No comments about Letters Of Elizabeth Barrett And Robert Browning (Classic Books on Cassettes Collection) [UNABRIDGED].

No comments about Tales of Two Cities: Library Edition.

No comments about Landscape Turned Red: The Battle of Antietam.

No comments about Vet in a Spin (Vet).

5 comments about The Chieftains: The Authorized Biography.

1. This is a wonderful history book of the Chieftains. The book is very informative about their love of Irish heritage, the traditional music, and all the wonderful groups, singers, musicians that they have shared the stage and recordings. Paddy has a great sense of humor, and he is the glue that holds the group together and make them what they are. I own a lot of the Chieftains recordings, videos, and I look for more products that they have made. We were sadden for the loss of their great harpist, piantist, Derek Bell. We all miss him.RIP



2. Mr. Glatt appears to have enjoyed carte blanche access to these fabulous musicians but his book reads like he spilled his notes and put them in the book in random. One moment he's praising founder Paddy Moloney for his computer-like brain, the next we're supposed to laugh that Paddy is five hours late for a major recording session.

   There's some fun stuff here, but the weeds are thick!




3. I purchased this CD because of my interest in Nanci Griffith as a songwriter, musician, and performer. Nanci does not disappoint as she breathes life into the narrative of fellow musicians and collaborators, the Chieftains. It is her familiarity with them as friends and musicians which adds to the excitement of the performance. Nanci has already won three grammies, been nominated for seven, and this should have been her fourth.



4. Nanci Griffith does a fabulous job narrating the audio version of the Chieftain's autobiography. Her voice is as sweet and flowing as the melodious tunes she sings.



5. Irish music is very hot. It is amazing how many successful Irish bands (of all types) have emerged from this tiny Island of 5 million. Yet in no small way can they all point to a single pioneering band that helped put Irish music on the map.

   The Chieftains are more than simply a successful collection of great musicians who have toured the world for over 30 years. When they started, in the mid 1960's, there was little interest in traditional music in Ireland. In Ireland, Irish music wasn't considered to be "hip" and broadcasts were limited to relatively unimaginative ceili music. The most famous Irish musicians of time, the Clancy Brothers, were not even living in Ireland when they began.

   The Chieftains took traditional Irish music and infused it with a new energy and style. They soon developed a cult following, but after doing the sound track for the movie Barry Lyndon (early 70's) their popularity exploded. Even after upwards of 30 albums, they and constant touring, their popularity never falters.

   The Chieftains : The Authorized Biography by John Glatt tells the story of how it all happened. If it weren't all true, it would sound wildly improbable.

   For anyone interested in Irish music, this book is a must.

5 comments about An Affair to Remember (Nova Audio Books).

1. If you like/love Tracy and Hepburn in movies, you'll love this book. It's a true account of their lives and how their affair came about, how it was hidden to the world (insiders in Hollywood knew all about it). In fact, it was so well hidden (Kate used to always slip in the back way at hotels), that Tracy's wife upon meeting Hepburn told her she was shocked, that she thought the affair was only a rumor. A very good read, you won't be disappointed.



2. I have always thought that Tracy and Hepburn were a Great couple in Movies, but they were amazing in real life too. The book was a very good history of each of their lives and how they became intertwined. I think it is one of the best books that I have ever read.



3. I have been looking for years for a Spencer Tracy biography and this is about as close as I could find. I have to say I was very pleasantly surpried by this book. First off, it is a quick and easy read and is especially well written for one of these Hollywood tomes. Secondly, rather than just telling the story of the Tracy/Hepburn love affair, it gives you so much background on both stars that I feel as though I have gotten my long sought after Tracy bio. Finally, the book helps the reader to understand that there really is no understanding a love like Tracy and Hepburn shared. Neither could put it into words and neither seemed interested in doing such. Rather than a lot of psycho babble that you usually get in these types of books, the author realizes that there is no accounting for taste and there is no explaining love.



