Product Description
This digital document is an article from Siempre!, published by Edicional Siempre on April 30, 1998. The length of the article is 1511 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: El hombre de la máscara de hierro.(TT: The Man In The Iron Mask)
Author: Mario Saavedra
Publication: Siempre! (Refereed)
Date: April 30, 1998
Publisher: Edicional Siempre
Volume: v44Issue: n2341Page: p78(2)

Distributed by Thomson Gale ... Read more

Product Description
The authors show how women can prepare for pregnancy and childbirth by using the Alexander Technique. By achieving an overall improvement in balance and movement, a mother's experience of childbirth can be transformed, with numerous benefits to her own health and her baby's development. As well as explaining how many of the health problems associated with pregnancy can be traced back to faulty posture, the authors show how the technique can be used to achieve a more natural birth, reducing the need for medical attention. This text is fully illustrated, with practical easy-to-follow photographs, and its publication aims to meet the great demand for information about natural childbirth techniques. ... Read more

Product Description

When James Henry Trotter accidentally drops some magic crystals by the old peach tree, strange things start to happen. The peach at the top of the tree begins to grow, and before long it's as big as a house. Then James discovers a secret entranceway into the fruit, and when he crawls inside, he meets a bunch of marvelous oversized friends—Old-Green-Grasshopper, Centipede, Ladybug, Miss Spider, and more.

Customer Reviews (5)

Jeremy Irons makes a great story even more fun!
I can now never hear/think of the word "blossom" without imagining Jeremy Iron's voice from this CD and giggling.

James and the Giant Peach
My twin boys who are 5 just love this story, It is very well narrated and it captures their attention wonderfully. They listen to it over and over again especially in the car. i also love listening to it too !!

Performed, not read
The story of James and the Giant Peach, bizarre and quintessentially Roald Dahl, is well known, so I won't discuss it here. This is a wonderful way to enjoy it, with Jeremy Irons performing, not reading, the story.My daughter (8) was entranced, and it made what might have been a long, boring road trip into a fun adventure for both of us.

James and the Giant Peach audio book
This audio book is wonderful! I teach elementary special education and it's fantastic for my struggling readers to be able to listen to this classic as they read along with the book.

Great book, great narration
I had borrowed this from someone and love it so much that I'm purchasing one for my own personal collection.James and the Giant Peach is, of course, a childhood favorite.What makes this particular version so incredible is Jeremy Irons.He is amazing.He brought each character to life with their own distinct voices.I would highly recommend this as a gift to yourself or others regardless of age. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Lolita
Despite its lascivious reputation, the pleasures of Lolita are as much intellectual as erogenous. It is a love story with the power to raise both chuckles and eyebrows. Humbert Humbert is a European intellectual adrift in America, haunted by memories of a lost adolescent love. When he meets his ideal nymphet in the shape of 12-year-old Dolores Haze, he constructs an elaborate plot to seduce her, but first he must get rid of her mother. In spite of his diabolical wit, reality proves to be more slippery than Humbert's feverish fantasies, and Lolita refuses to conform to his image of the perfect lover.
Playfully perverse in form as well as content, riddled with puns and literary allusions, Nabokov's 1955 novel is a hymn to the Russian-born author's delight in his adopted language. Indeed, readers who want to probe all of its allusive nooks and crannies will need to consult the annotated edition. Lolita is undoubtedly, brazenly erotic, but the eroticism springs less from the "frail honey-hued shoulders ... the silky supple bare back" of little Lo than it does from the wantonly gorgeous prose that Humbert uses to recount his forbidden passion:

She was musical and apple-sweet ... Lola the bobby-soxer, devouring her immemorial fruit, singing through its juice ... and every movement she made, every shuffle and ripple, helped me to conceal and to improve the secret system of tactile correspondence between beast and beauty--between my gagged, bursting beast and the beauty of her dimpled body in its innocent cotton frock.
Much has been made of Lolita as metaphor, perhaps because the love affair at its heart is so troubling. Humbert represents the formal, educated Old World of Europe, while Lolita is America: ripening, beautiful, but not too bright and a little vulgar. Nabokov delights in exploring the intercourse between these cultures, and the passages where Humbert describes the suburbs and strip malls and motels of postwar America are filled with both attraction and repulsion, "those restaurants where the holy spirit of Huncan Dines had descended upon the cute paper napkins and cottage-cheese-crested salads." Yet however tempting the novel's symbolism may be, its chief delight--and power--lies in the character of Humbert Humbert. He, at least as he tells it, is no seedy skulker, no twisted destroyer of innocence. Instead, Nabokov's celebrated mouthpiece is erudite and witty, even at his most depraved. Humbert can't help it--linguistic jouissance is as important to him as the satisfaction of his arrested libido. ... Read more

