Customer Reviews (1)

I don't order this producto for myself. i order for my brother
My brother told me that this product is one of best method to teach English ... Read more

Product Description
With a police cover-up and citywide outrage brewing in the wake of an African-American football star's suspicious death while in police custody, Cuban-American crime reporter Britt Montero steps in to uncover the truth. Read by Joan Allen. Book available. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (9)

Crime Beat Reporter
Edna Buchanan introduces readers to an intrepid protagonist in the persona of Britt Montero. CONTENTS UNDER PRESSURE is just what the headlines say, it is as explosive as a front page expose of crime in an exotic city.
Britt propels readers on a seat of the pants ride through the streets of Miami in her search for the truth and a front page story. She is a character that will draw readers to beg for more from a former ace reporter who knows her beat and her trade.
This is one title I will keep on my shelf to read a second time.
Nash Black, author whose titles are now available on Amazon Kindle.
Sins of the Fathers: A Brewster County NovelWriting as a Small Business

Enjoyable
This is the second Britt Montero novel that I read from the series and find them enjoyable.The characters are well portrayed and I find Britt and her photographer Lottie to be likable.The action is non stop and the plot is far from predictable.

Not a Tourist Brochure
Britt Montero, a seasoned 30-something crime reporter, works the seamy side of Miami for a major daily.If only half her tales are true of criminals and street people targeting tourists, I wouldn't want to go there, even for a day on the beach.According to Britt and her friends, the producers of the TV series Miami Vice (not actually named) spent millions upgrading dilapidated neighborhoods to make their level of degradation believable for TV audiences.In this stew of crime, heat, poverty, and traffic congestion, Britt uncovers evidence of racially-based police brutality.Pursuing such a story not only would sour her crucial relationship with the police, it potentially could divide the city.It's a trendy story, briskly written to pull the reader along.I couldn't say, however, that it stands out from the crowd of books featuring feisty single women, whose lives are full of people under 40.I listened to the recorded book, ably read by Donada Peters.

Action and Suspense with a Strong Female Character
Edna does a fantastic job with the details and actions in this book.The main character is portrayed as a strong individual.This is refreshing because too often female characters always need a man to make them, or they are airheads, etc.Edna created a great storyline which will have you sitting on the edge of your seat until the end.

I enjoy reading strong female characters. Britt is one.
Edna Buchanan is an insightful and intelligent writer.The strength of her Britt character and the other women was nice to read.I get tired of the hapless naives that are usually swooning for attention and support inother novels.It's good to see a woman with confidence, intellect, andscruples measure up to the job at hand. ... Read more

