True Enough

Book Description

When Ashley Grant shows up uninvited at Heartland, Amy is suspicious. Ashley has been anything but nice in the past, and now she is asking for a favor. She wants Amy to help train Bright Magic, a showy European jumper recently purchased by her mom. Despite Amy's cloudy relationship with the Grants, she accepts the challenge, knowing that helping horses is her first priority. And as Amy starts to work with Ashley, she is forced to see her bitter old rival in a whole new way.

Customer Reviews:

soooooooooo good!.......2005-04-21

these books r soooooo cool! i didnt really like the ashley part of the book.i would have put 4, but the ruth and hank part made up for the 5th star. it must be sad for ruth seeing her father fade away like that. it is so cool how ty understands wat ruth is going thru. I AM A HUGE HEARTLAND FAN AND I HAVE READ EVERY BOOK XCEPT FOR ALWAYS THERE AND FROM THIS DAY ON. I TOTALLY RECOMMEND THIS SERIES! :)

I love this series!!!.......2004-09-11

I thought this book would have Ashley and Bright Magic in the book much more often than they were, because they were on the cover and on the back they were mentioned in it, it was mainly about a horse named Boxer and his owner, Hank who has Alzheimer's.

True Enough- Definitely Good Enough!.......2004-03-24

This is yet another of Lauren Brooke's amazing stories about the healing and training of troubled horses. Again Ashley interferes (she ALWAYS does, after all) but this time, the interference is a bit more disguised. It is not like Ashley to show up at Heartland unannounced, and definitely not at all like her to ask Amy for genuine help. Amy agrees to herlp retrain Bright Magic, a gorgeous and honest jumper, but after he begins to respond, Ashley no longer wants Amy's help. However, Ashley does drop her crop every time before she enters the jumping ring. A little interesting, isn't it? In many of her books, Brooke describes "joining up" a process of establishing trust and dominance and friendship between a person and a horse. I must say, it works! I have seen it being used at the stable I ride at, and I have experimented with it myself. My horse respects me and trusts me so much more when I am finished! Thanks Lauren Brooke!

AWESOME BOOK!!!.......2003-11-07

I LOVED THIS BOOK AND ITS ABOSOLUTELY AWESOME, NOT AS GOOD AS THE FIRST FEW, BUT STILL GOOD!!! WHAT HAPPENS IS... AMY GOES TO A SHOW WITH STORM AND SEES ASHLEE TAKE A FALL OFF HER HORSE, LATER ON ASHLEE TURNS UP UNEXPECTEDLY ASKING AMY FOR HELP, ALL THE WHILE AMY IS TRYING TO FIGURE OUT WHATS WRONG WITH BOXER, THE NEWEST HORSE AT HEARTLAND!!! WELL ID BETTER STOP THERE BEFORE I GIVE TO MUCH AWAY!!! LIKE I SAID, AN AWESOME BOOK, AND WELL WORTH READING!!! TO ALL THE HEARTLAND FANS OUT THERE, I HAVE A FAN GROUP!!! ...

Great, BUT is Too predictable!.......2003-11-02

I love this series, but they are all the same now! hopefully the new ones are a bit better, cuz the last few are still awsome, but u just know wuts gonnna happen!

Once is Enough (The Sailor's Classics #6)

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A "must read" for aspiring blue water cruisers
Sailing adventure and survival. Once is Enough
anold set of friends reviseted..
Ship of fools.
Seamanship

Once is Enough (The Sailor's Classics #6)
Miles Smeeton
Manufacturer: International Marine Publishing
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

General | Biographies & Memoirs | Subjects | Books

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ASIN: 0071382194

Book Description

"Unique among books of maritime adventure." Times Literary Supplement

When the 46-foot Tzu Hang sailed from Australia into the vast Southern Ocean in December 1956, her crew of three couldn't know what terror awaited them. Six weeks later and several hundred miles west of Cape Horn, in the dead of night in a violent storm, they were somersaulted by a freak wave and nearly destroyed. When the boat righted itself, it was half full of water and dangerously close to sinking. Its masts had been snapped off and its deck partly ripped away. Miles Smeeton's wife, Beryl, had been flung overboard and injured but miraculously got back aboard. Somehow the crew saved the boat, survived the storm, and four weeks later reached Chile under jury rig.

