Book Description
Ecovillages have arisen around the world in response to the social fragmentation of modern life and its alienation from nature. They provide a variety of ways of living in community with others and with nature and are linked worldwide through the Global Ecovillage Network. While interest in this approach to sustainable living is rapidly increasing, there is relatively little literature on the topic and none that brings the design principles of permaculture to bear on the successful design of these communities.
Ecovillages explores the new departures in personal, social, and ecological living represented by this phenomenon. This book explores the background and history to the ecovillages movement and provides a comprehensive manual for planning, establishing, and maintaining a sustainable community using a permaculture approach. Aspects discussed include:
• Tools for social design
• Leadership and conflict management
• House design and building techniques
• Gardening, farming, and food production
• Water and sewage
• Energy and heat sources
• Alternative economics
Featured throughout the book are full-color case studies-or "living examples"-of successful ecovillages ranging from kibbutz to camphill communities and from as far afield as Australia, Israel, Europe, and the United States. Each example includes data on its location, date of founding, number of residents, and spiritual or ideological affiliation, the photographs bringing to life the special characteristics of the particular community.
Packed with tips, useful insights, sage advice, and a compendium of resources, Ecovillages will appeal to a broad range of people interested in living in community-or planning to do so.
Jan Martin Bang has spent a lifetime working in alternative communities, ranging from the kibbutz in Israel to his present home in the camphill community of Solborg in Norway. He leads training and development for new ecovillage projects around the world.
Customer Reviews:
Not at all what I thought it would be....oh well........2006-03-21
This book offered nothing new or enlightening about sustainable living. However, if you are looking for a book on hippie communes (i.e. communal living), than this is the book for you. That about covers it.
Packed with practical applications; not just theory.......2006-01-03
There's long been a movement towards living in community with others as an alternative to the nuclear family model, but in modern times 'ecovillages' have emerged around the world, adding attention to sustainability and social interactions to the model. Ecovillages explores these developments, opening with a history of the movement and progressing to include a practical manual for planning and maintaining a sustainable community using permaculture as a foundation. From house design and building options to farming and handling sewage and energy sources, Ecovillages is packed with practical applications; not just theory.
Book Description
This digital document is an article from Utopian Studies, published by Thomson Gale on June 22, 2006. The length of the article is 1349 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.
Citation Details
Title: Jan Martin Bang. Ecovillages: A Practical Guide to Sustainable Communities.(Book review)
Author: Peter M. Forster
Publication:
Utopian Studies (Magazine/Journal)
Date: June 22, 2006
Publisher: Thomson Gale
Volume: 17
Issue: 3
Page: 557(4)
Article Type: Book review
Distributed by Thomson Gale
Customer Reviews:
Excellent.......2000-03-12
After doing much searching and researching, I've found that this book, along with F. Olsen's "Kilns", is an excellent resouce for those of us who have spent much time working with kilns from a pedestrian level, but little time investigating the construction of them. Jack Troy's writing is clear and enjoyable and his knowledge obviously exhaustive. The first place to go if you are considering the merits of woodfired work.
A great resource for potters..........1998-07-08
"Wood-Fired Stoneware & Porcelain" is a great resource for potters interested in this alternative style of firing. The book contains substantial information on kiln design, clays, glazes, stacking, and firing wood kilns. Troy adds in details from his own considerable experience, and the photos and illustrations will make you anxious to get to the studio (or your local brick supplier...) The only drawback is that the majority of the photos are in b&w; however, the color plates that are included are great. A nice historical section, and lots of work by and info on contemporary potters. Most likely a good book to have on the shelf, and a great companion to his book on Salt-Glaze.
A perfect introduction to wood firing and out door kilns.......1997-04-17
Jack Troy is a very good and entusiastic
writer. This new book is very much worth
it's price and if you can get your hands
at the old one, Salt Glazed Ceramics, that
is a trofee.
