The Zebrafish: Genetics, Genomics and Informatics, Volume 77, Second Edition (Methods in Cell Biology)

Book Description

This volume of Methods in Cell Biology, the second of two parts on the subject of zebrafish, provides a comprehensive compendia of laboratory protocols and reviews covering all the new methods developed since 1999. This second volume covers advances in forward and reverse genetic techniques, provides an update on the zebrafish genome and gene/mutant mapping technologies, examines the new systems for efficient transgenesis in the zebrafish, provides an in-depth view of informatics and the emerging field of comparative genomics, and considers the extensive infrastructure now available to the zebrafish community.

* Details state-of-the art zebrafish protocols, delineating critical steps in the procedures as well as potential pitfalls
* Illustrates many techiques in full-color
* Summarizes the Zebrafish Genome Project

Customer Reviews:

Boring.......2001-08-16

I found the book to be dull and not very informative. It was a waste of money. There are much better books out there. Did not help me prepare for the exam. Answers to questions were simplistic and not complete.

Book Description

This research-level monograph on harmonic maps between singular spaces sets out much new material on the theory, bringing all the research together for the first time in one place. Riemannian polyhedra are a class of such spaces that are especially suitable to serve as the domain of definition for harmonic maps. Their properties are considered in detail, with many examples being given, and potential theory on Riemmanian polyhedra is also considered. The work will serve as a concise source and reference for all researchers working in this field or a similar one.

Book Description

When The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter was published in 1940, Carson McCullers was instantly recognized as one of the most promising writers of her generation. The novels that followed established her as a master of Southern Gothic.

"McCullers' gift," writes Joyce Carol Oates, "was to evoke, through an accumulation of images and musically repeated phrases, the singularity of experience, not to pass judgment on it." McCullers effortlessly conveyed the raw anguish of her characters and the weird beauty of their perceptions. Set in small Georgia towns that are at once precisely observed and mythically resonant, McCullers' novels explore the strange, sometimes grotesque inner lives of characters who are often marginal and misunderstood. Above all, McCullers possessed an unmatched ability to capture the bewilderment and fragile wonder of adolescence.

In The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, an enigmatic deaf-mute draws out the haunted confessions of an itinerant worker, a young girl, a black doctor, and the widowed owner of a small-town café. Two shorter works, Reflections in a Golden Eye (1941) and The Ballad of the Sad Café (1943), use melodramatic scenarios and freakish characters to explore the disfiguring violence of desire. The Member of the Wedding (1946), on which the play and film were based, tells of a young girl's fascination with her brother's wedding and is perhaps McCullers' most moving and accomplished novel. In Clock Without Hands (1960), the story of a terminally ill druggist, McCullers produces some of her most forceful and indignant social criticism.

Edited by Carlos Dews.

Customer Reviews:

The American Jane Austen?.......2003-12-24

I have read many novels by many writers, both American and foreign, but it's been a good long while since I've read something so penetrating and perceptive as Carson McCuller's first and last novels. The characters in the books, their lives and personalities, are so well thought-out and delineated that you have to wonder how a woman of 23 could put something like this together. Anyway, below is a synopsis of each story in this volume.

The Heart is a Lonely Hunter is the longest of Carson McCullers' novels, and the first. She wrote it in the late `30s, and published it in 1940, when she was 23. It's an incredible first novel, and amazingly prescient and wise for someone of her age, era, and upbringing. The story revolves around a deaf mute, John Singer, who works engraving silverware in a small city in the South somewhere. He has only one friend in the world, another deaf mute who works for his cousin, making candy. As the story begins the candymaker (named Antanopolous) is committed to an asylum, and Singer moves from the home they shared, and slowly begins to acquire a circle of other friends. Principle in this circle are four people: Mick, the daughter of his landlords at the rooming house he lives in; Biff, who runs the diner where he takes his meals; Blount, another denizen of the diner, who wishes to unionize the local mill-workers; and Dr.Copeland, a black man who rages against the injustice of white society towards him and his race. The heart of the story is a character study of these five people, with alternating chapters following the one and then the other. Each is intelligent, in his or her own way, and each has special insights into the world around them. How these characters interact, and the relationships between them and the rest of the world, make the heart of the story and most of the book.

Reflections in a Golden Eye is a shorter story, one of McCullers' novels that is really more of a novella. The plot revolves around a love triangle that develops between two officers on an Army base, and the wife of one of them. There's also a strange, solitary, enigmatic private who tends the horses on the base, and he interacts with the other characters. Frankly, I didn't enjoy this story as much as The Heart is a Lonely Hunter. The characters weren't anywhere near as believable, and their motivations weren't as transparent or understandable. The ending was also somewhat predictable.

