Book Description
At last, the comprehensive book of cartoons from beloved New Yorker cartoonist Roz Chast.
Customer Reviews:
All this Roz Chast in one place? For ME!?!.......2007-09-14
This collection of Roz Chast cartoons brings me great joy and delight. It's fun to watch the evolution of her particular "style" from her earlier works to recent years. All of my favorites are here (i.e. "Inside One's Memory Bank", etc.) Some people don't "get" her, and that's fine with me ("Can't come to the U.S. to buy property -- I have to finish Scrubbing This Teakettle!") She draws some of my favorite cartoon facial expressions ever and I have a secret dream of someday owning an actual cartoon she penned or seeing my likeness as drawn by Roz. Those fantasies may never happen, but in the meantime I forked over the bucks for this great big old book and am so glad that I did. Where else can I relish a world of "Bad Mom" magazine and "The kid who learned about math on the street"?
Lamp Lovers Unite!.......2007-08-04
Like Pablo Picasso, Roz Chast is a prolific genius. But unlike Pablo, Roz is FUNNY!!!
A lot of entertainment for Roz Chast fans.......2007-07-10
Whenever I pick up the New Yorker, I always search first for Roz Chast cartoons. I love her sense of humor. The book is a great value - hours of entertainment. Roz Chast fans will not regret making this investment.
Theories of Everything Exceeeds Expectations.......2007-05-21
I've been a fan of Roz Chatz's work for just about 30 years. This amazing compendeum does not dissapoint. It's more than just looking at cartoons. It's a real READ. I spent about two or three weeks perusing this volume. Unlike most "cartoon books" this one has intellectual weight. It is both insightful and F U N N Y! If you are at all familiar with this artist/writer's work than THEORIES OF EVERYTHING is a must for your library.
A very funny lady.......2007-05-15
I love the quirky, definitely neurotic humor to be found
in this treasure of cartoons. A great brouse when I need
a laugh.
Average customer rating:
- Innovative
- If you like learning from novels
- 5 star concepts in a 3 star novel
- A must for every potential project manager
- if you manage projects for a living...
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Critical Chain : A Business Novel
Eliyahu M. Goldratt
Manufacturer: North River Press
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Binding: Paperback
 General
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Similar Items:
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It's Not Luck
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The Goal
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Theory of Constraints
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The Race
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Necessary But Not Sufficient
ASIN: 0884271536 |
Book Description
Powerful yet simple techniques to solve project management's toughest problems. This book teaches companies to drastically cut project development times resulting in early completion within budget and without compromising quality or specifications.
Customer Reviews:
Innovative.......2007-01-03
An interesting concept presented in an innovative novel. Easy to read and follow. Just like a novel once you start, it is a page turner and hard to put down.
I highly recommend this along with Goldratt's first novel, The Goal.
If you like learning from novels.......2006-10-24
A "made-for-TV" novel with a lesson about a new method of project scheduling. Goldratt invented the "Theory of Constraints," a general problem analyis and planning method which he then applies to various areas. Each application presented in story format.
"Critical Chain" = "Critical Path" x "Theory of Constraints".
Read this book if you want an easy read and a fun introduction to the subject. But if you actually want to apply the Critical Chain method, you'll probably need a textbook format. Or make the effort to abstract the method from the dialogue of the story.
5 star concepts in a 3 star novel.......2006-10-04
Eli Goldratt is one of the most respected experts in the field of Project Management. His work on the Theory of Constraints provides project managers with some very useful tools for keeping projects focused, on budget, and on target. I have definitely benefitted from Goldratt's insights into these topics.
Unfortunately, this work of fiction, with three largely separate story lines, makes for an awkward read. The 246 page novel has about half of its page count spent on two stories that add little to the main message of the book. The ongoing storylines about fixing the business school's executive MBA program and the main character's relationship with his wife Judith have nothing to do with project management. Fortunately, these two superfluous stories are at the end or beginning of each chapter and it is easy to skip over them and get to the useful subject material in the main story line, the running of projects and their problems. Skipping over about 100 pages of the book makes me question the value of paying for a book that could have easily been less than half as long. I might be OK with that if the stories were interesting or well written, but they are not.
Using the book as a reference would be challenging. It has no Table of Contents, no Index, nor a Glossary. The Chapters do not even have titles, or a summary of the key concepts at the end in most cases. I would struggle to find an important concept if I went back to the book more than a week or so after reading it.