Product Description
Chapters: Kurt Vonnegut, Joan Baez, Allen Ginsberg, Henry David Thoreau, Gore Vidal, Thomas Pynchon, Benjamin Tucker, Jane Jacobs, Henry Miller, Benjamin Spock, Adrienne Rich, Pete Seeger, Howard Zinn, Amos Bronson Alcott, Utah Phillips, Stanley Elkin, Lucy Stone, Kent Hovind, Andrea Dworkin, Terry Southern, Scott Nearing, Gloria Steinem, Betty Friedan, Susan Sontag, Norman Mailer, Rose Wilder Lane, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Norman Thomas, Robert Creeley, Albert Szent-Györgyi, Nelson Algren, Leslie Fiedler, Paul Goodman, James Baldwin, Walter Lowenfels, Julia Butterfly Hill, James Crumley, Karl Hess, Dorothy Day, Paul Krassner, Kathy Kelly, Eugene D. Genovese, Denise Levertov, Robert Duncan, Orville Schell, Stephen Symonds Foster, Paul Cuffee, Saul Landau, Edmund Wilson, Arthur Waskow, Robert Scheer, Kirkpatrick Sale, Anatol Rapoport, Helen and Scott Nearing, George Wald, John Howard Yoder, Robert Bly, Abby Kelley, Michael Novak, Donald Hall, David Mcreynolds, John Woolman, Galway Kinnell, Grace Paley, Anton Refregier, Fred J. Cook, A. J. Muste, Tillie Olsen, Raymond Hunthausen, Peter Matthiessen, Ammon Hennacy, Tupper Saussy, Kay Boyle, Philip Corner, Elias Hicks, Brian Willson, Salvador Luria, Cyrus Pringle, Carl Oglesby, Fries's Rebellion, David Dellinger, Kenneth W. Royce, Todd Gitlin, Garrett Eckbo, Robert L. Schulz, Philip Levine, J. Bracken Lee, Muriel Rukeyser, Juanita Morrow Nelson, Peace Pilgrim, Victor Perlo, James Kirkwood, Jr., William Mandel, Marshall Sahlins, Donald Ogden Stewart, Rick Ufford-Chase, Lew Welch, Ed Sanders, Dwight Macdonald, the Saint Patrick's Day Four, Gordon Zahn, Peter Dale Scott, Charles Lane, Staughton Lynd, Lyle Stuart, Robert Coover, Tony Serra, John M. Pratt, John Wieners, Jack Newfield, Ed Mcclanahan, Claire Wolfe, Anna Howard Shaw, Kimberly Mansion, Merle Miller, Frances Crowe, David Harris, Edward S. Herman, Eric Bentley, James Otsuka, André Schiffrin, William Matthews, Barbara Deming, ...More: http://booksllc.net/?id=189874 ... Read more

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Chapters: Edgar Allan Poe, Thomas Paine, Marcel Duchamp, Abbie Hoffman, Joan Baez, Allen Ginsberg, Edward Hopper, Jack Kerouac, Lenny Bruce, E. E. Cummings, Eugene O'neill, Phil Ochs, Jane Jacobs, Henry James, Derek Walcott, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Pete Seeger, Margaret Sanger, John Reed, Willa Cather, Thomas Wolfe, Jeff Buckley, Bob Dylan, Tom Paxton, Mark Koltko-Rivera, Harry Everett Smith, Romany Marie, Annie Leibovitz, Isamu Noguchi, Leontyne Price, Vincent Gigante, Odetta, Hart Crane, Edgard Varèse, Tim Robbins, Beauford Delaney, Peter Yarrow, Gregory Corso, Dorothy Day, Paul Krassner, Dorothy Canning Miller, Jerry Orbach, Frank O'hara, Richard Barone, Dave Van Ronk, Willem de Kooning, Hans Hofmann, Wavy Gravy, Willie Nile, Mary Travers, Amy Sedaris, Tuli Kupferberg, Max Eastman, Mary Carillo, Jim and Jean, Richard Fariña, Mabel Dodge Luhan, Albert Pinkham Ryder, Delmore Schwartz, Eric Andersen, Edith Evans Asbury, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, Maria Muldaur, Morena Baccarin, Peter Warren, Carolyn Hester, Suze Rotolo, Fred Weintraub, Gino Hollander, Robert Motherwell, Robert de Niro, Sr., Robert Lopez, Franz Kline, Robert Isabell, Artie Traum, Paul Stookey, David Blue, Jane Bowles, Heather Marks, Margot Gayle, Craig Rodwell, Mimi Gross, Izzy Young, Lisa Jane Persky, Happy Traum, Virginia Admiral, Anita Hoffman, Frank Christian, John Taylor Johnston, Guido Bruno, List of People From Greenwich Village. Source: Wikipedia. Pages: 597. Not illustrated. Free updates online. Purchase includes a free trial membership in the publisher's book club where you can select from more than a million books without charge. Excerpt: Bob Dylan (born Robert Allen Zimmerman; May 24, 1941) is an American singer-songwriter and musician. He has been a major figure in popular music for five decades. Much of his most celebrated work dates from the 1960s when he was at first an informal chronicler, and later an apparently reluctant figurehead of s...More: http://booksllc.net/?id=4637590 ... Read more

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Top Notch, a dynamic 6-level course for international communication, sets a new standard, using the natural language that people really speak. With a rock-solid learner-centered approach, Top Notch provides students an opportunity to confirm their own progress at the end of every easy-to-teach two-page lesson.

