Out on the cold, desolate plains of Siberia there stood a boy, filled and surrounded by the incredible writing of a man who is close to the ways of the wild. This boy stood watching a Soiux warrior in his journey home. This boy was me. When I read Last of the Breed by Louis L'Amoure, I experienced a feeling I had never felt before. It was a feeling of lonliness, comfort, joy and sorrow. I could feel the cold that Major Joe Mack felt. I could feel his hunger as well as my own as I feverishly read through the last minutes of class before the bell rang for me to go to lunch.

This is a book of capture and escape, a cat and mouse game between a man and his enemies. It has a quality about it that makes you want to keep reading, yet not want to know what imminent danger lies around the next rock, or hillside, or bend in the stream. I loved this book from beginning to end and have read several times as I hope you will too. If you enjoy the outdoors, suspense, survival, or if are just a Louis L'Amour fan, I highly suggest you give this book a try.

The late Louis L'Amour wrote mostly Westerns--specifically about the 'Old West'--for which he is justly famous. I may have read them all, but I hope not. I hope there are a few more out there, somewhere.

This book, however, is different. This is the kind of authentically detailed story that is his hallmark, but it is more modern. It is about U.S. Air Force Major Joe Mack, whose forbears were Sioux Indian. When his experimental aircraft is forced down in the USSR, he is captured, and no one but he and his captors know he is a prisoner. He escapes a prison camp, and is forced to survive the Siberian wilderness in an effort to make it to the Bering Strait, which he will have to cross to get back home. He is pursued relentlessly by a Yakut scout who knows the land intimately. Joe Mack must think like a Sioux to escape.

Louis Dearborn L'Amour (originally Lamoore) lived the lives that he portrayed. He was a roustabout, merchant seaman, boxer, cowboy, logger, miner, and an army officer during WWII in tank destroyers. He was shipwrecked in the West Indies, sailed a dhow on the Red Sea, and circled the earth on merchant ships. He wrote a hundred books, and had more million copy best-sellers than any other author. I was personally desolated by his death. What a glorious man! He was a true troubadour in the original sense.

Joseph H. Pierre
Author of The Road to Damascus: Our Journey Through Eternity

The Passion is about, well, passion... and not much else. Winterson's main characters examine their passions in beautiful, perhaps overdone, language. (I get the feeling that if someone else had written this novel, it would be considered a humorus parody of Winterson's style.)

Winterson sets her story in a fantastical version of early 19th century Europe, but this book has little to do with Europe per se, and other to launch one character's infatuation with Napolean, the setting really serves no real purpose to the story. I mention this not because I'm particularly worried -- a novel has to be set somewhere -- but because earlier reviewers seem to love the "historical" aspects of the novel, when in fact there really aren't any of note. Furthermore, because the the story is told from the first person, and because the characters always dwell on their introspective passion problems, little is lent to the setting of the story -- they are simply places with names and a few lines of beautiful, overwrought description. Historical fiction readers, beware.

The main players themselves do nothing more than worry about the loves of their lives and the obstacles in between -- their passions override characterization, making them rather one-dimensional. Perhaps this flat characterization is intended. If so, it's an interesting comment on what overriding passion does to one's character -- namely, passion destroy personality. However, such people do get tiresome, in real life and in this book.

Still, I read the book and enjoyed it. While passion seems to be its only theme, it is a good theme nevertheless, and its presentation is compelling, if somewhat overstated. I'm glad it is a slim book, though.

* * *

Henri, a poor country boy joins the French military to follow his passion: Bonaparte. His tour of duty takes him on Napoleon's marches, and one is treated to an inside of look at being a soldier in Bonaparte's army. Napoleon's passion for fighting has him take his armies into Moscow. Concurrently, a woman gives birth to a child in Venice. The child's father is a Boatman, and those children, according to legend, can walk on water. The child turns out to be a girl, but is nonetheless a Boatman's Daughter. She has a passion for gambling, and meets the love of her life and finds another passion, in the process losing her heart. After her heart has been broken, she marries a cruel, fat Frenchman and exults in his passion for debasing her. Her destiny takes her to Moscow, where she meets Henri. Henri's passion for the Boatman's daughter proves to be no small thing in his own destiny.