Product Description
A successful doctor and politician has what seems to others a perfect family life. In fact, his life has been a good performance, until a chance meeting with his son's lover. This strange and secretive woman, emotionally crippled by her past, unlocks the violent reality behind his carefully created facade, and his consuming obsession threatens everyone around him. As he spirals toward his destruction, he comes to understand her warning--damaged people are dangerous. 4 cassettes. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (48)

A so so read for me, glad to have read it
He would have been better off dead.It would be better that he died, than the reality of what he did.How could he do this to his wife, to his son?What was it about Anna that was so appealing, intoxicating, that made him throw away his carefully planned, successful life, so late in the game, for a woman so wild, so dangerous, and so obviously damaged?See the impact of infidelity on one man's life.

I honestly had no idea, until after I read this, that this book was so successful, it was made into a movie.I felt like I did not get invited to the party.I was obviously missing something. The book was not a bad book, just for me, it felt false somehow.

The story is written in first person narrative, from the perspective of the adulterous man, whose name we do not learn.Yet, throughout the book, I am painfully aware of his character being written by a woman, because he sounds and acts like a woman, while Anna, his love interest, sounds and acts like a man.There seemed to be a real disconnect there.Now, to be fair, the story was set in England, so perhaps this is a more European feel that I, as an American reader, can not relate to, but to me, it just seemed like what a female writer thought a man should sound and act like.In reality, it was more feminine.

Anna's back story also had a disconnect for me, with the character we now saw before us.Her back story was one quite believable of a woman, but her present character, while intended to seem like a damaged woman, instead just seemed like a lothario.

That being said, I think the story had real potential.I liken the male character to Humbert Humbert in Lolita, a man drawn to pathetic behavior to chase the fancy of a ridiculous love affair that will never materialize.Humbert too is a non-masculine character, so perhaps the books work much in the same way.But I always found Humbert somewhat pitiable, forgivable.I have no forgiveness for the male in this book.Yet I am glad to have read his story.

Self-destruction of Two Damaging Souls!
Josephine Hart's novel DAMAGE has all the flavor and atmospheric quality of a Jean Racine's character or Shakespeare's with a modern twist. Doomed to failure, defeat, and irrepressible destruction, the main characters or hero (should we say antihero) moves forward spellbound, towards their own destiny, until their last breath dies out. We got hooked to the story while at the same time we sort of hate the individuals for getting us drenched as well into their dark erotic passion. Like the movie of the same name, Damage sizzles in this noir tale of ruthless passion that damages the soul and shows the depravity of human existence.

Well-told and beautifully written and yet unconvincing and passionless.
I've seen the movie twice but hadn't read the book until now. Comparing the movie to the book, I'm pleased how they are not so different in structure and plot yet I find the book much better. One thing that I am most surprised about is that Damage is Josephine Hart's first novel. Otherwise, I would have laid more harsh criticism of the book. Really, the book is well-written, and it contains great choice of words while the dialogues are beautifully thought up. I like the feel and the atmosphere of the English high class through the dialogues, actions, thoughts, and attitudes. However, I am still disappointed, as I was in the movie, in the lack of passion and chemistry in the relationship between Anna Barton and...uh....(you know, I was thinking of the characters and how easily I knew the names of them, but I rattled my brain one night for what was the name of the main character and couldn't remember; later, I looked up in the book and couldn't find it; and finally, I looked up online to find the name, and it turned out to be that the main character has no name. It is just so funny.). Anyway, back to Anna and her lover, I remain unconvinced in their love for each other and how they show zero development of their relationship, only just a robotic feel for each other. I think if that part was better developed, then the book certainly would receive five stars from me. However, one could make a very good argument that the story was told primarily from the main character's point of view. That may be a very fine excuse to relieve my criticism. Nevertheless, the story, if cold and passionless, is quite first-rate and very rationally explained. Another thing which I love about the book which almost never happens in books and movies is the details in the aftermath, especially how the main character took care of the affairs and what did he do. This is something that is notoriously untold in stories because people naturally assume when things happen, nothing more is further explored. So, kudos to Josephine Hart for it. As for the shocking parts of the story, I must admit that I am just too desensitized to them because there have been a lot of worse crap in the past decade which have appeared on television, movies, news, and the internet. All in all, Damage is an impressive book which led to an impressive film, and to pick either, I would go with the book.