Ten months later, they again attempted Cape Horn and once again were capsized, dismasted, and nearly sunk. This tale of fear and determination electrified the sailing world when first published in 1959. What keeps it as fresh and captivating now as when it was written, however, is not the fury of the storm but Miles Smeeton's spare, eloquent descriptions of life at sea. Once Is Enough rolls with the rhythm of the ocean, and the reader, like the crew of the Tzu Hang, is shaken from a page-turning dream by the storm's sudden violence.

Customer Reviews:

A "must read" for aspiring blue water cruisers.......2006-11-06

This is a first hand account of two thwarted attempts to round Cape Horn from the west. It is written by Miles Smeeton, the skipper of the forty two foot ketch, Tzu Hang. It is not for sailors only, and if all you want is sailing, you may end up bored. Much of the book takes place in a port town in Chile, where the Smeetons and John Guzzwell (Trekka Round the World) put in for repairs. The Chilean section is interesting in that it is about the people who end up involved in helping to restore the yacht - some of whom are real characters.

Be sure to read the forward, which provides a brief expalnation of who these people were, and how they ended up spending their retirement sailing the worlds oceans.

Smeeton is not a professional writer, but he writes well, with good descriptions of the people they met, his own impressions, and sensory detail, all of which combine to make the book readable.

There is an historical angle as well. It takes place in the mid-1950's. Smeeton and his wife, Beryl, retired after World War II, Smeeton being an Btritish Army officer and veteran of that war. They are virtually never freaked-out, and always find time for tea.

If you like Brits, if you like sailing, or if you just like a first hand account of some of the original adventure travelers, you will like this book.

Sailing adventure and survival. Once is Enough.......2006-09-14

A fine book of sailing adventure, daring,and demonstration of pure determination to survive infused with applied skills and love. With plenty of luck.
Although not nearly the same, my enjoyment in reading this tale
flows from duck hunting alone in near freezing temperatures de-
parting the dock at the darkened hours of 4 - 5 a.m. --hunting
experiences that afforded me insight into and identity with
Mile's - Beryl's - and John's characters. They were fortunate
to have survived!

anold set of friends reviseted.........2006-07-09

Miles and "B" Smeton, along with John Guzzwell were all members of the same sailing organization with me, and we shared some exciting and happy times cruising Hawaiian waters..and meeting up from time to time..
While many writers have attempted to explain the incredible shambles of a rollover at sea, I think Miles, in his rather old school British style, has done it best.
This is reality in cool, understated British Brigadier style that every sailor should read, not just for the adventure, but for the example of coolness under duress, inventiveness, and determination that it represents,,
David M. "DR Dave" Parker

Ship of fools........2001-11-25

The first half of this book is an enjoyable read, even if like me, you feel that the Smeeton's goal to round Cape Horn in a yacht is foolhardy. And sure enough, the Southern Ocean serves up the house specialty for them right on cue, pitchpoles their boat, and they narrowly escape with their lives.

By the time I got to the second half of the story, I was disgusted with their pointless and quixotic drive to try to round the Horn again after they had spent half a year in S. Chile begging, borrowing, and stealing parts and labor to rebuild their nearly-demolished yacht. At this point I could not enjoy any more of Mile's detailed descriptions of their jury rig or navigational efforts.

The Smeetons deluded themselves into believing that they were some sort of noble adventurers, striking out where less daring people feared to tread. The truth was that they were fools; their experience and knowledge provided them with ample reasons why people should not attempt the Horn in a small boat. But they just did it anyway. A lot of their folly was driven by this pride. Miles even admits that they did it BECAUSE they feared doing it. To his credit, at one point he confesses that they were not thinking rationally when they decided to make the second go at it (which ended disastroulsy, same as the first).

Years later the CCA awarded the Smeetons the Bluewater Medal, but it wasn't in recognition of this particular voyage, but rather for their lifelong accomplishment of cruising nearly the entire globe in Tsu Hang. On the voyage detailed in Once is Enough, their culpability in repeatedly putting themselves in such unnecessary risk was anything but seamanlike.

Seamanship.......2000-04-07

Once Is Enough is more than enough, especially south of Cape Horn.

Perserverance and seamanship at its best!

