Average customer rating:
- A stunning best-seller, if written by a General today
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A Soldier's General: The Civil War Letters of Major General Lafayette McLaws
John C. Oeffinger
Manufacturer: The University of North Carolina Press
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Campbell Brown's Civil War: With Ewell and the Army of Northern Virginia
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The Darkest Days of the War: The Battles of Iuka and Corinth (Civil War America)
ASIN: 0807826901
Release Date: 2001-12-05 |
Book Description
During his service in the Confederate army, Major General Lafayette McLaws (1821-1897) served under and alongside such famous officers as Robert E. Lee, Joseph E. Johnston, James Longstreet, and John B. Hood. He played a significant role in some of the most crucial battles of the Civil War, including Harpers Ferry, Antietam, Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, and Gettysburg. Despite this, no biography of McLaws or history of his division has ever been published.
A Soldier's General gathers ninety-five letters written by McLaws to his family between 1858 and 1865, making these valuable resources available to a wide audience for the first time. The letters, painstakingly transcribed from McLaws's notoriously poor handwriting, contain a wealth of opinion and information about life and morale in the Confederate army, Civil War-era politics, the Southern press, and the impact of war on the Confederate home front. Among the fascinating threads the letters trace is the story of McLaws's fractured relationship with childhood friend Longstreet, who had McLaws relieved of command in 1863.
John Oeffinger's extensive introduction sketches McLaws's life from his beginnings in Augusta, Georgia, through his early experiences in the U.S. Army, his marriage, his Civil War exploits, and his postwar years.
Customer Reviews:
A stunning best-seller, if written by a General today.......2002-05-27
Collections of letters reach a special audience. Such collections may occasionally feel tedious, but they open a window onto the personality and the ordinary details of everyday life, often of exceptional people. This book appeals to another subset of readers - those with a passion for understanding the American Civil War.
John Oeffinger has given us a wonderful introduction to a military leader whose name most Americans have never heard. Lafayette McLaws' pensmanship is the primary reason these letters have taken so long to make their way into print. Examples of his writing atest to Oeffinger's task in bringing the letters to readers, at long last.
McLaws was a military man on the losing side of a war fought over slavery, but we see here an individual who lived by a sense of duty and citizenship, who openly expressed his love and concern for family and the education of his children. There are many touching thoughts written into words and expressed by a man often absent from family life by the call of his profession.
If this book had been written by a military leader of our own time, it would be a best seller.
Book Description
This digital document is an article from Journal of Southern History, published by Southern Historical Association on November 1, 2003. The length of the article is 525 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: A Soldier's General: The Civil War Letters of Major General Lafayette McLaws.(Book Review)
Author: Christopher Leahy
Publication:
Journal of Southern History (Refereed)
Date: November 1, 2003
Publisher: Southern Historical Association
Volume: 69
Issue: 4
Page: 943(2)
Article Type: Book Review
Distributed by Thomson Gale
Book Description
This intellectual biography recovers the legacy of Karl Popper (1902-1994), the progressive, cosmopolitan, Viennese socialist who combated fascism, revolutionized the philosophy of science, and envisioned the Open Society. Malachi Hacohen draws a compelling portrait of the philosopher, the assimilated Jewish intelligentsia, and the vanished culture of Red Vienna, which was decimated by Nazism. Seeking to rescue Popper from his postwar conservative and anticommunist reputation, Hacohen restores his works to their original Central European contexts and, at the same time, shows that they have urgent messages for contemporary politics and philosophy.
Customer Reviews:
Pretty Good.......2006-09-02
I read this book after Caldwell's excellent "Hayek's Challenge". I don't normally read biographies, but that was so good I hunted around for related material (and found this).
Unfortunately, this suffers in comparison. Caldwell is much better at signposting and structuring the argument. In contrast, Hacohen jumps around, often covering the same period in different contexts. And his hand is too heavy - the authorial opinions are often forced (or even plain odd - what on earth does he have against Popper's wife?).
Still, his intentions are generally honourable (not always; there's a blind spot as far as Zionism goes) and the final chapter, which places Popper's thought within the current(ish) left-wing context, is interesting.