Average customer rating:
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Graffiti
Brassai
Manufacturer: Flammarion
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
 Collections, Catalogues & Exhibitions
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ASIN: 2080107135
Release Date: 2002-05-03 |
Book Description
Brassaï became interested in the marginal art form of graffiti in the 1930s, seeing it as a form of outsider art that could open the door to new forms of artistic expression. His atmospheric photographs capture the essence of this unfettered creation. Stark contrasts of black and white alternate with softer shades of grey that meld into one another, smoothing the harsh gouges typical of graffiti. Several of these photographs first appeared in the Surrealist review Minotaure; others were first published in France and Germany in 1960, in a work entitled Graffiti, which accompanied an exhibition that visited New York, London, Milan, Baden-Baden, Frankfurt, Hannover, and Paris. The approach was hugely influential, both for the Surrealists and in the domain of Outsider Art. Accompanying the photographs are selections from previously unpublished writings, including extracts from Brassaï's own notebooks, in which he noted the presence of elements of graffiti on the walls of Paris that he intended to photograph. The book also contains an interview with Picasso on the subject of graffiti as an art form. This first English language version of this classic title is a beautifully produced edition of what is undoubtedly a seminal work in the history of modern photography.
Average customer rating:
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Graffiti
Brassai
Manufacturer: Chr. Belser Verlag
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
ASIN: B000NLAX8K |
Average customer rating:
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Graffiti
Brassai
Manufacturer: Flammarion-Pere Castor
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
ASIN: B000N6393Q |
Average customer rating:
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Hi and Lois: Croquet For A Day (Hi and Lois)
Mort Walker , and
Dik Browne
Manufacturer: Tor Books
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Mass Market Paperback
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ASIN: 0812503112 |
Customer Reviews:
The only love story I ever read cover-to-cover........2006-08-10
Sarah Haardt was a true Southern Bell and, unfortunately, this book gives little insight into what a remarkable women she was in her own right. I am a Mencken fan and, if he was a bigot, then I am also a bigot. I think he had too little patience for Southern culture and those less intelligent than himself, which would have been a large percentage of the population. But I think writing was his salvation being an intellectual castaway amid a virtual sea of stupidity in his time and place. If you like to watch the slow development of a firm foundation for marriage and a relatively happy ending, and I think increasingly lonely, aging curmudgeon gets younger wife and perfect intellectual companion in one cute package certainly qualifies, this might be a good choice.
For Mencken Fans Only.......1998-08-23
This book is a collection of the private letters between Henry Louis Mencken and Sara Haardt during their long courtship. In these letters, one will find much that will interest the Mencken fan, but little of much true interest. There is no dirt to be had here, just the reflections of a couple of people who are very fond of each other and very fond of writing. One may gain an insight into the times in which they live and the hardships of Prohibition and of life in the 1920's in general, but a thorough reading of Mencken's other works is far more revealing.
Book Description
"The native American Voltaire, the enemy of all puritans, the heretic in the Sunday school, the one-man demolition crew of the genteel tradition."-Alistair Cooke
Fiercely intelligent, scathingly honest, and hysterically funny, H.L. Mencken's coverage of the Scopes Monkey Trial so galvanized the nation that it eventually inspired a Broadway play and hit movie.
Mencken's no-nonsense sensibility is still exciting: his perceptive rendering of the courtroom drama; his piercing portrayals of key figures Scopes, Clarence Darrow, and William Jennings Bryan; his ferocious take on the fundamentalist culture surrounding it all-including a raucous midnight trip into the woods to witness a secret "holy roller" service.
Shockingly, these reports have never been gathered together into a book of their own-until now.
A Religious Orgy in Tennessee includes all of Mencken's reports for
The Baltimore Sun, The Nation, and
The American Mercury. It even includes his coverage of Bryan's death just days after the trial-an obituary so withering Mencken was forced to rewrite it (both versions are included, although the rewrite seems, if anything, even less forgiving).
With the rise of "intelligent design," Mencken's work has never seemed more unnervingly timely-or timeless.
Customer Reviews:
Brilliant...Classic Mencken.......2007-01-16
I am a huge fan of H. L. Mencken and this addition to the library doesn't disappoint. Mencken was one of America's most respected, despised, and feared journalists. As the number one literary enemy of the fundamentalist most of his career, Mencken was in his element at the John Scopes trial that pitted the science of evolution against the mythology of fundamentalist Christianity.
