1 comments about The London Merchant (Regents Restoration Drama).

1. The London Merchant has disappeared from the stage with little loss to modern audiences. As an example of Restoration drama, it is occasionally assigned reading for English majors. The critic Charles Lamb described it as a nauseous sermon.

   Nonetheless, George Lillo's play was a resounding success in London in the summer of 1731 and was apparently performed 179 times by 1776. Its repetitious moral lessons and its laudatory attitude toward commercial trade seemingly resonated with eighteenth century audiences.

   The London Merchant is based on a popular ballad that recalled a notorious criminal event from the previous century. The honest, young merchant apprentice George Barnwell was captivated by the charms of a calculating, amoral, woman of pleasure, Mrs. Millwood, and was persuaded to embezzle money from his employer. Murder follows.

   Why should a nauseous sermon rate three stars? The moralistic tone of The London Merchant clearly dates Lillo's work and would make it difficult to perform today. And yet, possibly this play remains fascinating to read simply because it is so foreign and so different.

   In talking about love of women, Barnwell says, "My youth and circumstances make such thoughts improper in me yet." Was such naivete credible? In facing execution, he calmly reasons: "Thus justice, in compassion to mankind, cuts off a wretch like me, by one such example to secure thousands from future ruin." We readers are intrigued with this insight into eighteenth century moralistic philosophy.

   The fifth act is unlike any that I have encountered. It prolongs the story to once again reiterate the moral lessons. The final eleven scenes include a lengthy sermon between Barnwell and his former master Thorowgood, a tearful good-bye between Barnwell and his close friend and fellow apprentice Trueman, a revelation that Maria had long loved him (if only he had only remain honest and moral), and a final visit with the unrepentant Millwood.

   The introduction and editing by William H. McBurney in the Regents Restoration Drama Series was quite good. The appendix includes an epilogue, a final scene (the execution), The Ballad of George Barnwell, and a chronology of the Restoration period.

5 comments about Lilo & Stitch: Collected Stories From the Film's Creators (Lilo & Stitch).

1. This book is as beautiful as the background watercolors of the original movie The book takes a personal look at the stories behind the movie. Not necessarily linear in presentation, the chapters are broken into narrations by different creators of the film and either how they came to be involved or how they added to the film. The art that is scattered throughout each chapter is often beautiful.
   
   I personally have two favorite images from the film, one a watercolor of a drainage in Hawaii, overgrown with native plants and the second is drawings of how the alien creature, experiment 626, would work showing his skeleton and structure.
   
   This book is listed as for ages 4-8, total mistake. this is not a kids book but would be appropriate for early teens through adult. It is an excellent book for those interested in animation, or as myself, a fan of Lilo and Stitch.



2. this is a must have for any fan of the "art of" series books. it is as beautiful as the movie itself. it is splashed with all the beautiful rough drawings and amazing watercolor paintings that take your breath away. i wouldnt have asked for any more!!!!!!!!



3. A charming, lovely book, a great compliment to the movie, and the perfect gift for any fan of Lilo & Stitch. If you count this gem among your favorite films (as I do), this book is a must-have for you, as it's filled with gorgeous sketches and watercolors, showcasing the development of the characters and setting. (I'm gushing, yes, but I can't help it.) And it's filled with little stories from all the key members who worked behind the scenes, reminding you of how very human animated films are. Personally, I think this is the best of the Disney "Art of..." books, but I'm biased, as Lilo & Stitch is my favorite Disney film. It's not hardcover, but it hardly matters. The book is unique, just like the film.



4. "Lilo and Stitch" was the perfect summer family film. Lighthearted and heart warming, it contained all the elements of the best Disney has to offer. The great thing about this film is that it did this without all the fanfare and majesty that, as of recently, has been dragging down the Disney films. This pseudo-making-of book offers the same unpretentious vision. As most fans of Disney animation know, this type of book is released for every feature. While quite a few have been really nicely done, most have been bogged down in the technical aspects of animation. While it is an awe-inspiring and often misunderstood process, hearing and re-hearing about the animation process gets a bit stale. These publications began to feel like the same book with different pictures. Thank goodness the creators of this book have taken a refreshingly different approach to telling the story behind the story of Lilo and Stitch. Personal accounts and artistic insights prove to be just as entertaining and engaging as the sketches and watercolors that fill this slim addition to the Disney Making Of Library. Like the film, the book doesn't feel the need to show off the technical merrits of the production. Too often authors of animation books come across defensive about the medium, forcing comparrisons with other more respected mediums (film, fine art, literature) as if there is a need to defend animation. In a way they are preaching to the choir. Most people who purchase these books already respect the process, the amazing artists, and the mountains of work that goes into each production. Lilo and Stitch the book finally offers some insight into the creative minds and, more importantly, hearts of the creative forces behind the magic. Let's just hope that Disney, particularly their Florida unit, continues to produce animated features with this simple charm and storytelling. With more films and books like Lilo and Stitch it would make it easier to overlook the occasional "Atlantis" or "Treasure Planet".