Hope and vision.......2003-09-18
Prof. Hacohen gives us an eminent look at the personal, political and scientific antecedents of Karl Popper's main scientific and political publications.
His book is also an excellent and concise economical and social panorama of Austria in the first half of the 20th century.
It is a realistic portrait of Popper as an individual: irascible and arrogant, an eternal dissenter, intellectual loner, not without a certain persecution mania.
It shows clearly how Popper's main philosophical contributions, 'testing and falsification', came into being, as well as his political defense of 'The Open society'. It is all the more surprising how great the difficulties were to publish his books, although they constituted a crucial and fundamental philosophical breakthrough.
Although, for me, Popper is the greatest philosopher of the 20th century, some of his positions are flawed. He is a dualist (mind/body). His defence of Socrates is also much contested. The Dutch classicist G. Koolschijn pretends that Socrates was not a democrat. He was probably condemned for pleading against democracy in his teachings.
Particularly interesting is Popper's struggle with Heisenberg's Indeterminacy Principle, where he lost the battle with Heisenberg.
I also agree with the author's essential remark that 'socially disadvantaged groups do not have a fair chance of being heard, let alone prevailing, in the so-called democratic political process. Organized elites and corporate interest block, manipulate, and circumvent the channels ... a fairly egalitarian socioeconomic structure and public control of corporations are preconditions to effective democratic dialogue.' (p.543)
This book contains an excellent presentation of Wittgenstein's Tractatus and Popper's critique of it. It runs the defenders of Otto Neurath (Cartwright & Co) into the ground.
All in all, a fascinating book for those who are interested in modern philosophy and more particularly in Popper's work.
Newcomers should first read the works of Popper himself, or the excellent introduction by Bryan Magee in his small book 'Popper'.
An important chapter of intellectual history.......2003-04-17
There are two standard evaluations of Popper's importance. The first sees Popper as an important figure in the philosophy of science, one whose work is now passe, but whose influence cannot be denied. The other sees Popper as one of the great geniuses of the twentieth century, a polymath who gave us new paradigms of scientific and political thinking. This second view, while still the view of the minority, is gaining support in a new millennium where Popper is enjoying something of a renaissance. This is the view that has inspired both Bryan Magee and Antony Flew to pen histories of philosophy subtitled (surely not just for the sake of alliteration) "From Plato to Popper." And this is the view that inspires Malachi Haim Hacohen to give Popper a central place in what, despite its title, is an intellectual history of inter-war Vienna.
If Popper's importance has not been properly appreciated, suggests Hacohen, that is because we try to situate him in the Anglo-American tradition that appropriated him after the Second World War and in which he became famous. Instead, Hacohen traces the genealogy of Popper's philosophy through the currents of thought in inter-war Vienna, showing how they shaped Popper and how Popper responded to them within this context. We see how his principle of falsification evolved as a response to the logical positivism of the Vienna Circle, and how his critique of historicism and promulgation of the Open Society--though published in and appropriated by a Cold War West--were in fact inspired responses to the socio-political debates of 1930's Vienna.
Hacohen's primary aim is to give us a greater understanding, and hence a greater appreciation, of Popper's achievement. But in tracing inter-war Viennese culture more broadly, he also shows the extent to which that culture's set of concerns has shaped our own intellectual outlook thanks to the diaspora of Viennese intellectuals--many of them Jewish--in the face of the Nazi threat. The Vienna Circle influenced a generation of philosophers, Hayek has become a champion for libertarians, and Gombrich has changed the way we look at art. In all of these cases, but none more so than in philosophy, these thinkers have found success in England and America by adapting ideas born out of uniquely Viennese debates to contexts that these debates never reached.
Inevitably, our reception of these ideas on foreign shores distorted their intent. For instance, we tend to understand the Vienna Circle as Ayer understood it without appreciating how the tools and methods these philosophers developed were meant to settle the debates on the nature of science that had divided an earlier generation of Viennese thinkers, the likes of Boltzmann and Mach. Like the Vienna Circle, Popper is too often read as his English-speaking contemporaries interpreted him, and Hacohen's book gives us a rich sense of the problems and debates that shaped Popper's distinctive outlook. Hacohen has labored tirelessly in the archives, and while his preference for completeness and transparency of research over readability makes it a laborious slog, both the depth, breadth, and originality of Hacohen's scholarship is exceptional. He is more at home discussing the social sciences than the natural sciences, but he is more at home in both of these fields than most of us can ever expect to be.