Product Description
Ninety-year-old artist Lee Allen, whose retina was beginning to suffer from age-related macular degeneration, realized that he could see the defects in his vision. For a decade he studied these defects and carefully drew pictures of the holes in his vision, showing the way they changed with time and with laser surgery.Macular degeneration is the most common cause of blindness among older people in the industrialized world.

This important book, set in type most visually impaired people can read, includes information about macular degeneration and comments from Lee's doctor and colleagues. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Macular Degeneration: Perceptions and Drawings of an Artist
This is a unique book illustrated and written by an accompished medicalillustrator, Lee Allen, and two EyeMDs, ophthalmologists H. StanleyThompson, MD and James C. Folk, MD. Anyone faced with losing vision frommacular degeneration the most common cause of blindness in individuals overthe age of 50 will benefit from reading this book.

Lee Allen at 87 LeeAllen's life was always about drawing and painting. He worked as a youngman under Grant Wood. But during the Great Depression of the 1930's, heneeded a way to survive so he took a job as an artist that was beingoffered by Dr. C. S. O'Brien in the Department of Ophthalmology at theUniversity of Iowa. The unwritten deal between these two men was that Allenwould, for the moment, put aside his aspirations in the fine arts andconcentrate on becoming the best ophthalmic illustrator in the country.O'Brien asked Lee to attend all the lectures offered to theophthalmologists in training, to take his work to national meetings, and topublish his findings under his own name in the ophthalmic literature,whether he had the appropriate academic degrees or not. Lee Allen took thiscontract seriously.

In this book, a biographical sketch of Lee Allenreviews some of his many accomplishments and contributions to ophthalmicpractice.

When Lee was 78, he began to recognize the first signs ofage-related macular degeneration in his left eye. Naturally he began tosketch them. There never was anyone better equipped by training and longexperience to describe the particulars of age-related macular degeneration,from the inside out, than Lee Allen. He has just the right combination ofskill, experience and persistence to draw what he sees.

If you learnedfrom Henry Grunwald's book: Twilight:Losing Sight and Gaining Insight youwill find this "atlas" and biographical sketch of Lee Allen'svery informative. ... Read more

Product Description
More Magazine March 2008 Joan Allen fabulous at 51; Great Spring Style over 40; Sleep in the Nude and other ways to sail through menopause; Cross-Train your brain; Money Phobia; Top 10 jobs for midlife women; and more ... Read more

Product Description
Top Notch, a dynamic 6-level course for international communication, sets a new standard, using the natural language that people really speak. With a rock-solid learner-centered approach, Top Notch provides students an opportunity to confirm their own progress at the end of every easy-to-teach two-page lesson. Features of Top Notch Fundamentals * Essential model conversations that make key social language unforgettable and easy to personalize * Intensive vocabulary development with active recycling * Complete grammar support--extended by a bound-in Vocabulary Booster *"Top Notch Interactions"--unique step-by-step discussion builders that guarantee success for all learners * Thorough attention to pronunciation * A wide array of learning strategies and activities that promote critical thinking * Authentic and refreshing content that connects students to the real world ... Read more

Product Description
This digital document is an article from First Things: A Monthly Journal of Religion and Public Life, published by Institute on Religion and Public Life on December 1, 1999. The length of the article is 5679 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: JOAN OF ARC: HER STORY.(Review) (book reviews)
Author: Charlotte Allen
Publication: First Things: A Monthly Journal of Religion and Public Life (Refereed)
Date: December 1, 1999
Publisher: Institute on Religion and Public Life
Page: 37

Article Type: Book Review

Distributed by Thomson Gale ... Read more

Product Description
This digital document is an article from Wind Speaker, published by Aboriginal Multi-Media Society of Alberta (AMMSA) on April 1, 1999. The length of the article is 1358 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: Grandmother believed in boy's artistic talent: Allen Sapp.
Author: Joan Black
Publication: Wind Speaker (Newsletter)
Date: April 1, 1999
Publisher: Aboriginal Multi-Media Society of Alberta (AMMSA)
Volume: 16Issue: 12Page: 1(suppl)

Distributed by Thomson Gale ... Read more

Product Description

Top Notch, a dynamic 6-level course for international communication, sets a new standard, using the natural language that people really speak. With a rock-solid learner-centered approach, Top Notch provides students an opportunity to confirm their own progress at the end of every easy-to-teach two-page lesson.

