Zafra's story, I was gripped by Cristina Pantoja-Hidalgo's stunning story, I was overwhelmed by all the fantastic poetry, especially "Marcelina" by Jean V. Gier. All women will understand the stories these Filipinas have to tell. Highly recommended!

Finally, after a hundred years of neglect, Filipina women have this book where their own voices can be heard. The stories are poignant and laden with sensuous sentences. The poems brim with profound beauty. There are recognizable Filipina authors like Jessica Hagedorn, Evelina Galang, and Linda Ty-Casper but there is also a fair representation of younger talent like Lara Stapleton and Gina Apostol. Such a treasure trove of familiar elegant voices and new vigorous word-smiths from the Philippines as well as Filipina-Americans.

I am so happy to see this collection of Filipina (!) writers. Way to go! Now it's time to see these individual writers produce their own books so that we will have more to show the world. It is very encouraging to know that there are many writers of Filipino background out there. Get busy! I highly recommend this collection to those of you who simply love to read.

I'm a student in the university I will introduce Rudolf Besier. I read the book. I need information about the biography of Rudolf Besier. I have no enough time. I think The Barrets of Wimpole Street is the most successful work of Rudolf Besier

Well this play started off slow, but once Robert Browning was introduced, I was completely entranced. The play is set in the bedroom of Elizabeth Barrett, and it tells of the dynamics of living in a home with a domineering father. I felt deeply for Elizabeth's situation, and the fact that it's based on her actual life is amazing. It helped me see how such great work can come forth from such a tortured soul.

The point where she meets Robert Browning warmed my heart and sent excitement through me as I read it. Rudolf Besier did a wonderful job in conveying the depth of love and commitment of Robert Browning. I missed Robert Browning when he wasn't in a scene, and I relished every scene that had him.

Also, the scenes with Elizabeth's father were electrifying. The way the play described the father's relationship with his children was very well done. Besier definitely walked the line without being too obvious.

Overall this was a magnificent play. I enjoyed it tremendously.

Rudolf Besier's "The Barretts of Wimpole Street" is an excellent play based on a turbulent period in the life of the poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Elizabeth is an invalid who along with her many brothers and sisters lives in terror of her borderline insane father. He rules his house with an iron fist, forbidding any of his children to marry or even have friends.

Into this nightmare comes fellow poet Robert Browning, who through a combination of tender ardor and sheer stubbornness forever changes the life of Elizabeth, and ultimately all of the Barretts. The final scene, where the family comes to terms with a great shock, is both frightening and triumphant.

Besier's play is rooted in fact and tightly paced, with an incredibly suspenseful ending, especially since most people know how Barrett's life turned out. Good, solid dialogue and an interesting historical backdrop make this play well worth reading.

GRADE: A-

Throughout this book, Wood stresses the fact that there is absolutely no way to truly apreciate the severity of slavery through recollection, but that it is important to try. It is important to understand just how widespread the phenomenon was, and how this tragedy in human history still resonates loudly within our psyches. One major point of the book is how populations who had been heavily involved in the slave trade, starting with the British and extending to the US North, began to sugar-coat their involvement by airing opinions of moral superiority over others. The best and most famous example being Harriet Beecher Stowe's "Uncle Tom's Cabin", where Africans who were enslaved actually end up better off than their free African counterparts due to the fact that they become Christian. The slaves were redeemed through their brush with western cutlure (ie slavery). Other examples of visual evidence include the middle passage slave ship diagrams, runaway slave reward notices, inhuman iron helmets and shackles. Each area examined is brought to life by Wood's seemingly unending arsenal of background information and nontrivial ties to art history.
The book's real strength lies in how it can in fact bring the reality of slavery back, to confront western culture with it as something that still lingers, but with an almost Freudian degree of mass-denial. Slavery in the US existed longer than it hasn't, the economic ripple-effect alone should be self-evident. We are still in the wake of this dark era in our culture; Wood puts us on the therapist's couch and makes us remember, rather than suppress, these memories.

this book is incredibly interesting and engaging. Wood is insightful and it is not at all tedious to read. it was throught-provoking and i actually looked forward to reading it. plus, he's a really cool guy.

Dozens of images of archives across Britain and North America on Atlantic slavery are presented in Blind Memory, which provides an artful blend of images and words reflecting 19th century Afro-American slave experiences. Woodcuts, paintings, diaries, short stories and artifacts are examined in this study of visual representations of slavery.

Sandy's writing takes you to a place you'd usually rather not even visit!!! She shines her beacon through the darkest recesses of the illness she combats daily.