The problem, then, is whether Popper is the central figure of the intellectual history of inter-war Vienna, which is how Hacohen portrays him, or if he is only one of a number of bright minds to emerge from that context, and neither the brightest nor the most influential. He was a marginal figure at that time, and his contemporaries in the Vienna Circle, though respectful, seemed not as convinced as he was that he had delivered the deathblow to logical positivism. The philosophical world more generally tends to give the role of death-dealer to Quine for his 1951 paper, "Two Dogmas of Empiricism." Hacohen might reply that we inflate Quine's importance to Popper's detriment because we come to logical positivism from an Anglo-American perspective, and that in failing to appreciate its original context, we fail to appreciate that Popper had buried logical positivism by 1934. There is some merit in this argument, and perhaps if Popper had arrived in London before 1946 and if the Logic of Scientific Discovery had been published in English before 1956, things would be different. But whether a result of historical mischance or of Popper's work not being as decisive as he thought, he has failed to have an impact on English-speaking philosophy that rivals the Vienna Circle. Or Quine, for that matter.
Hacohen makes an excellent case for the tremendous, and too-often unnoticed, influence of inter-war Vienna on post-war scholarship in the English-speaking world, but he is less convincing in situating Popper as the central figure of this influence. Popper certainly developed interesting and fertile responses to the problems of his intellectual milieu, but it seems a bit of an exaggeration to claim that he solved these problems, or even that his solutions are more compelling than those of any of his contemporaries. Hacohen does not simply state his allegiance to Popper baldly; he provides arguments, but these arguments are not likely to convince those of us who are not already Popperians.
Popper has never been fully embraced by the mainstream of Anglo-American philosophy, and this may be connected with his having been shaped by a different set of concerns than his English-speaking contemporaries. With these concerns in clearer focus, he still doesn't emerge as one of the great thinkers of the twentieth century, but Hacohen's effort to give him his due does shed valuable light on an interesting period. Though his emphasis on Popper's importance may be misplaced, Hacohen's book nonetheless makes for engaging intellectual history.
A comprehensive study of a great philospher.......2002-06-18
Malachi Hacohen as written a great biography that both covers the personal has well as the philosphical development of one of the 20th century's greatest minds. This is a big book in every sense of the word, big in ideas, big in scope. One of the by products of reading this book was to discover the immense impact that intellectuals from 1920's Austria and non germanic Central Europe had upon, not just philosphy, but also economic and political developments in the Anglo Saxon world. People such as Hayek, Drucker, Polyani, Tarski, Neurath, Mises and many more have had a profound effect upon the thinking of both the Right and the Left in the US and Britain. One of those books which one can honestly say the reader will be much wiser after finishing it.
Battle of Britain in the world of ideas.......2002-02-12
The book has several different aspects, all of absorbing interest, including the detailed reconstruction of Popper's intellectual career and the depiction of the social and political milieu of Vienna between the wars.
Popper was the archetypal workaholic. Hacohen reports that he worked for 360 days of the year, all day, without the distraction of newspapers, radio or TV. Several times a month, even in old age, he worked all night and friends such as Bryan Magee would get an early morning call from Popper, bubbling with excitement to report on his latest ideas. Popper lived well out of London near High Wycombe and when Magee gained Popper's confidence he was invited to visit, taking the train to "Havercombe" (in Popper's heavily accented English). When I made the trip to Havercombe, Popper arranged to meet me at the station, carrying a copy of the BBC Listener, presumably to pick him out from all the other elderly gentlemen of middle-European extraction who might be thronging the platform at 2.00 on a Wednesday afternoon. In the event, he left the magazine at home and the kiosk had sold out so he had to buy The Times and fold it to the size of the Listener. Of course he was the only person in sight apart from the Station Master. Popper, then aged 70, had what his research assistant tactfully described as a "very positive" attitude to driving. Fortunately it was not far to his home and there were few other cars on the road. Safely home, our conversation laboured, and he frequently pushed a tray of choc-chip cookies towards me. Later he lamented to his assistant that I had eaten a whole weeks supply of his favorite cookies in one afternoon. These aspects of Popper are the other face of the man who some described as "the totalitarian liberal".
