Customer Reviews:
The finest biography of a great king.......2005-09-07
This 1989 biography, the first to appear in English, is the finest work on Louis XIII which I have read in twenty years' study. It studies the king's life in detail, examining the innate character, principles and environment which shaped him, and the ways in which he in turn shaped the political and social future of France. Moote demonstrates clearly that, far from being the caricature created by Tallemant and Dumas, Louis was an intelligent and effective king who developed his own ruling style and chose the best of servants - the great Richelieu, of course - to support him in his task. The work follows his life chronologically, departing from this in the final section to study thematically his legacy, looking at the warfare state, culture and his intimate life (an achingly sad part of the book for anyone who cares about him).
This is an insightful and sympathetic study, clearly written and a very easy read. My only regret is that it is not several hundred pages longer. It has an interesting selection of illustrations - pamphlets and medallions as well as the standard de Champaigne portrait of Louis from the Prado (which, incidentally, was done many years after his death). I highly - no, completely - recommend this book to anyone.
Excellent biography of an overshadowed king.......2004-02-12
This proves to be an excellent biography on Louis XIII who usually don't get too much attention by historians since he was often totally overshadowed by Cardinal Richelieu or by his heir, Louis XIV. But this well written and easy to read biography, the author showed the Louis XIII was an equal if not a controlling element of a partnership that grew between him and Cardinal Richelieu. Through both men, France grew and became the next European super power. People of France suffered for that growth and men like Richelieu were often damned by later history as villians and monsters (Three Musketeers book for example). What was so interesting about this biography was the author make it so clear how politically and personally acute Louis XIII was in the first place. His support of Richelieu, during good times and bad, revealed a highly focus and mature mind. While his personality wasn't anything to bragged about, his quirks and eccentic behavior can be overlooked as long as he had his eye on the ball and kept on going. A book written with great insight, understanding and nicely researched, I am sure it will be a bit before this book will be surpassed.
An exhaustively detailed portrait of a king........2003-03-13
From his boyhood until he became king at the age of 14, we have the explanation to his moods, that reflected on his growing personality.
Within a few years after he set the crown of France on his head, slowly but with determination he started to implement his views, dispite all oposition from his mother and the old feudal nobility, who didn't appreciate a slash on it's privileges.
Louis XIII and his chief-minister Richelieu formed a terrible but effective pair aimed at constructing a solid country out of several kingdoms.
What a diference from the week Louis XIII depicted on the classic "The Three Musketeers" by Alexandre Dumas.
If it wasn't so exhaustive, particulary in the king's younger years, it would be quicly read.
Engrossing subject, superbly depicted!.......1999-11-17
This is the best historical biography I have ever read.
That said, my one complaint is the failure to include genealogy charts for the French and Spanish royal houses. Readers need these charts.
On the other hand, there are several excellent illustrations, and the characters that they represent are so skillfully drawn in words that they assume truly human dimensions, a rarity in historical biography!
The characters in this history include the king's widowed mother (and bitter political foe); his wife Anne, childless for over twenty years before Louis XIV was born (she often befriended outrageous schemers and troublemakers); Cardinal Richelieu, Louis's brilliant partner (he attracted deadly hostility from many directions); and Gaston, Louis's brother, who threatened to overthrow the king. Louis's illegitimate half-brothers and sisters were reared at court and created problems as well.
The king's "favourites," both male and female, are a fascinating group in their own right. They could fill a book of their own. I will use the extensive bibliography to learn more about particular characters and events in the life of Louis XIII.
The main character was a king at the age of eight, following his father's assassination. Violence and insurrection threatened the king through much of his life. The story of his public triumph against political opposition, often at immense personal cost, is a gripping one. Military, political, and diplomatic events are described extremely well, while the court and its characters can almost be seen and felt. Professor Moote tells the life story of a complex and very human individual who occupied an extraordinary position. It is a moving story.
I hope that Professor Moote will write more about the history of France. Please!
Engrossing subject, superbly depicted!.......1999-11-17
This is the best historical biography I have ever read.
That said, my one complaint is the failure to include genealogy charts for the French and Spanish royal houses. Readers need these charts.
On the other hand, there are several excellent illustrations, and the characters that they represent are so skillfully drawn in words that they assume truly human dimensions, a rarity in historical biography!
The characters in this history include the king's widowed mother (and bitter political foe); his wife Anne, childless for over twenty years before Louis XIV was born (she often befriended outrageous schemers and troublemakers); Cardinal Richelieu, Louis's brilliant partner (he attracted deadly hostility from many directions); and Gaston, Louis's brother, who threatened to overthrow the king. Louis's illegitimate half-brothers and sisters were reared at court and created problems as well.