A much slimmer, edited version of this book, with just the TOC and project management material, laid out end to end would be an instant must have, and a valuable learning tool.
A must for every potential project manager.......2006-08-11
I've been introduced to CCPM (critical chain project management) years ago in school, but thought it was boring. Reading Goldratt's novel opened my mind to it in a much deeper way, and I'm now using it at my work with great success. I also recommend his other business novels.
if you manage projects for a living..........2006-06-27
Face it, everything that happens in a business is either a process or a project. Even companies that manage projects for a living (e.g. construction, software development) often are lousy at managing internal projects (working ON the business). If you have anything to do with projects, you need to read this book. It will change how you look at projects forever. This guy is brilliant.
Customer Reviews:
A superior work of literary criticism.......2003-02-11
Though Girard admits in an interview that when he wrote this book he was indulging in the dubious pleasure of debunking, it is still an excellent entree into the mimetic hypothesis. The book outlines the important theory of "triangular" or "mimetic" desire, which states that the notion of a desire original to the subject is a romantic lie, and that human beings borrow one another's desires. The book is also a monumental contribution to the study of the history of literature, showing that the evolution of society is tracked and analyzed by the great novelists, who alone in the Western world have understood the mimetic foundations of human interaction.
An indispensable book.......2001-08-17
Groucho Marx said "I wouldn't be a member of any club that would be stupid enough to have me". In DECEIT, DESIRE and THE NOVEL, Girard and his wonderful translator Yvonne Freccerro help us explore that dilemma of self-distaste, and the ever-receding goal of acceptance.
The book argues that the novel as a form is historically preoccupied with one particular dilemma: That when young, each of us believes that the OTHERS have some passport to community that we ourselves lack. The path through life (to maturity or to death) takes place through imitation of, and competition with, those persons who seem to have achieved what we wish ourselves to achieve. As part of this, we often chase after objects whose possession promises to "transform" us into someone else. Think of Swann and high society, Don Quixote and knighthood. If we tilt at windmills-- or seek achievements we don't value once we have them-- it may be because we thought these symbols will yield not merely themselves but also what they symbolize: Don Quixote hopes to become a knight, Swann hopes to become an aristocrat.
When the transformation doesn't happen-- when, for example, Groucho Marx becomes a member of the country club and discovers he's still as uncouth as he always was -- the possession disappoints. The victim then either matures, or sets off on another treasure hunt.
There has never been a work of literary criticism so revealing of the human psyche as DECEIT, DESIRE AND THE NOVEL. Girard's book focuses on envy, but in the process reveals a path to becoming genuine. If nothing else, this book will send you back to Proust, Cervantes and Stendhal greedy for text.
triangular mimesis.......2000-06-21
Girard's work in _Deceit, Desire & the Novel_ is a psychoanalytic approach to literary criticism. It explores the relationship between the subject and object of desire, attributing the cause of desire to a third party, the mediator. He uses Proust, Dosteyvsky, Stendhal and Flaubert as models. Overall, it is engaging, easy to read and absolutely necessary for anyone interested in critical theory.
Book Description
Every novelist's work contains an implicit vision of the history of the novel, an idea of what the novel is. I have tried to express here the idea of the novel that is inherent in my own novels.
-- Milan Kundera
Kundera brilliantly examines the work of such important and diverse figures as Rabelais, Cervantes, Sterne, Diderot, Flaubert, Tolstoy, and Musil. He is especially penetrating on Hermann Broch, and his exploration of the world of Kafka's novels vividly reveals the comic terror of Kafka's bureaucratized universe.
Kundera's discussion of his own work includes his views on the role of historical events in fiction, the meaning of action, and the creation of character in the post-psychological novel.
Customer Reviews:
Essential reading for writers but also important for the novel itself.......2006-06-14
I am starting a novel this summer, and this book was recommended to me by my Creative Writing professor. Being a fan of Kundera already, I bought the book without question.
For the reviewer who said that Kundera writes pretentiously: I am actually amazed, since Kundera's lack of pretention and clarity surprised me. So much literary criticism is bloated and difficult to read, but Kundera is very simple, very concise, and yet also explanatory. Often he will make a statement, such as "All novels are concerned with the enigma of the self," which he not only explains but gives immediate examples, never letting the flash of his writing try to convey the point.