Customer Reviews:

Disillusionment in early Kentucky.......2006-04-02

This novel, one of Warren's best, is set in Kentucky in 1825, and is concerned with power and redemption - and also what may or may not be the truth. Jeremiah Beaumont, an idealistic lawyer and promising politician, becomes disillusioned with his benefactor (Cassius Fort) when he learns that Fort has seduced a young girl (Rachel Jordan). Beaumont "rescues" Rachel and proposes marriage to her; she accepts only if he promises to kill Fort. But Fort refuses to fight Beaumont, and in an excellent piece of character development, Warren shows the betrayal and weakness this refusal instills in Beaumont. He and Rachel marry anyway, but when Beaumont reads a political handbill revealing the affair between Rachel and Fort, he thinks Fort wrote it to end his political ambitions. Now he kills Fort and is arrested. He escapes from jail and learns that another character, Wilkie Barron, had written the handbill, not Fort. Rachel commits suicide and Beaumont is murdered while trying to get the truth told.

Warren, as part of his narrative method, uses a number of letters and diaries and a manuscript written by Beaumont found amongst his papers as a means of conveying the story. But, of course, these represent only Beaumont's side of the story and may not be "the truth" at all. Warren's characters are strongly drawn; the ambitious and evil manipulator, Wilkie Barron, is particularly good. The suicide of Rachel is a bit melodramatic, though it's tempered somewhat by the unhappiness and trials she faces living with Beaumont. Warren based the novel on a true story. A highly regarded work, it's among the best of his novels.

Penn Warren's Other Masterpiece.......2005-10-27

This novel is one of the big sleepers in 20th century American fiction, and adds a twin peak to Penn Warren's other novelistic masterpiece, All the King's Men.

On the surface, the story traces the rise, career, love, and misadventures of Jeremiah Beaumont in the early days of Kentucky and of this republic. Simultaneously it is a meditation on the process of history, and its strangeness to the eyes and ears of later generations. Unlike All the King's Men, wherein there is 1st person narrative by a main character, Jack Burden, who fairly almost drowns in history, here the narrative is 3rd person and objective. We are immediately distanced by the narrator/historian, who holds in his hands the letters and court documents relating to Jeremiah, in the 1st sentence: "I can show you what is left." Indeed, the story is largely based on actual material discovered by Katherine Ann Porter and given to Warren.

From here a fascinating narrative opens as we are immediately dropped into frontier Kentucky with the young lawyer's assistant Jeramiah. The passion and violence of the setting is made palpable, along with Jeremiah's youthful lust and apparent idealism, and the manner in which they affect his relationship with his employer -- but to go into details would spoil this engrossing and fascinating story. The merit is the confidence with which Penn Warren engages the strangeness of this world, without the usual method in "historical fiction" of merely dressing up contemporary figures in old costume. These people are puzzles, and the burden of the text is to unwind them. Yet they are so alive on the page, so true, that we are able to follow deeply into their bizarre depths and the alien wonder of early America.

In the end, the reader will have lived in early western Kentucky and emerged back in the contemporary world stunned. Penn Warren's passionate engagement with the American psyche carries one through the several hundred pages effortlessly. The book is many things -- straight realism, philosophical speculation, moral tale, melodrama, psychological portrait. Finally, it is simply one of the few 20th century novels to take up the multi-faceted challenge of Herman Melville to plunge into the national heart, with no pre-established goal except to come back home with as much truth as two arms can carry.

Too Dark for My Taste.......2005-09-12

This book was in my library for a number of years and I had not read it. Most of my reading time was taken with non-fiction. Finally, I decided that any book by an American author that had received three Pulitzer prizes including prose and poetry, must be worth reading.

If fact, this book is very well written. The character development is excellent, dialog is as I remember it when working in the rural areas of Kentucky during summer vacations from college in the 50's. The plot is well developed and the story is interesting and thought provoking.

On the surface, this is the story of Jeremiah Beaumont and his larger-than-life difficulties. Beneath the surface, this is a story of integrity, morals, truth and justice. It is not a story of "hope". The final sentence pretty well sums it up: "Was all for naught?