In 1925, Mencken drew the nation's attentions to a trial taking place in Dayton, Tennessee that would test the boundaries of a new law (the Butler Act) that prohibited the teaching of: "any theory that denies the story of the Divine Creation of man as taught in the Bible, and to teach instead that man has descended from a lower order of animals." One enterprising individual set about testing the law by asking a local teacher (a friend sympathetic with the cause) to teach Darwin's theory of evolution. That teacher was 24-year-old John T. Scopes. Lasting eight days in the courtroom and eleven days in total, the weather was painfully hot probably irritating Mencken even more.
Writing for the Baltimore Evening Sun, Mencken's verbal energy and acute wit are stunning (no journalist, pundit, or commentator today even comes close). And much of his sarcastic eloquence comes, of course, at the expense of the key figure at the trial William Jennings Bryan. As the billing promises, these reports are by the most famous newspaperman in American history are vivid, highly intelligent, scathingly honest, and hysterically funny.
Mencken saw the transparent attempt at keeping evolution from being taught in schools contemptible, and the Scopes trial as ample opportunity to ridicule the "yokels," "half-wits," and "buffoons" who believe that man is not a mammal and the earth is less then 6,000 years old. But Mencken left his most venomous criticisms for those representing the prosecution, especially Democratic presidential candidate and fundamentalist Christian William Jennings Bryan. Five days after the end of the trial, Bryan died. In writing one of three scathing Bryan obituaries, Mencken opines:
"The meaning of religious freedom, I fear, is sometimes greatly misapprehended. It is taken to be some sort of immunity, not merely from governmental control but also from public opinion. A dunderhead gets himself a long-tailed coat, rises behind the sacred desk, and emits such bilge as would gag a Hottentot. Is it to pass unchallenged? If so, then what we have is not religious freedom at all, but the most intolerable and outrageous variety of religious despotism. Any fool, once he is admitted to the wholly orders, becomes infallible. Any half-wit, by the simple device of ascribing his delusions to revelation, takes on an authority that is denied to all the rest of us."
"I do not know how many Americans entertain the ideas defended so ineptly by poor Bryan, but probably the number is very large...though they are thus held to be sound by millions, these ideas remain mere rubbish. Not only are they not supported by the known facts; they are in direct contravention of the known facts. No man whose information is sound and whose mind functions normally can conceivable credit them. They are the products of ignorance and stupidity, either or both."
"What should be a civilized man's attitude to such superstition? It seems to me that the only attitude possible to him is one of contempt. If he admits that they have any intellectual integrity whatever, he admits that he himself has none. If he pretends to a respect for those who believe in them, he pretends falsely, and sinks almost to their level. When he is challenged he must answer honestly, regardless of tender feelings. That is what Darrow did at Dayton, and the issue plainly justified the act. Bryan went there in a hero's shinning armor, bent deliberately upon a gross crime against sense. He came out a wrecked and preposterous charlatan, his tail between his legs. Few Americans have ever done so much for their country in a whole lifetime as Darrow did in two hours."
This volume includes all of Mencken's daily reports for The Baltimore Sun, as well as additional stories filed for The Nation and The American Mercury. It also includes his coverage of Bryan's death just days after the trial, plus numerous rare photos, and the full transcript of Darrow's historic cross-examination of Bryan. Oh wouldn't Mencken have a field day with with our fearless fundamentalist leader were he alive today! Alas, journalists like Mencken just don't exist anymore. Highly recommended reading and very contemporary as it seems little has changed in the "bible belt."
Amazon.com
Journalist, muckraker, political gadfly, atheist, and conservative dissident, H.L. Mencken "was to the first part of the twentieth century what Mark Twain was to the last part of the nineteenth--the quintessential voice of American letters." So says the eminent critic Terry Teachout in this landmark biography, which explores why Mencken has been largely forgotten today.
Mencken held to ideas that history was busily sweeping aside. He railed against the growing power of the federal government in the early years of the Roosevelt administration, insisting on an elitist brand of politics that favored the "superior man." He advocated an isolationist course in world affairs, even as totalitarian powers swallowed up whole nations; he agitated against progressive domestic causes; and, albeit ironically, he proposed that capital punishment be turned into a public entertainment. Yet he wrote some of the best, most cruelly entertaining journalism of his time, reporting on great trials, minor crimes, and political conventions, skewering received opinion.