So much ground is covered in this tiny book: the difference between modernism and "establishment modernism," the craft of his own work, the history and purpose of the novel, insights into several of his great works, insights into European history, parallels between music and literature, etc, etc. Make sure to take notes, since your memory won't be able to hold everything in.
I praise Kundera also for his deep respect for the novel, not only arguing against those "established modernists" who claim the novel is dead or antiquated, but stressing the infinite possibilities of the novel and how the weaknesses of the great works show the paths future novels can take. Rather than being pretentious or snobbish, Kundera reaffirms the life of the novel as central to the question of the self, which is as infinite as the novel is.
This book is also essential for writers especially. For plotting out the structure for my work, Kundera's insights have been invaluable. Of course, Kundera doesn't suggest you write as he does, and you won't want to, but his radiant insight surely helped me find out what I myself wanted to do. Kundera's essays prompt exploration and possibility. A great read.
Clear your head before committing to this!.......2005-11-23
In this critical examination of the "art of the novel", Kundera meditates upon the existence or non-existence of "art" in novel-writing. It is a combination of narrative and philosophical ponderings highlighted by Kundera's famed lyricism. However, therein lies the the book's weakness. The dense language could lose your "average" reader and some issues, such as the meaning of art, begin to lean far more towards the philosophical rather than in analytical technique. Kundera tends to wander off on tangents.
The Art of the Pretentious Novel.......2005-10-01
I've read this book twice, but I admit I've not yet read any of Milan Kundera's other work. Maybe they're amazing. Maybe. But judging from this book--and from some of the other reviewers who have posted here--I'd guess they're about as unpretentious as a pale, young intellecutal discussing the merits of W.G. Sebald and Friedrich Nietsche at a Cambridge, Massachussetts tea shop.
This book DEFINES pretentious. The author knows you're an uneducated fool, and he will prove it to you.
That said, he's not an idiot, and a lot of his pompousness is justified. If you don't mind having a thousand things quoted at you that you've only read half of, or the author's overall snobby tone, then you really might find some good insights into a the structure of books and the weaving of stories.
...Or, you might find yourself scribbling death threats to the author in the margins. ...Yeah, that's a bad habit of mine.
How much value does a book have you don't remember? .......2005-01-13
I know I read this book. I read it all. I tried to learn about the art of novel- writing from it.
I have just read the Amazon reviews posted about this novel. A couple are good. They tell me that Kundera writes here about Cervantes, Sterne, Balzac, Dostoevsky and Kafka. They tell me the book has a seven- part structure as his novels do. They tell me that Kundera contrasts the art of the novelist with the thought of the philosopher- and that for him the art of the novelist is in portraying ambiguity and complexity. They tell me that this particular book is one of his best.
Now I have read other Kundera works. I know his work plays much with chance and infidelity and philosophical reflections by the characters on whether their disloyalty or love is bringing them to the incredible lightness of being which some seem bound to living in. They tell me too that the reflections touch about politics , Czech freedom, what it means to write under tyranny and what it means to live in the West.
But the truth is I having read this work on the novel by Kundera remember not one single sentence or thought from it.
This the impatient Amazon reader perhaps thinks says more about my own empty head than it does about the value of Kundera's work.
But I now wonder if something in Kundera's world and way of seeing things, his kind of liberation, his kind of emphasis on the incidental and very secular do not repel this religious reader seeking to feel that all, even in the novel, should have some kind of deep and permanent connection with the One Source of all true meaning.
It may be I have forgotten Kundera because his themes and understanding are ones I simply do not wish to know.
Kundera's Art.......2003-10-09
This relatively small book (165 pages) offers an engaging peek into the mind of a brilliant novelist and scholar. Consisting of interviews, speeches, and published work, Kundera expounds on his literary beliefs about what makes a great novel. My favorite sections are the interviews because of their immediacy and accessibility, although the author's most profound insights arise from his discussion of other authors: Kafka, Cervantes, Tolstoy, Flaubert, and others.
Writers, students of literature, and Kundera's faithful readers should find much to think about in these pages. This is not a light discourse on how to write a novel; Kundera takes his art seriously, in both deeply instinctive and scholarly ways. Those looking for a how-to book would be well-served to look elsewhere.
Book Description
The Cambridge Companion to Proust provides a broad account of the major features of Marcel Proust's great work A la recherche du temps perdu (1913-1927). The specially commissioned essays, by acknowledged experts on Proust, address a wide range of issues relating to his work. Progressing from background and biographical material, the chapters investigate such essential areas as the composition of the novel, its social dimension, the language in which it is couched, its intellectual parameters and its humor.