The Man Who Could Not Kill Enough: The Secret Murders of Milwaukee's Jeffrey Dahmer

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Expanded Newspaper Articles
Mediocrity in journalism
A poor telling of Dahmer's story
So so account
Milwaukee's Finest

The Man Who Could Not Kill Enough: The Secret Murders of Milwaukee's Jeffrey Dahmer
Anne E. Schwartz
Manufacturer: Citadel
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

Criminology | Crime & Criminals | Nonfiction | Subjects | Books

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ASIN: 1559721170

Customer Reviews:

Expanded Newspaper Articles.......2007-07-05

This manages to make Dahmer's macabre story boring by stiffly recounting the tale in chronological fashion. The writer, a cop's wife and a Milwaukee newspaper reporter who was first on the scene, doesn't really have the skill to write a full length book. She needed a ghost writer to make the facts come alive. It reads like a long and dull newspaper article. With so many better accounts on the market, don't bother with this one.

Mediocrity in journalism.......2006-05-26

I have read this book and was very disappointed in the quality of the storytelling and the bias toward the police shown by the author. Why did she feel the need to recount the criminal history of some of the victims of Dahmer? In general, I felt that the $5.00 I spent on this book was more of a crime than anything Dahmer did.

A poor telling of Dahmer's story.......2004-06-21

I would not recommend this book at all. It seems to me that this author used the book to brag that she's married to a cop and has an inside scoop on everything instead of using it to tell us the story of Dahmer. I have read many Dahmer books from different points of view and this one was my least favorite. I guess it's worth a read but be warned, it isn't the greatest Dahmer book there is.

So so account.......2002-04-24

I quite enjoyed this book, but found it was in part poorly researched. Dahmer was never cruel to animals, in fact he loved them and would look after them , as did another notorious 'cannibal' killer, Dennis Nielsen, who also killed for company. It was only dead animals eg.road kill that he dissected.
I have also read Brian Master's book , "The Shrine of Jeffrey Dahmer" and was more impressed, although I was surprised he would put Dahmer and Ted Bundy in the same category.
Dahmer was an extremely sick human being, but not a torturer.Sadly we will never know what mental illness made him commit these horrific crimes which ruined the lives of so many families.
I don't recommend this book.

Milwaukee's Finest.......2000-12-10

This book was written by the Milwaukee Journal crime reporter who was the first reporter on the scene when Jeffrey Dahmer's personal slaughterhouse was revealed to the public on July 23, 1991. This book was published the following year and as such it doesn't have the benefit of time with which to look back on the murderer that shocked Milwaukee and the nation. Of course, Jeffrey Dahmer himself didn't have much time, either -- he was killed in prison in November 1994 by a delusional fellow inmate.

Dahmer's misdeeds are widely known, if only in part, but this book does bring forth the full horror in the very first chapter. Working the crime beat, Anne E. Schwartz, the wife of a cop who frequently got to go "under the yellow tape" for a closer look, was one of the few who actually got to stand in Dahmer's cramped, fetid apartment. Upon entering, she first noticed the general clutter and the trappings of a gay single man: potato chip bags, cigarette butts in an ashtray, and posters of muscular hunks adorning the walls. But she also couldn't help but notice the twisted and macabre additions that lurked in every room: a filing cabinet containing multiple human skulls, a scrapbook containing photos of partially dismembered corpses, containers of formaldehyde and chloroform, not to mention various bones and decomposing body parts. She knew this would be the case of a lifetime and in fact she was the one who broke the story.

Schwartz's carefully compiled narrative follows Dahmer from his younger days to the last eighteen months of his life before his arrest, a time he used to kill a dozen men. The book starts strong because the story is simply so shocking. But Schwartz has also spoken personally to many members of the victims' families. Their stories really frame the tragedy, and Schwartz does keep the book moving, but the book nevertheless begins to be less about Dahmer at this point. And while not many other authors would have had the perspective on Milwaukee to address just how badly this case fractured the city and exposed raw racial divisions, the book really ceased to be about Dahmer at this point. I felt it lost its focus. The story of Milwaukee is certainly one that needed to be told -- just not in a book with this particular title.

For those interested in "profiling" or criminal motive, this book will disappoint you. It's not a detective story, either. Schwartz does go into some depth regarding Dahmer's relationship with his probation officer (recall that Dahmer was on probation when he killed many of his victims) and these details reveal just how sad, miserable, and lonely Jeffrey Dahmer was in the last year of his freedom. But for the most part, this is a book that will appeal mostly to avid Dahmer fans or to those who want to read about the fallout from the case on the city of Milwaukee, its Police Department, and its citizens. It might also hold interest for those who are interested in how journalists work with police departments to report on crime.