Mencken was "something more than a memorable stylist, if something less than a wise man," Teachout concludes. This careful portrait--the first full-length biography to appear in more than 30 years--gives ample evidence for that verdict. --Gregory McNamee
Book Description
When H. L. Mencken talked, everyone listened -- like it or not. In the Roaring Twenties, he was the one critic who mattered, the champion of a generation of plain-speaking writers who redefined the American novel, and the ax-swinging scourge of the know-nothing, go-getting middle-class philistines whom he dubbed the "booboisie." Some loved him, others loathed him, but everybody read him. Now Terry Teachout takes on the man Edmund Wilson called "our greatest practicing literary journalist," brilliantly capturing all of Mencken's energy and erudition, passion and paradoxes, in a masterful biography of this iconoclastic figure and the world he shaped.
Customer Reviews:
4 STARS.......2007-10-21
I already knew a lot about Mencken when I bought this book. I learned a lot from reading it. I think it does a great job of compressing a large life into a workable package without missing much of the important events and people.
On the otherhand the reading is a bit tedious. The introduction was marvelous, though. Mencken's diaries are tedious reading, too.
The book is a nice addition to my Mencken collection.
A Great Book about a Complex Personage.......2007-07-22
H.L.M. was one of the greater journalists who ever lived in America. More so than almost anyone, he lifted an intellectual class up from the chains of religious orthodoxy. He had an amazing gift for epigrams, penses, and bon mots. He also promoted several authors we take for granted today into the limelight which first shone upon them. Finally, he wrote some of the best books (e.g., Happy Days) about turn of the century life.
However, he was also an anti-Semite (although he had many close Jewish friends) and was utterly blind to the evils of Hitler. As he gets older, his grasp of world begins to weaken.
Today I'm sure the politically correct crowd writes him off without thought as 'a dead, white, male', little appreciating the high irony that H.L.M. created virtually single handedly the liberal atmosphere of discourse on which they depend.
Teachout has done a superb job of updating his life from numerous sources which have only become available recently. It is a tale rich in period detail and interesting characters. Dreiser, Sinclair, Knopf, Bryan, Twain and others walk through this narrative and each leaves a memorable wake behind them.
You should read this book for the quotes from H.L.M. alone. The period details and the famous personages in the narrative will significantly compound the reward you get for reading this book.
The Life of H. L. Mencken........2007-06-28
_The Skeptic: A Life of H. L. Mencken_ by critic Terry Teachout is an interesting biography of the Baltimore newspaperman, iconoclast, and cynic H. L. Mencken. Mencken (1880 - 1956) was a journalist and writer who lived in Baltimore throughout most of his life. He is perhaps best known for his sarcastic and abrasive style in which he pilloried the dominating viewpoints of his day. Mencken was an atheist and materialist largely influenced by German thinkers such as Nietzsche as well as the Social Darwinists of his era. Politically, Mencken's views may be described as libertarian and he remained an opponent of "puritanism" (particularly concerning alcohol during the Prohibition period) and the entry of the United States into the world wars. Mencken also was a fervent opponent of F.D.R., whose policies he firmly disagreed with. In addition, Mencken frequently directed his rage at such figures as William Jennings Bryan and others who sought to disallow the teaching of Darwinian evolution. Mencken also frequently attacked what he sarcastically termed "quakery" in medicine, as well as Christian Science which was a particular dislike of his. This book provides a fascinating account of this man whose writings remain an essential part of American literature. As an ardent enemy of the political correctness of his day, Mencken can be profitably read both for his humorous style and for his profound commentary.
