This is a reprint of the 1st edition (1914); Bridges continued writing until his death in 1930. The 2nd edition (1936, reprinted 1942-47) includes more poetry, and a further reissue (1953) added his long work, The Testament of Beauty. You might as well seek out a copy of that 1953 edition (reprinted 1959-64), which at 700 pages is a much fuller volume. His lovely, perfect short poems are here in the 1st ed., though, if that’s all you’re looking for. “Beautiful must be the mountains whence ye come, And bright in the fruitful valleys the streams, wherefrom Ye learn your song…” (”Nightingales”)

Zip file of the entire book (4.7MB)

I like reading ERB. I have a problem with alot of fantasy or scifi authors that are in mass production now, they have a certain pompousness about them that is really off putting to me as a reader. ERB doesn’t have that at all, his narrative style is direct and simple. His characters are always enjoyable, this is the first non-Tarzan book that I have read (I have more waiting for me on my shelf) and the first told in first person too. (Though I see from the others that Tarzan seems to be an exception in the third person narration)

David Innes, like Tarzan is a man forced back into his primal ways by circumstance, with his superior mind though he is able to rise above the creatures that live in the core of the Earth. (Another common theme in ERB, brawn without brains will only take you so far). A sort of pantheon is set up, not unlike the Norse gods, there is Hooja the sly one and Perry, something like an Odin, Ghak as a sort of Thor and David as our hero, duped by Hooja and forever loyal to Perry, supported by Ghak and other noble and strong men in Pellucidar, slaying the dragons and other nasty critters.

I also enjoyed the character of Dian the Beautiful, she is a little bit more than the average cave woman as he has to come to and she manages to outwit David in certain ways as well, though it seems she is little more than an object of beauty to the other central characters for much of the story.

David is also in an interesting postion between forces of female power, his love for Dian and his hate for the all female race of the Mahars, his ultimate lifting up of Dian and dooming of the Mahars. One man seems to hold all of the power in this book, but considering the ending of the book he only holds it precariously.

It took me a while to get into this book, as it is nothing compared to the last ERB book I read (Tarzan and the Jewels of Opar) however once I figured out which animal was what and the story was flowing I was really interested in it. A very fun read and with a little bit of food for thought just for good measure. Its too bad these books are so hard to find now.

The reader: Mac Kelly accomplishes something with this story rarely seen in audiobook narraration: he actually enhanses the story with his voice. Kelly’s voicing of the wub, in particular, brings out its porcine character better than the actual text. The rest of his narration is equally excellent and the recording environment is nicely silent. Surrounding the actual story are several promotions for other podcasts and audiobooks for sale, but since these are directly related to the story itself, they are unobjectionable and may be useful to some listeners.

Source: Time Traveler Show | MP3
Length: 32 min
Reader: Mac Kelly

The name Philip K Dick emerges quite frequently in any debate over the identity of the world’s greatest science fiction author. Consider, then, the claim that Dick short stories are actually a more impressive achievement than his novels. Excessive, you say? I think it’s true. Dick’s one hundred-odd stories contain at least one mention of most of the ideas that shaped modern imaginative fiction. As such, the five-volume collection of his stories, of which “Beyond Lies the Wub” is the first volume, must be centerpiece of any serious scifi collection.

Dick’s prose is never lavish, but always plain and workable. In a sense this merely disarms us, as we don’t expect such wondrous invention from apparently normal writing. Aside from that limitation, however, these stories range over everything imaginable: from fantastic to prosaic, from the present time to far future settings, and from horror to tragedy to light-hearted wry humor. Two of the best comedy stories in this volume feature Dr. Labyrinth, a kooky inventor who sees problems and solutions quite differently from the rest of the human race. In “The Preservation Machine”, he invents a method for converting musical works to animals, so as the great classical masterpieces can have better odds of survival in a Darwinian world. In “The Short Happy Life of the Brown Oxford”, he discovers that inanimate objects will come to life if they are sufficiently irritated. “The Preservation Machine” ends with the discovery that the struggles of a dog-eat-dog world have transformed the works of Bach and Schubert into hideous bits of cacophany, a prime example of how even Dick’s humorous tales are not without their bite.