Those of us who are looking for explanations might instead turn to Robert Ressler's book on serial killers, I Have Lived in the Monster. There is a lengthy interview with Dahmer perforated with Ressler's commentary that helps explain why Dahmer felt compelled to commit such acts of violence.

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Never Enough
Joe McGinniss
Manufacturer: Simon & Schuster
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

Murder & Mayhem | True Accounts | Nonfiction | Subjects | Books
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The Diana Chronicles

Wonderful Tonight: George Harrison, Eric Clapton, and Me

Shattered Dreams: My Life as a Polygamist's Wife

ASIN: 0743296362

Book Description

At thirty-nine, Nancy Kissel had it all: glamour, gusto, garishly flaunted wealth, and the royal lifestyle of the expatriate wife. Not to mention three young children and what a friend described as "the best marriage in the universe."

That marriage -- to Merrill Lynch and former Goldman Sachs investment banker Robert Kissel -- ended abruptly one November night in 2003 in the bedroom of their luxury apartment high above Hong Kong's glittering Victoria Harbour.

Why?

Hong Kong prosecutors, who charged Nancy with murder, said she wanted to inherit Rob's millions and start a new life with a blue-collar lover who lived in a New Hampshire trailer park.

She said she'd killed in self-defense while fighting for her life against an abusive, cocaine-addicted husband who had forced her for years to submit to his brutal sexual demands.

Her 2005 trial, lasting for months and rich in lurid detail, captivated Hong Kong's expatriate community and attracted attention worldwide. Less than a year after the jury of seven Chinese citizens returned its unexpected verdict, Rob's brother, Andrew, a Connecticut real estate tycoon facing prison for fraud and embezzlement, was also found dead: stabbed in the back in the basement of his multimillion-dollar Greenwich mansion by person or persons unknown.

Never Enough is the harrowing true story of these two brothers, Robert and Andrew Kissel, who grew up wanting to own the world but instead wound up murdered half a world apart; and of Nancy Kissel, a riddle wrapped inside an enigma, a modern American woman for whom having it all might not have been enough.

In this singularly compelling narrative, Joe McGinniss -- past master at exposing the dark heart of the American family in the bestsellers Fatal Vision, Blind Faith, and Cruel Doubt -- explores his darkest and most disturbing subject yet: a smart and beautiful family so corroded by greed that it destroys itself from within.

Here is a family saga almost biblical in its tragic proportion but dazzlingly modern in flavor -- and utterly unstoppable in its pulsating narrative drive. From the shimmering skyscrapers and greed-drenched bustle of Hong Kong to the moneyed hush and hauteur of backcountry Greenwich, McGinniss lures readers irresistibly forward, as this twisted tale of ambition gone mad and love gone bad rushes to its terrible, inexorable conclusion.

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Brilliant

Not Enough

Excellent writing.

Families in a country village 2002

True enough, but not quite good enough

True Enough
Stephen McCauley
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

Gay | Fiction | Literature & Fiction | Gay & Lesbian | Subjects | Books
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Blue Heaven

ASIN: B000066TQ7

Amazon.com

New York writer Desmond Sullivan doesn't believe in marriage. His five happy years with his lover Russell haven't fundamentally challenged Desmond's conviction that, at best, true love is "an acute form of tolerance." He's sexually restless, and looking forward to his four-month teaching stint in Boston as an attempt to regain some of his own identity and try to complete the biography he's been writing. Jane Cody, a Boston public television producer, is similarly disenchanted with her marriage to a clumsy, kindly professor of English. Lately, Jane has been meeting her ex-husband Dale for drinks and coffee, although she's well aware that he's a jerk. With so much going wrong in her life, it strikes Jane that she and Desmond could collaborate on a series of documentaries, salvaging both of their foundering work lives. A page-turner, not by virtue of its plot, but because of Stephen McCauley's utterly engaging narrative voice, True Enough reprises some of the themes of his earlier novel, The Object of My Affection. It also has the virtues of a good Woody Allen film: Great comic lines and brilliant social observation among a small circle of successful friends. And like so much of Allen's work, the subject is married love: Fidelity and betrayal in their many guises. A funny, well-developed novel with surprising emotional depth. --Regina Marler