Hacohen has provided sufficient background to explain why Popper's ideas were so exciting for some people, and so threatening for others, though it was left to Bill Bartley in the 1960s to articulate the way that Popper had challenged the unstated and uncriticised assumption of "justificationism" which is the glue that holds together the ideas of the positivists and other "true belief" philosophers. Popper's lack of progress in the community of professional philosophers needs to be understood against the persisting background of justificationism, subjectivism and determinism which he has criticised in favour of critical rationalism, conjectural objective knowledge and non-determinism.
Hacohen has assembled a massive amount of material and a lesser talent in organization would have lost the plot among the details. Helped by a liberal quantity of headings sub-headings and his very clear exposition, he has kept his material under control and kept several balls in the air with superb aplomb. The several balls are Popper's diverse interests and the chaotic events that were going on around him in Vienna, not only among the intellectuals but also in Austrian politics.
These events forced Popper to flee to the other side of the world, to New Zealand, surely the antithesis of Vienna in most cultural, intellectual and political respects. There, his campaign for critical rationalism, objectivism and non-determinism was waged in political philosophy. His achievement in writing the two large volumes of "The Open Society and its Enemies" can be compared with the Battle of Britain, where young pilots held Hitler at bay in the skies over the English Channel. Popper daily patrolled the intellectual stratosphere, challenging Hitler's intellectual henchmen from Plato to modern times. This work would have been an amazing achievement under any circumstances, as it was it had to be done in the face of dreadful news from home (fourteen relatives died in the Holocaust), under the threat of Japanese invasion and against the resistance of his Professor who regarded his research and writing as theft to teaching time.
To conclude, this book is a wonderful piece of scholarship and its deserves to be read with close attention by anyone with a shred of interest in the ideas that have shaped the world today. With any luck Popper's ideas will help to shape the world tomorrow. I dissent from Hocohen's reading of Popper's ideas as a prop for social democracy, but anyone imbued with the spirit of critical rationalism can make up their own mind on that.
This book is actually worth six stars, so buy two copies, one for your local library.
Book Description
This digital document is an article from The Review of Metaphysics, published by Philosophy Education Society, Inc. on March 1, 2002. The length of the article is 896 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: Hacohen, Malachi Haim. Karl Popper, The Formative Years, 1902-1945: Politics and Philosophy in Interwar Vienna. (book review)
Author: Keith Culver
Publication:
The Review of Metaphysics (Refereed)
Date: March 1, 2002
Publisher: Philosophy Education Society, Inc.
Volume: 55
Issue: 3
Page: 634>(3)
Article Type: Book Review
Distributed by Thomson Gale
Amazon.com's Best of 2001
First attracted to his subject by its horrific ability to destroy the human mind and body, journalist David Shenk ultimately finds reasons to accept Alzheimer's disease--and almost forgive it--in The Forgetting. Shenk describes his work as a biography, the life story of a biological outlaw that sends victims "on a slow but certain trajectory toward forgetting and death." But his illuminating portrait of this growing epidemic offers more than a basic chronology. Shenk begins with the disease's christening in 1906, when German physician Alois Alzheimer discovered mysterious tangles and plaques in the brain of a dead woman who in life had suffered severe memory loss and dementia. The tale unfolds to reveal a host of intriguing players: struggling scientists (the clever, the bullheaded, and the pharmaceutically endowed), politicians divided by opposing priorities, exhausted caregivers, and patients whose biological clocks virtually tick backward over an average eight-year period. It includes impossible twists: longer life expectancies and successful treatments for other diseases mean more cases of Alzheimer's will inevitably occur. Shenk's graceful synthesis of personal accounts (from Plato to Reagan) with a century-long search for answers and cures leads him to an impressive conclusion. Perhaps Alzheimer's disease is much like winter: "Once it is gone, we'll face less hardship, but we'll also have lost an important lens on life." --Liane Thomas
Book Description
Afflicting nearly half of all persons over the age of 85, Alzheimer’s disease kills nearly 100,000 Americas a year as it insidiously robs them of their memory and wreaks havoc on the lives of their loved ones. It was once minimized and misunderstood as forgetfulness in the elderly, but Alzheimer’s is now at the forefront of many medical and scientific agendas, for as the world’s population ages, the disease will kill millions more and touch the lives of virtually everyone.