The book begins with Mencken's early life growing up in Baltimore. To understand Mencken fully, one must understand the Baltimore of his era. Early on Mencken joined organizations such as the Y.M.C.A. but found it not to his taste when they began preaching Christianity to him. Mencken became a lifelong skeptic as his father had been. Mencken's father owned a cigar factory which Mencken soon began work for. His father's bourgeois views were reflected in Mencken's later writings. However, Mencken soon grew dissatisfied with his job at the cigar factory and when his father died he sought work as a newspaper writer. Mencken had a knack for newspaper work and quickly grew in the ranks of writers. He also developed as an abrasive critic of the American "booboisie" (the middle classes). Mencken also had broader aesthetic interests and early on took an interest in the philosophy of Nietzsche (at the time regarded as a dangerous thinker). Mencken, whose own ancestry was largely German, admired German culture and this may have led to his love for Nietzsche. Mencken wrote books on both Nietzsche and Shaw which have become minor classics. Mencken also was heavily influenced by Mark Twain, whose works he read as a young boy. Early on, Mencken became friends with and took an active interest in such writers as Theodore Dreiser and Sinclair Lewis, both of whom he admired. Mencken had a lifelong hatred for puritanism and in President Wilson he perceived the policies of a puritan. Given Mencken's love for Germany and German culture it is understandable that he would oppose Anglo-Saxon dominance and the entry of the United States into World War I. Mencken also greatly enjoyed drinking alcohol, so during the time of Prohibition his hatred for puritanism grew to enormity. Mencken also continued to write pieces critical of religion as well as an interesting essay on women, which is sure to provoke the ire of latter-day feminists. Although Mencken is rumored to have been anti-semitic, he had many Jewish friends including Alfred J. Knopf and together with George Nathan published _The American Mercury_. In addition to commenting on the political scene, Mencken also commented on such things as medicine and "quack cures" and the teaching of Darwinism at the Scopes trial where he served as a reporter. Mencken developed a lifelong aversion to F.D.R. and firmly opposed his policies. However, it was the entry of the United States into World War II which particularly enraged Mencken. Mencken married but towards the end of his life developed an intense hypochondria. This led to a stroke which effectively ended his writing carrier, although he continued to collect his papers after it.
This book provides an excellent biographical account of H. L. Mencken and his life and times. It is the account of a fascinating figure who remains highly important for American letters.
enjoyable but flawed.......2007-06-14
Terry Teachout, who writes for the New York Times, the National Review, and others has written a very short but enjoyable biography of H.L. Mencken. However, when I read another Mencken biography that puts some episodes of Mencken's life into a very different light, I began to reconsider my thoughts on this biography.
One problem is that this book gets facts wrong. In his later years Mencken claimed that he came by his first job as a journalist by applying for it every day until he got it. In earlier years, his story was completely different; it "improved with time," without Teachout catching on. Teachout also writes that "Mencken did not pay well enough to consistently attract established talent... Forced to search for new faces...necessity also inspired him to look in places where others feared to tread. He reveled, for example, in printing the work of black writers." Another biography reveals that Mencken had long been extremely keen to promote African-American writers, to the extent that he tried to establish up a magazine devoted solely to African-American writers and culture, but couldn't raise the funding. He also was vociferous in speaking out against lynching at a time when this made him few friends, and cost his employer quite a bit of money. Teachout and other biographers seem to describe completely different people. Mencken's exact views could be hard to pin down; on some issues he contradicted himself in word and deed, sadly Teachout doesn't adequately reflect on this ambiguity.
A strong point of this biography is that Teachout correctly describes how Mencken had a legendarily acidulous and humorous pen, and how many of the frauds he took on - quacks, cult leaders, faith healers, politicians against evolution, superpatriots, Prohibitionists, and more - deserved every diatribe he sent their way. As Teachout mentions, Mencken unfortunately he didn't only lampoon fashions people adopted and careers people chose, but also ethnic groups, in tracts that do not make for too pleasant reading.
Another trifle is Teachout's version of Mencken's romance with Marion Bloom. In his account, the relationship foundered because Mencken was unwilling to marry a woman born in poverty. Another biography, however, describes how Mencken viscerally disliked Christian Science, which he deemed to be quackery. When she tried convert him to Christian Science, to which she had converted after the romance began, he would go into purple rages. And yet she couldn't stop. Having known people with persistent and idiosyncratic religious beliefs, Mencken's version strikes me as painfully believable. In Teachout's book, however, Christian Science is described as Mencken's fig leaf to avoid admitting that the relationship foundered over her having poor origins. Mencken eventually married an ailing woman only expected to live for three years and unable to have children; this is not the mark of a complete egoist and snob.
Biographers are free to - even expected to - add their interpretations to the facts of their subject's life. But readers shouldn't come to realize that the facts and insinuations in different biographies cannot be reconciled.
Superb biography.......2006-08-22
There have been many biographies written about H. L. Mencken. This is the best. Elegantly written and succinct, readers can learn much from this idiosyncratic man of letters. Unlike other biographies, you can glean much without knowing every minute detail.
Average customer rating:
- Viva Mencken!