On the horror end we have “Colony” and “Meddler”. In “Colony”, a exploration team on a new planet finds that murderous blobs of protoplasm are capable of imitating any inanimate object. As Dick himself says is the end notes: “The Ultimate in paranoia is not believing that everyone is out to get you, but rather that everything is out to get you. “Meddler” tells the tale of reckless engineers who build a mirror scoop for observing the future. Regrettably, their own observations guarantee that the future will be a worse place. How can this be? Dick explains the enigma in high style.

Among the more solid hard sf stories is “Mr. Spaceship”. An elderly professor agrees to have his brain donated to a cause; it will be installed as the command unit for a spaceship, where its intelligence will allow it to navigate alien minefields. However, the titular vessel has plans of its own, and may prove capable of outwitting both the humans and the aliens. It’s a fine example of Dick’s faith in individual cleverness against the mass stupidity of government, bureaucracy and corporatism.

It’s hard to pick a best story from such a volume; it’s a classic case of ‘they’re all so good’. Top honors would have to go to “The Little Movement”. A bizarre old man sells toy soldiers to unsuspecting children. But who’s really in charge of the operation, and how can such a sinister scheme be stopped? In second place comes “Nanny”, a triumph of wicked humor and shrewd observations of human nature. Mechanical nannies are sold to suburban families, but (as always) there’s more going on than meets the eye. In this one, Dick correctly anticipated how parental obsession with child safety would come to overrule common sense.

The reader: Mark Nelson is an excellent reader. His voice is clear and masculine with a wholesome sound. The recording is noiselessly clean. Nelson adds in a little laser-beam sound effect after the Librivox disclaimer. It’s silly, but it shows that he really cares about the product he’s producing and giving away. For more of his readings,

Source: Librivox
Length: 7 hr, 4 min
Reader: Mark Nelson

“Plague Ship” (1956) was one the first science fiction novels I ever checked out of our local library (I can still close my eyes and see that one dinky little shelf, crammed with some of SFs’ greatest juvenile authors: Norton; Heinlein; Del Rey; Nourse).

This book contains the second ‘Solar Queen’ adventure. Norton’s four-book series about the trader-crew of the ‘Solar Queen’ ended in 1969 with “Postmarked the Stars” but beware! Lesser authors have butted into the series, presumably with Norton’s permission since this remarkable Gandalf Grand Master of Fantasy and Nebula Grand Master just recently passed away after a long and extremely fruitful career (her first novel was published in 1934, her latest fantasy in 2005).

One ‘Solar Queen’ rip-off to avoid at all costs is “Redline: the Stars.”

Norton’s ‘Solar Queen’ stories are told from the viewpoint of Dane Thorson, an apprentice-Cargo Master who is introduced in “Sargasso of Space,” the first ‘Solar Queen’ novel, as a “lanky, very young man in an ill-fitting Trader’s tunic.” Most of this author’s heroes and heroines are young, uncertain of themselves, shy, with a tendency to trip over their own enthusiasms and load themselves up with guilt at the slightest opportunity. They are very likeable and their adventures are narrated in remarkably lean prose with just the right touch of description.

After ten years of schooling, orphan Dane Thorson is assigned via a computer analysis of his psychological profile–not to a safe berth on a sleek Company-run starship that his classmates were vying for–but to a battered tramp of a Free Trader. To say that the ‘Solar Queen’ “lacked a great many refinements and luxurious fittings which the Company ships boasted” was an understatement. But she was a tightly-run ship and what she lacked in refinement, she made up for in adventure. Dane soon settles in under Cargo Master Van Rycke and learns “to his dismay what large gaps unfortunately existed in his training.”