Set in magical, eternal cities, encompassing a time which captivates the imagination, and written in beautiful prose, this work is emminently readable, and entirely riveting. There are beautiful heart-stopping phrases worth quoting on every page -- words which, by their beauty, make this spellbinding tale a lyrical journey of discovery. There are many kinds of passions in this piece, and following each to its end, and savoring each as it comes, is a bittersweet and very poignant experience. Do it! Highly Recommended!

In this place, Rubashov began to reminiscene about his past, the betrayals of individuals for the higher cause of the Revolution and the party. In between, we witness his interrogation, first under Ivanov and then under Gletkin. Throughout the interrogation, Rubashov was reminded of the logic of the revolution where the ends justify the means and truth is whatever that is useful at the moment. And in his own particular case, he must be sacrificed for the good of the party and the Revolution. Using the presuasion of this logic, first under the more urbane Ivanov and latter under the more brutal Gletkin, Rubashov who has been wavering in his faith of the party was convinced and hence was "sacrificed" in a kangaroo court.

This book examines the totalitarian regime of Stalin with its philosophy of convenience and its consequences. At a more personal level, I found this book a chilling tale of morality when such a philosophy of conveniece is adopted and our humanity is thrown away in the consideration of politics. It is a must-read book to understand the dangers of totalitarian regimes be they of the right or left.

Rubashov's experience is the experience of hundreds of millions of people in communist countries. Those of us who have not witnessed a communist revolution in our own countries have a hard time understanding their experience. Darkness at Noon helps us to do that. We cannot say we understand communism without having read this book.

Koestler writes in layers. He doesn't waste his words. The story may appear simple, but there is a purpose to the sequence of events and in each of Rubashov's action. Each conversation has a message.

This is much more than the story of a man wrongly condemned. We can find that simple plot in Arthur Miller's the Crucible. This story explains how it is possible that people like Rubashov, intelligent and idealistic people, could have lent themselves, heart and soul, to a totalitarian ideology. We learn that communism is a wolf in sheep's clothing. A peddler of impossible dreams. Nearly everyone, including many of its once loyal followers, end up disillusioned. People are betrayed, terrorized, imprisoned, and killed by the system they once supported and helped bring to power.

Koestler leaves the reader with the understanding that communism is deadly and evil precisely because it appeals to our idealism and love for others. That it continues to survive through deception, lies, fear, and by creating suspicion, distrust, and paranoia in people.

Arthur Koestler was a former communist. This novel is a work of fiction only in its editing and the charachters' names. Rubashov most likely represents Koestler and all the blind idealists who once believed in communism until there was communism.

Between Koestler and Soltzhenitsyn, they've left only fools believing in communism.

A few words about the other works in this edition: Dostoevsky wrote White Nights while in his 20s, before his Siberian exile and while he still held an interest in the Utopian ideas he would later condemn. It's a story of a young man and a young woman, both socially isolated, who happen to meet one night and, over the course of the next three nights, fall in love, with, unsurprisingly, a maudlin ending. The book dragged a bit at first, but I found the second half of it very touching and, though a fairly immature work, it was definitely worth my time.

The Dream of a Ridiculous Man was the last short story Dostoevsky wrote, and contains a very clear version of his notion of the necessity of suffering for love and redemption, expressed through a man who dreams of travelling to another planet identical to earth in which suffering doesn't exist. It's not a really great work, but it's a quick and pleasant read.

The volume also contains three short excerpts from The House of the Dead (the book based on Dostoevsky's imprisonment)--two of them dealing with prisoners' tales of the murders that got them imprisoned, and one a discussion of corporal punishment. The excerpts are fairly interesting, but if this sort of thing fascinates you you're better off getting the whole work, which is published by Penguin Classics.