Understatement as an Art form
This short, dark, sparse novel, Ms. Hart's first, is a masterpiece of understatement of the barren human condition. Every word, every sentence, every paragraph is a compact complicit tool of a human conspiracy that launches, unleashes and then reels the reader's mind in, until it is completely entangled in this plot.

There are so few words that the reader has no choice but to be attentive. It is as sparse with its words as the protagonist, Steven, is barren of emotions, and is one of those rare times when there is almost too much space for the reader's mind to wander. For when the imagination is unleashed in the darkness of this forbidding, forbidden and tragic tale, the reader becomes a voyeuristic participant, vicariously locked into a scenario of emotional barrenness that he knows is all only too human.

The systematic unraveling of this prototypical "all American/all European" family, as Steven and his son's girlfriend descend into the unspeakable, probes the outer depths of the human condition in a way that is exactly the opposite of say that of a Jean Genet in "The Thief," or of a Jean Paul Sartre in his autobiographical "Words." In each of these examples, it is the richness, density and quantity of the words that measures the accuracy of the human condition. There, the human condition is measured by the gram; here, it is measured by the microgram: by the utter sparseness of words.

Its beauty is not unlike that of a Japanese Haiku painting, or a Miles Davis rendition of any standard Ballard. The economy of the art form becomes a tool that startles the mind with its quietness. It is the silence and the lack of words that is deafening, not the quantity or the noise. Space rather than chatter is the hammer that drives the message home. It is the "stealth-ness of the scarcity of words" that alerts us to what the protagonist is capable of. Since it is after all but a restatement of the human condition, the plot thus writes itself.

All three art forms speak in the same understated language, tracing out the contours of deep emotional pictures with sounds, brush strokes or carefully chosen words: Sounds, stokes and a scary economy of words that tell the same human story: of self-made sorrows, self-destruction covered over by efficient dissembling and rationalizations; compelled from the depths of emotionally barren souls all "sleep-walking" through life, ever vulnerable to every illicit and forbidden desire.

Ms. Hart was a play write and teacher of acting before writing this novel. One wonders what surprises she still has in store for the world. Five-hundred stars.

A glimpse into The Relationship Penal System
Josephine Hart has written a splendid tour de force into obsession and repression gone mad. Hart's narrative is like receiving a slow but lethalinjection that renders the reader in a state of excrutiating paralysis from which there is no escape. Hart may be discussing tea and crumpets as she characterizes the dwelling place and lifestyle of the upper crust inmates depicted in the book. Stephen's tolerance of his patients is as incidental as his acquiensce to serve politically. Simply a matter of fact: like washing your feet with your socks on. It does not - will not feel good: but it will do in order to keep self-examination, question, conlict,communication and answerability in abeyance. His wife Ingrid is an ice Princess who basks in the "pleasing proportions" of a life she created. The children equally damned appear balanced in schedules and expectations endemic to the system from which they were launched. Anna Barton's entrance into their lives served to exact pennance from each family member. It also indicted the race mind and establishment that invented the rules of engagement for the compound. An engagement that led to the death of Martyn and the remainder of the Barton's who were on the same balcony all their lives. Now, without the cover of duplicity they are forced to encounter their own malignancy, the people next door and the stranger in their bed. Anna Barton did what she does: inject, poison and wait. That she fed on her prey is academic. The prison doors were always open to the players and everyone who is truthful may get up and leave. This book is a marvel. ... Read more

Product Description
Lolita is the sensational best seller that blew away conventional restraints that took America by storm. Hubert Humbert is a middle-age fantasist, still in love with Annabel, his first sweetheart. She was a beautiful, young, and pure woman who died years ago of typhus. Out of the blue Humbert finds a girl fatally reminiscent of Annabel. Her name is Dolores; he rechristens her Lolita. But instead of the innocence he expects, Lolita gives him steamy pubescence. She is greedily sensual, eager to earn her way into womanhood. ... Read more

Product Description
A little magic can take you a long way.

When James Henry Trotter accidentally drops some magic crystals by the old peach tree, strange things start to happen. The peach at the top of the tree begins to grow, and before long it's as big as a house. Then James discovers a secret entranceway into the fruit, and when he crawls inside, he meets a bunch of marvelous oversized friends -- Old Green-Grasshopper, Centipede, Ladybug, Miss Spider, and more.

Customer Reviews (230)

a perfect deus ex machina
I never read Dahl while I was a child, and now I'm not sure why not.