Customer Reviews:
Slightly uneven, but overall a solid introduction to Proust.......2002-07-02
This is an excellent and helpful introductory set of essays by leading Anglo-American Proust scholars that will prepare any beginner for working his or her way through Proust's masterpiece. As in any anthology, some of the essays are more rewarding than others. Many of the pieces provide a stellar introduction to Proust and Proust's world, while some (especially some of the later essays in the volume) are as impenetrable as some of Proust's own longer and unfathomable sentences. Nonetheless, anyone unfamiliar with Proust will come away well prepared to read and study Proust's masterpiece. A word of warning: if it is important to you not to know plot details (though Proust is hardly about plot; it isn't the destination in Proust, it is the getting there that counts) before reading a book, then you might want to consider skipping this. Personally, I believe that Proust is one of those rare authors about whose tale one needs to know as much as possible before reading.
The volume is apt to be of less value to Proust scholars, or even serious readers who have read the biographies by either Carter or Tadie, or the critical works of Roger Shattuck, or others (both Carter and Shattuck have essays in this volume). The best essays in the collection tend to be those that are more introductory in nature. The weaker essays tend to be those that are more specialized and focused on specific issues in Proust.
Overall, however, I encourage anyone needing an introductory work on Proust to consider spending some time working through the essays in this book.
Customer Reviews:
German Romanticism melds into Western Marxism.......2001-05-29
In this pre-marxist work of the Young Lukács, he takes advantege of the German Romantic myth of the Homeric epic as the hallmark of a supposedly "unalienated" civilization, where the individual was his envinronment and had no need to develop the kind of alienated, subjective self-consciousness we find in the bourgeois XIXth Century novel. Of course this is a modern myth, based on a very selective reading of Homer's epic - which already betrayed a clear consciousness of the divide existing between the Human and the Divine, as well as of a further divide between the mythical Heroic age and the everyday realities of an archaic class society. Neverthless, this modern myth came to form the core of Lukács' lifelong research programme - the study of alienation, which came to form much of the best research of Western Marxism (after reading Lukács'work one can not imagine Adorno and Horkheimer's _Dialectic of the Enlightnment_ being written without Lukács' starting stone). A must-read, therefore, for anyone interested in Western Marxism in general, as well as Lukács and the Frankfurt School in particular.
The epic and the novel.......2000-04-22
The "Theory of the Novel" (1916) is the major work of Lukacs' pre-Marxist period. It is extremely useful both as a kind of document of the feverish intellectual atmosphere of pre-WW I Europe and as one of the underground classics (together with his "History and Class Consciousness" (1923)) that influenced what was later to become the Western Marxism of the Frankfurt School. Lukacs' pre-Marxist prose style, comparable to that of his friend Ernst Bloch's, may seem excessively romantic at times but the overall effect is that theory seems to come alive as the expression of a living human being undergoing an intense personal crisis. The first part of the book discusses the rise of the crisis of interpretation that is represented by the novel as a literary form when it is placed in contrast to the fullness of meaning perceivable in the earlier epic, the form which the novel presumably replaced. Lukacs' discussion of the fundamental dichotomy tearing apart at European civilization from within parallels kindred works such as Nietszches' "The Birth of Tragedy" (with its Apollonian/Dionysian schema) and Toennies' classic work of sociology "Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft." Also instructive to the student of literature would be a comparison of Lukacs' model with that of Auerbach's "Mimesis" and Bakhtin's contrast of the epic and the novel. The second part of this book is an application of this binaristic framework to novels by Cervantes, Balzac, Flaubert, Goethe, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. While this whole second part is incredibly rich in insights, Lukacs' application of the Bergsonian notion of time as duree to his study of Flaubert's "L'Education sentimentale" is particularly unforgettable. There, he writes: "Time is the resistance of the organic."
Average customer rating:
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The Politics of Home: Postcolonial Relocations and Twentieth-Century Fiction
Rosemary Marangoly George
Manufacturer: Cambridge University Press
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Binding: Hardcover
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ASIN: 0521453348 |
Book Description
Twentieth-century imperial and postcolonial narratives in English have a major investment in the notion of "home." At the same time, the concept of "global English" challenges the traditional boundaries of national literatures. Through inter-related readings of the work of "first-world" and "third-world" writers and theorists, including Joseph Conrad, Kazuo Ishiguro, Anita Desai, Edward Said and Homi Bhabha, the author explores the problems, pleasures and privileges involved in "feeling at home" in literature.