Sandy you are a truly awesome person....in the real sense of that word.

Sandy Jeffs depicts the terrible, violent relationship between her parents and ts effect on her. Jeffs uses the second person to address the dead, as when she tells her father: 'Years of your blistering anger/has severed her senses from life's delights' in 'Farewell Old Bastard'...Jeff's poems about her mother express symathy and empathy, as in 'Mavis's Song': 'Her songs burst forth as though/her life depended on them'. Whilst Jeffs diction is not always inventive, her spacing, timing and self editing are superb, creating disciplined intensity which many readers will find impressive and cathartic, reinforced by the work's wider social dimensions. - Jennifer Maiden, Australian Book Review

At last a poetry book I can read that speaks to my experiences. Thank you Sandy for breaking the silence! on a topic that is widespread but noone ever talks about it. This books invites you into the harrowing world of domestic violence and alcholism with poetry that is both accessible and evocative.

Just to preface the fact that this review is a little biased, I am one of the writers who contributed to this book.

However I do think that I can speak for what I thought of the collection as a whole. This project has been in the works for a number of years now, and I have been eagerly awaiting it coming out.

Since getting the book, I have been amazed at the depth and breadth of the poems contained in this anthology. I have found some of them heartwarming and some of them frankly disturbing, but they all evoked something from me, and that I find to be valuable.

I loved that these poems address the training experience from different viewpoints. Many of the poems contained within are from the mind and heart of the medical students, physicians, etc, while another group comes from inside the patient's soul. It is this complex interaction developing between the poems that I have found to be the most intriguing to me.

I hope to have the opportunity to hear more from the voices of my fellow poets in the medical field.

Reading "Body Language" brings the reader into a world that is completely unfamiliar to most of us, the world of medicine. It's a compilation of poetry written entirely by doctors. The poems explore their world, a world of sixteen hour days, catheters, and mental patients. While this world is unfamiliar to me, except occasionally as a patient or family of a patient, these poems bring me right into the action. I feel like I am an intern working a sixteen-hour day who has not seen my mother in months.

The poems are magical in that they explore something wholly different from our day-to-day experiences. The subjects of these poems are not flowers or beautiful women; they are the gritty truths of life as a doctor, and they bring the reader right into that OR. The doctors write of unfamiliar or even scary subjects in a way that speaks to universal human truths and emotions. They explore love, loss, death, relationships, exhaustion, and aging, all things that are a part of our day-to-day lives.

The beauty of this compilation is that it brings the world of the young doctor, the intern, to life in a way I've only before seen on television. These doctors, masters of the scalpel, are also masters of the pen.

Poetry, without question, is a tricky thing. For many Americans it is an inapproachable art form that resides in a fortress guarded by elitist intellectuals. For the minority of Americans who read it, it is a personal thing--tough to define what works for some readers and tougher to understand for most. For the occasional reader of poetry, the favorite poem is usually something that sparks a familiar memory and puts it in perspective--a first love, the sight of the moon rising over a ridge in the mountains in the winter or the memory of a summer night in youth. For those of us that don't read much poetry it is the commonality of experience buried in the words speaking to something deep down inside of our common existence as humans that's tends to attract us to a poem.

While the language in many of the poems in Body Language is striking, what draws the physician reader in more than anything else is the commonality of experiences inherent in these works. There are many remarkable landscapes in these poems, from the struggle to understand the intricate detail of the human body in anatomy class to the indelible memories of the manic patients or hopelessly depressed during psychiatry core clerkship. It is mostly all here, in the form of poetry, evoking those moments that most physicians have painfully internalized or stepped around or ignored for the lack of time to pay any attention to. For some these things have become shadows and for others scars and for many, things they just never understood very well to begin with and don't want to think about much any more. These are poems about all physicians as much as they are about those of the physician poets that wrote them. This book brings important experiences back, whether sadly, bluntly, humorously or subtly, in a way that reminds physicians of all the things they've been blessed and cursed to see and be part of.

Body Language was the "brain child" of Neeta Jain, currently an R3 at California Pacific Medical Center in San Francisco, when she was still a medical student at University of Rochester School of Medicine. She collaborated with another medical student at Yale University, Dagan Coppock with the support of her U of Rochester faculty advisor, Stephanie Brown Clark. While still 4th year medical students, Neeta and Dagan solicited submissions from students, residents and attending physicians from across the United States, receiving hundreds of submissions. Ultimately they culled out around 90 poems to create this anthology.