The Ballad of the Sad Café is the shortest of McCullers' novels or novellas, weighing in at 60 pages. It's the story of a strange, unpredictable relationship between the standoffish businesswoman who dominates the culture of a small town, and a dwarf hunchback who shows up one day claiming to be her long-lost nephew. How the two of them interact in the story is strange, to say the least, and not wholly explained in the story. This creates an enigmatic atmosphere, and as the story progresses and it becomes obvious we're not going to receive an explanation of things, you find yourself re-reading passages looking for clues as to motivations. I enjoyed this story much more than Reflections in a Golden Eye, perhaps almost as much as The Heart is a Lonely Hunter.

The Member of the Wedding is perhaps McCullers' most strange work. The heart of the book is built around the fantastic intentions and beliefs of a twelve-year-old girl. In the first portion of the book, she's known as Frankie. Later, when she gets the idea she's going to leave with her older brother on his honeymoon, she changes her name to F. Jasmine, and the book follows that convention. Once it develops that she can't go with the brother and his new bride (you knew this was going to happen) she becomes Frances. There isn't much of a plot other than this girl fantasizing about all of the things she's going to be or do, and looking down her nose at all the common people who surround her, who she thinks are beneath her.

Clock Without Hands is the best of McCullers' books other than The Heart is a Lonely Hunter. I now wonder if the length of the books had something to do with whether I liked them or not. She seems to have been able, in the longer books, to build her characters more, and have more plot twists. Clock Without Hands is about a dying pharmacist in a small Georgia town, and the events surrounding his death, but it really turns out to be more about one of his acquaintances, a senile old judge who imagines himself a great leader of the opposition to the desegregation movement. The episodes of the Civil Rights movement, as McCullers recreates them, become at times farcical and silly, and the resistance to the movement altogether silly and irrational.

Library of America volumes are wonderful to hold and read, and this is no exception. The type is clear, the book handy to hold or slip into a pocket. Given McCullers' stature as a writer, I think I'm going to value this book for a good long while.

Magnificent McCullers.......2002-03-11

Carson McCullers, one of America's greatest Southern writers, was often misunderstood, as many people were put off by or unwilling to deal with her (at the time) controversial subject matter. MCCullers used the grotesque as exaggerated symbols of everyday experience. The loneliness and isolation of her gothic-like characters were merely extreme examples of feelings we all have, though magnified and intensified to the nth degree.

Tennessee Williams, in his introduction to MCCullers' "Reflections in a Golden Eye", posed the question (in a mock dialogue) most people asked about writers of the 'gothic' school such as Carson McCullers, Flannery O'Connor, Katherine Anne Porter and Eudora Welty: "Why do they write about such dreadful things?" Williams replies, " In my opinion it is most simply definable as a sense, an intuition of an underlying dreadfulness in modern society.. Why have they got to use..symbols of the grotesque and the violent? Because a book is short and a man's life is long... The awfulness has to be compressed."

McCullers, unlike any writer I have ever read, pierces the heart of themes such as love, isolation, and loneliness with her lucid, poetic prose. Tennessee Williams, in Virginia Spencer Carr's biography of McCullers summed up McCullers' writing as follows: "I have used the word 'heart', but it is not an adequate word to describe the core of Carson McCullers' genius....I believe, in fact I know, that there are many, many with heart who lack the need or gift to express it. And therefore Carson McCullers is what I would call a necessary writer: She owned the heart and the deep understanding of it, but in addition she had that 'tongue of angels' that gave her power to sing of it, to make of it an anthem."

The unique lady of the "South".......2001-10-20

Until very recently, it was quite difficult to find a nice hardback copy of Mc Culler's novels. Each one of them is absolutely priceless and unforgettable; believe me when I tell you that "The Ballad of the Sad Café" is one of those stories that long remain on your mind. Mc Culler's novels, clearly influenced by Faulkner, surpass the master himself in magnetism, , power of storytelling and above all, characterization. If you add to all this a dose of gothic dark strangely ambivalent sense of humour, the result is certainly a writer utterly impossible to classify, novels that you really enjoy reading and characters that you are very unlikely to forget. Besides I am fully in love with the Library of America hardback editions and Mc Cullers certainly deserves to be included in this collection.
Later, if you want to give yourself a treat, go and buy her autobiography, although unfinished, a memorable book.