I did like the book, as it is inventive and well told. What is best is the manner and speed of the parent's dispatch and the character's relegation to the bad place. (If you read any children's fiction, you know that this has to happen sooner or later. All positive parental figures in children's literature come from outside the home.)

James goes on an adventure, earns a sense of himself and is emancipated from the oppression of his aunts. The conflict is not too scary but instead allows for a sense of wonder in the child reader.

His emancipation is through the means of magic handed to him, a perfect deus ex machina. Dahl plays with the conventions of the literature, but his work does not come across as formulaic, instead is something new. I am on my way to get another book of his off my shelf.

One of my Favorites!!
It's to be another Roald Dahl classic this week, Esteemed Reader. Whoo hoo! As you know, Roald Dahl is my favorite author and James and the Giant Peach is one of my all-time favorite stories. It's the sort of book that will convince even the Mike TV's of the world to pause their video games and not unpause them until the book is finished. In my quest to better understand middle grade fiction (thus improving my ninja skills), I try to read as widely as possible. But I also find it useful to go back and reread the books I loved as a child with adult eyes.


James and the Giant Peach is a prime example of one of the things I love most about middle grade fiction: stories for kids can go anywhere and kids, unlike many adults, are willing to accompany the author to the previously unfathomed depths of human imagination. Who else but children could understand and love the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles? Stephen King and William S. Burrows and many other adult writers have written a lot of out there stuff, but none of them touches the absolute insanity of James and the Giant Peach.

So here's the plot and I swear I'm not making this up (I wish I had, though): James Henry Trotter is a nice boy sent to live with his wicked and abusive aunts after his parents are killed by an escaped rhinoceros. So far, it's a pretty standard set up, right (except the part about the rhino)? But wait! One day when James is in the garden he meets a wizard who just happens to be in the neighborhood. Okay, a little strange, but after all, this is children's fiction. The wizard gives James some magic crystals (awfully nice of him), which James accidentally spills near a peach tree. The crystals enchant the tree so that it grows a peach the size of a large house.

Rob, I hear you saying, that's not so very weird. True, but there is more story to come! James tunnels inside the giant peach all the way to its pit where he finds a wooden door. Inside the giant peach are giant insects who are all very happy to see James and are eager to take a voyage with him. Is that weird enough for you? No? Well the insects chew through the stem of the peach and then they and James ride it down a hill, squashing James' wicked aunts, into the ocean, where they sail off into the horizon.

What's stranger than a human boy and his giant insect pals sailing the ocean inside a giant peach? I'm so glad you asked! Because what happens next is sharks attack the peach, eating away at its tasty flesh to eventually get at James and the bugs. But not to worry. Among the giant bugs is a giant silkworm and a giant spider and they spin long strands of web and silk that James is able to use to lasso seagulls. So the answer to the original query what is stranger than a human boy and his giant insect palls sailing the ocean inside a giant peach is a human boy and his giant insect pals flying to New York in a giant peach by way of hundreds of lassoed seagulls.

Now then, I want you to imagine an adult story in which the plot I have just described to you would fit in. Say we change James to an adult. Say we even end the story by revealing that it was all a dream, something Dahl is too classy to ever do. I can't think of an adult author who could pull this plot off. But a middle grade author? No problem. That's what I love most about kids. When I was a kid and I read this book, I didn't find it the least bit strange that there were giant bugs living inside the giant peach. Kids just sort of go with the flow when it comes to stories, so a writer has a great deal more leeway with the suspension of disbelief.

James and the Giant Peach is a stupendous feat of imagining, and it's worth reading just for that. But as with all great stories, there's a little more to this one. Note how sad James is while living with his aunts, who call him terrible names and mistreat and abuse him. Note how he has no ideas for getting himself out of a bad spot because he has no sense of self worth. Next, note how the giant bugs praise James for everything he does and how supportive they are of him. In that environment, James flourishes and hatches all sorts of brilliant ideas, such as flying his giant peach to New York. There's something to that, I think, and it may be a large part of why James and the Giant Peach has survived years and years of readers and is likely to be read for years to come.

James and the Giant Peach
James and the Giant Peach, by Roald Dahl

As is common in many of Roald Dahl's books, James is a child stuck in a horrible situation. Orphaned, he's living with two nasty aunts who use him as manual labor and don't ever let him have fun.

But someone is looking out for James, and a mysterious little man gives him a bag of green magic crystals...only...he drops them. But his chance at happiness isn't lost, because the crystals are dropped beneath a peach tree. The tree, formerly barren, suddenly produces a peach that grows larger by the minute, until it's the size of a house. Inside the peach are a variety of common garden insects, such as a centipede and a grasshopper, each as large as a human because they too ingested some of the magic crystals.