The Forgetting is a scrupulously researched, multilayered analysis of Alzheimer’s and its social, medical, and spiritual implications. David Shenk presents us with much more than a detailed explanation of its causes and effects and the search for a cure. He movingly captures the disease’s impact on its victims and their families, and he looks back through history, explaining how Alzheimer’s most likely afflicted such figures as Jonathan Swift, Ralph Waldo Emerson,and William de Kooning. The result is a searing, powerfully engaging account of Alzheimer’s disease, offering a grim but sympathetic and ultimately encouraging portrait.
Download Description
Afflicting nearly half of all persons over the age of 85, Alzheimer's disease kills nearly 100,000 Americas a year as it insidiously robs them of their memory and wreaks havoc on the lives of their loved ones. It was once minimized and misunderstood as forgetfulness in the elderly, but Alzheimer's is now at the forefront of many medical and scientific agendas, for as the world's population ages, the disease will kill millions more and touch the lives of virtually everyone.
The Forgetting is a scrupulously researched, multilayered analysis of Alzheimer's and its social, medical, and spiritual implications. David Shenk presents us with much more than a detailed explanation of its causes and effects and the search for a cure. He movingly captures the disease's impact on its victims and their families, and he looks back through history, explaining how Alzheimer's most likely afflicted such figures as Jonathan Swift, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and William de Kooning. The result is a searing, powerfully engaging account of Alzheimer's disease, offering a grim but sympathetic and ultimately encouraging portrait.
"Riveting... Superb... A wonderfully readable history of the brain and of memory."
SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE BOOK REVIEW
"A remarkable addition to the literature of the science of the mind... Shenk has drawn together threads of neurobiology, art history, and psychology into a literary portrait of Alzheimer's disease perfectly balanced between sorrow and wonder, devastation and awe."
LOS ANGELES TIMES BOOK REVIEW
"An elegant new book... Shenk rises above the usual rhetoric of combat and cure, enabling us to confront Alzheimer's not as an alien pestilence but as part of the human condition."
NEWSWEEK
"Written with a researcher's attention to detail and a storyteller's ear."
THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW
"Destined to be a classic... Shenk's guided tour is free of medical jargon, filled instead with clear and sometimes memorable phrasing."
THE SEATTLE TIMES
Customer Reviews:
The title haunts to tell of the forgetting disease.......2007-07-17
You don't have to be a science nut to be enthralled by David Shenk's book, The Forgetting--Alzheimer's: Portrait of an Epidemic. From the first official case of Alzheimer's (Auguste D., a fifty-one-year-old German woman first treated by neuropathologist Alois Alzheimer in 1901), to the use of transgenics to study the disease in mice, Shenk covers everything you need to know about the harrowing disease that, by 2050, will affect 15,000,000 Americans. Except, that is--a surefire way to prevent it.
After 100 years, scientists still do not know exactly why humans get Alzheimer's, but they have learned a lot along the way. Shenk explains even the most intricate details of the disease clearly and carefully, making use of helpful analogies and explaining how memory works on a biological level. He chronicles the decline of several public figures, each of which was either diagnosed with the disease or likely had it before Alzheimer's twentieth-century discovery, including some of the greatest minds of the Western world: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Jonathan Swift, Jorge Luis Borges, Willem de Kooning.
Shenk is careful to keep a human element running through the book, reminding readers that science is not a cold, black-and-white world, but a flexible, complex world on which our daily lives depend. Each chapter begins with an anecdote from a family caregiver (spouse, child, etc.), and Shenk follows the progress (or rather, deterioration) of a support group for patients in the early stages. He also writes of a listserve, where caregivers from across the nation ask questions, give advice, share experiences, vent frustration, and celebrate those rare lucid moments.