Perhaps I am cynical or perhaps I just don't really believe that given the frantic nature of modern medicine, that there are many doctors that can devote the time to polishing their poetry in the tradition of William Carlos Williams, a New Jersey General Practitioner who practiced prior to the era of information overload. Williams wrote on a typewriter in between patients, during the time doctors now reserve for looking up a question, returning a phone call or answering an old email.

But I was wrong. I came home from work exhausted one recent evening and picked up the book to discover another world, however familiar that world was. In that world are poems that occasionally jump off the page. Many of these poems are written by serious poets, poets published long before this book came along, and some are written by relative novices. But what unites these poems is the power--the raw emotion--of so many of the experiences described. We're reminded of overwhelming fatigue so harsh one envies the dead or the mundane call to pronounce a patient's death before fading back into the halls of the hospital. It is all here, experiences in training and in the practice of medicine.

The anthology is divided into six sections:
Medical student, first year; Medical student, second year; Medical student, clinical years; Intern; Resident; Attending. It is almost impossible not to find a situation or emotion in a poem in each section that all physicians have experienced at some point in their lives. For example, life that occasionally interjects itself into the mind numbing lecture hall of our pre-clinical years of medical school (Richard M. Berlin):

Medical School Lovers
One morning, while disease-slides flashed
and filled the lecture room with twilight blue,
the back door opened a sliver of light
and they entered holding hands.

A few of us turned, then the others,
four hundred eyes focused
on the couple at the door,
faces still flushed from making love,

their pleasure so certain.
The slides flashed on
and the lecturer persisted
but we were gone for the day,

Still dazed by the way love can enter
our lives in a flash of light,
spinning our heads as we struggle
with lessons everyone learns in the dark.

And for residents, the "soft" admit in the night (Mindy Shah):

MAO
It's what we call
a "soft" admit,
which means
your illness does not
impress us.
Here is your room,
the toilet, your bag
of personal belongings.
The toothbrush is
on us.
We'll round at seven,
but I can tell
by the smell of your breath
you're going to live.

To summarize, after reading this book cover to cover, I was not surprised to learn that Garrison Keillor had picked up a copy and had asked permission to read some of its contents on his radio show--Writer's Almanac. It is great stuff that speaks about many of the things doctors have been through that they're too tired or too busy or too afraid to stop and ponder over the years of practicing medicine. I highly recommend the anthology and congratulate Neeta Jain and her co-editors on a tremendous achievement.

Stolen Kisses (by Emily Osborn)
The fresh-laundered smell
of a boy's shirt
startles me
leaning closer
with my stethoscope
I pretend to hear a murmur
soak in the odor
of a kiss

I wish I had written this book! It grabbed me from page one and kept me breathless throughout. The story, a boy caught in an Irish Union workerss' intrigue in post-Civil War coal country, hunted by a man on a scent tracking horse, is original and gripping. The development and growth of the character, Phin, is great.

Susan Williams Beckhorn
Wind Rider, Harper Collins 2006

Phin Chase has gone from being an orphan that no one really wants to being someone that a lot of dangerous people want to find.

Phin has witnessed a murder by the Sleepers, otherwise known as the Molly Maguires or the Ancient Order of Hibernians. Whatever you call them, they run most Irish immigrant towns, and you don't want to be on their bad side. In fact, most people try to avoid them all together.

Now they're looking for Phin. And the more he finds out about them, the more he realizes there is no one he can trust. He's never missed his mother so much or felt so very alone. The only logical thing Phin can think of to do is run. So run he does. But he seems to keep running directly into the hands of two men. Both men are definitely dangerous -- one wants to hurt Phin, but the other is debatable. Sometimes Phin thinks he could trust him, even be helped by him, but then there are times that Phin is sure he's at least as dangerous as the first man.

How long can one young boy hold out against an entire underground militia and a horse that can track his scent? CHASE is a great adventure story, set in the midst of real history. It's exciting and interesting and fully believable. Phin Chase is a great hero; he's unsure, he makes mistakes, he has a multitude of narrow escapes. Right up until the very end you're not sure if or how he'll escape. Page-turning, edge-of-your-seat adventure with an interesting cast of characters, set during a real time in the history of our country. Definitely a great choice for a good regular read, or a way to make a book report more interesting!

Reviewed by: Carrie Spellman

Chase -by Jessie Haas gr 4-9

Set in a Pennsylvania coal mining town in the 1870's, young Phin Chase has just witnessed a murder. He's reading a borrowed book on Englebright's front porch when several men from the mine who have a grievance with Englebright, kill him.. Instead of killing Phin too, they decide to pin the murder on him. He can't stay in town. If he does, he will be tried and convicted, because who will believe the story of an orphaned boy against respectable men from the town? So he runs.

