Minnesota Books

Again, the pictures in the book are easy enough to use for my 3 year old. The information contained in the book is useful. We enjoy using this book and look forward to the spring and summer when we can travel further than our backyard.

I do believe there is not an English monarch or a mover and shaker around them that Barber has not written a book about. I might be wrong, but not by much! His works are wonderfully researched and developed, making them a pleasure to read. While he has written biographies on many different people, he has a vast list of books on Arthur and Grail Lore.

I really like this one, because he looks past the valiant legend and searches out Arthur the man. Arthur - as far back as Longshanks - has been molded and used to their purposes - so it's hard to peel back all the layers and get back to original Arthur.

Barber takes on that chore of removing the many embellishments, in a work that is enjoyable for the average reader as well as the Grail Addicts. Loaded with medieval paintings and woodcuttings this book is a wealth of information.

A must for any Grail Lore Library.

This book has a photo of each flower. It gives the height, amount of sunlight, problems of the plant such as disease resistant or insects, spacing, when to plant, when the plant blossoms, etc. A real keeper for a novice gardener like myself.

This is a very interesting and very introspective account from behind the scenes in the landmark Cohen v. Cowles supreme court case. Reporters broke their promise to Cohen not to print his name as the person who disclosed public arrest records of the 1982 candidate for Minnesota Lieutenant Governor. Cohen lost his job and was ruined. By contrast the candidate who was the subject of the public records served two terms as lieutenant governor. The candidate for whom Cohen worked went back to being a billionaire businessman.

This book tells the story how Dan Cohen and Elliot Rothenberg won this landmark case in the U.S. Supreme Court.

I love alphabet books and I love all things referencing nature and life in the northern woodlands. This book has various elements that are unique to an alphabet book. First, the A starts off with January and goes through the year with Z ending with December. This is noted at the bottom of the page and the month/season is depicted in the illustration. For example A for Antler shows a snowy landscape in the back. Another example is August showeing the time that beavers build a dam in their Pond (P). I love the seasonal element especially since I feel our young children are growing up with only commercial holidays as the indicators of our seasons (locked inside air conditioned buildings away from nature, etc.). The illustrations are woodcuts that were then colored with paint and they are beautiful and fun. (Can you tell I am also a woodcut admirer?) The illustrations are sometimes lifestyle representing such as E as Evening depicting parent and children reading and writing by lantern-light and Q as Quiet near the edge of the pond. (These illustrations are not purely animal or nature references.) Some modern day machines also are represented by G as Grader and O as Outboard (boat motor) so this is not purely an old-fashioned or timeless depiction. Letters are represented in woodcut with both capital and lower case print style and the word features woodcut as well with the first letter of the word in capital and the rest in lower case. A short paragraph of usually two sentences describes the scene and often times includes personal experiences of the author.

Reminds me of "A Farmers Alphabet" which represents old-fashioned life in Vermont for its lovely woodcut illustrations and clearly marked letters that are good for teaching young children the alphabet.

This author has a similar book on counting which I plan to read and buy in the future called "Gathering". I am hoping it is as wonderful as this book.

Archer puts suburbia into historical context, going back to before it was even known as this. Its beginnings were in the "nascent bourgeoisie...philosophical, economic, and political circumstances" of late seventeenth century England. Especially, the "new architectural type [of] the compact bourgeois villa" came to be seen as an ideal residence by the nascent bourgeois public. This architecture type allowed for a "new settlement pattern" different from the traditional ones of dense urban development and sprawling manors--namely, suburbia with its homes surrounded by lawns clustered in country-like areas. Along with laying out the cultural and philosophical origins of suburbia, including the developing concept of the self, Archer presents both sides of the assessment of suburbia. In modern-day America, where the majority of the population now live in suburbia, there has for many decades been an ongoing debate over whether suburbia is the acme of the American dream of prosperity and upward mobility or an illusion entailing the stifling of individuality and cultivation of materialism. Archer's book is substantive enough to be a text in college courses on suburban studies, while also being accessible and engaging enough as a timely work of cultural studies for the general reader. The author is a professor of cultural studies and comparative literature at the U. of Minnesota. With material ranging from Enlightenment English philosophy to portrayals of suburbia in recent movies, from architectural plans of the "compact bourgeois villa" to inventions such as lawnmowers and economic changes such as new banking practices associated with suburbia, the work demonstrates how fertile this subject is while bringing it into focus and drawing the avenues for further exploration of it.

Edwin Lundie loved to use heavy, visible timbers in his designs of country houses and cabins. And he loved to use warm, earthy color tones, custom-made hardware and rough-hewn, rustic fireplaces and chimneys.

The result is soothing, comfortable and visually memorable.

His city houses have a storybook quality, evoking early New England. Interiors of these houses are lighter, more formal and delicate than those of his country houses, but there still are rustic elements in brick, stone, wrought iron and hand carved wood.

You can see all of this in The Architecture of Edwin Lundie, a lovely book filled with color photography and Edwin Lundie's skilful drawings.

The Crowded Room is a beautifully written, charming look at a week in the life of Jeffrey Dunne, a high-school senior in 1978. The author has captured exactly what it's like to be a shy, angst-ridden, confused teenager. Jeffrey has lost his girlfriend and feels alienated from his other friends. Yet, until the final chapter, he's not prepared to do anything to resolve the situation he finds himself in. The Crowded Room is a fascinating slice of life, with an antihero who will live in your mind long after you have finished reading the book. Highly recommended.

This is a study of a selection of Yeat's poems in manuscript. The complete version in hardcover contains material on his plays and prose writings as well. Bradford notes, "With many late poems it is possible to study the entire external process of composition, beginning with their prose sketches and continuing through successive drafts until Yeats corrects the final typescript." This book reveals the steps in this process. This is an extremely interesting book for anyone interested in the process of creation. My favorite quotation is from the final page. It explains in part the success of a great poet. " . . . he never allowed his equipment to rust unused. Early and late he worked at his art strenuously. It is this continued faith in works that in part distinguished him from lesser poets, that and an unusual ability to stay at a poem until it came right."

Olivia Holmes's book, originally a variation on her Doctoral thesis, traces the evolution of the phenomenon of the single-authored collection of poetry, in the light of the transition from oral tradition to vernacular writing in the Middle Ages. It starts from a consideration of the ramifications of the shift from the case of multi-authored anthologies of poetry to that of the single-authored collection, which expresses the writer's individual ideas and beliefs in poetry and writing.

The prose is lucid, and hard to fault for its immense clarity. In the book itself, Holmes shows a consideration of the text(s) she studies as products not only of an intimate engagement with historical-literary phenomena, but also as expressions of the authors' capabilities in writing and their self-reflexive dimensions of thought as poets writing either against or in line with inherited literary models of the Middle Ages(or both).

The book was indispensable to my work as a Honours student, because of the groundbreaking work it offered in relation to Dante's Vita Nuova, and the the study of Italian poetry's development as a whole during the Middle Ages. Culminating as part of a recent latent insurgence against the traditional opposition between medieval conformity and renaissance individualism within literary circles, Olivia Holmes's scholarly will prove rewarding, for its ability to prove medieval Italian poetry as a ground for laying down the foundations to both the expression and the psychological phenomenon of individualism itself.