Alzheimer's risks increase drastically with age, and, as Baby Boomers near retirement, it becomes crucial for average Americans to understand all they can about a disease that will prove both emotionally and financially devastating even for those who do not receive a diagnosis. Shenk gives us hope, however, with discussions of scientific advances and a chapter devoted to how each of us can improve our odds and perhaps escape the ultimate forgetting.
Armchair Interviews says: Well worth reading for the future--our parents or our own.
This book is tops!.......2007-05-13
I have read a lot about Alzheimer's but this is definitely one of the best. It is easy to read with good illustrations of Alzheimer's onset in persons such as Ronald Reagan. Shenk's comparison of a baby's growth with Alzheimer's decline illustrates the heartbreak for those caring for someone with this disease. I highly recommend this book to professionals as well as laypeople.
I love this book........2007-04-29
The Forgetting is a great book. I love the way it "introduces" you to Alzheimer's. Not so much scientific as human. This terrible disease process that is stalking us as we all age is often misunderstood and not truly appreciated for all its horribleness until it strikes within your own family. I found this book strangely comforting and ultimately left me in a better place than when I started reading it. I highly recommend this book. As an elder law attorney who specializes in helping family's with issues related to this disease process I include this book on my must read list I give to clients. I also highly recommend the DVD that was inspired by this book The Forgetting - A Portrait of Alzheimer's.
An intimate portrait.......2006-06-02
I am 24 years old, I have never dealt with Alzheimer's in any way, shape, or form. I happened across The Forgetting in a bookstore, being the intense browser that I am, and was immediately attracted to the portrayal of the subject matter.
I enjoyed each page of The Forgetting. With every word, and each carefullly crafted sentence I began to see a different world, one I had been ignorant of and blind too.
I discovered the severity of an illness, which in all likelyhood will continue to spread, and battled with humanity's inability to cure this storm of the century.
David Shenk guides the reader through the history of Alzheimer's and the very little knowledge we have accrued on a illness which has hit its centennial mark. I am thankful David Shenk wrote a touching and compassionate piece of medical history. Although I may not fully understand the implications of Alzheimer's I am now aware of the severity of the illness and am willing to do what little I can to help.
The Forgetting.......2004-01-30
I was diagnosed nine years ago with Alzheimer's and have read everything I could get my hands on about this disease. I think your book is the most informative book on Alzheimer's that I have read. I think it could be called the Alzheimer's Bible.
Book Description
In this latest volume in the
Good Things With Martha Stewart Living series, you will find dozens of ideas, projects, and recipes to help you entertain more easily and often. Delicious drinks and hors d'oeuvres, simple lighting projects, beautiful centerpieces, clever place cards, creative table coverings, and luscious desserts round out this inspired collection.
Customer Reviews:
nice pictures.......2007-08-27
Martha Steward is a classic. She is a strong woman that I admire. This book however is lacking substance. I flip through it and so just couple of nice advices.
Good Things for Easy Entertaining: The Best of Martha Stewart Living.......2007-01-10
Gift - recipient was excited and pleased.
A waste of time.......2004-06-18
"Try The $50 Dinner Party" by Sally Sampson. Sally's book is super and we used for a very elegant party at our large beautiful home.
Awesome Book - pick it up.......2004-04-20
This is one of my favorite books on entertaining. I love all of Martha's stuff and this one is one of my favorites. Anyone considering entertaining on any scale should pick this up and read it!!
Terrific book filled with "good things"!.......2004-03-17
In spite of Martha Stewart's recent troubles, her legacy continues with this splendid book. It is fresh, intelligent and packed full of great tips and ideas for the entertainer who wants to make a splash without spending a fortune. The thing I like about Martha Stewart's approach is her emphasis on simple abundance--the notion that you can achieve good results through creativity and ingenuity. I think those who want to criticize Ms. Stewart should consider how many people she has inspired through this approach to good living!