Sometimes I just want to give Dane a big hug.

“Plague Ship” takes the crew of the ‘Solar Queen’ to Sargol, where the enigmatic feline natives seem very reluctant to trade away their fabulous scented gemstones. When Dane Thorson discovers an herb that the Salariki are willing to swap for their gems, he fears that his eagerness to make a trade breakthrough might have poisoned a native child.

That becomes the least of his worries when the ‘Solar Queen’ blasts off from Sargol with invisible, undetectable stowaways that would brand the free traders anathema to all inhabited worlds.

In space, the more senior members of the ‘Solar Queen’s’ crew succumb to a strange plague that resembles sleeping sickness. Dane and his fellow-apprentices, with the assistance of Captain Jellico’s Hoobat (a sort of blue parrot-lizard, or at least that’s how I’ve always pictured it) discover the source of the plague: venomous hitch-hikers from Sargol. “It walked erect on two threads of legs…a bulging abdomen sheathed in the horny substance of a beetle’s shell ended in a sharp point.” It was only about a foot-and-a-half high and could change color like a chameleon.

The Hoobat kills and eats the first creature, and then the hunt is on for others of its kind.

Even with the source of the sleeping sickness discovered, the ‘Solar Queen’s’ young apprentices must still convince the rest of the galaxy that they are not a plague ship–and therefore eligible to be destroyed on sight without warning.

The ‘Solar Queen’ novels are prime representatives of Norton’s lean action-packed brand of story-telling (at least the ones she solo-authored.) If you haven’t read them since you were a teen-ager, I urge you to try them again. For a few pleasant hours, you will be immersed in the adventures of a likeable, feisty band of free traders on exotic, carefully-drawn alien worlds.

Zip file of the entire book 429 MB

The stories in this book, first published in 1855, are wonderful. All of the famous Olympian heroes and gods are here in well-told stories, written in fine prose at a level simple enough for small children. The back cover says that the book contains, “Evocative myths of Greece and Rome; Action-packed tales of the Norse gods; Original text, untouched and unabridged; First full-color illustrated edition of a timeless classic.” All true.

However, what the back cover also says is that the book contains, “Specially created illustrations and maps by a world-renowned artist.” Very misleading. Don’t let the “world-renowned artist” phrase fool you. Treat it like the throw-away phrase, “critics rave” applied to movies in the daily newspaper.

My first issue is with the artist’s drawing ability. His is on the same level as those who draw the cheap superhero cartoons on Nickoleon on Saturday morning. Not really a problem in itself, it’s just disappointing that such well-crafted stories should be coupled with such bad “art.”

The other, much bigger, problem is the way the people are posed and the way their features are presented. I do not object to nudity per se; I am very familiar with Greek, Roman, and Christian high art. But Giovanni Caselli’s drawings are not the tastefully done nudes of antiquity. They are more like the drawings seen in men’s magazines. They are not classically beautiful, not even romantically seductive. They are just cheaply sexual. There are dozens of these inappropriate drawings, spread liberally throughout the book. They will be very distracting to your child and — if you have any culture at all — distressing to you.

Just because something is childish does not mean it is fit for children. Unless you are looking to introduce your children to poor art and soft porn, I would recommend you skip this book. The good Christian, Jewish, Heathen, Asatru, etc., parent who wants to raise a classically educated child should get the original stories without these illustrations.

War and Peace (Russian:

If you run a business in which there are employees other than yourself, then chances are that you’ve hired the wrong person a time or two. It can be a huge disappointment when that happens- a time consuming and costly one, and one that takes its toll on the employee as well as on the company. The authors reveals how to avoid the time and the upset by hiring the right person on the first go-round. Although this book focuses on the hiring of middle and upper management individuals, their advice translates for hiring down through the ranks as well.

You will learn how to define your outcome for each hiring campaign, how to interview more effectively, and how to motivate the ideal candidate to join your company. There are other books on Amazon with similar subject matter, but none with the extensive research that supports the findings presented by the authors here.