5. I could not put this book down...I read it all in one sitting. If you're a fan of the movie this is the book for you...strong recommended!

No comments about Argumentation: Understanding and Shaping Arguments.

No comments about Persona and Shame: The Screenplays of Ingmar Bergman (Persona & Shame Ppr).

1 comments about Bill Elliott : The Peaceable Man.

1. There was something about "I'm a peaceable man", when Bill Elliott would look you in the eye and say that line. Of course we fans knew him as "Wild Bill", and when you went to see him on the big screen, you got exactly what the marquee said...plenty of thrills, adventure and loaded with action. My personal favorites were the "Red Ryder Series" or "The Great Adventures of Wild Bill Hickok" an ongoing character that would appear in many films to come...as Hickok and Wild Bill Saunders. Elliott was a natural for the western, his riding abilities and fight scenes were the caliber of Buck Jones and Bob Steele. Seems the more films he made the better his acting and scripts were.

   Bobby Copeland's book on "Bill Elliott:The Peaceable Man" is chuck full of answers to all the questions his fans had from early on. The forward by actress and co-star Peggy Stewart gives us a real insight of the man who was so peaceable. Plus other stars Gabby Hayes (his sidekick), Dub Taylor (another sidekick), Roy Barcroft (king of the badmen), Terry Frost (another badman), Tom London (a favorite of mine, did a lot of westerns with Wild Bill and many others), Marie Windsor (appeared in the film "Hellfire", a big favorite of mine) and Tex Ritter (teamed with him in many films)...all have expressed the same sentiments, Wild Bill was one of best-liked people in films. What you saw on the screen is what he really was...a great human being.

   Copeland's coverage of the life and times of Elliott is very touching and entertaining. In his book there is His Biography...In the Comic Books...Ranking His Popularity...They Knew Bill Elliott...His Horses...They're Talking About Bill Elliott...Personal Life...Bill Elliott's Obituary...His Principal Sidekicks...Fred Harmon(Cowboy Artist, Creator of Red Ryder)...Bill Elliott Look-Alike(Ronnie Aycoth)...The Real Wild Bill vs. The Reel Wild Bill...Non-Starring Films of Elliott...More About the Author's Favorites...About The Author. There are many photos of stills, behind the scenes and personal pictures. My favorite is a rare photo of Gene Autry, Bill Elliott, Roy Rogers and the president of Republic Studios Herbert Yates during the peak of the studio.

   I found myself being transported back in time, Mr. Copeland's book has opened my eyes to what a wonderful unselfish person Bill Elliott was...only wish I could have met him. He was one of a kind...a peaceable man!

   Total Pages: 194 ~ Empire Publishing ISBN 0-944019-31-5 ~ (1/30/2000)

1 comments about Museum of Words: The Poetics of Ekphrasis from Homer to Ashbery.

1. In lucid prose, Heffernan explores the literary trope of ekphrasis (representation of visual art in verbal art) and shows how notions of ekphrasis have changed from Homer's day to our own. This book is an absorbing investigation of the complex and often competitive relationship between visual and verbal art. An excellent and readable study of a fascinating topic, Musuem of Words is sure to be informative for both the scholar and the general reader.

1 comments about King Hedley II.