Amazon.com
While this book is very much in the style of Martha Stewart, the parties that it depicts were planned and executed by other folks. There's a Louisiana lunch at a stately home outside Baton Rouge, complete with maquechoux oysters and pecan-crusted catfish; a garden harvest party, with mountains of vegetarian delights served in an East Hampton garden; a Vietnamese-Thai feast in a garden by the Sacramento River, with the signature flavors of Southeast Asian cooking--lime, ginger, lemongrass, chile paste--gracing spring rolls, chicken, and fish; a soul-food brunch given by an interior designer in Harlem that includes collard greens, gumbo, and sweet potato tarts. Details such as how to make lovely, lotus-like napkin folds are illustrated in "Good Things" sidebars. From the down-home barbecue in a horse arena in Marfa, Texas, to the Polynesian fantasy picnic on the beach in Maui, the key to a great party, says Martha, is caring--"about people, originality, the most attractive settings, and lovely, finely honed, time-honored traditions." And let's not forget food.
Customer Reviews:
Wonderful Party Themes.......2007-03-06
This book is filled with an array of creative parties, there are 11 party themes ranging from simple to more elaborate. The book is also filled with many recipes, crafts, and decoration ideas; most of which are accompanied by beautiful photographs :)
I Love Theme Parties!.......2005-01-01
Theme parties are great! Getting your guests to "dress the part" isn't at all difficult! If you want people to dress up, just inform them that it is a "themed costume party". Your guests will try to out-do each other with their creative costumes. It really makes things a lot of fun and makes decorating in a theme really worth the effort! My friends and I have one about once a month.
I think Martha is great, but no one should follow any entertaining "to the letter". These books are for just for ideas and Martha's ideas are some of the best, hence her empire.
Regarding the woman with the "waterfront property" whose party was a "fiasco", no one with a third home in Switzerland knows how to throw a party. Hence, the story is a total fraud by someone who harbors some sort of grudge. Did the shiitake gravy turn out badly for you in front of the husband's boss? She didn't realize that anyone with that much wealth would hire a professional party planner who would do all the work for them. I should know, I have a good friend is actually is a professional party planner. Whomever the "reader" with a grudge is, she's made a common nouveau riche (or no riche at all) mistake of misundersanding the role played by those in the upper classes. Marha isn't upper class (contrary to popular opinion). She's upper-middle class, the highest class who still cook at home for themselves during the holidays and for parties. Upper and lower don't mean "better" and "worse" - as class measures they're just indicators of lifestyle. Upper Middles have the most fun :)
Dreadful. Our party was almost a fiasco.......2004-06-14
We planned a wonderful dinner party for 100 guests at our waterfront home. I hired the best chef & event planner I could find and told them to follow this book. They said they many of the things just would not work or would take forever.
We were saved at the last minute by a very resourceful neighbor who attended finishing school, graduated from Wellsley and has a third home in Switzerland.
My husband was furious and threw the book away.
Get's the juices flowing!.......2001-08-21
Now I know that we can't all go to Texas to have an authentic Tex-Mex fiesta, but the ideas are great none the less. Who care's if no one comes dressed the part? This book is all about themes. Themes that you can manipulate and call your own. Each party is beautifully photographed and the recipes are delicious. They even offer her infamous "Good Things" as a sidebar for many of the parties. Don't let the perfection overwhelm you. This book delievers.
The Subtitle of The Book Says It All.......2000-06-12
I'd love to throw one of the parties in this book, but I can't figure out how to get my guests to dress in the perfectly appropriate style. One person in a gingham check outfit that would be perfect for the Fourth of July picnic would simply ruin the Thai-Vietnamese feast. Until I get a more malleable group of friends, I'll just have to stick with the suggestions in "Swell" by Cynthia Rowley and Ilene Rosenzweig. That being said, I highly recommend that everyone buy all of Martha's books -- it greatly alleviates the depression that will befall you when you invariably attend a function that follows her instructions to the letter. Somehow the perfectionism seems less than perfect when you know it has been cribbed directly from Martha!