- Mencken Mania
|
Mencken: A Life
Fred Hobson
Manufacturer: Random House
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
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ASIN: 0394563298
Release Date: 1994-05-03 |
Customer Reviews:
Viva Mencken!.......2001-02-11
As a fan of H.L. Mencken--and perhaps one of the few people under thirty who has read "The American Language," "Treatise on the Gods," "Heliogabalus" and all five volumes of "Prejudices"--I am shocked and appalled at the lack of respect paid the great author by his biographer. Mr. Hobson didn't seem to undertake the arduous task of writing a biography on his subject due to a sincere respect or enthusiasm; rather, he seems to have been moved by the less noble motivation of "One-ups-manship"; for as a Baltimorean scribe who happened to be at the right place, at the right time--he was granted access to some of Mencken's hitherto guarded (and now recently released) documents by the executors of Mencken's estate. As a result, Hobson is at times needlessly peevish with his subject, naively judgmental and historically hypocritical. The last remark is born of a nausea grounded in a Politically Correct self-righteousness that the biographer displays when he all but waves his finger at ghosts from the past when, say--for instance--he notices that in a much different world people in the 1910s and 1920s used such racially insensitive phrases for "haggling" as "jewing one down". (SHOULD this be considered offensive? --Certainly.) But for anyone in the modern era who has uttered the phrase "gyped," perhaps eighty years from now some pompous pedant will lodge the ludicrous claim that this shows your hatred of "gypsies" (where in fact the term "gyped" comes from). No, I might hazard the assertion that most people who have used the phrase do not hold an irrational grudge against the Romany people. Rather, they use such phrases unthinkingly--bereft of an racial connotations. My point? --Yes, there were insensitive things about the past. But no more so than in the Present. And to trot out situations and customs--verbal or otherwise--without the benefit of a cultural context betrays both ignorance and malice. Mr. Hobson is shameful in his betrayal of that lowest of critical temptations: To lash out at one's betters. Perhaps if Mr. Hobson thinks that using the term "African American," instead of "black" is a badge of tolerance over and above that of Mencken, maybe he can back up his words with actions: For it was Mencken--not Hobson--who distinguished himself by aiding and promoting writers of the Harlem Renaissance and for his outstanding support of civil rights for both blacks and Jews. Perhaps Mr. Hobson has given as much of himself to the causes of helping others? --If not, then he needs to moderate his disrespectful attitude; for Mencken's actions speak louder than Hobson's words.
Mencken Mania.......1997-06-06
Despite some boring passages, Fred Hobson provides a generally interesting and thorough portrait of the original cynic, H.L.Mencken. The book addresses many issues of racism and anti semitism on Mencken's part fairly and openly. The novel is excellently written. I would have preferred more information on the Scope's Trial in relation to Mencken because my interest in Mencken was sparked when reading Inherit the Wind by Laurence and lee in which Mencken is satired as E.K.Hornbeck. Read this book- it is informative and excellent. My congratulations to Fred Hobson and Happy Reading
Average customer rating:
- The Lion of the Twenties still roaring
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Disturber of the Peace: The Life of H.L. Mencken (Commonwealth Classics in Biography)
William Raymond Manchester
Manufacturer: Univ of Massachusetts Pr
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
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ASIN: 0870235443 |
Customer Reviews:
The Lion of the Twenties still roaring.......2000-11-18
I highly recommend this book to anyone who admire's the genius of H.L. Mencken. Manchester has created an in-depth account of the "Lion of the Twenties," from his early childhood in Baltimore as the son of a German-American cigar company owner, to his acendence to the pinnacle of the American intellectual renaissance of the 1920's. Manchester sculpts a palpable and staunch profile of the self-described "conservative anarchist," who made his mark as the editor of the influencial American Mercury magazine, writer/editor for the Baltimore Sun, and author of The American Language, the penultimate chronicle of American English. Mencken was a prolific pundit, scholar, social critic, reader and writer, blessed with a caustic wit, a hair-trigger mind, and an impossibly contrarian nature. His voracity for reading was so deep that he was known to read a motor repair manual "just because it was another human being trying to communicate." No one escaped his crticism with socialists, Christian Fundamentalists, and politicians particularly targeted. Manchester's writing, as in all his excellent works (I also highly recommend "Goodbye Darkness," Manchester's memoir of his combat service in the South Pacific as a U.S. Marine in WWII, five stars)is wonderfully rich. Manchester's style also has a lot of Mencken in it, which is another reason I liked the book. I don't know if he was consciously attempting to pay homage through stylistic similarities, but the cadence, language and were reminiscent of Mencken's works, and gave me the feeling it was really Mencken telling his life story through the hand of Manchester. Not a bad guy to emulate, even when you're as good as Manchester.