Average customer rating:

Compelling drama, but oddly cold
A Desultory Battle For Consciousness In The Deep South
maybe mcculler's best
A Strange but Effective Story
The Poetry of Menace

Reflections in a Golden Eye
Carson McCullers
Manufacturer: Mariner Books
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

Classics | General | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

Contemporary | General | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

Literary | General | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

ASIN: 0618084754

Book Description

A new trade paperback edition of McCullers' second novel, REFLECTIONS IN A GOLDEN EYE, immortalized by the 1967 film starring Elizabeth Taylor, Marlon Brando, and John Houston. Set on a Southern army base in the 1930s, REFLECTIONS tells the story of Captain Penderton, a bisexual whose life is upset by the arrival of Major Langdon, a charming womanizer who has an affair with Penderton's tempestuous and flirtatious wife, Leonora. Upon the novel's publication in 1941, reviewers were unsure of what to make of its relatively scandalous subject matter. But a critic for Time Magazine wrote, "In almost any hands, such material would yield a rank fruitcake of mere arty melodrama. But Carson McCullers tells her tale with simplicity, insight, and a rare gift of phrase." Written during a time when McCullers's own marriage to Reeves was on the brink of collapse, her second novel deals with her trademark themes of alienation and unfulfilled loves.

Customer Reviews:

Compelling drama, but oddly cold.......2007-03-04

With its short page count, "Reflections in a Golden Eye" is more of a novella than a novel. What is disappointing about it is that it takes about fifty pages (the majority of the novella) to get involved in the characters and the plot. It starts intriguingly enough, with the promise of a murder involving the central characters ("two officers, a soldier, two women, a Filipino, and a horse."), but McCullers' prose is so cold and distant that it makes the plot inaccessible to the reader. The descriptions of the setting benefit from this and become starkly beautiful -- "Then suddenly the sun was gone. There was a chill in the air and a light, pure wind. It was time for retreat. From far away came the sound of the bugle, clarified by distance and echoing in the woods with a lost hollow tone. The night was near at hand." -- but the characters are rendered so abstruse by it that it feels slightly maddening. After thirty pages someone asked me how the book was so far and the only word that came to mind was bizarre. The violence (both subtle and overt) is startling and seems too unreasoned.

But stick with it. In the last thirty pages or so you begin to comprehend the pathos of the characters and their situations, and suspense begins to build as the novella heads to its shattering climax. What McCullers is exploring is how repressed desire can turn to intense hatred, and how that loathing can turn to violence in one sudden moment. The characters are all stuck in their own traps, and most of them are being driven mad by desperation. At the center is Captain Weldon Penderton, a repressed homosexual whose desires are so internalized that the only expression they can find is rage and despair. When his colleague, and his wife's lover, remarks that another character would do better in life if he conformed to the mainstream a little more Penderton angrily disagrees, bitterly wondering "that any fulfillment obtained at the expense of normalcy is wrong, and should not be allowed to bring happiness. In short, it is better, because it is morally honorable, for the square peg to keep scraping about the round hole rather than to discover and use the unorthodox square that would fit it?" When you consider the ramifications that a life of trying to scrape into a round hole have had on him, you can't help but feel for Penderton. This becomes all the more resonant when you consider that "Reflections in a Golden Eye" was written at a time when McCullers' own marriage (to a bisexual soldier) was failing as a result of their homosexual affairs.

In the end "Reflections" is a startling and intelligent, not to mention socially important, work. I just wish that it wasn't so hard to get into in the first place, because its initial heartlessness is a misgiving. There actually is a lot of emotion and depth in this novella, and yet it is only toward the ending that it truly shines.

A Desultory Battle For Consciousness In The Deep South.......2006-06-23

Carson McCullers' critically overlooked but excellent second novel, Reflections In A Golden Eye (1941), represents the author at the height of her creative powers. At the time of its release, Anais Nin thought the book betrayed the influence of D. H. Lawrence, but a more likely inspiration was fellow Southerner Erskine Caldwell, whose early novels Tobacco Road (1932) and God's Little Acre (1933) shared McCullers' tart black humor. Like Caldwell, McCullers parted the heavy curtains of social respectability and looked human nature unsentimentally in the face: Reflections In A Golden Eye examines infidelity, madness, sexual frustration, emotional insensitivity, erotic obsession, the failure of self actualization, voyeurism, homosexuality, and bisexuality with perfect calm and assurance.