The king's "favourites," both male and female, are a fascinating group in their own right. They could fill a book of their own. I will use the extensive bibliography to learn more about particular characters and events in the life of Louis XIII.
The main character was a king at the age of eight, following his father's assassination. Violence and insurrection threatened the king through much of his life. The story of his public triumph against political opposition, often at immense personal cost, is a gripping one. Military, political, and diplomatic events are described extremely well, while the court and its characters can almost be seen and felt. Professor Moote tells the life story of a complex and very human individual who occupied an extraordinary position. It is a moving story.
I hope that Professor Moote will write more about the history of France. Please!
Average customer rating:
- History of basketball as seen through the eyes of a player
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Outside Shooter: A Memoir
Philip Raisor
Manufacturer: University of Missouri Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
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ASIN: 0826214843 |
Customer Reviews:
History of basketball as seen through the eyes of a player.......2004-01-13
Outside Shooter: A Memoir is the personal autobiography of professional basketball player Philip Raisor. The pressure of serving in a team sport in the 1950's is aptly recalled (especially since this was an era when American society first took steps toward integration in professional team sports), steps as hotly resisted in the area of athletic competition as anywhere else. Both Philip's physical struggles and difficulties of conscience are astutely and honestly detailed in superbly insightful work which is especially recommended to the attention of anyone interested in the history of basketball as seen through the eyes of a player on the front lines.
Book Description
Play It Again, Sam is a timely investigation of a topic that until now has received almost no critical attention in film and cultural studies: the cinematic remake. As cinema enters its second century, more remakes are appearing than ever before, and these writers consider the full range: Hollywood films that have been recycled by Hollywood, such as The Jazz Singer, Cape Fear, and Robin Hood; foreign films including Breathless; and Three Men and a Baby, which Hollywood has reworked for American audiences; and foreign films based on American works, among them Yugoslav director Emir Kusturica's Time of the Gypsies, which is a "makeover" of Coppola's Godfather films. As these essays demonstrate, films are remade by other films (Alfred Hitchcock went so far as to remake his own The Man Who Knew Too Much) and by other media as well.
The editors and contributors draw upon narrative, film, and cultural theories, and consider gender, genre, and psychological issues, presenting the "remake" as a special artistic form of repetition with a difference and as a commercial product aimed at profits in the marketplace. The remake flourishes at the crossroads of the old and the new, the known and the unknown. Play It Again, Sam takes the reader on an eye-opening tour of this hitherto unexplored territory.
Customer Reviews:
Nuggets Amidst the Jargon.......2002-04-18
The nineteen essays collected here (along with introduction and afterword) grapple with various aspects of cinematic "remakes", and while most have something to offer the general reader, many get bogged down in attempting to find a definition or critical space for remakes. In other words, to get to the good stuff, you're going to have to wade through a lot of critical jargon from psychoanalytic film theory and cultural studiesýwords such as "intertextuality," "oedipal" and "postmodernity" pop up a lot. That caveat aside, there are plenty of nuggets to reward the patient reader.
Albert Kolker's "Recalculating the Hitchcock Formula" is an intriguing analysis of Martin Scorcese's Cape Fear, in which it is proposed that Scorcese remade Cape Fear by simultaneously remaking Hitchcock's Stage Fright, I Confess, and Stranger on a Train. Dan Georgakas's essay on Robin Hood effectively shows how the 1938 and 1991 versions each embodied the cultural and political trends of their time. Michael Brashinsky's considers Bergman's Virgin Spring and Wes Craven's The Last House of the Left in an examination of how a to remake a European "art" film into a low-budget slasher picture. In "The Superhero With A Thousand Faces," Luca Somigli provides a cogent analyses of the relationship of superhero film franchises such as Batman and Superman to their comic-book sources. His elegant conclusion is that such projects are based on the accumulated myth of the characters and setting, rather than being remakes. My favorite essay is Elisabeth Weis's exploration on how the film M*A*S*H was adapted for television and managed to continually reinvent itself while maintaining audience loyalty. Other essays have their moments, but the ones above will be the most accessible and interesting to the general reader.
Book Description
This digital document is an article from Cineaste, published by Cineaste Publishers, Inc. on September 22, 1998. The length of the article is 699 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: Play It Again Sam: Retakes on Remakes.(Review)
Author: Justin Wyatt
Publication:
Cineaste (Magazine/Journal)
Date: September 22, 1998
Publisher: Cineaste Publishers, Inc.
Volume: 23
Issue: 4
Page: 61(1)
Article Type: Book Review
Distributed by Thomson Gale
Average customer rating:
- Right On!