Like other reviewers, I wish I’d had this book about 8 years ago. If this book only helps you to make one great hire, it will have paid for itself 1000’s of times over.

This book must be flying off the shelves at Amazon’s warehouses, and for good reason. It is a welcome diversion to the anger-fear-nausea that has churned within me over the past few weeks and months. This hot-off-the-presses book can guide me in constructive thought and planning.

Will we have deflation or inflation? Schiff believes it will be deflation for big-ticket items typically purchased with debt (dwellings, education); for everything else there will be inflation. The reader should study this book, analyze his reasoning behind his recommendations, and evaluate how (or whether) to apply his strategy. As for me, his words sound spot-on, but I wonder if global markets are sufficiently decoupled for his advice (get out of $US) to be effective right now. On page 136 he states that decoupling is inevitable, but how long will it take to happen? No one really knows the answer to that.

This is written for people at various stages of life: students contemplating education and career choices, mid-career people looking for shelter from the storm, and retirees who want to maintain the best possible lifestyle and health care on fixed funds.

He lists pros and cons of various investment vehicles that can take you to other global markets (ETF, ETN, Mutual Funds, ADR, etc.), and how you may preserve the value of your domestic funds with precious metals and a very select few US investments. You won’t find hot stock tips here. Instead Schiff shows you how to approach finding the best regional economies / countries / companies in which to invest, and provides some general directions to start your search.

Lastly, this is not an entirely pessimistic book. (Thank you Mr. Schiff!) I’m not ready to head for a bunker in Mexico with canned food and toilet paper - but he does recommend you stockpile foodstuffs and other essentials at home because inflation will erode your purchasing power. He has (cautious) hope for America, but acknowledges the next decade could get grim. You must be particularly wise now to avoid getting hit by the Destitution Bus. This book, along with much research, reflection, and planning can show you how.

Get it from Librivox

Here is the first chapter.

I found the book an easy read. It was informative to find out the day to day life of an average soldier in the Confederacy during the last part of the Civil War. In many ways though I wish the author would have been more specific with details, but I had to remember of the time (1882) in which he wrote. He was really a product of the time, the flowery language shows and I accept this. Still some of the descriptions seemed intentionally vague, as if he was scared at offending some one, or worse yet stirring up old emotions. I would however, recommend it to a person studying the day to day life of a soldier in the Army of Northern Virginia.

George Orwell.

With the possible exception of one young German lawyer there are no revolutionary acts in John Le Carre’s “A Most Wanted Man”. Rather, we have high-level functionaries from German, British, and US intelligence agencies for whom deceit is the norm and truth plays, at best, a secondary role in acting in what is or may be in each country’s national interest. In tone and substance this is not much different from Le Carre’s Cold War fiction. The trick is to see whether the same cynical realism plays as well in today’s `war on terror’. Le Carre’s transition from the Cold War to the brave new world post-9/11 is excellent. The result is a book that is dark, cynical, and almost as rewarding as the best of Le Carre’s earlier fiction.

The most wanted man in question is Issa. Issa is the product of the rape of a Chechnyan woman by a Red Army Colonel stationed in Chechnya. Raised by his father in Russia, Issa flees to the west after his father dies. Issa finds his way to Hamburg and despite his famished look it appears that Issa has connection to money and influence. He is also, apparently, a Muslim and because of his Chechnyan heritage he is identified by Russian intelligence agencies as a suspected terrorist. German, US, and British intelligence agencies based in Hamburg quickly identify him as a person of interest. The other main protagonists are Annabel Richter and Tommy Brue. Richter is a newly qualified attorney who has foregone work in private practice to work for a German civil rights organization created to assist immigrants and refugees in normalizing their status in Germany. Brue is a private banker whose bank is the depository of the significant funds Issa may lay claim to.