This book is an argument supporting the view that irrationality has its merits. We are in danger of ignoring our own desires in favour of a popular or dominate view. What the underground man is proposing is to be aware of the danger of buying into the proposition that there is a collective 'common good', that all people are essentially the same and desire the same things. He goes on to warn that if the men of 'science' are correct, if our desires and interests are the same, if our behaviour can be recorded on some central data base, where all we have to do to understand how we should behave is by logging onto this data base, what hope does humankind have of experiencing individual needs, creativity, adventure and innovation? According to the underground man, absolutely no hope at all.

The American philosopher, William James, had grappled with the same argument around the same time that this novel was written. He recorded in his diary that his first act of free will was to believe he had free will, and began his new life on that simple but important premise.

Freedom for William James and the underground man is the highest most valuable aspect of our existence. The underground man believed that it was absolutely imperative that we at times go against our 'best interests' even if our free will is an illusion. When considering the barrage of information that continually comes our way, we should attempt to separate the 'wheat from the chaff' according to our desires, beliefs and will - a word of advice from a 19th century 'neurotic'.

It is impossible to illustrate the many facets of this important novel in the limited space provided. Therefore I urge you to open ~Notes from the Underground~ and submerge yourself into the ideas and arguments it proposes we consider.

MOONLIGHT BECOMES YOU
COLOR ME DARK

As the title indicates, the story covers one day in Ivan Denisovich's ten-year prison sentence. Ivan is a peasant who runs afoul of the authorities when the Germans capture him during the war. When he finds his way back to the Soviet camp, the authorities charge him with treason and sentence him to the camps. Denisovich is luckier than many of his fellow convicts; they are serving 25-year sentences. This day is better for Ivan than most; he ends up getting a better work assignment, a member of his squad gets a parcel loaded with food, and Ivan manages to get extra food rations. He even scores some tobacco, his only weakness.

Ivan lives day by day; it is the only way he can survive the camps. What is most shocking about this book is the matter-of-fact way in which the story is told. All of life is reduced to acquiring food and staying warm. Following the rules and avoiding punishment is just as important. Woe to the man who ends up in the guardhouse cells for ten days. I was nauseated by how hard Ivan worked on the power plant. Here's a guy who is a prisoner, forced to lay bricks in the middle of winter, and he is busting his hump to do a good job. But in a way, this can be uplifting, too. Ivan refuses to give up to the brutality of his condition. Every day is a struggle, but Ivan never grouses or causes problems. He accepts everything camp life throws at him and triumphs. You get the impression that Ivan is going to make it out of the camp no matter what.

This is an excellent book that exposes the real face of Communism. No matter how brutal Communism is (or was) as a system of government, it failed to crush the spirit of humanity. I recommend reading this book in conjunction with Arthur Koestler's "Darkness at Noon," another book that exposes the sickness of Communism.

The character Ivan mirrors A.S. in some respects, most notably in the fact that he doesn't care at all about any of the ideology behind the camp. Some of the other characters debate politics or sociology and mostly get thrown into solitary confinement. But not Ivan. He thinks about food and how he's going to get more of it. He thinks about keeping his foot wrappings dry and leaves the political proselytizing to the fools who will soon be dead.

Ironically, this is where the book finds its true literary achievement. At the heart of this character is a total disillusion, not the smallest spark of hope or faith in ideals or humanity, and yet the experience of watching this character carefully manuever his way to an extra bowl of soup, a pinch of fresh tobbacco, an old crust of bread -- it's magical somehow. The scene of the prisoners laying bricks is practically transcendental. Here there is dignity, pride, a sense of accomplishment, community, even a small amount of pleasure. Did we forget we were reading about a communist forced labor camp? Yes, for a moment, we did.

There's a powerful statement about the nature of a human being in that. This is A.S.'s achievement, the puzzling complexity of this book -- it is precisely out of his hopelessness and disillusion that Ivan Denisovich's humanity and strength arise.

You can still feel the author's conflicted sorrow, the unquenched bitterness and the utter frustration with a communist system that was completely irrational and blindly destructive. Yet the source of that frustration is the love he had for his country that nearly destroyed him. This confusion and melding of opposite poles is only appropriate for literature about Soviet communism -- a system based on such high utopian ideals, yet responsible for some of civilization's most massive atrocities.