4. These two screen giants met on the set of Woman of the Year in 1942 and were together until Spencer died of a heart attack, shortly after wrapping up Guess Whose Coming to Dinner in 1967. This book chronicles their remarkable, romantic pairing in an era where a movie star's private life could remain hidden from a prying public. Spencer was married to a devoted Catholic, Louise, and he refused to divorce her. He also felt a tremendous sense of guilty about his deaf son. So marriage was out of the question, but Kate didn't care, she just wanted she be with Spencer, and she was, following him all over the world to sit worshipfully at his feet.

   Andersen dutifully chronicles the nine classic Tracy-Hepburn films and gives some intriguing behind-the-scenes glimpses into each movie. There is also much information about Tracy's legendary bouts with the bottle, his brief fling with Gene Tierney in the early 50's and Kate's affair with Howard Hughes in the 1930's. All the bases are covered, but I wish Andersen would have interviewed more people close to the duo. Still, an engrossing read and essential for anyone enamored with either Spencer or Kate.




5. I found An Affair to Remember a truly remarkable portrait of Hepburn and Spencer's lives (before and after they met). The book was interesting and well written. A great pick for anyone interested in either actor.

No comments about Magic Johnson (The Smart Reader Book and AudioCassette, Level Two).

5 comments about Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman.

1. Adopting a definition of the word 'genius' as a 'truly original thinker', Gleick shows throughtout this entertaining book - how Feynman meets this definition. From his work on the Manhattan project to his investigation of the Challenger disaster, Feynman continues to approach problems from 'scratch' so to say. Feynman did not believe in reading his peer's papers - he believed in looking at the abstract and trying to figure out the contents on his own! He believed in solving every KNOWN problem first - before dealing with unknown tough problems. There are several insights into his 'problem-solving' approach - which may have seemed madness to some - but Gleick goes on to show how there was method to his madness - and how his peers were more than aware of his brilliance.
   There are several great anecdotes - from Feynman's time at Princeton, Caltech, Cornell and Los Alamos.



2. Genius by James Gleick is a worthwhile read even if you don't have a clue who Richard Feynman was. This is one of those wonderful biographies that leaves you feeling you actually know the man and not just the image concocted by historians and public relations spin doctors.
   Gleick does a really great job of showing Feynman growing up in pre world war II America and the beginning has an almost Tom Sawyer-like feel. Neither geek nor wannabe, not overly impressed by himself or anyone else, Feynman moves though childhood to become not only a brilliant mathematician, but a scientist who liked to play the bongo drums and also helped invent the Atomic bomb.
   The tale becomes tragically beautiful as the almost gothic love story of his first marriage unfolds and twists through his work at Los Alamos and the first atomic bomb. Week after week a young Feynman hitchhikes alone across the country to visit his wife in the sanitarium and week after week the bomb comes closer to becoming a reality.
   The story continues winding through the brilliant maze of Feynman's career with detail and clarity. Gleick's story is more about the man than his work so don't expect to understand Feynman diagrams when you're finished reading it, but you will be entertained.



3. For what is Feynman most famous:
   1) his diagrams
   2) his quantum electrodynamics renormalization
   3) his tacyons
   4) his path integrals
   The only reason I give this book 3 stars is that it is a well researched
   biography that deals with his life, times and personality.
   as far as telling about the physics or any of the equations involved,
   this is inadequate. I couldn't even find a mention of tacyons.
   In this I see a certain contempt for the American
   in the author. Since he is a famous and important
   scientific author that is truly a disappointment.
   There are 500 pages of Feynman's life with more about
   his three wives and his behavior in lectures than
   about why he is really important to the physics of his time?
   There may be still some of my resentment in his Red books
   being over the head of those people taking
   beginning physics in 1964 at UCLA.
   They were closer to upper division physics texts
   than lower division, but because he was the wunderkind
   of California physics, we got them.
   For me they weren't bad as, just very very wordy/long
   and hard to read,
   but for many they were the kiss of death to their
   science hopes. So calling Richard Feynman a genius may be
   O. K. with some, but for me he was just an overrated fellow
   who couldn't express himself very well.
   This book actually made me want to find out more about Julian Schwinger!