Le Carre does a wonderful job portraying Issa, Richter, and Brue. Issa is a total cipher. He has a naïve innocence about him (think of Chance from Jerzy Kosinki’s Being There) that takes the reader in one direction in assessing his motives and the real reason for his presence in Germany. Yet there are enough anomalies and discrepancies in his story and in his remarks to Richter and Brue that make you go, “hold on a moment, there’s more here than meets the eye.” Richter is something of a naif, her idealism tends to obscure her ability to cast a truly critical eye over the gaps in Issa’s story.

Tennyson once wrote:

“That a lie which is half a truth is ever the blackest of lies;
That a lie which is all a lie may be met and fought with outright;
But a lie which is part a truth is a harder matter to fight.”

Le Carre writes with exquisite precision and insight about a world in which truth is not a matter worth fighting for. Highly recommended.

Zip file of the entire book - 93MB

Reading simple adventures for young people should be a staple for children. As they mature, they will be exposed to new and unfamiliar circumstances and learning about how others dealt with new situations will help prepare them.
This book is not about a haunted house, quite the contrary, while the house is abandoned and could be considered spooky; the children have no qualms about entering. Alan is a boy living in a beached houseboat with his widowed mother. Pete and Chris are a brother and sister who live nearby and when they meet, they quickly become friends. Alan’s late father was one of two brothers whose father owned a house nearby. When Alan’s grandfather died, his will could not be found. The grandfather had stated that he was going to leave the house to Alan’s father, but with no formal document and another brother, the matter had been tied up in litigation for years.
Alan regularly goes into the house to explore and once he meets Pete and Chris, they start accompanying him. As they are leaving the house one day, Alan notices a footprint indicating that someone else has entered the house. This is the beginning of a mystery that the trio investigates. To do so, they must conquer their fear and engage in some significant deductive reasoning and they are able to do both.
The plot of this book is at the right level and complexity for young people. The main characters must think things through and be brave, yet young readers will be able to follow the plot and the danger to the children is minor. It is a good exercise in critical thinking for the child in the middle years of elementary school.

I would think that Marx has had both good and bad rep and that his detractors and fans have taken his legacy further than it deserved. So how should he be viewed? I submit that there are 4 ways to do so and all of them are mutually important. They are 1) Economic, 2) Intellectual, 3) Political and 4) Moral.

Marx based his economic views on the premise that all value of a good produced comes from the labor that goes into it. Intuitively this seems wrong. What of the capital, management, demand (by the way Marx does not like the idea of supply and demand either) etc. Our experience shows that all of these and more play a role in determining what value a thing has. Iteratively the Marxist model of economy then suffers from its imperfect premise. His contention of lack of sustainable profits etc make sense if you agree with his premise but that is not how it shapes out in the modern World. All in all it seems that Marx misses the point about how economy works, and given his incredible intelligence, you wonder why.

I think the reason is in the intellectual workings of his mind. Now it appears that most of human experience happens in shades of gray or on a spectrum. Very few things actually are definite “this or that”. This is particularly true of psychology, sociology and also economics. Perhaps the very fact that so many variables come to bear on any given situation that it would be impossible to reproduce that situation again reliably. Hence much of these fields are understood along a spectrum and minor variation in observation is to be expected from event to event and from time to time. Unfortunately many people tend to think of the World as an absolute. For this, against that, regardless of the circumstances (abortion, death penalty, taxes etc come to mind). Marx takes the notion of value of labor from Adam Smith and particularly David Ricardo and fixates upon it as the only determinant of value of a good. Intellectually it boxes him in an inflexible position where he has to stick to his position. Eventually this inflexibility dooms him.

Marx built upon his economic position to develop a political scenario that just did not happen - not sustainably. I think here the folly is not that the position was wrong but rather that when he makes his predictions: “….exploiters will be expropriated …”, he never says how it would come about. This would not be so bad if more of his writings actually had some sort of road map of how you get to this utopia, but they don’t.