James and his new friends take a magical journey on the gigantic peach, as journey only the imagination of Roald Dahl could produce. I'll never look at rainbows or hail the same way again, or seagulls!

4/5.

Every child should experience this book
This is a glorious little tale about the giddiness of being a child.Yes, it is shockingly dark in the beginning, how poor James leads such a miserable existence, but once the peculiar things start to happen, Dahl takes readers on a joyful romp around the world.

There is one chapter that doesn't fit the tone at all, in which James basically interviews all of his mutated insect/arachnid/other companions about how valuable they are to humanity, and it comes across feeling like an editorially-mandated After School Special ("Hey kids! Be nice to bugs!").I like to think that perhaps Dahl was mocking the inability of grown-ups to write for children without trying to bonk them on the heads with a lesson, but it's not artfully accomplished.The book is much stronger when the tone is cheeky and ludicrous, like when the gigantic Centipede composes enthusiastic limericks about the way an enormous peach squashed some of the villains of the story, or when Dahl rewards readers with the most spectacular role reversal of all for a lonely boy who has been denied the opportunity just to play with other children.

This book was first read to me in my kindergarten class, and I find that I love it more each time I read it for myself.If you care about children, you will share this book with them.

childhood favorite
I was thrilled to own a copy of one of my favorite childhood books.The illustrations of this publication year can't be beat!The book arrived in a timely manner and in decent condition.The only thing that was missing was the book jacket...I wish that would have been stated in the book description. ... Read more

Product Description
The heartrending story of British boy Jim's four year ordeal in a Japanese prison camp during the second world war. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (33)

Better, darker than the movie
The book was made into a movie a while back with the kid from _Newsies_. The movie is not as good as the book. The book is more true and as a result 'darker'. Ballard is an excellent storyteller, but one disconcerting thing is that he tells the story of his young life in the third person. Odd, you know, this creates a bit of distance but perhaps he needed it.

Buy it for the nearest teenager - open their mind
Of course I didn't just mean teenagers.

This is an important book in the true sense of the phrase - the sort that will puncture the hard heart of all budding hoodies and open their minds.

The writing is exquisite, the characters unforgettable, the world is evoked in 3D and you lose yourself in it.

And as for the little boy? made me wish I had one of my own and I've never been remotely interested in being a parent!

Transcendent
Upon its publication, EMPIRE OF THE SUN alerted a wider audience to something those of us who had been reading Ballard for years already knew -- that J.G. Ballard is one of the major authors of our time. It's a pleasure to re-read EMPIRE in 2009, (the novel's twenty-fifth anniversary) and discover it remains as hauntingly dream-like and vivid as ever.

The movie always struck me as an unfortunate misfire -- Spielberg, who is all about surface and texture, trying and failing to interpret Ballard, who's all about understatement and "inner space." I never have a desire to go back to the movie, but I could read EMPIRE again and again, and I never hesitate to recommend it to family and friends.

Much better than the movie.
An incredible book. While reading this book I realized I had never heard much about the WW2 in the pacific outside of the American military operations of island hoping and the movies that came out of those events. I found this book very interesting. What was more surprising is it was based of Ballard's actual events that occurred to him during this time. I found myself wanting to so bad to know that everything would turn out well in the end. There were a few missing points in the book that I wish I could know the answer to, like what happened to certain individuals after the end of the book.

I'm trying really hard not to spoil the book for anyone who has not read it yet. I felt my mind completely engrossed in the book and I found myself day dreaming during the day and finding myself at Lunghua camp and realizing how grateful I should be that my meal is more than just rice and a sweet potato.

Would I say this book changed my life? Doubtful but it has made me more interested to read other books of the same nature, I want to go and read a book of someone who was in a concentration camp in Germany and then sit and compare what they had to go through, I would also be more interested now in reading more books of the pacific world war 2.

WWII coming-of-age story
Set in Shanghai during WWII, the novel follows a young British boy named Jim as he struggles to survive after being separated from his parents. Jim is crazy about airplanes and wants to be a pilot when he grows up. He admires the bravery of the Japanese soldiers and continues to idolize them, even after he is locked up in an internment camp where he sees up close the ugliness of war.

Jim is not always the most likeable character. He can be surpisingly callous, but he is a survivor.

Empire of the Sun is a well-written and realistic portrayal of a boy's struggle for survival during a brutal war. The overwhelming brutality was a bit much for me, but readers who enjoy war stories will love this one. ... Read more