Average customer rating:
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Europe after 8:15,
H. L Mencken
Manufacturer: John Lane Co.; [etc., etc.]
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Unknown Binding
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ASIN: B00085JLO8 |
Book Description
CONTENTS LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS time 1869 Dancing on the Deck 44 1 880 The Grand Dining Saloon 44 1880 The Quarter-deck 58 1880 The Main Deck 58 1 875 Mail Steamer of the Anchor Line 62 1858 The Bremen 68 1 869 The First Morning at Sea i oo 1869 The Start 100 1864 The Cuba of the Cunard Line 118 1 872 The A dnatic of the White Star Line 1 2 2 1859 The Great Eastern 128 1859 Family Saloon Cabin on the Great Eastern 132 1860 Cabin of a Sailing Ship 132 1859 The Grand Saloon of the Great East ern 134 1859 Deck of the Great Eastern 138 1850 The Atlantic 148 1869 Main Saloon of the Hamburg-Ameri can Line Steamer Silesia 160 1857 An Afternoon in the Tropics 160 i 853 The American Steamship The Golden Age 164 1849 The Sailing Ship Deutschland of the Hamburg-American Line 174 1842 Charles Dickenss Stateroom in the Britannia 194 1848 Ladies Lounge in the Hamburg-American Sailing Ship Deutschland 194 1 842 An Early Steamer 198 1 847 The American Steamship Washington 208 1842 The Queen East Indiaman 260 INTRODUCTION The usual books of travel by sea deal with the experience of sailors or of persons seeking high adventure. Storms, shipwrecks and the other perils and hazards of the deep are recounted at length, and much is often included that is intelli gible to no one save professional sailors. In the selection of material for the present volume only the narratives of ordinary passengers, traveling in the best ships available at the time and place, have been included. They are arranged in the inverse order of their dates, with the most modern first. All detailed descriptions of storms and other such commonplaces have been omitted, and an effort has been made to show what everyday life at sea was before the days of the luxury liner. To the average landsman a great ship and its navigation are impenetrable mysteries and he makes little ef fort to investigate them. His interest is mainly in other things, and more particularly in those that affect directly his creature comforts, or furnish him amusement on the long, and usually quiet and lazy days of travel. A number of the narratives that follow are of travel on the North Atlantic during the Nine teenth Century. It was during this time that the greatest changes were made in passenger travel, ix X INTRODUCTION and most of them were first seen on the Atlantic. Going back from the Nineteenth Century, the ac counts written by actual passengers become in creasingly rare, and nothing written before the Fifteenth Century has been found that could be called the narrative of a bona fide first-class passen ger. But a number of amusing accounts of other travelers have been unearthed and two of them have been thrown in for good measure. One is Felix Fabris story of his voyage to the Holy Land and the other is the story of Jonah from the Old Testament. Fabri was a pilgrim and did not travel first class, but he traveled in a first-class ship, and his account of life aboard is an accurate de scription of what a passenger of his day ordi narily experienced. In the story of Jonah is the first reference in the literature of the world to a passenger who actually paid his fare. Most of the older narratives are very meager, and about all that can be gathered from them is that life on the earliest ships was very much the same as life on a ship of the Fifteenth Century. When man first built and ventured out in boats is not known. No doubt it was at a very remote date, for primitive Homo sapiens lived on the banks of rivers and on the shores of lakes and seas and thus probably learned in many cases to build boats before he learned to build houses. His first INTRODUCTION xi craft, fashioned of the materials at hand, were crude, but as he learned from experience he used his new knowledge in their construction, and often they showed greater skill and ingenuity than any thing he made on shore...
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Swimming the Hellespont
Ben Oshel Bridgers
Manufacturer: 1st Books Library
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
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ASIN: 1403309949 |
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