As the first paragraph bluntly reveals, Reflections In A Golden Eye is a tragedy involving "two officers, a soldier, two women, a Filipino, and a horse." The novel takes place on a microcosmic army base in the Deep South: and "an army post in peacetime is a dull place." Despite the insulation of the setting and the generally grotesque inner lives of the cast, the smoothly critical tone of the book suggests that McCullers' characters are largely everymen, and thus essentially no different in any specific manner from the average American man or woman.

The novel's predominant theme is the general lack of self-awareness which, in the author's vision, most members of society, at all levels, enjoy or suffer. The book begs the question, "Which is the greater burden, consciousness or unconsciousness?" McCuller's answer is clear: for most people, the burden of consciousness is by far the heavier cross to bear.

Adulterous, lust-object Leonora Penderton is not only "a little feeble-minded" and inherently "very stupid," but emotionally coarse as well, while her stolid married lover, Major Morris Langdon, keeps "very recondite and literary" books by his bedside but privately longs for the "pulp magazines" featuring "wild, interplanetary superwars" hidden in his bureau drawer.

Alison Langdon, Morris' tense, cuckolded, and perpetually ailing wife, suffers from fits of "madness" which drive her to acts of self-mutilation. Sadly, Alison, the proverbial 'eye among the blind,' is the single character capable of making an accurate assessment of the terrible events unfolding around her. When the exasperated Alison finally announces what she has witnessed, she is diagnosed as mentally ill and taken away, a theme McCullers admirer Tennessee Williams would adopt and develop to great effect in the following decade.

Reflections In A Golden Eye is also dominated by characters who are, to varying degrees, homosexual in some capacity of their natures. The book's main character, secret aesthete, figurative eunuch, and kleptomaniac Captain Weldon Penderton, is vaguely aware of his homosexual instincts, and routinely and masochistically becomes enamored of his wife's lovers. Pompous and absurd, Captain Penderton, who was raised by "five old-maid aunts" and who is known as "Flap-Fanny" among his subordinates due to his flabby buttocks, receives the brunt of McCullers' often hilarious scorn.

All of the book's homosexual elements converge and are caricatured in Alison's mischievous house boy, Anacleto, who spontaneously creates and performs ballets, wears "a blouse of aquamarine linen," speaks rudimentary French to Major Langdon's annoyance, and whose paintings, which are at once "primitive and over-sophisticated," lay "a queer spell on the beholder." Like a folkloric animal trickster, Anacleto is continually described in physically atavistic, monkey-like terms. But McCullers allows the effeminate Anacleto a revenge of sorts: he is the only character who is both self-aware and self-accepting.

Rounding out the cast is the introverted Private Williams, a somnambulistic young man--and undetected murderer--who awakens to a new level of consciousness and strange longing after coming into contact with Leonora, whose horse, Firebird, he stables. Unfortunately for all concerned parties, Captain Penderton becomes as uncomfortably enamored of Private Williams as Williams is of Leonora, with fatal results. Though Private Williams clearly develops a definite sexual attraction for Leonora, he also becomes oddly mesmerized by Captain Penderton's halting overtures, which in turn lead him to spasmodic acts of irrational violence.

Though McCullers slightly loses her tight focus as the story winds to its conclusion, Reflections In A Golden Eye is so pristinely and economically written that it feels organic: there is barely a false note in any of its deft 124 pages.

maybe mcculler's best.......2005-12-31

"there is a fort in the south where a few years ago a murder was committed. The participants were: two officers, a soldier, two women, a filipino, and a horse."

So starts ms mccullers novel, "reflections in a golden eye." This novella was written in 1941 and its underlying sexual tones are well ahead of its time. From extra marital affairs to homosexuality with a little voyeurism mixed in, we get a very unique picture of a southern army base in the 1940's.

The story is told with great precision and limited verbiage. As a result I enjoyed this more than I did ms mccullers more famous "the heart is a lonely hunter". Captain penderton's battle with his demons-which include his wife, her horse, and a private for whom he has unwanted feelings-is interestingly contrasted to the singular and more simple desires of the other characters.

A very well written book which, by the way, was made into an excellent movie starring marlon brando and elizabeth taylor. Don't miss either.

