Villiers Reviews

I first read this book as a young woman in college and I still love the content and the stories. It was well written and the photographs very powerful. I learned to have a better appreciation for the sea and the men who sail and love her.

I am going to buy this book to be one of my prized collections. It is part of my memories as a historical museum worker and I think this is something I would like in my home library.

This collection of sea tales is by far one of the best. It covers all centuries of seafaring vessels, including the Battle of Trafalgar, pirates, and modern day voyagers. The Cape Horn voyage aboard the steel packet was a favorite, as was the narrative by Robin Lee Graham. I highly recommend this book for all potential sailors.

This was a very interesting and TRUE account of the early days of ships. From inflated animal skins to modern ships, the detail and knowledge are evident. You don't set the book down. A captivating and thorough account. I spent several weeks about a year ago trying to find a copy. I has previously read the book when I purchased it via National Geographic. I then had it 'borrowed' at work and hence the search over 7 years later. It was this good. I even remembered the title and authors name.....I usually don't.

I am a tall ship buff. I was doing some research for a role playing game when I came upon this book in a UC Library. Afere an untold amount of photo copies, I decided to try to find a copy for myself. This book gives the most comlete and accurate account of trall ship life, ecconomics, and detail, I felt I was a crew member. A rare insite on day gone by.

Studying this book beforehand sped up my practical learning dramatically when I crewed aboard the barque Picton Castle. I also recommend Eagle Seamanship (available from Amazon)

Most comprehensive book on square rigged sailing, covers the ships, the men,the economics and the captains of the late sailing age (clippers to steel sailing ships). Provides both broad scope and detail on aspects of rigging and shiphandling. Required reading when this reviewer was Bosun on the brig "Unicorn"

this book is brilliant. it captures perfectly the obsession of the french decadent movement with the female and what the male will do to control "woman." I will not give away any details of the story, but i must say the female as vampiric, hysterical, and simply put, sick, is what the character of thomas edison in this novel tries to put an end to by making his own version of "the female" that will be better suited to the world and society, but actually selfishly, to the needs of the male, and in particular mr. edison in the novel. it is a brilliant novel and i recommend THE DECADENT READER, from which i read this novel, it contains more unknown and unfortunately unread literature from this extremely fascinating movement at the end of the nineteenth century.

This little known novel is a masterpiece of Decadent literature (a brief movement localized in France around the turn of the last century that was influenced mainly by the poetry of Baudelaire and the theories of evolution put forth by Darwin). It tells the story of a fictionalized Edison who builds a female cyborg to exist in place of the unattainable love object of a tortured young man. She is animated by the spirit of a ghost and has the appearance of a Venus statue. Villiers, in the decadent tradition, lauds artifice above "nature," writing characters who traverse the world of illusion as that which is more real than real, a world in which appearance and the material are everything. This book might be of particular interest to feminists: Villiers only writes women as artifical beings, hysterics, ghosts, objects of fetishism. This book is a must read for any one interested in metaphysics and the rhetoric of "image" versus "being."

I think this book is fab! i now own both of the first 2 books in the dream hair series and totally love them. this is a book with credibility, like kevyn's makeup books. the dream hair books have tips galore and cute side line storys for the 4 girls in the book. amazing pictures and advice even down to vitamin supplments to help better care for your hair (well, maybe that's in the city hair book... so buy them both!) i'm obsessed with beauty books but will only buy the good ones, these are definitely worth it

The photography alone is worth the price of this book. Simple, tempting, and no calories. Send this book to every chocolate lover you know.

This book was given to me by a beautiful person and it is a beautiful book. It has the mystery and the decadence of my little Anne. Read the count Vera and think about your lost loves.

This little book is amazing. I live in Italy and for years I looked for a recipe that allows me to do the Focaccia. Non of the recipes I found were good. 'till I bought this book and tried "Focaccia al rosmarino". Absolutly great! Since then I made most of the recipes featured here and all of them came out perfect.
The recipes in here are:
Bacon and walnut fougasses
Focaccia with rosmary and sea salt
Focaccia with pancetta
Cherry tomato focaccia with basil
Italian ciabatta with olives and thyme
Olive oil bread
Saffron braided loaf
Vanilla Challah
Rye and caraway loaf
Chile pepper bread
Poppyseed loaf
Multiseed bread
Pumpernickel
Spelt sourdough (the only recipe in this book that needs a starter)
Beer bread
Honeynut loaf
Granola round
Blue cheese and walnut twist
Sour cherry loaf
Onion rolls
Garlic knots
Pumpkin bread
Easy cheesy brioche
Cheese rolls

Every recipe comes with a beautiful picture

I really recomend this book!

The mother of all SA cookbooks. Simple recipies for everyone. From flapjacks to roasts. Includes traditional recipies.

I've read these books over and over in paperback form, and it's good to finally see these books made available to the public again. Always delightful and skillfully written, these three short novels are guaranteed to amuse you and convince you that life's not so bad after all. Anthony Villiers travels, staying one step ahead of creditors, side-stepping the villians and presenting an enigma to almost everyone else. Mr. Villiers travelling companion is a Trog, best described as a big furry toad with glowing blue eyes who believes in "lines of occurance" instead of causality. Note: the 4th book in this series was never written. Nonetheless, I still strongly recommend these books to anyone looking for a fun, light read.

"Into Africa" is a wonderful, almost breathless, whirlwind tour of the African continent. The travels described in the book may have begun as a search for what remains of the ancient empires that once existed, but became as much a discovery of what Africa is today, and what it will become.

