2 comments about Encomium Emmae Reginae (Camden Classic Reprints).

1. This is a detailed, fact-filled book on Queen Emma of the 11th century. It is a fascinating portrait of a queen who lived through a lot of tragedies. Not for the light reader, though.



2. If you are interested in the life of Emma of Normandy, wife of King Canute, then this book will captivate you. It is a fascinating, contemporary look at the legendary events of 11th century England.

5 comments about Wilde Album: Public and Private Images of Oscar Wilde.

1. Cutting to the chase, the real prize in this marvelous little book are the photographs. For once, we get something other than the usual lot that appear in books with a Wilde connection. Mr. Holland has achieved through his pictures (most seem to be from the family collection) something which most texts don't do..... a feel for the whole of Wilde the man. There is a human dimension to this slim volume that one does not find elsewhere. There are pictures of ancestors, parents, editorial cartoons, advertisements, all in relatively strict chronological order, from the child in a dress (as was customary for little boys in the period) to the student, the developing fop, the lampooned character, the ludicrous pairing with Bosie... who looks perpetually bored and thoroughly uninteresting... to the depressing denouement, death bed and funerary monuments.

   The text reveals nothing new but it is elegantly written. Both of Wilde's children were devoted to the memory of their father. It is evident that the grandson was raised in like manner.

   Of Wilde's two boys, Cyril died in WWI without issue. Mr. Holland is the grandson of the other, Vyvyan.

   If you are interested in the period, England and Ireland in late 19th century, Wilde, gay history, etc. buy this book. It is worth infinitely more than it costs.




2. This is a sparkling gem for all fans of Oscar Wilde. It is a brilliant retelling of Oscar's life through pictures. Filled with everything from photographs of Wilde the aesthete to hilarious caricatures of him from Punch magazine to some of Wilde's own drawings and notes, this fabulous little book has it all. Many of the items I have not seen in any other volume. It goes wonderfully well coupled with Richard Ellman's gorgeous biography or it stands tall on its own. All and all, a marvelous book that I cannot possibly recommend highly enough.



3. This volume is more touching and insightful than most
   works about Oscar Wilde tend to be. It is filled with
   the narrative commentary of Wilde's grandson,
   Merlin Holland, who gives honest opinions as well
   as factual detail about the various stages of
   Oscar Wilde's life.
   The treasures, however, are the multitudes of
   photographs, memorabilia, and paintings that are
   included -- as well as drawings, satirical cartoons
   (mostly lampooning Oscar, both at Oxford and later
   in life), and wonderful notations under the items.
   The most interesting photographs, for me, are
   the ones which were done by Napoleon Sarony. They
   seem to touch a more thoughtful, poetic, dreamy
   Oscar, rather than the posing bon vivant or the
   deliberately provocative aesthete/decadent.
   The volume does well to have one of those photos
   on the cover, as well as having a different photo
   beside the title page. The grotesque photos,
   that almost make one cringe, though, are of
   Oscar in a skirted Greek national costume
   (with boots!) from April 1877; Oscar in a
   checkered suit and bowler hat at Oxford in
   1878, and Oscar at age 2 in a blue velvet
   dress, a daguerreotype which has been color
   tinted. The weirdest photos are of the
   "blond tiger/panther" Lord Alfred Douglas,
   would-be "friend" and lover of Oscar. His
   eyes look vacant, haunted, cold in most of
   the photos , except for the one on page 147,
   in which he looks touchingly sensitive and
   lonely...the caption below the picture says
   it all: "Douglas aged 23. 'Your slim gilt
   soul walks between passion and poetry. I know
   Hyacinthus, whom Apollo loved so madly, was you
   in Greek days,' Wilde wrote to him around that
   time."
   Truly a remarkable album of memories.



4. What a Gem! If you are a fan of Oscar Wilde then this book is indispensable.
   My only gripe is that it is too small. A larger format would have shown off the many Napoleon Sarony photos (the largest collection in one publication) If the publisher and Mr Holland ever read this....I'd gladly shell out for a large format edition. Other than that, I'm quite too utterly ecstatic about the book.......WELL DONE!