1. Wow, the god of small things must be glancing my way. The first to write about an August Wilson play! I feel honored.
   King Hedley II is Wilson's 8th play in his monumental 20th Century cycle, here reflecting the 1980's. Full of the pains and pressures to maintain one's dignity and relish a life constantly off-balance, the play focuses on King, who is in his 30's and living in Pittsburgh's Hill District in 1985. His face has a long scar from a razor cut by the man he later killed, ultimately doing 7 years. With him is his best friend Mister, with whom he plans to open a video store, operates as a middle man selling refrigerators and is otherwise a business partner. King's wife Tonya met him after his prison time, and can only stand so much of his anger and is not emotionally ready to take him getting arrested again, or the suggestion that he'll be in trouble again. King's mother Ruby lives with them, an ex-lounge singer, she is a hardened woman, not the woman Tonya wants to be, having been with and through men who abandoned her, were murdered or imprisoned. Her relationship with Hedley is tenuous at best. When Elmore, a longtime flame of Ruby's returns to Pittsburgh the pressures of these people's lives are boiled toward the inevitable but horrible ending. An ending that is infused with tradition and sacrifice, as the spiritual, either crazy or touched Stool Pigeon-the play's chorus-proudly observes.
   What makes Wilson such a master is his potent characters all of whom make strong proclamations of themselves with remarkable language. He is able to define another world, an American culture I can experience very clearly. The difficulties of being black in America are here as in his other plays, but in King Hedley II there is little joy. There is love and the need for affection, but the violence and anger of being taken advantage of, of staying true to oneself in a world where friends can be killers, or parents can abandon children takes over. There is tragedy in these people's stories. How can somebody survive and thrive in a community full of dangers and desperation in a country that is indifferent, contradictory and ever disappointing.
   Through Stool Pigeon Wilson informs the superstitions, the connections to the Earth, the Black American spectrum that has held onto it's spirituality, "the world that the characters turn to when they are most in need." That spirituality, for example made out in the numbers 66 and 67, which appear frequently, intense personal stories of murder and loss, black cats, hard dirt or his Falstaff like Aunt Ester's offstage presence.
   King Hedley II is another fabulous Wilson work. Sad and maddening, it has many highlights, symbols and wisdom. His passionate visions of each decade are all the more amazing for his subsequent and premature death the same year his final play, Radio Golf was produced.

No comments about Teaching Movement and Dance: Sequential Approach to Rhythmic Movement.

4 comments about Don Juan.

1. To call someone a "Don Juan" today is to call him a womanizer, or if you're willing to be a bit more generous in your interpretation, a smooth-operating romancer. That was the beginning and end of my knowledge of all things Don Juan until about two years ago when I first saw the legend of Don Juan performed on stage. It was then that I learned that "womanizer" only begins to scratch the surface of the character, and that Don Juan is in fact an unrepentant libertine who undoes women at every opportunity and then moves on to his next target with the clearest of consciences and without so much as a glance backwards.
   
   Recently, I was reminded of that play and that in turn has spurred an interest in reading the various interpretations of the Don Juan story. The most well known are the original 1630 play by the Spanish playwright Tirso de Molina; Moliere's version that followed a few decades later; a 19th century play by another Spanish playwright by the name of Jose Zorrilla; and Byron's unfinished magnum opus.
   
   An English version of Tirso de Molina's play has been hard to come by, so my reading of the many Don Juan's began with Richard Wilbur's translation of Moliere's work, and it proved to be a thoroughly enjoyable starting point. Moliere's play wonderfully balances wit and at times even rollick with deeper, empathetic moments, such as a powerful scene in which Don Juan's father denounces his son for his baseness and for his disregard of his family's noble legacy, which Don Juan knowingly cheapens through his morally corrupt lifestyle. As for Don Juan himself, there is no deed that is too wicked. As the play opens, we learn that his most recent conquest was a certain Doña Elvira, a nun whom Don Juan, under promise of marriage, beguiled into leaving the convent and breaking her vows. When Don Juan sets his eye on his next seducee, Don Juan's explanation of why he can no longer bear to be with Doña Elvira only adds impiety to his already impious deed, and it's a wonder that God does not make a dark smudge of Don Juan right then and there. Yet despite Don Juan's utterly contemptible acts, Moliere does not make him entirely unsympathetic. Don Juan may be a monster, but he's one that possesses the gifts of charm and eloquence, and we can't help but to find him fascinating. His defense of his actions, and by extension of his immorality, is brilliant and perverse and deeply seductive all at once; his discourse on hypocrisy is sharp and scathing and tempts us, not entirely without success, to reconsider his moral abrogation against the backdrop of society's insincerity. For all his deplorable acts, at least it can be said that Don Juan is true to himself, even in the face of terrible consequences.
   
   As for Richard Wilbur's work in translating Moliere's play, I'm always somewhat reluctant to comment on the quality of a translation. For one, the very reason that I'm reading a translation is that I'm unversed in the original language, and second, I rarely fully read multiple translations of a given work. When there are multiple translations available, I generally read a few passages in each and compare them to find which one speaks to me more. In the case of Moliere's Don Juan, that translation was Wilbur's; the language is vibrant and modern and free of the stodginess that I encountered in older translations. If you're interested in reading Moliere's Don Juan, which I wholeheartedly recommend, then this I believe is the translation to go with.