Book Description

Dubbed by The New York Times as "the secret love child of Edith Wharton and Woody Allen," Stephen McCauley presents his fourth deftly comic, critically acclaimed novel. Jane Cody imagined she'd lead a tumultuous life, full of money, passion, and painless tragedies. Instead, she wakes up at forty with a doting second husband, a precocious son who loves to bake, and a fast-paced job as a producer for a Boston television station. What went wrong? In New York, Desmond Sullivan -- biographer of demi-celebrities such as the forgotten torch singer Pauline Anderton -- wonders how he ended up "stuck in something as pathetic" as a happy, secretly monogamous relationship with smart, sweet Russell. Jane and Desmond meet in Boston and join forces to create a series of TV documentaries on America's cultural mediocrities. But their search for the truth about the elusive Anderton takes them on a journey of self-discovery in which they learn more about their own secrets and lies than they ever wanted to know.

Customer Reviews:

Brilliant.......2007-05-13

Stephen McCauley is one of most incredibly insightful, perceptive writers I have ever had the pleasure to enjoy. I stumbled across Alternatives to Sex, looked him up on Amazon and ordered everything else he'd written. I only wish he were more prolific. Deeply layered characters, well constructed plots that will have you examining yourself and your life as well as other's...McCauley is that rarest of things, a gay writer where the adjective becomes less important than the noun.

Not Enough.......2006-03-27

Whenever I write down what I thought of a book I've read, the ones I feel ambivalent about like "True Enough" are the hardest to write. It's easy to find something to say when you really love or really hate a book; it's much harder when you don't really care about what you've just read.

For myself, I think the problem is so many of these social satires written with ironic detachment ("The Sportswriter" by Richard Ford comes to mind) leave me feeling empty. In part I think it's because while I'm optimist I'm jaded enough to already know love stinks and life stinks. If that's all you got, then it's not enough. Tell me something I didn't already know. Or at the very least, feed my naive notions that true love exists and life can get better.

But to be fair, "True Enough" is amusing and often funny as a satire about the whiny pseudocrises of upper-middle-class Easterners. My favorite part is when Jane gets out of her car to confront the impatient soccer mom in the SUV. I'd need several more limbs to count the number of times I've wanted to do that sort of thing.

If you don't already know, the plot involves Desmond, a gay man in New York having trouble with his long-term relationship to Russell, and Jane, a woman in suburban Boston having trouble with her long-term relationship to Thomas. Desmond gets a temporary teaching job in Boston while finishing his biography on an unknown torch singer. This brings him into contact with Thomas, who teaches in the same department, and by extension, Jane. Jane is losing her job at a public TV station to her go-getting assistant Chloe. Jane is secretly seeing her ex-husband Dale on the side, at first at the behest of her friend who is having trouble in her long-term relationship with Dale. What starts as drinks eventually becomes much more. In the meantime, she gets an idea to do a series of documentaries on minor celebrities like the singer Desmond is writing about. They start working together even as their relationships seem to be going to Hell and in the end wind up in Florida during a tropical storm to inverview the singer's daughter. There's more, but I won't spoil the surprise ending.

I felt a little cheated at the end where the author switches to the viewpoint of Rosemary, Jane's cynical friend who made a mint on a teary memoir of her husband's death. The switch kept me as the reader from really knowing how things had worked out for Jane and Desmond about a year after the Florida excursion.

For the most part while reading this I kept waiting for something exciting to happen, but nothing ever did. Even the big surprise at the end elicited a yawn. Too little, too late for the big shock. After lulling me into a detached-ironic-stupor for 300 pages, why try to shake me out of it in the last 15?

I don't have any complaints about the writing itself, nor did I find anything to rave about in that area. Which is symptomatic of the whole thing. At the end I shrug and say, "So what?"

The whole point seems to be that love and life doesn't work out as we planned. To quote a very popular movie, "Well I'm glad you're here to tell us these things." I'd never have figured that out on my own. So what?

That is all.

Excellent writing........2003-02-07

I really enjoyed his writing. This was the first McCauley's book that I read. It, along with the movie, compelled me to read another book of his, "The Object of My Affection."

Families in a country village 2002.......2003-02-05

In terms of plot structure, it seems not much has changed for Stephen McCauley since Jane Austen came out with that simple line about "two or three families in a country village." Only now the village is global and the two or three families are extended and include one or two gay marriages as well.