Customer Reviews:
Excellent Book.......2006-11-16
I loved this book ... couldn't put it down until the last page was over ! When's the next one coming??
Customer Reviews:
Unabashed Apologia For the Postmodern Literary Bureaucracy.......2005-09-22
This is not good literary exegesis, it is an unabashed apologia for a literary bureaucracy, another pamphlet of the endless "literary production" under the pseudo-Marxist homology of poststructuralism. It ends up merely as a political struggle to save Kafka for purposes of cultural and intellectual identity.
This book purports to get at "the real Kafka," by stripping the man and his work of all transcendent pretensions assigned him by critics of the old school, by making him a model for the new uniformed postmodernist-socialist man. In "Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature," Deleuze and Guatarri have done the same things they accuse the old Kafkologists of doing, in effect stripping Kafka of his old Kafkalogical baggage only to create a new Kafkology, one that focuses more on a weird interpretive biography of the man as celebrity than it does by trying to understand his works in their modernist setting.
In Machina Res.......2001-01-06
According to Deleuze & Guattari, we have suffered too long amidst the retrograde critical judgements of mainstream Kafka scholarship. Ad nauseum, these pedestrian hacks have given us Kafka the alienated loner, Kafka the neurotic metaphysician, Kafka the theological invert, Kafka the gynephobic prisoner of ascesis, Kafka the self-hating Jew, Kafka the suicidal insomniac. Scholars have made their reputations by sending this great author on greased skids to Hell, earmarking him as an avatar of the Negative, a nodal point of absurdity and paradox, the pilgrim of an epic and hallucinatory Guilt Trip (partly at fault are the Muir translations, which categorically pitch the Kafkan voice as a syntax of doom and alienation). No doubt Kafka suffered immensely in his professional, family, and erotic life, in the anti-Semitic maw of Czech nationalism, in the iron-maiden of terrors both historical and metaphysical, but critics who reach their limit in expounding the pain and absurdity of the Kafka trajectory are providing us with a false and incomplete picture of this sublime literary event.
D & G decided to bring the hammer down on these reflexive doomsayers, to restore some of the joy and vibrant panache to Kafka studies. They wanted to bring him "`a little of this joy, this amorous political life that he knew how to offer, how to invent. So many dead writers must have wept over what was written about them. [We] hope that Kafka enjoyed the book that we wrote about him'"(xxv). It is useful to recall the evening Kafka read the opening chapter of *The Trial* to his circle of literary friends, assailed by roars of laughter, Kafka himself laughing so hard he had to constantly stop reading to wipe tears from his eyes. The ramifications of this episode have been repressed and overturned by the necrophilic martyrology of a reflexive Kafka scholarship. For here we have gone beyond any mere "laughter of the Abyss," the impish cackle of "black comedy," the doomed precincts of Camus's "cosmology of the Absurd." Kafka's hilarity is a laughter of resistance, of felicity, of squeezing some measure of freedom out of our peremptory and obstructionist universe. As argued in this text, the battle is within and against the political, economic, technological, bureaucratic, judiciary, and linguistic machines which held Kafka's language in thrall to its obstacles and terrors.
Here is a cento of principles developed by D & G in their dissenting text, the prolegomenon to any future in Kafka scholarship:
1. Isolation from the Law is not merely the absence of God (coinciding with the SNAFU of metaphysical realism) but rather entails the eternal suspension of judgement, ultimately an Artaudian desire "to have done with Judgement."
2. The question of ASCESIS. Deleuze has long underscored the idea that when a writer or philosopher espouses an "ascetic" lifestyle it is only as a means to achieving a more subterranean pitch of libertinism (or Life). Kafka had plenty of opportunities for conventional happiness, to live the life of a Max Brod, for example. Rather he followed the witch's wind of literary apprenticeship, a far profounder Life although, from a judgemental distance, appearing monstrous and ill-fated.
3. Kafka's oeuvre is characterized by a complete lack of *complacency*, and stands accordingly as a total rejection of every problematic of Failure. His suicidal fantasies, then, were not merely an agonizing cry of despair, but also a series of unmerciful thought-experiments designed to charge the literary machine, to clear the waters for fresh speculation.