Book Description
A must-have for Martha fanciers.” —People
“When Martha Stewart talks, holiday entertainers should listen.” —San Francisco Examiner
“Stewart really knows how to put together dishes that complement one another.” —Washington Post
Enjoy 20 complete menus with more than 150 deliciously diverse recipes
Menus
Celebrating Spring
Pink Peony Dinner Party
Hors d’Oeuvres in the Garden
A Small but Special Baby Shower
Spicy Thai Lunch
Louisiana Seafood Feast
North Carolina Barbecue
Crabs and Corn on the Beach
Tuscan Buffet Outdoors
The Best Clambake
Surprisingly Simple Chinese
“Fried Green Tomatoes” Brunch
Midsummer Fiesta
Pasta for a Crowd
Halloween’s “Ghoulish” Pleasures
Thanksgiving at Turkey Hill
Holiday Dessert Buffet
A Birthday Dinner of Gifts
New Traditions for Christmas
Come for Champagne and Caviar
Customer Reviews:
Just awful - nothing turned out!.......2003-01-08
I gave a small dinner party for neighbors and nothing turned out. Our best friends also became ill.
The whole menu.......2002-12-10
I've had this book for a number of years and everytime I have company or want to spoil my husband I pull out this MS classic. I have the whole meal planned, take the xeroxed pages shopping, and I have a great dinner. No guessing what side dish goes with what. I truly appreciate the planning that went into this edition and the recipes are excellent.
One of her best!.......2001-01-14
This is my favorite Martha Stewart book - and I have several. The menus are original but yet not over the top. I have actually tried and used the recipes - and have been asked for them - which to me is the ultimate compliment. The pictures are great - this is a book you will actually use - instead of just reading and putting back into your cookbook library. Buy this book, you won't be disappointed.
Great ideas.......2000-04-02
Martha has done it again. There are so many unique ideas that get lots of compliments when they are used! The book has menus for almost any type of entertaining that one might want to do.
Book Description
All the recipes from "What to Have for Dinner, " one of the most popular features of Martha Stewart Living Magazine, are collected here in one beautifully illustrated volume. Organized by season, the book gathers 30 simply laid-out menus for four, complete with a preparation schedule. Includes a resource guide for flatware, napkins, plates, and related items. 200 color photos.
Customer Reviews:
didn't really like the book.......2007-07-30
Probably just me, but I really didn't find any of the recipes interesting.
Delicious yes, but far from every night of the week.......2003-03-12
I adore Martha, her style, her books, and her website... but I have to be honest about this one. I throw dinner parties up at school all the time and so I was thrilled to have a dinner party with these recipies. True- you can use one or two recipies for a quick easy side (think desserts here) but I made the delicious asian noodle meal and not only did it take an hour of prep time for julienning veg and other things, but when my guests arrived, not only was I not finished preparing, but I wasnt even close. It ended up taking my guests pitching in... fun but not what I had planned. It took four of us almost 2 hours to make it . It was so delicious, and also so impossible to make unless you have TONS of spare time and are planning on taking at least 2 hours to make .
Just so I am clear- DELICIOUS FOOD THAT TAKES TONS OF TIME (at least that is if you arent a professional chef)
Good food in here.......2002-12-07
These are the cards from the back of the magazine for a few years, all gathered as menus designed to make dinner for four in about an hour. The turkey and green chile burritos are good, and the coffee custard is outstanding; they are from Menu 7, andthe whole thing is great. The citrus marinated pork chops are also delicious. If you like cookies, the Oatmeal Lace cookies are fabulously rich and sweet. My favorite is the Mocha Shortbread Wedges recipe--has to be the easiest dessert ever, not too sweet, and really quick and easy.
Never lets me down.......2001-11-14
I first stumbled across this little cookbook in a used book store in the middle of nowhere. Everyone in the family had $5. to spend and boy did I get my money's worth...and so did my family for that matter because every recipe is a gem. It is now my standard gift to newer cooks who are setting up house and entertaining - the listing of what to do in which order is great for the less experienced and some of the combinations of foods are unusual but always work - I tried another Martha book and was disappointed - this one is a keeper!
Helpful..........2001-11-03
For someone who lives alone and wants to impress guests... this is for you... Enjoy! I did! Thank you Martha :-)
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