Finally, is he as bad as I have made him out to be? Well, you be the judge. This is a man writing at the tail end of the initial experience of the industrial revolution. He devotes a large part of Capital to vivid descriptions of young children being dragged out of bed at 2 and 3 in the morning to work in horrible factories, of starving mothers giving up their children to horrendous working conditions in phosphorus match factories where they would die within a few years or were horribly afflicted, of terrible lung diseases in potters or resistance to reducing the average work day to a mere 18 hours. He sees all these and cries out. What follows may be flawed but is grounded in a deep human sympathy. And his experience resonates today with us when we think that perhaps the working poor ought to at least get a living wage, or people must not have to make a decision between rent and medicines and children ought not to die because access of healthcare was not affordable.

The Black Arrow tells the story of Richard (Dick) Shelton during the Wars of the Roses: how he becomes a knight, rescues his lady Joanna Sedley, and obtains justice for the murder of his father, Sir Harry Shelton. Outlaws in Tunstall Forest organized by Ellis Duckworth, whose weapon and calling card is a black arrow, cause Dick to suspect that his guardian Sir Daniel Brackley and his retainers are responsible for his father’s murder. Dick’s suspicions are enough to turn Sir Daniel against him, so he has no recourse but to escape from Sir Daniel and join the outlaws of the Black Arrow against him. This struggle sweeps him up into the greater conflict surrounding them all. The story of the Wars of the Roses is told in miniature by The Black Arrow. (Summary from Wikipedia)

Zip file of the entire book 237 MB

Thanks largely to Max Brod and scores of subsequent literary commentators who read Franz Kafka through Beckettesque lenses, the image of Kafka most of us grew up with is of a tortured, self-loathing, desperately unhappy and hopelessly ill prophet who’d looked into the abyss, recognized the futility of existence and the absence of God, and tried to write about it in allegorical tales in which he’s usually the thinly disguised protagonist. Given this settled picture of who Kafka is and what he’s all about, plowing through one of his books can be a pretty grim task, unbearably heavy, dark, gloomy.

The virtue of Louis Begley’s The Tremendous World I Have Inside My Head is that he helps us take a fresh look at the author whom the “Kafkaesque” school of interpreters has almost ruined for many of us. Relying heavily on Kafka’s own words in his journals and letters, Begley invites us to re-think Kafka. In the first place, he allows us to see that Kafka’s personal life wasn’t the ubiquitously dark and tragic closet thing it’s commonly thought to be. Kafka was as capable of laughter, frivolity, calm, and immersion in the quotidian as the rest of us. He was well-known rather than reclusive during his lifetime, and entered with gusto into the wrangles and feuds typical of the literati. (Kafka tells us, for example, that he hates fellow author Franz Werfel because of his wealth, health, and youth.)

Second, Begley argues that there’s an “intrinsic and unshakable humanism” in Kafka’s work that is frequently overlooked by commentators and readers who’ve been trained to see his work as exclusively allegorical, darkly religious (or perhaps anti-religious), and politically prophetic. This doesn’t mean that the dark side isn’t in Kafka. It obviously is. It’s just to say that it ought not be the one standard by which we read and judge his work.

Finally, Begley worries that these ideological readings of Kafka disregard in an almost total way the very thing that Kafka most wanted to be known for: the aesthetic value of his work. Kafka was a craftsman of the highest order who would labor mightily–some might say obsessively–over single sentences and paragraphs. He had a message he wanted to convey, naturally. But he also wanted to chisel beautiful word sculptures.

After reading Begley’s book, I had two responses. First, I realized, with a great sense of relief and liberation, just how Brodbeaten I’ve been for years, and how Brod’s gloomy interpretations of Kafka have diminished rather than enhanced my ability to appreciate Kafka–so much so, to be honest, that it’s been years since I’ve even tried to read him. Second, Begley’s book prompted me walk over to my bookshelf, take down The Trial, blow the dust off it, and begin anew.

What more could one ask from a book about Kafka?