Features of Top Notch 2

• Essential model conversations that make key social language unforgettable and easy to personalize
• Intensive vocabulary development with active recycling
• Complete grammar support—extended by a bound-in Grammar Booster
• “Top Notch Interactions”—unique step-by-step discussion builders that guarantee success for all learners
• Thorough attention to pronunciation
• A wide array of learning strategies and activities that promote critical thinking
• Authentic and refreshing content that connects students to the real world

Product Description
Actress Chris Callaway finds her life threatened by a stalker whose attack leaves her blind, and it is up to Beverly Hills police detective Jon Larsen and Danny Devere, a gay friend, to track the would-be killer. Simultaneous. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (14)

"Dead Eyes" Is Dead On!
Based on a recommendation from my aunt and uncle, I stepped away from my usually literary diet of Danielle Steel and Richard Paul Evans to feast upon the "Dead Eyes" of Stuart Woods. And what a feast it was!A thrilling meal of page-turning action, mixed with romance, ironic twists, and some light-hearted humorous moments.I enjoyed every bite of this feast and look forward to savoring more of Woods' books.

"Dead Eyes" is Dead On
Put your feet up and enjoy this one like you would an old TV detective thriller because it has it all; murder, mystery, and suspense. It has a female in distress and a Hollywood detective and a friend to try and save her; what more could you as for. Oh yeah; it has a surprize ending with no commercials. Stuart Woods as always is a good read.

One Of The Worst Books I've Ever Read
I read this book three years ago.It was the first and last book I read by this author.I read many thriller books and quite honestly, I'm pretty easy to please. In fact, this is about the only Thriller book that I didn't enjoy at all in the last 5 years.This is my first review and I'm writing it because I don't want people see the 5 star reviews and waste their time with this book.It's truly awful.It started off okay and then the characters and the plot take a horrible nosedive.I've never felt so cheated out of my time.

This was another great Woods' book
I listen to most of Stuart Woods' books on tape and really enjoy them.This one was a particularly good one and carried you along from the first page to the last.Obviously, the suspected villain may not be the true culprit, but then when are they?It was a great story of stalking a celebrity and it was chilling. I thought the book was great, but then I've become a Woods' fan because none of his books are ever boring.

Disappointed But Not Ready to Give Up
(...) unfortunately I started with Dead Eyes.I felt as though I was reading a suspense story from a beginner romance novelist.The dialogue at times was laughable and I agree with another reviewer that the ending was thrown together.The few sex scenes were like something from Barbara Cartland.My biggest complaint was the portrayal of the cop Jon Larsen- he came off as an incompetent dolt.Through the entire book, the stalker was one step ahead of him to the very end.However, this writer gets such high praise from other reviewers that I'm not quite ready to quit and plan on checking out the Stone Barrington series. ... Read more

Product Description

For all of her days, Reta Winters has enjoyed the useful monotony of happiness: a loving family, good friends, growing success as a writer of light fiction, novels 'for summertime.' This placid existence cracks open one fearful day when her beloved oldest daughter, Norah, drops out of life to sit on a gritty street corner, silent but for the sign around her neck that reads 'GOODNESS.' Reta's search for what drove her daughter to such a desperate statement turns into an unflinching and surprisingly funny meditation on where we find meaning and hope.

Warmth, passion and wisdom come together in Carol Shields' remarkably supple prose. Unless, a harrowing but ultimately consoling story of one family's anguish and healing, proves her mastery of extraordinary fictions about ordinary life.