A Strange but Effective Story.......2005-05-21

Written in 1941, Carson McCullers' second novel probably qualifies as a novella or long short story. Surely it was light years ahead of its time as Ms. McCullers takes on homosexuality-- latent and the other kind, masochism, adultery, voyeurism, self-mutilation, a nervous breakdown and animal cruelty in fewer than a hundred pages. In the hands of a lesser writer, this tale would have degenerated into a trashy detective story. Ms. McCullers, however, manages to make the characters, with all their warts, believable, and for the most part, sympathetic. Captain Penderton, for example, is tormented by his hidden feelings for other men-- he is simultaneously attracted to both Private Williams as well as Major Langdon and hates Williams, even though he ought to despise the Major since he is cuckolding the Captain who, along with everyone else, knows about it. But Penderton is a real person, unhappy, lonely but capable of murder.

Ms. McCullers keeps this story first class with her spare, though poetic language. "An army post [the story is set on a military post in the 1930's in the South] in peacetime is a dull place. Things happen, but then they happen over and over again. . . At the same time things do occasionally happen on an army post that are not likely to re-occur. There is a fort in the South where a few years ago a murder was committed. The participants of this tragedy were: two officers, a soldier, two women, a Filipino, and a horse." With those opening lines, the story begins and never slows down.

I never had an English professor who would give Carson McCullers the time of day. Her novels were too gothic, her plots unbelievable, there were too many kinks in her characters. Could it have been that her stories were too close to home or were they jealous of her popularity with the reading public from the publication of her first novel THE HEART IS A LONELY HUNTER?

REFLECTIONS IN A GOLDEN EYE holds up well on a second reading. Made into a movie by John Houston in 1967 starring Marlon Brando-- in one of his best roles-- and Elizabeth Taylor, this novel is ripe for a remake now by someone with the talent of Mike Nichols.

The Poetry of Menace.......2005-04-26

This novella is a brave, bald exploration of homosexuality and infidelity in the military. It presents itself as a rare event that disturbs the routine dullness of peacetime military life.

The small circle of characters is individually and collectively self-destructive. There's Captain Penderton, who comes to nurse ambivalent homosexual yearnings for Private Williams, who fancies his wife. Meanwhile, Mrs Leonora Pederton is sleeping with General Langdon, whose wife, Alison, eventually succumbs to a complete breakdown of sanity. Got that? Good. It's compulsive stuff.

In this narrow social circle, author McCullers sets "normal" domestic events such as cooking delicious Southern dinners, and card evenings, against sexual episodes (both overt and latent). These range from Private Williams crouching in Mrs Penderton's room all night long to observe her sleeping naked, through to the tormentedly homosexual Captain Pemberton wrecking the body and spirit of his wife's horse on a particularly brutal ride.

In some ways, the strangest character is the Langdons' Filipino houseboy, Anacleto. Effete, devoted and fastidious to a "T", a would-be dancer and artist, he provides tragic Mrs Langdon with a kind of love. And it is Anacleto's artistic vision of a peacock with grotesque reflections in its golden eye that explains the title.

Typically of McCullers's Southern Gothicism, the writing infuses poetry with a feeling of utter menace. At times it's scarily bald, yet lyrical: "In the sky there was a white brilliant moon and the night was cold and silvery."

Some have found it too short, but I don't see that as a problem. It's a quick, chillingly stylish read that plumbs hidden psychological depths and doesn't shrink from uncomfortable truths.

Average customer rating:

Reflections in a Golden Eye
Carson McCuller
Manufacturer: Bantam Books
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000H5I7VM

Average customer rating:

Reflections in a Golden Eye
Carson McCullers
Manufacturer: New Directions
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
ASIN: B000IF67G8

Ballad of the Sad Cafe Including Also the Heart is a Lonely Hunter, Reflections in a Golden Eye, the Member of the Wedding and New Short Stories

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Ballad of the Sad Cafe Including Also the Heart is a Lonely Hunter, Reflections in a Golden Eye, the Member of the Wedding and New Short Stories
Carson McCullers
Manufacturer: Houghton Mifflin
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
ASIN: B000KYTY80

Average customer rating:

REFLECTIONS IN A GOLDEN EYE
Carson McCullers
Manufacturer: Zephyr Books
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000GVWFZ6

Average customer rating:

Reflections In a Golden Eye
Carson McCullers
Manufacturer: HOUGHTON MIFFLIN AND RIVERSIDE
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
ASIN: B000OJQVNM

Average customer rating:

REFLECTIONS IN A GOLDEN EYE

Manufacturer: Bantam
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000HH4U02

Average customer rating:

Reflections in a Golden Eye
Carson Mccullers
Manufacturer: BANTAM BOOKS
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000VB49LO

Average customer rating:

Reflections in a Golden Eye
Carson McCULLERS
Manufacturer: Bantam A1763
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Mass Market Paperback
ASIN: B000KPAX0M

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