Authors Marq De Villiers and Sheila Hirtle divide the book (and the continent) into nine sections, each with its own distinct character and history. Part one looks at southeast Africa, highlights of which include a visit to the impressive stone ruins of Great Zimbabwe, ruins which produce a sound when one's ear is pressed against them, the source unknown. We are introduced to the Makuni or the "Living Stones" of Zambia, named not after the famous explorer and missionary but rather for the fact that a chief begins his duties by swallowing a small stone, which lodges in his gut and becomes an embodiment of his people. This region is also home to the colorful Maasai warriors, often noted by tourists in colorful red garb (so that people will want to photograph them), nomadic pastoralists that have been pushed out of the increasingly artificial wildlife sanctuaries of Ngorongoro and the Serengeti despite having lived there for many hundreds of years.

Part two looks at the east coast of Africa, the lands of the Swahili speakers. Fabled east Africa, long a tropical coast skirted by (increasingly threatened) coral reefs and (disappearing) dhows, one can still find along it Lamu, near the Somali border, still an island of coral brick buildings and mosques dating back to the 14 century. Even more famous is exotic Zanzibar, fabled island known to the ancients and part of Tanzania in name only, once a famous source of spices.

The third section looks at southern Africa, a land largely shaped by the Zulus and the migrations they caused in the 1800s thanks to the tyrant Shaka Zulu. We read about mountainous Lesotho, well known for its conical hats, vigorous ponies, and blankets (called Victorians), a distinct national character that is only 150 years old, invented by arguably Africa's wiliest diplomat, Moshoeshoe the Great; and Swaziland, one of the last of the traditional African monarchies, famous for the Umhlanga or Reed Dance, where barely clad young maidens symbolically offer themselves to the king as brides. The enigmatic San or Bushmen of the Kalahari also receive attention.

Part four looks at the ancient rain forest lands of the Kongo, long a source of slaves for the world and even well into the 20th century under the yoke of forced labor by France (in the Congo) and Belgium (in Zaire). It is a troubled region, but one of great contrasts; separated by the Stanley Pool of the mighty Congo River are two very different capital cities; Brazzaville of Congo the authors describe a sleepy and pleasant town, in vivid contrast to Kinshasa, capital of Zaire, a much larger, angrier, and dangerous city. Some of the most interesting passages in the book are in this section, particularly of his travels up the Congo River, in war torn Angola, and among the pygmies of Cameroon.

The fifth section looks at the Gulf of Guinea, long fabled as the Gold Coast and dominated by the fierce Ashanti, bold enough to challenge the British Empire and almost win. Of particular interest are violent and overpopulated Nigeria; the country of Benin (growing more into a model of how Africa could be), whose ancient kingdom of Dahomey was once noted for "Amazon" warriors; Togo, where vodun (the African incarnation of Haitian voodoo) still reigns; Ghana, perhaps the most "Christian" of the west African nations and a robust democracy; and Liberia and Sierra Leone, whose prospects are gloomy indeed.

Section six was quite interesting, examining the peoples and old empires of the Sahel, the grasslands bordering the southern Sahara, as well as the Sahara itself. Once dominated by a series of mighty empires, first Ghana for over 800 years, then Mali, the greatest perhaps of Sub-Saharan African empires, then nearly 400 years later the Songhai. Fabled Timbuktu is covered in this section, the desert city a center of Islamic learning from the 14th century on. The authors' coverage of Mali is especially interesting, notable for Mansa Musa, an African king so extravagantly wealthy he was well known in 14th century Europe after his pilgrimage to Mecca, and his predecessor, Abu Bakari II, the Voyager King, who actually sought to reach lands he believed to exist on the other side of the Atlantic, disappearing from history when he accompanied personally 2000 vessels for a perilous journey into the unknown. Also fascinating was coverage of the Tuareg or "Blue Men" of the Sahara, a fair-skinned desert nomad group where the men go veiled, not the women, and the Dogon tribe, cliff-dwellers in southern Mali that are neither Christian nor Muslim but have instead their own complex religion.

The later sections of the book are somewhat shorter, but no less interesting. Part seven looks at the Maghreb and the Barbary Coast of North Africa, an area once controlled by the now extinct Carthage, the land of the Berbers, the Bedouin, and the Moors, once dominated by the Almoravid and the Almohad civilizations, in part infused from the Andalucian culture of Islamic Spain. Part eight devotes some time to Egypt, which the authors maintain it is definitively a part of African civilization, and Ethiopia, a fascinating land of rock-hewn churches and according to some the home of the Ark of the Covenant, and once dominated by the powerful Axumite Empire. The book closes with the Great Rift, believed by paleontologists to be the true cradle of mankind, home to the enigmatic Chwezi or BaChwezi empire, the fabled Mountains of the Moon, and the horror that was Idi Amin in Uganda and is the conflict between the Tutsi and the Hutu in Rwanda and Burundi.

A fantastic book!

I really enjoyed this book because it was well written history of the African people. The man who wrote this book is an exceptional writter for National Geographic. He seems to have a very good perpective upon the history of the African people. The other great thing is he provides a source for the Pharoah Khufu being an African person. He shows the deepest respect to African people and their culture. He is one of the only white writters on Africa that seem to do this. We have other people like J PHilipe Rushton,John R Baker,and the people behind the bell cruve seem to be on a cultural campain to posion the masses.
I wish however the writter would have went more indepth into African spirtuality. He does talk about the Mountains of the Moons being the source of the acient Egyptains.

The major highlight of this book is that it mentions every country on the continent; many books which view Africa as a whole tend to stick with maybe a dozen of the 45 countries that make up Africa, but the authors have touched, albeit briefly, along all modern African states, and attempt to bring them together as a whole, and make cohesive conclusions about the continent. The continent - a real study of the continent in all of its incarnations. As an overview of the continent, as a pair of authors taking the long view, and reaching unique and enlightening conclusions, there is no better book.