All in all a quick read and honestly not as depressing as it may sound. An incredible novel as well as an incredible piece of literary history. Besides, when was the last time you got off so easy reading a Nobel Prize winner?

PS. I happened to pick up All Quiet On the Western Front at the same time as this book. They turned out to be quite similar in a number of ways. If you like one of these books, you will certainly like the other. Both fascinating and oddly beautiful accounts of the misuse of the population by those in power.

Turgenev manages to leave no stone unturned, casting withering attacks on peasants, psuedo-intellectualism, government officials, corruption, and conventions. The book mentions that Turgenev alienated and angered many in Russia with this book, and the reader will quickly see why.

Turgenev recognized the backwardness of Russia, and that it must change if it were to survive in a new world. The big question was how, and Turgenev shows that while idealists like Bazarov may have new ideas (Bazarov's idea was nihilism, a belief in nothing), those ideas mean nothing if not backed up with solutions to the problems.

An excellent book, and very readable. The price is low enough that most people really don't have an excuse to give this one a shot.

I loved this book when I first read it as a teenager and I enjoyed it even more on subsequent rereadings. It makes the world of 19th century Russia seem strangely familiar and it gives many a current political thread a grounding in meaningful history.

(Aside: considering the top-heavy committment and involvement of the United States, the "international" space station is about as "international" as an International House of Pancakes.)

A must-read for anyone interested in space exploration. Especially a must-read for anyone unfortunate enough to have paid money for astronaut Jerry Linenger's book, "Off the Earth -- Surviving five perilous months aboard Mir." The reader may judge for himself the "peril" involved, especially in light of the dangers faced by Linenger's successor on Mir, astronaut Michael Foale.

If anything, Burrough is perhaps too balanced and fair-minded in his prose. One suspects he had reams of material he couldn't use, as it would make the book more of a "kiss-and-tell" than it actually is. Nevertheless, some of the finest reporting about NASA (and public policy as a whole) in years.

The picture provided is of a joint venture that was primarily politically motivated with scientific research, and even crew, as after thoughts. It is implied that NASA learned little from the experience because they weren't watching closely. Which is too bad if true because what can be learned is the importance of attention to minute detail and extensive planning.

The dramatic discription of the various accidents on MIR makes exciting reading. The view given of political manipulation in NASA's management and the bitter and acrimonious personal conflicts are disturbing (but interesting to read).

The insight into political chicanery in NASA management is alarming for the space program if accurately portrayed.

The book is well researched, and Burrough is not afraid to delve into the dark waters of NASA's bureaucracy to round out the story. He dug deep to interview many of the significant figures of the book, including the likes of astronaut Jerry Linenger, Phase One director Frank Culbertson, NASA administrator Dan Goldin, and NASA's Johnson Space Center director George Abbey. Almost no one comes off unsoiled, and yet the author treats each subject fairly. Burrough makes extensive use of American and Russian flight transcripts, and he takes care to document the stressful lives of Russian cosmonauts, who are severely overworked and underappreciated. The author's narrative and reconstructed dialogue are well written, and he always allows the story and the people, rather than commentaries, to propel the book. I think Burrough achieves a good balance in presenting the material, which must have been difficult given the myriad personalities and politics involved.

However, I was disappointed in the choppy layout of DRAGONFLY's major sections. Burrough takes a hundred pages to outline the beginnings of Phase One and its troubles from 1992 to 1997 ... the problem is, this critical background is actually Part Two, and it appears in the middle of the book, which interrupts the tumultuous events of 1997. By that point, this section does the reader little good, because we are already up to our ears in Phase One's trials and tribulations. As I was reading, I couldn't help but ask myself repeatedly, "Why am I reading this now?" Phase One's dysfunctional operation in Russia and its harried, undersupported astronauts Shannon Lucid, Bonnie Dunbar and Norm Thagard provide an ominous prologue to later events. But Burrough's failure to present these stories at the book's outset only serves to downplay their significance while disrupting the natural line of the story, and that's a shame.