On the way, a friend gives him the killer's wallet to return to him, but Phin can't do that. He knows he'll be caught and brought to the jail. So he runs, with the wallet. It has enough money to help him get far away. If only he can.

He manages to hop a train out of town, but there is a mysterious stranger hot on his trail; a mule trader who keeps showing up in town. Really a mule trader? And if not, then who is this man and his magnificient black stallion who never seem to be more than a stone's throw from Phin and his hiding places. Phin ends up leaving town in the same car as the mule trader and the killer, Ned Plume, who is also looking for the boy, because he wants his wallet back.

Phin leads them on an intense chase, suffering all manner of ills and chills, hunger and bruises while running for his life. Eventually, a regretful confrontation comes to bear bewteen Phin and the mule trader, exposing the man's true identity and his reasons for hunting Phin. But these reasons are not the same as Ned Plumes, and Phin still has one more person to face before he can think about ending his flight.

This books is a real page turner. Beautifully written in terse prose that keeps the tension high and the questions present until the last possible moments, this book is well worth the read. In addition to being that great kind of historical fiction that makes you want to know more about the period, it also makes you want to stay with Phinn, keeps you rooting for him all the way, and does not disppoint in the end.

This is one of the best introductions to popular Christian fiction that seeks to draw the reader into the world of meaning. too often modern literature, following earlier reductionist authors, strips the inner meaning of life away, leaving a dark, bleak universe void of any real and lasting meaning by which the reader can transcend the shadows of life. The authors covered in this short intro do the opposite by enlivening the universe with meaning, playfulness, sobriety, and joy.

Lewis, Chesterton, Bunyan, Charles Williams, George MacDonald, Tolkien, L'Engle, and Walter Wangerin are discussed individually with a fantastic apologia for their literary forms as an introduciton. A great read! Enjoy!

In this relatively short work, Rolland Hein manages to successfully review and critique the works of many Christian authors who created mythological stories. The critiques, ranging from Bunyan's "Pilgrim's Progress" to Tolkien's "Lord of the Rings," are arranged chronologically, beginning with Dante and ending with contemporary 'mythmakers.'

The reviews not only cover the works and the Christian elements in them, they also provide useful information and good insight into the lives of these men and women. Quotes are presented, giving the authors' views on the art of Christian mythmaking and their attitudes toward the various ways we can discover truth.

This book is excellent. It is very well-written, and thoughtfully organized. The insight it provides on such authors as Tolkien, Lewis, and MacDonald is invaluable. If you are interested in one or more of these authors, get this book--it may help you to better understand them or even discover new authors and new worlds to explore.

Fantasy's "breaking away" from the primary sensory world offers a journey into the unknown to experience the REAL, according to Rolland Hein. We all have a Mythos (worldview); this cherished text sharpens the Christian sensibility by using the secondary worlds to help us understand spiritual concepts. Out-of-print version has been updated, a superior gift to anyone interested in Christianity, Fantasy, Narnia, Middle Earth, Imagination, or any of the Oxford Christian Writer or their successors.

I ordered the Oxford companion to help me study for my comprehensive exams. Even though I didn't use it much for that purpose, I think that it is a must have for anyone planning to major in English in college. The text is in dictionary format; many terms/concepts you find will come up in any college lit course. It is a great purchase and probably much cheaper than what you will find in a University bookstore.

This is a compact version of the 6th edition of the Oxford Companion to English Literature. The emphasis is naturally on British literature (John Galt is not listed as a character in Atlas Shrugged, but as a Scottish novelist). There is coverage of writers from the United States, Canada, Africa, the Caribbean, and India.

Among the entries are:
- short biographies of novelists, dramatists and poets, and also a few philosophers (Swedenborg), historians, scholars, critics, biographers, travel writers, and journalists
- plot summaries and descriptions of poems

Other notable entries:
- literary and intellectual movements, genres, and critical theory
- figures in Irish mythology
- gay and lesbian literature
- literary societies, libraries, publishers, and even coffee houses

Certain topics get a two-page treatment. (Black British literature, science fiction, structuralism and post-structuralism, ghost stories, post-colonial literature, romantic fiction, spy fiction, etc.)

There's no editorializing. They "describe and characterize rather than judge."

This book fills a niche, and does so perfectly. I wanted a reference work for literature, but I didn't want to pay $50 for one. This book gives short, concise blurbs, which is often all one needs. It is organized well and is inclusive enough for the average household. Not a book for specialists, but excellent for the layperson and student.