4. Reflexive scholarship tends to move backward from unknowns to knowns (i.e. the castle is God, the beetle is oedipal frustration, the penal colony is fascism, the singing mouse is a writer, and writers are those who express CONTENT and represent THINGS). Rather we should take Walter Benjamin to his limit, by acclimatizing ourselves to a mode of literature "that consists in propelling the most diverse contents on the basis of (nonsignifying) ruptures and intertwinings of the most heterogeneous orders of signs and powers"(xvii).
5. Renovate the battlefield...: reterritorialize Kafka's "metaphysical" estrangement onto the concrete political arrangements with which he engaged throughout his life. Understand the political or "fantasmatic" nature of Kafka's simulations, that his fictions are not merely an allegory of resistance to fascism, but the infiltration of a ruptured sensibility into the fascistic functioning of the Law, a node of deterritorialization inside the torn apart.
6. The desire for innocence is as pernicious as the fetishization of guilt, since both imply an Infinity by which we can define and calibrate Judgement. Justice is desire and not law. Desire is a social investment traversed and legitimized by Kafka's literary machine, which "is capable of anticipating or precipitating contents into conditions that...concern an entire collectivity"(60), which speak for a people that may not be prepared to live through its message.
Perhaps I'm trying too hard to cram difficult arguments into tiny hard-to-swallow capsules. The text itself has to be read to be believed. Perhaps in response to those who felt *Capitalism and Schizophrenia* did not provide enough "concrete examples," D & G have steered their war-machine onto one of the most treacherous and misunderstood literary oeuvres of the preceding century. The result will either leave you cold (as is the case with virtually every reader I've conferred with on this text) or revolutionize your jilted perceptions of a great author.
Kafka and Deleuze hand-in-hand........1999-11-24
The detailed concepts on how Gilles Deleuze read Kafka still amazed me. To understand Deleuze, one must read Deleuze in relation to Kafka.
Book Description
The Arabian Nights: A Companion guides the reader into this celebrated labyrinth of storytelling. It traces the development of the stories from prehistoric India and Pharaonic Egypt to modern times. It also explores the history of the translation, and explains the ways its contents have been added to, plagiarized and imitated. Above all, the book uses the stories as a guide to the social history and the counterculture of the medieval Near East and the world of the story-teller, the snake charmer, the burglar, the sorcerer, the drug addict, the treasure hunter and the adulterer.
Customer Reviews:
A MUST!.......2007-07-11
The best companion to one of the most fascinating collection of tales in history. Irwin's work is also a great socio-political study of both the times that The Arabian Nights was written in and the times that it was finally translated into the west. If you have the The Arabian Nights and this book then I highly recommend Irwin's other book, Night & Horses & the Desert: An Anthology of Classical Arabic Literature, and Edward Said's Orientalism.
A Facinating Read.......2006-04-10
This is one of the more interesting companion books I have read. It goes into great detail of the history and the formation of the 1001 Nights collection, and provides an interesting window into Arabic culture. However, one thing I found to be really interesting is that the 1001 tales of Arabic culture were primarily oral tales. The professional storytellers who would tell these books would have manuscript versions which they would use as notes, so there were no official versions--each telling would be elaborated and expanded on depending on the audience. The version that we are familiar with in the west was formalized in France in the 17th century, and may have more relevance to the European expectations of Arabic culture than to Arabic culture itself. In fact, several tales which appear in the European version do not appear in any Arabic manuscripts and may have been written by Europeans to fill the demand for fantastic tales. Overall, this book is quite interesting and I really recommend this to those who would like to see how a lose collection of oral tales becomes a work of literature.
A very useful companion........2005-09-24
The history of the Arabian Nights (1001 Nights) is often appended to the various translations available. They tend to be brief and often reflect the focus of the editor and/or translator. The Arabian Nights: A Companion by Robert Irwin is very substantial. The author often makes conclusions but always includes the thoughts of those with whom he disagrees. This is a must for anyone who really enjoys this collection of stories and will be rewarded by its fascinating history and the history of its translation...almost as enjoyable as the stories themselves.
Good companion.......2000-05-03
As someone who loved the "Arabian Nights" since childhood, I eagerly read this book as well. For the most part, I wasn't disapointed. It does a wonderful job of setting the scene, discussing its origins, its distortions, and showing how the stories relate to medieval Arabian life. I was particularly impressed with the section discussing the connections between various story collections in both Asia and Europe. In short, this book helps the reader better understand this complex (and often confusing)work. The chapters are all clearly laid out and well argued, and the book as a whole is easy to read. He has complex ideas, but is able to communicate them fluidly.