- Funny funny and highly enjoyable
- Fiction and Journalism
- Off the Bus Wolfe Becomes Social Critic, Timeless Insights
- Absolutely Delightful.
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Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers
Tom Wolfe
Manufacturer: Bantam
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From Bauhaus to Our House
ASIN: 0553380621
Release Date: 1999-10-05 |
Customer Reviews:
Right On!.......2007-05-10
You know, the more I read him, the more I am convinced that Tom Wolfe is the world's greatest living writer. In fact I'm getting to the stage that if he wrote out his back shopping lists and released it on Amazon I'd probably buy it. Is Radical Chic the greatest work under about 60pages in the English language? You'll never think of Leonard Bernsteen (Bern - stein!) again without smirking.......
Funny funny and highly enjoyable.......2007-04-29
I read this years ago and rereading it now I am reminded of what a hilariously funny writer Wolfe is. Wolfe 's description of the super- in-radical chic crowd as they patronize and entertain the guntoting Black Panthers is ferociously clever. Wolfe analyzes what he calls 'nostalgie de boue' the 'nostalgia for the mud' and gives a brief course in the history of High Society in America. The old money always holds its nose as the new money until it it is replaced by it.
Wolfe is especially funny when he takes off on accents. Here is a small sample," Otto Preminger speaks up from the sofa where he's sitting, also just a couple of feet from (Black Panther) Cox. "He used one important word" then he looks at Cox'"you said zis is de most repressive country in de world. I don't beleef zat"
Wolfe gives us a blow- by - blow account of the famous party at the Bernstein's residence.He also tells of the aftemath when Charlotte Curtis gives her New York Times Report and the radical chic crowd is astonished to find themselves abandoned by the key institution of American liberalism, the 'New York Times Editorial Page'.
In the second essay Wolfe goes to the West Coast and describes the white liberal establishment encountering the newly militant minorities angered at the bureaucracy of the poverty program.
This is a funny funny and highly enjoyable book.
Fiction and Journalism.......2006-06-14
The cringing white liberal and the self-serving bureaucrat, the sychophantic Jewish silver-spoon socialist and the cunning black race-baiting political opportunist -- these are the types of characters that Tom Wolfe elucidates with wicked satire in his stories, which are a titillating admixture of acid fiction and scathing journalism. The types in this book, moreover, seem to be a fixture of the contemorary world, and their elucidation by Wolfe amounts to a humorous education in past forms. One cannot help but note that militant Islam receives the same perverted reception from several quarters as did the likes of the Black Panther movement of yore.
Off the Bus Wolfe Becomes Social Critic, Timeless Insights .......2006-02-19
Radical Chic is timeless and as relevant today as when Wolfe put his politically incorrect observations down in writing. Wolfe is like a mirror of inescapable truth to those blinded by their sense of personal wisdom and charity.
Mau-Mauing the Flack Catchers captures the tidal pond where government and neighborhood activists interact.
Wolfe has the eye of a reporter mixed with the sense of story to chronicle events in a way that needs little narration.
Both should be required reading in every school of journalism and by every public official in the land.
Absolutely Delightful........2004-11-05
I can't believe it took me this long to get around to reading this book. Here we see the rich and famous cavorting with violent anti-white, anti-American, and anti-Semitic criminals during the 1960s. It's hard to say who these pampered masochistic high society types hated more; themselves or their own people. Wolfe's recounting of Leonard Bernstein's "ode to the Panthers" party is outstanding. It's great journatlism. Heck, you know a situation is surreal when Barbara Walters is a voice of reason at a social gathering.
As a writer, Wolfe, could not possibly have done a better job. The narrator is everywhere but is not himself a character in the proceedings. He may be a fly on the wall but he is a fly that takes copious notes. The details are magnificent and he has a savant's eye for great quotations. You'll laugh, you'll rage, the limousine liberals and champagne socialists will astound you. The book was written over 30 years ago but it is just as applicable today as one could replace The Black Panthers with a nineties fellon like Mumia Abu Jamal. The section on mau-mauing, or the fine art of the racial shakedown, is totally priceless. It too is as applicable to the present as to the past. Wolfe foreshadows the great future successes of Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson at coercing cash out of whites who willingly give it away to ease their politically correct minds. A magnificent effort and, at 10 bucks, the price isn't bad--a pity that he didn't write another 200 pages.
Book Description
RADICAL CHIC and MAU-MAUING THE FLAK CATCHERS, Tom Wolfe's fourth book of social commentary, consists of two devastatingly funny essays, dealing with political stances and social styles in a status-minded world.