In her own writing, Reta reaffirms her own sense of self, as well as her sense of humor. As her theoretical reflections on modern womanhood play counterpoint to her unwavering sense of creating a home and keeping her family together, Reta's smarts and fears form a wonderfully coherent narrative--a life worth reading about. With Unless, the inaugural title in HarperCollins's Fourth Estate imprint, Shields (author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Stone Diaries) once again asserts her place in the canon. --Emily Russin ... Read more

Customer Reviews (109)

Empty story, some good writing
Carol Shields clearly has the skill to write sentences well. Unfortunately, the story line is the book is missing until about five pages from the end. Not worth the read unless you are a middle aged Canadian writer, worried about your teen daughters, caught up in the fact that you are passive and basically unhappy with the way feminism of the 70's and 80s turned out. If that's the case, you will love this book. This book bored me to tears. I only finished it for a book reading group and the fact that I had actually paid money for all of this pontificating and nonsense which took 320 pages to write.

I Read This Book So You Don't Have To
The story is interesting, the storytelling is easy to follow, and that's about where my praise ends.Unless is centered on a woman (Rita) who has lost her once-promising daughter to the streets, and how she spirals into despair because of it.She decides that her daughter "opted out" of life because she realized that, as a woman, much of life was already closed to her:excellence, respect, opportunities, etc. (all of which is true; anyone who claims we have actually reached equality should check out some statistics on violence, wages, eating disorders and heads of Fortune 500 companies).But whatever valid points she makes about gender discrepancies (she writes letters to men who have consciously or subconsciously slighted the female half of the world) are eradicated by her refusal to voice her grievances (she never mails them).How are we supposed to respect her demand for equality when she won't even voice that demand, and instead spends her days glorying in the triviality of polishing her banister and shopping?

I was willing to go along with Rita despite her uselessness-- after all, not everyone is cut out for activism.However, what irrevocably lost me is her outrageous pretension.She describes her expensive possessions in great detail, she seems to think that a daughter dropping out of college is the worst thing that could happen to anyone (probably because of her own liberal arts degree, she wants Norah to study linguistics), and everyone in the book seems to be upper-class and white (although she and her friends have the decency to be embarrassed about ordering a bottle of "good white wine" at a campy rodeo-themed restaurant).The clincher, though, is when a man comes to her house to deliver mulch and makes the mistake of telling Rita how he dreams of finding a job that pays enough to be able to marry his girlfriend and start a family.Rita describes his dreams as "so pathetically little"-- why?Because he's not learning French, like her?Because he's not writing a novel, like her?It's not only condescending, but downright hypocritical:she claims that her life is centered around her children, but this man is not entitled to center his dreams about his future children?

Of course, everything is wrapped up tidily at the end of the novel without Rita having to lift a manicured finger.Needless to say, I will not be checking out the other works of Carol Shields.

grief peppered with humor
My favorite chapters are the unsent letters that Reta, the narrator, composes to authors who acknowledge the influence of other male writers, ignoring female writers. The best is the one she writes to someone whose obituary she has just read. Feminism is certainly a dominant theme in this book, but so are family and grief. The grief, however, is not over a loved one's death. Reta and Tom's oldest daughter, Norah, has essentially dropped out, silently begging for money on a Toronto street corner, with a handwritten sign around her neck, bearing the single word "Goodness." This unfortunate situation consumes the lives of Reta, Tom, and their two younger daughters. I guess you could say that at least death has closure, whereas Norah's circumstances cause ongoing concern as winter approaches. The overriding mystery is what caused Norah to take the drastic step of dropping out of college to panhandle, but there's actually a lot in this book to savor. I loved that Reta's mother-in-law, Lois, has a file of 100 dessert recipes and brings dessert to dinner every night, as soon as Reta signals by closing the red kitchen curtains. Also, it's almost a book within a book, as Reta contemplates various endings for the novel she is writing, a sequel about a fashion writer who is engaged to a trombonist. Her new overbearing editor is a hoot, interrupting all her sentences and suggesting that she use a pseudonym, such as R. R. Summers. (Has J.K. Rowling started a trend?) You can imagine how our feminist protagonist feels about such a gender-neutral name. And, of course, everyone has a theory as to why Norah has checked out. The author drops a hint early on but not large enough for me to put two and two together.