4. Biography and popular science description of Feynman's work tells the personal story of one of modern physics most unique minds. Feynman won a Nobel Prize in the field of quantum physics in 1965, and was a leading thinker in the Los Alamos project. Gleick does a decent job of making the physics understandable at a popular level.
   
   Never a manager or administrator of the "big science' that 20th century physics created in the war and post-war periods, Feynman stuck to his theoretical roots.
   
   He was a bundle of contradictions:
   
   He seldom read in the literature, reading only enough of books and papers to understand the problem, then resolving it in his own way, often quicker and better than others.
   
   He was a devoted husband to his tubercular first wife, then a womanizing scoundrel afterwards.
   
   He was a professor who disliked teaching, a theorist who thought in concrete analogies, a middle-class Jewish boy from Long Island who was only admitted to anti-semitic Ivy League institutions (with their shameful quotas in the pre-war period) because of the brilliance of his mind at that early stage, who became the highest-paid professor at CalTech during the post-war years.
   
   He was even called by many who knew him and worked with him by the label "Genius". Gleick spends some time talking about what constitutes genius and how to identify it. I believe Feynman defines his genius in this statement: "A theorist who can juggle different theories in his mind has a creative advantage, Feynman argued, when it comes time to change the theories." (p. 368) Feynman's genius consisted of his ability to envision complex physical analogies, and quickly compute complicated formulas from the many in his memory.
   
   An inveterate story teller and shaper of his own legacy, he memorized and crafted stories and anecdotes to mold his image. As Gleick recounts one story about the difference between colleague Murray Gell-Mann and Feynman: "Murray makes sure you know what an extraordinary person he is, they would say, while Dick is not a person at all but a more advanced life form pretending to be human to spare your feelings." That's genius.
   
   This makes a good companion to Richard Rhodes "Making of the Atomic Bomb" which covers the Los Alamos period from a broader perspective.



5. Richard Feynman was one of those individuals that appear on the scene and like the stars, burn bright for a short time before flickering out. In Feynman's case it is the story of a one-of-a-kind, an iconoclast who broke all the rules and relished in his bad boy reputation. He was a rampant womanizer, someone who liked to have fun but mroe than anything he was a man possessed by a brain and work ethic that causes one to gasp.
   
   Reading the book, one discovers that it was not just his thought experiments or math skills or polymath catholicism of knowledge that impressed. All of these (or even one of these) would have have been exceptional but it was the ferocious speed of thought and the range of ideas that spewed forth. Indeed, even he admits he was not always right but like a bubbling cauldron, the conjectures and propositions kept rising to the top.
   
   The writing hit just the right balance between necessary detail and a layman's attempt to grasp his latest scheme. This is not an easy read for someone not aware of scientific advances or cognizant of recent theories in quantum mechanics. Yet - and this is what I find so distinctive - he managed to break down the most frightenting complexity to smaller problems that could be solved. Despite his abhorance of philosophy, art, music - the liberal arts that have dominated over hard science - his finding had deep philosophical conotations - cause and effect, time, predictability, chaos and order. He hated pretense (the "new" math), rote memorization, a single methodology and any kind of fuzzy thinking. His brilliant mind raced ahead of his speech as he thought of newer and better ways to arrive at solutions.
   
   Like Einstien, he engaged in thought experiments. Einstein rode a beam of light; Feynman inhabited an electron or haydron or photon or meson or any of the innumercable sub-level particles. Like Einstein his work ethic was legendary and he was held in awe by those who knew him best. Unlike Einstein, his formulas were too esoteric for appreciation by the general public, no easy e=mc2. But thankfully he differed from Eingstein in another respect - Feynman remained scientifically creative until the end. He reveled in his allure - to women and men - yet he found peace in domesticity at last. In some ways it is almost impossible to approach such genius - all we can do is follow the path of all probabilities (lol).

No comments about Michelangelo: Library Edition.

No comments about A Picture Book of Eleanor Roosevelt (Picture Book Biography).