5. Mr. Oscar Wilde, the toast of all London for his successful plays revealing the immoral soft underbelly of the British aristocracy, received a slanderous calling card at his club from the Marquess of Queensberry, whose son Al was assisting Mr. Wilde in his investigations of the more corrupt and immoral and hypocritical aspects of those filthily wealthy imperialists.
   
   At Al's urgent request, Mr. Wilde filed suit for slander against Al's own father, serving as noted in this book in Mr. Wilde's own words, as the dice in a cruel and callous oedipal gamble between father and son. Mr. Wilde lost; the petit bourgeois father won and before the Crown brought charges against Mr. WIlde under a new immoral activities act, the father had Mr. Wilde's home ramsacked and auctioned, all of Mr. Wilde's treasured and expensive belongings, and those of his wife and two small sons, in order ostensibly to cover his own legal costs in defending himself against Mr. Wilde's charge of slander. The auction, staged as it was, brought only a very small percentage of its actual worth, yet destroyed all that the family owned.
   
   Mr. Wilde's grandson, in gathering this present album, mentions the fact of this destruction of his family heritage by alluding to the registry of six family albums which were sold and discarded beyond any recovery. Merlin mentions this fact cold, without further comment, but the skilled reader may read between the lines the deep and painful import of this action to Merlin personally. Thus this present effort grows immeasurably poignant and important.
   
   Though others praise the photographs here, it is the comprehensive and extensive and brilliant essay by Merlin here which makes this book as well. This book grows thereby essential for any reader of the English language, and for any reader of Irish resistance to English colonialist power, in particular that fatal power which was so coldly brought to bear against its most subtle and charming and astute and eloquent and Irish critic, greater even than GB Shaw, more subtle even than the great Mr. James Joyce.
   
   Never mind please my ramblings nor the effusiveness of other reviews which here appear upon this page. My one qualm regarding this book is that it is not BIG enough!
   
   Please see as well the excellent, if painfully abridged, production of An Ideal Husband in the BBC collection The Oscar Wilde Collection (The Importance of Being Earnest / The Picture of Dorian Gray / An Ideal Husband / Lady Windermere's Fan) if only to see younger and slimmer and in his prime he who would later play for them Sherlock Holmes. The Importance . . .in this collection is also tolerable if abridged and awkward; Lady Windermere's Fan begins slow with the mournful Lord, but grows inexorably to a heart wrenching finale without sentimentality.
   
   Read all of Mr. Wilde's published work (lacking of course the bulk his writings for Women's World, and lacking his original French text of Salome) in Complete Works of Oscar Wilde (Collins Classics). The original French text of Salome you may find at Salome: Drame en un acte (Collected Works of Oscar Wilde) in order to perform your own translation into English which will undoubtedly replace Al's. It is also available in a Spanish translation at Salome - Bajo El Monte and a fine selection of his short stories at El Fantasma de Canterville y Otros Cuentos (Serie Roja Alfaguara) (Serie Roja Alfaguara).
   
   Please read this book and know the extent of the destructive power of an offended British aristocracy, a destiny, as Merlin here indicates, as inexorable as any ancient Greek drama. Merlin's assessments of his grandfather's oeuvre are also excellent and right on, although too brief! Find further critical work by himself as well as by his father Vyvyan Holland, whose photographs as a small boy are so telling here.

1 comments about The Memoir of Marco Parenti: A Life in Medici Florence.

1. This doesn't actually have the actual ricordi of Marco Parenti, the son-in-law of Alessandra Strozzi and a diplomat and merchant of Renaissance Florence, which would have been great, but it IS an excellent resource for learning about how one part of Florentine society worked. There are chapters here about his early life, education, and what Florentine politics were like at the middle of the 15th century. Along the way we learn about the Strozzi, the Medici, and a host of other families. We also learn what exile was like, and how letter-writing worked in a world without a post office (also some fun stuff about ciphers). While I definitely wish it included a straight translation of Parenti's personal logbook, this is a tremendous resource. Don't miss it if you're studying the Medicean period at all.