Because of the author's intense dynamism and his insightful wit (I want to say one-liners because there are some brilliant passages) the plot is almost incidental: Desmond leaves his lover Russell to teach a course in Boston and meets Jane Cody who has become re-involved with her ex-husband while trying to understand where her life and those of her husband's and son's meet in harmony. There are a series of effective sub-plots: Russell's job and his state-of-the-art lesbian co-worker; a jaded widow writer whose success rests on a book entitled DEAD HUSBAND; Jane's be-wigged and judgemental mother-in-law; Jane's extraordinarily erudite six year old son; and a mysterious 60s female vocalist about whom Desmond is writing a biography.

I don't make the comparison to Jane Austen too glibly: just as Emma, Catherine and Elizabeth do, these modern characters discover what it means to love and learn better how to love, they become aware of their own mistakes and weaknesses while suffering the pain of recognizing their errors and amending the harm done. McCauley has his characters attend the most engaging parties during which they discover and reveal themselves with a punch, very much like Austen's gatherings where characters such as Darcy, Wickham and Henry Crawford display themselves perhaps more than they intended. Within the very serious subjects of love and self-awareness, the humor is astute and hilarious.

All this nonsense aside, McCauley's book is a pleasure to read, and far better than most of the current crop.

True enough, but not quite good enough.......2003-01-20

This is an enjoyable read, on the whole. It's (mostly) written from the point-of-view of its two protagonists, Desmond and Jane. Their stories are different at the start of the novel but they meet and their stories intertwine.
Woven around their combined quest to find the truth about the life of a little-known singer (for a TV documentary they're making) are their personal quests to find the truth about their own relationships. Looking for meaning in relationships is familiar ground for Stephen McCauley.
Familiar characters too: Desmond, a gay man from New York with no particularly endearing characteristics, and Jane, rather stereotypical career-woman with a husband she doesn't find attractive any more.
These rather unpromising characters are matched by an equally unpromising central plot-line. Not much to work with then.
And I think that Stephen McCauley makes fairly heavy weather of the material he has lumbered himself with. Which is a shame, considering how light and deft his previous work is.
The saving grace for Desmond and Jane, who spend the entire novel looking for a reason to tell the story of "Pauline Anderton" is that they make an a astonishing discovery. Great for them, but for the reader, it comes too late and seems like an attempt to salvage a flagging plot.
Up until then, nothing much happens that surprises or interests, and we grind through the quite unattractive lives of characters we can't care much about. The writing is inelegant too: there's too much detail about, well, everything, and none of it adds to the story. It's neither significant, nor particularly interesting. It's just padding.
There are a few quirky characters, but even the most potentially interesting one, Rosemary, is given a "hammy" B-movie part to play. Jane's child, Gerald, is perhaps the most interesting character, but again he's handled without much subtlety.
I'd say that this is McCauley's least satisfying work to date, unfortunately.

Never Enough: The Remarkable Frauds of Julious Melnitzer

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Never Enough: The Remarkable Frauds of Julious Melnitzer
Brian Martin
Manufacturer: Stoddart
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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ASIN: 0773726888

To die is not enough;: A true account of murder and retribution

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To die is not enough;: A true account of murder and retribution
Donald Delano Wright
Manufacturer: Houghton Mifflin
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Unknown Binding

General | Criminal Law | Law | Subjects | Books
ASIN: 0395184789

Oddly Enough: Unbelievably Outrageous but True Stories from the News

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Wonderful world of the weird

Oddly Enough: Unbelievably Outrageous but True Stories from the News

Manufacturer: M Q Publications
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

Essays | Humor | Entertainment | Subjects | Books

General | Humor | Entertainment | Subjects | Books

Trivia | Fun Facts | Reference | Subjects | Books

General | Reference | Subjects | Books
ASIN: 1840725958

Book Description

Over 250 crazy but true stories! Together MQP and the world's greatest news agency. Reuters, bring to you some of the most astonishing and incredibly bizarre news items from around the globe. From subjects such as love and marriage, crime and the law, furry friends and the just plain werid, find out just how bizarre the human race can be.

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Wonderful world of the weird.......2007-06-08

Great book to spend a few minutes with now and then. It proves beyond doubt that of all the species on our planet we are the most odd.

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The Man Who Could Not Kill Enough
Anne E. Schwartz
Manufacturer: Titan Books Ltd
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

Criminology | Crime & Criminals | Nonfiction | Subjects | Books

True Crime | True Accounts | Nonfiction | Subjects | Books
ASIN: 1852864435

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