In RADICAL CHIC, Wolfe describes the courting of romantic radicals -- Black Panthers, striking grapeworkers, Young Lords -- by the social elite. In the companion essays, the author travels west to survey another meeting between militant minorities and the liberal white establishment. Wolfe's account of the performances of such masters as the Mission Rebels, Youth for the Future and the New Thang, and the responses of the catchers of the flak, including the mayor himself, makes for uproarious farce, more so because it's true.
Average customer rating:
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Winning With the Nimzo-Indian
Raymond Keene
Manufacturer: Hardinge Simpole Limited
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Binding: Paperback
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ASIN: 1843820587 |
Book Description
70% of M&A’s fail, yet deals are essential for growing world-class companies
How have the most successful deal makers consistently defied this paradox and beaten the odds? The answer is by using a disciplined approach to deal making, focusing on just four key decisions.Most other books on M&A are more comprehensive, covering all aspects of the deal from planning to integration.
This book offers a distinct contribution to M&A literature in that it purposefully focuses on the due diligence that must be done before a decision to make a deal ever happens. It identifies the key factors that are most critical to whether or not a merger succeeds. Get this right, and your chances of success are much greater.
Customer Reviews:
Relatively good read with M&A process nicely laid out but several weak areas.......2007-06-11
Overall, this is a good book where the M&A process is nicely laid out and with critical decisions clearly explained. The part on why you should go away from a deal is valuable as it is always forgotten in other M&A books. There are several weak areas nonetheless in this book. The link with strategy is a bit simplistic: "organic growth is not enough, you have to acquire to really grow... and we have the data backing this claim." It is as easy to prove or contradict, depending on what you want to say - and recent financial litterature (and real life examples) tends to contradict this claim. Examples are sometimes not adequate. In particular, the ultimate strategic choice made in the Newell/Rubbermaid case and praised by the authors is a mere corporate strategy 101 mistake. Typically you would integrate some of the operations but not the marketing/channels, and certainly not the brands. I don't know any commodity products that managed to become high-end branded ones. By the way, the CEO who is praised in the book got kicked out by N/R around the time of the book release (and his track record is not fabulous). Otherwise, the book is easy to read and enjoyable - except the beginning which is a bit long. The last area that I found a bit annoying is the continuous repetition of how good Bain's studies backing the book are. When you look closely, these studies are merely several interesting but lose statistical analysis that are mostly based on CEO interviews who have themselves a vested interest in saying how good they are at M&A. Nothing to brag about. But all in all, this is a relatively good read.
Excellent M&A Book.......2005-07-15
Mergers and acquisitions (M&A) are often essential to a company's growth and viability. However, a staggering 70 percent of mergers fail, often with devastating consequences for all concerned. For executives contemplating a deal, Mastering the Merger is filled with excellent, actionable advice. It is written in a tight, compelling way that business leaders will find quite useful.
Mastering the Merger focuses on the importance of due diligence well before targets are identified and M&A decisions are made. Specifically, it describes:
1. The most important questions prospective acquirers must ask before consummating any deal, regardless of size. Here the authors show executives how to ask and answer the big questions.
2. Strategies and tactics to effectively target acquisitions and close deals.
3. How to decide which aspects of a newly acquired business to leave independent and which to integrate. The authors focus here on how to integrate quickly but where it matters.
4. How to anticipate and deal with contingencies. The emphasis is on how to predict and manage the unexpected.
Authors David Harding and Sam Rovit are partners at Bain and Company, an elite business consulting firm that specializes in increasing the underlying market value of companies. Because successful mergers are a key method of increasing a company's value, Harding and Rovit are in an excellent position to share what works and what does not.
Packed with Knowledge!.......2005-06-08
The odds are overwhelmingly against merger success - academic studies say 70% of mergers fail. Yet the biggest, most successful companies in the world grew through mergers and acquisitions. Building a global corporation from organic growth alone is nearly impossible. In this excellent discussion of merger basics, authors David Harding and Sam Rovit point out some facts that most academic analyses of mergers ignore. They show how successful acquirers tilt the odds in their favor. The secret is experience, doing a lot of small deals and focusing relentlessly on each investment. The mergers most likely to falter are the big deals that make the papers and wind up proving the academic case that most mergers fail. We encourage CEOs to read this book - especially CEOs whose consultants and investment bankers have been advising them to acquire or merge.
Book Description
Ultimately, the success or failure of a merger grows out of the decisions made by executives at critical junctures throughout the transaction. Using the case of Kellogg, this chapter illustrates that the better people are at handling the four imperatives of a business combination, the more successful the merger is likely to be.
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