1 comments about Nineteen Acres.

1. A book which covers familiar ground only to transform it utterly! John Healy's book covers Irish poverty, bereavement, land-hunger and emigration but it does so with such passion, courage, sympathy and perhaps most importantly, with such grinding honesty, that anyone from the West of Ireland can immediately recognise the terrain, only to realise with a shudder that that Ireland has disappeared. A personal memoir of his growing up in Charlestown, Co. Mayo, the one-time Irish Times journalist lays bare the true story of his mother's "people" from nearby Carracastle. The farm on which they were born and raised, the "Nineteen Acres" of the title, has been central to the lives of his mother, her three sisters and her brother. "Keep your mouth and your legs closed. Keep your ears open. And send home the ticket for Anna." were the parting words the eldest sister Mary heard from her mother when she emigrated to the States. Each sister in turn would hear those words, with only the last name changed each time as they followed Mary, one by one, to the land of opporunity. What they did not see were her tears as she walked back home. Only Healy's mother Nora would return, to marry Stephen Healy, the tall and handsome but "soft" insurance agent, whose generosity to his customers leaves his family in dire straits with his early death. Meanwhile Nora's brother Jim, now farming the nineteen acres, has married the luckless Mary-Anne, whose failure to concieve makes her family, the "long-tailed crowd from Barroe", the most likely inheritors of the patch of land which spawned the O'Donnells.

   This story is not just about Nora's burning ambition to outlive Mary-Anne, but about the heroism of generations of Irish people who emigrated and whose toil and sacrifice and deep loyalty to their families, kept the wolf from many Irish doors. They also sustained the "mixed" small-farming way of life long past its economic "due-by" date. Their mammoth sacrifices, like Mary O'Donnell's tears for her emigrating children, often went unseen.

   This book is an obituary for a mother, a family, a way of life and an Ireland that has passed away. It would make timely reading for the well-fed Celtic tiger cubs of today, whose memories don't quite reach back to the "Aran Banners", the poor man's potatoes of 50 years ago, but whose roots are as surely grown from the self same soil.

No comments about Lady Unknown: The Life of Angela Burdett-Coutts.

5 comments about William Shakespeare & the Globe.

1. This book was the best Shakespeare book i've read. It had great facts and pictures for my Shakespeare roport. Now i read it for great enjoyment. It not only tells the story of Shakespeare but the story of Sam Wanamaker who had a dream to rebuild Shakespeare's Globe Theather. This was the best shakespeare book around, i bet you will enjoy it



2. Book Review: William Shakespeare & the Globe By: Aliki

   This book has been honored with many awards for good reason. With pictures, a sprinkle of quotes from several of Shakespeare's own plays, and many historical references make this book is a very interesting layout of William Shakespeare's life and times. The book chronicles the theatre world in Shakespeare's time and his involvement in it all,and the building and rebuilding of the famous Globe theatre (even up to its rebirth in 1987!). The book shows the various phases of William's life in "Acts" just like his famous plays. The book even discusses the many words and phrases that he invented that we still use today. It ends with a look at Sam Wanamaker and Theo Crosby's vision of recreating The Globe and how they went about creating this wonderful restoration.

   A book that captures the reader's attention visually and with its easily read text. I am, as a teacher of 7th grade English, very impressed by this book, and can't wait to share it with my classes.




3. The presentation is clever. Aliki has organized her information into Acts, Scenes, and Asides, with Act Five being the work of Sam Wanamaker to recreate the Globe Theater. She has also laid out her prose text as if it were lines of poetry, furthering the playbook effect. I often checked the text to see if it was written in iambic pentameter (it isn't). The illustrations are lively and highly detailed.
   
   The pages are very busy. Here are the contents of a typical page, from top to bottom: four lines from As You Like It; a drawing of Christopher Marlowe; an information box about the Rose Playhouse and builder Philip Henslowe's diaries; seven lines of text about the Admiral's Men and Marlowe; a drawing of three actors on a stage, surrounded by groundlings; the titles of sixteen Shakespeare plays superimposed in wavy lines over the drawing of the actors; a caption beneath; and a line from The Merry Wives of Windsor.
   