Beautiful and imaginative
This is a "gauzy" novel about a mother's reaction to her daughter's withdrawal from life and decision to panhandle on a street corner. By "gauzy," I mean that the prose is concise and reveals only certain aspects of the story and characters.There is plenty of white space to be filled by the imagination.The prose is not overburdened with details.The book is tinged with feminism and the idea that women are destined for "goodness" but not "greatness." I found this novel to be engaging throughout and imaginative.

A Book to Read Before You Die
According to Peter Boxall's "1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die," "Unless," by Pulitzer-Prize winning novelist Carol Shields, is a seminal work worthy of being included in the "canon" - at least, according to the first edition of that guide (according to the second edition, published this year, we can now safely die without reading "Unless"). Interestingly, while Carol Shields is (to a limited extent) included in the "canon," one of the major questions she asks in "Unless" is why women are so often excluded. In "Unless," the protagonist, 44-year-old writer, Reta Winters deals with the plight of her 19-year-old daughter, who has given up her life to sit on a street corner, by distracting herself with work on a "light novel." Her friend, Danielle Westerman, a famous author in her own right, believes that Reta is wasting her time writing frivolous novels, but for all of her serious work, Westerman is nevertheless excluded from the "canon," prompting Reta to wonder, "How does she bear it? All the words she's written, all the years buried inside her. What does her shelf of books amount to, what force have these books on the world?" What, she wonders, is the purpose of writing, especially for women, when their work is so easily dismissed? Although Reta believes that women writers are excluded from the greatness accorded the "canon," ultimately she finds a purpose to her writing because of the personal joy it gives her and the voice it gives to women.

One of the major themes explored in "Unless" is the issue of how women are allowed "[g]oodness but not greatness," in the words of Danielle Westerman, a feminist pioneer and Holocaust survivor whose memoirs Reta has translated. Westerman believes that Reta's daughter has dropped out of life to sit on a street corner, wearing a "GOODNESS" sign around her neck, because she "has simply succumbed to the traditional refuge of women without power: she has accepted in its stead complete powerlessness, total passivity, a kind of impotent piety." In a series of unsent letters to various men who have excluded women from, among other things, a list of the Great Minds of the Western Intellectual world, a list of problem solvers, and a list of great writers, Reta expresses her outrage with "how casually and completely [women are] shut out of the universe," agreeing with Westerman that Norah has escaped from life after realizing she has no possibility for greatness. Like Westerman and her daughter, Reta has been allowed goodness, but not greatness. Although her first novel, "My Thyme Is Up," sold well, it was not taken seriously as a work of art. According to a review in the "New Yorker," her book "is very much for the moment, though certainly not for the ages." Writing the sequel, Reta again plans a book of comic fiction, featuring the dim-witted Alicia, but her male editor believes her draft is "close to greatness" and "could be one of those signal books of our time . . . with a mere two or three shifts of perspective" - that is, by increasing the role of the male character Roman and exploring the theme of his search for identity. In other words, in order to attain "greatness," Reta must sacrifice Alicia, in her gendered role, and focus instead on an "Everyman" Roman and his "universal" search for identity. In deciding how to finish her book, Reta must also decide what the point of her writing is - is she writing to be taken seriously or is she writing for herself?