2. This play is a treat to read, and I can't wait to see it performed. Moliere, however, must share the spotlight with the translator, Richard Wilbur, who shows an elegant flair for conversational prose. The contemporary American reader lives in a land of waning religiosity, yet one in which theocracy is ironically gaining influence in national politics. It is in this context that we have to smile, if not laugh, when Don Juan says,
   
   "It's no longer shameful to be a dissembler; hypocrisy is now a fashionable vice and all the fashionable vices pass for virtues. The part of the God-fearing man is the best possible role to play nowadays, and in our present society the hypocrite's profession has extraordinary advantages. It's an art whose dishonesty always goes unchallenged...The hypocrite, by means of pious pretenses, attaches himself to the devout, and anyone who then assails him is set upon by a great phalanx of the godly...The true believers are easily hoodwinked by the false...I can't tell you how many men I know who, by means of a feigned devotion, have glossed over the sins of their youth, wrapped themselves in the cloak of religion, and in that holy disguise are now free to be the worst of scoundrels!"
   
   Amazon's rules prohibit me from disclosing the ending, though it has been known for some 331 years, but I will tell you that it leaves Don Juan's valet, Sganarelle, wondering how he'll ever get his back pay.



3. "What a fine creed that is! So far as I can see, your religion consists of arithmetic." --said to Don Juan by his valet, Sganarelle

   Richard Wilbur won the National Book Award, the Pulitzer Prize, and he has served as Poet Laureate of the United States. His translation of Moliere's once censored comedy, Don Juan (1665), successfully conveys to English readers not only the words but also the humor of the original. For his translation, Wilbur wrote an insightful Introduction explicating the play's moral subtleties.

   The play's renowned French comic dramatist, Moliere (1622-1673), previously authored Tartuffe (1664), a comedy lampooning religious hypocrisy. However, Tartuffe offended pious sensibilities to the point that performances of it halted prematurely. As observed in Wilbur's Introduction, Moliere may have hoped to placate religious militants opposed to Tartuffe with a comedy about a young, wealthy, atheistic, amorous scoundrel that gets his just punishment in hell.

   However, if placation of religious scruples partially motivated Moliere to select the Don Juan character, his intention failed. The comedy outraged the pious, forcing him to make cuts after the first performance. Like Tartuffe, Don Juan closed early although it was a box-office success. Wilbur suggests that the primary reason it offended is its moral ambiguity. For although Don Juan gets his just punishment for his wickedness, mockery of orthodoxy is just below the surface of the plot.

   For example, in Act 1, Scene 1, orthodox beliefs are implicitly put on a par with superstition when Don Juan's valet, Sganarelle, reports that his master "doesn't believe in Heaven, or Hell, or werewolves even." In Act 3, Scene 1, Sganarelle asks if Don Juan believes in Heaven, Hell, and the Devil, to each of which he makes plain his disbelief. Finally, Sganarelle asks if he believes in the Bogeyman, and he answers, "Don't be an idiot." Sganarelle then objects, "Now there you go too far, for there's nothing truer in this world than the Bogeyman; I'll stake my life on that." Thus, Moliere casts a nincompoop as an apologist of orthodoxy.

   Another offensive characterization is the pious Poor Man in Scene 2 of Act 3. He is an idiot living alone for ten years in the woods praying for the prosperity of those who give him alms while he himself lacks "a crust of bread to chew on." Don Juan suggests that he worry less about others and pray to Heaven for a coat. Offering him a gold coin, Don Juan says, "Here it is, take it. Take it, I tell you. But first you must blaspheme." The Poor Man replies, "No, Sir, I'd rather starve to death."

   Perhaps most offensive is Don Juan's explanation of why he has decided to become a religious hypocrite in Act 5, Scene 2. Being a hypocrite will make it easier to hide his misconduct and make obtaining forgiveness easier by repentance if found out. Moreover, being the hypocrite will enable him to accuse his enemies of impiety, thereby stirring up against them "a swarm of ignorant zealots."

   Thus, in Moliere's Don Juan, nothing is sacred, and Richard Wilbur's translation captures every outrageous bit of it. Buy it, read it and laugh!




4. I had no intention of reading a romance type novel, I dont even read them and I happenned to pick this up , just to pass the time while I waited in line. I was mesperized and laughing by the time I was at the front of the line. I putt back the book I was going to buy and bought this. You wont be disappointed. Perfect reading for a cold snowy night!

1 comments about The Last Tycoon (A Scribner Classic).

1. While I am not really a Fitzgerald fan I am not sure how relyable this review is, but I had to read the book for a class. I think if you like his style the book is good, and many say that it would have been his best work had he been able to finish it. Because there is no ending, and the plot is not that enticing you really must read the book for readings sake and not to get a great adventure from it. If you have the time check it out and hopefuly it will do more for you then me, but otherwise this would not be my first choice of books.