Fortunately, that's the only significant criticism this book deserves from an outsider. DRAGONFLY is a landmark space history book by an author who has certainly done his legwork. Future space projects can learn a lot from Phase One's missteps, and DRAGONFLY provides a full accounting of those events. This illuminates the space business like no other account before it, and I think space history is better off because of it.

(My last comment goes to the publishers at Harper Perennial: Whoever decided to display a 1965-era photo of a Gemini spacewalker on the cover of this trade paperback set in the late 1990s ought to be fired for incompetence. I might as well write a book about the Persian Gulf War and put Audie Murphy on the cover.)

But as usual, Card does much more than just tell a good story. His special attention to inner thoughts and struggles and the psychology of human relationships is masterful. In the course of telling his fairy tale, he shares numerous philosophical thoughts about literary theory, psychology, and religion. The clash between cultures achieves more than just comedy, but provides deep insights about the chasm between times, cultures, and religions (especially Judaism and Christianity - both of which are somewhat unfairly portrayed as mere outward rituals entered upon by circumcision or baptism). Card demonstrates that it is possible for two very different individuals from different times and cultures to make a new beginning together in a marriage, although this meeting of cultures cannot occur without both gaining and losing something at the same time.

Especially thought provoking is the fact that Card uses a fairy tale to show that reality is not like the high fantasy of fairy tales, because in the real world that there is no such thing as living happily ever. Is Card satirizing the impossibly high ideals of beauty and happiness that fairy tales normally offer? I quickly found myself laughing at Card's harsh fantasy world, because it was one I recognized: the real world, my world, which in reality is often cold and harsh. We quickly discover that kissing a beautiful princess in the real world is not all it is made out to be. So we can identify with Ivan the naked prince - his shock at the harsh reality of a fairy tale come true (p.90) is our shock at the harsh reality of life.

Perhaps to heighten the effect of a fairy tale that reflects reality rather than fantasy, Card frequently resorts to crude language, and sexually explicit details. Also the portrayal of the witch Baba Yaga and her sidekick Bear was at times unnecessarily morbid. It is undeniable that this contributes to the effect of bringing the fantasy to cold hard earth, but personally I found it unnecessary to go so far in order to create the effect he wanted, and from Card (a Mormon) rather surprising and unexpected. I find it a shame that by employing such language and giving attention to such crude details, Card has made this book suitable only for mature and discerning readers, and made it inappropriate even for older children.

Card also uses the culture contrast between modernity and myth, past and present to criticize contemporary culture. Are Card's comments about the lack of respect for authority and the change in roles between husbands and wives (p.206) an implicit criticism of Western society? And is Ivan a mouthpiece for Card when he makes the observation that contemporary culture focuses on having itself remembered, whereas past culture focuses more on surviving (p.139)? And is the disappointing and harsh fantasy world that first promised so much intended to be a mirror image of life in the USA, which Ivan's Russian immigrant family also found disappointing (p.144)?

These and more questions will amuse you for hours. "Enchantment" is certainly a wonderful marriage of fantasy and reality, past and present, magic and science, pleasure and philosophy. The crude details do leave a bit of a bad aftertaste, but like Ivan and Katerina's marriage, this marriage of modernity and myth in the end proves to be most successful and satisfying

I had the fortune of having read some childrens' Russian fairy tales when I was younger and now I wish to go back and read them again. It might help to read a book of Russian fairy tales, before or after you read this, and it will amaze you further. Specifically, read Ivan and the Firebird, the Frog Princess, and Katerina Katerina.

The author has obviously carefully researched the history of 9th century Russia and creates a wonderful picture of life in that world. What makes this book so enjoyable though is not just the combination of literary genres, but the fact that the main characters are well developed and can carry the story. A lot of science fiction and fantasy contains one dimensional characters. Here you can truly empathise with and understand the motives of all the main characters.

I enjoyed reading Orson Scott Card's Ender series. This book is even more enjoyable. I wholeheartedly recommend it.