Ultimately, Reta decides she is writing for herself - for the joy writing gives her and because it gives her a voice. Reta begins work on the sequel to "My Thyme Is Up" as a "diversion" to forget about Norah; through her writing, she says, "I can squeeze my eyes shut, pop through a little door on the wall, and stand outside my child's absence." Whether she is working on a serious book or "light fiction" doesn't matter; it is the act of writing itself that gives her comfort, that redeems her. While out for dinner one night, Reta decides to "add to the literature of washroom walls," scrawling, "My heart is broken." This simple act serves to make Reta feel alive, to give her life: "At once I felt a release of pressure around my ribs. . . . I was allowed to be a receptor and transmitter both, not a dead thing but a live link." Unfortunately, her joy in writing the sequel is interrupted by her editor's comments on the draft. Whereas, before she had heard from him, her book had been her "darling baby" and "greatest distraction," now she dreads working on the book and stops writing. In the end, she rejects her publisher's ideas for Roman, not worrying about converting her book into a serious work of act but rather finishing it with a happy ending, "a convention of comic fiction," and asserts that her joy in writing is more important than how the book is considered by critics or whether it is included in the "canon." But it still begs the question that Reta posed about Danielle Westerman's work - that is, if her book is ignored, what then does it amount to?

Ultimately, the value of Reta's writing is that it gives her a voice. In a conversation with her friends, Reta realizes that men don't really talk to women. One of her friends says, "Men aren't interested in women's lives" - they don't care what women think and don't let women "enter the conversation." But even if, in the real world, the inner and outer lives of women aren't as important as men's, in popular fiction, they usually are. Reta acknowledges, "It is Alicia's skin I wear," and she refuses her editor's request to make Roman the center of her book. In "My Thyme Is Up," Alicia's - or Reta's - voice is heard, and that matters, even if her work is dismissed as inconsequential. The importance of Reta's voice is highlighted in a scene where she searches for "the perfect scarf, not the near-perfect and certainly not the impulse purchase we usually settled for" for her daughter Norah. Even though Norah provides minimal input for the scarf - she wants something blue and yellow - Reta conceives in her mind the scarf that will delight her daughter's heart and goes to twenty different boutiques in order to find it. When she does end up finding the perfect scarf, she shows it to one of her female friends, whose eyes tear up: "It's just that it's so beautiful. . . . You invented it, created it out of your imagination." Even if the scarf, like a book of comic fiction, may not amount to much from a world perspective, it is still important. While Reta can't control her daughter's life or her happiness, she can "provide something temporary and necessary: this dream of transformation." In other words, what matters is not the end product - the scarf or the book - but it is the act of not settling, of having imagination, of creating something your own, of giving others happiness that matters. Reta finds her voice not only in Alicia, the woman, but in Alicia the woman writer, who herself is a creator. Although Reta knows, as a writer, it is poor form to also make Alicia a writer, she can't help herself from exploring the area of writing, which "is the richest territory we can imagine. . . . This matters, the remaking of an untenable world through the nib of a pen; it matters so much I can't stop doing it." Her writing does matter, she concludes, because it allows her to enter a conversation normally she is excluded from; it gives her a voice in shaping her own world. If she has to sacrifice that voice to achieve greatness, it is not worth it. Having her own voice recognized and heard is what matters.

Although Reta believes that women writers are excluded from the greatness accorded the "canon," ultimately she finds a purpose to her writing because of the personal joy it gives her and the voice it gives to women. As a reader, I admit, I read "Unless" only because it was included in the "canon," as I am trying to become more well-read and add books from Dr. Boxall's guide of 1001 important works to my collection. But, the truth is, I will be lucky to make it through even one-tenth of his list because I know, if I tried reading the whole list, I would quickly tire of trudging through accounts of dirty old white men and their supposed "everyman quest for identity," which neither interests me, gives me joy, or gives me a voice. The power in "Unless" - the thing that gives it a "force on the world" - is that it provides ordinary characters - ordinary people you meet in real life - with a voice. Even if Reta Winters isn't a universal character - i.e., she is not an Everyman but likely appeals only to women - and she is not struggling to find her identity, her struggle to make it through each of her ordinary days is still important. Her story may not be "one for the ages," but it is enough to provide readers with a transformative moment of happiness, and that is good enough for me. ... Read more