   Aliki's efforts to squeeze as much as possible into this book sometimes become distracting. All of the illustrations have their own text boxes, with additional information provided in up to five sentences. Readers may have to keep backtracking in order to follow the narrative, and I sometimes wonder if texts like this are the best way to format nonfiction material.



4. Using this pretty children's book about Shakespeare's theater of choice, I will give you some history this author failed in her effort to influence kids of all ages. The Globe Theater was the most famous of Elizabethean age and built on the south bank of the Thames River in 1599 by members of the Lord Chamberlain's Men. The nearby Rose Playhouse built by Philip Henslowe,was not as popular with the populace of London.
   
   The Globe could hold between 2,000 to 3,000 spectators as most would be standing. In an 'aside', the actor would make a brief remark directly to the audience. Plays were performed in the afternoons, requiring no extra lighting. "Hell" was the trapdoor used by the entrances and exits of devils, monsters, or ghosts. "Heavens" were the machinery by which gods and goddesses were lowered to the stage below. There were no women on the Elizabethan stage as boys were used for their roles. In the reverse, we see Peter Pan as always a woman! Strange?
   
   William Shakespeare began as an actor in London in the leading theatrical company called the Lord Chamberlain's Men, and went on to write thirty-seven plays. He used soliloquy in his plays, which is a single character alone on stage speaking his thoughts in length directly to the spectators. In Drama Class at the old Central High School, we had to perform a soliloquy. I was a shy girl, only 14 then, but the one I chose was a favorite with the other class members. When I finished, they all yelled, "Go on." But, there was nothing else. Needless to say, I did not become an actress. But my husband was a college play director, and we were involved in every phase of putting on dramas of every kind, and sometimes comedies. We also attended plays in Nashville and Huntsville, Alabama. My three boys acted as children in their dad's plays.
   
   Shakespeare's acting company first staged his 'Hamlet' in 1600 or 1601 at the Globe Theatre, when it was relatively new. It was called a "revenge tragedy," which includes a ghost calling for vengeance, and the revenger must always die. They also performed "mystery plays,' "morality plays,' and "miracle plays." Are there such things as real miracles? After the way I was verbally abused by a bus of ghetto people using racial slurs and outright threatening remarks (all the time the driver ignored, saying she could not hear anything!), I have lost my faith in the fellowman and think they should have lived in Shakespeare's time, and they would have been hanged by the tail like donkeys as that is what they were. They should be sent back to Africa.
   
   The art in this little book is fantastic. It is worth the price just to look at the beautiful rendering of the Globe, a unique place to us Twentieth Century Americans.



5. I bought this book for my 1st grader as an intro to Shakespeare. For my purposes this book contains too much extraneous information about Sam Wanamaker. His accomplishment of having the new Globe theatre built is amazing, but pales in comparison to Shakespeare's accomplishments, which I would rather hear about. We get to know details about "Will," but not anything about his plays except for some excellent representative drawings of representative characters. What my daughter has taken away from this book so far is that London Bridge really did fall down, Shakespeare died at age 52 and Marlowe at age 29, Cleopatra is associated with a snake, London had city walls, and Queen Elizabeth I came before the current queen, Elizabeth II. That's all useful foundation material, but we'll need another book to really sample Shakespeare.

No comments about Wolfe Tone (Compact Irish History).

1 comments about Oliver Cromwell and the English Revolution.

1. This book presumes that you are an Oxford history professor. It presumes facts not in the book. Meaning it presumes you come to the subject with a vast array of knowledge and therefore spends all of its time on the grand academic questions rather than the chronology of Cromwell. If you are looking for a book to answer the question - who is Cromwell and why was he important - look elsewhere. If you want to know what are the most esoteric academic questions posed by Cromwell, this book is for you.

   It is more commentary on history rather than history. It is disjointed and disorganized.

No comments about Henry V: The Rebirth of Chivalry (English Monarchs. Treasures from the National Archives) (English Monarchs: Treasures from the National Archives).

No comments about Gladstone: God, Politics and the Million.