One idea I would challenge, however. I believe the scholars who argue that the more "complete" manuscripts probably arose from increased European interest in it. It makes sense that writers would add filler to reach 1001 nights in response to consumer demand.
An interesting read for fans of "Arabian Nights."
Average customer rating:
- One of the best anthologies I have ever read
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The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction (Cambridge Companions to Literature)
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On SF
ASIN: 0521016576 |
Book Description
Science fiction is at the intersection of numerous fields. It is literature which draws on popular culture, and engages in speculation about science, history, and all varieties of social relations. This volume brings together essays by scholars and practitioners of science fiction, which look at the genre from different angles. It examines science fiction from Thomas More to the present day; and introduces important critical approaches (including Marxism, postmodernism, feminism and queer theory).
Download Description
Science fiction is at the intersection of numerous fields. It is a literature which draws on popular culture, and which engages in speculation about science, history, and all types of social relations. This volume brings together essays by scholars and practitioners of science fiction, which look at the genre from these different angles. After an introduction to the nature of science fiction, historical chapters trace science fiction from Thomas More to the present day, including a chapter on film and television. The second section introduces four important critical approaches to science fiction drawing their theoretical inspiration from Marxism, postmodernism, feminism and queer theory. The final and largest section of the book looks at various themes and sub-genres of science fiction. A number of well-known science fiction writers contribute to this volume, including Gwyneth Jones, Ken MacLeod, Brian Stableford Andy Duncan, James Gunn, Joan Slonczewski, and Damien Broderick.
Customer Reviews:
One of the best anthologies I have ever read.......2006-09-04
Anthologies are notoriously inconsistent. Most contain several essays considerably below the level of the best pieces and many contain a few utterly miserable ones. On the downside, no essay in this collection truly stands out; on the upside, there really isn't a weak entry in the volume. I honestly cannot think of another collection of which I can make that statement.
Whether you are a serious fan of Sci-fi or a casual reader seeking an introduction to the field, this collection will prove invaluable. I fall somewhere between those two categories. Over the years I've read a few hundred Sci-fi novels and seen most Sci-fi films that have been made, but it has never been my main source of reading or film viewing. I've read rather a lot of the historically important works such as Mary Shelly, Henry Kuttner, H. G. Wells, Olaf Stapleton, and David Lindsay, but I've never attempted anything like a comprehensive reading of the classics. And I have ready very little that has been published in the past fifteen years. Still, I found that I learned an enormous amount about the field from this book. I learned about several historical works I had not previously known of, got a better understanding of the state of the genre from one decade to another, and learned a great deal about trends in the field in the past couple of decades. I also learned something about the various literary critical reactions to the genre. For those in the academy, it is a helpful introduction to the scholarly take on things.
The book is also great at pointing the way to other books. I kept a sheet of paper beside me as I read. I have already bought a few critical books on Sci-fi based on mentions of them in this volume, while I also have compiled a list of a number of novels that I plan on reading.
The essays in the book are broken down into three separate sections. The first section deals with the history of Sci-fi, from precursor works to the magazine age to various decades after. The second and most academic section deals with various academic approaches to Sci-fi, including Marxist, feminist, postmodernist, and queer theory. The final and most wide-ranging section covers a variety of themes such as gender, race, hard science fiction, alternate history, space opera, film and TV, and religion. The writers are mainly English and mostly academic, though several are also writers of Sci-fi. Even the writers, however, are fully qualified academics. For instance, one of the more scholarly entries is that by Brian Stableford. Though most of the essayists are British, American Sci-fi has so completely dominated the genre that it automatically demands priority. If anything, I was somewhat surprised by the absence of some European writers. There is, for instance, very little discussion of Stanislaw Lem, though several deserving British writers do receive attention.
In addition to the very good essays there is also a very interesting (though certainly not exhaustive) list of chronology listing some significant novels, short stories, movies, and television series. There is also a good bibliography at the end of the book, though I wish it had been annotated.
I highly recommend this collection to anyone interested in Sci-fi either in a casual or more dedicated fashion. In all honestly I have to say it is one of the most successful volumes in the Cambridge Companions series that I have read.
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