Lowest common denominator

I bought this Revision Guide for my son's GCSE and these are not just my comments but his own too. Somehow the guide's writers seem to think that to dumb down material makes it more accessible. All it does is patronise the readers. Teenage speak has its place but it is not on a GCSE paper. To think 'oh we'll make English Lit. cool by using street language to discuss Steinbeck's book' is simply failing to equip students in essential skills, ie mastering the type of written English which will enable them to achieve good grades, and doing them a huge disservice. Furthermore, in essays pupils are expected to back up every point they make with a quote from the text and there are no quotes at all throughout the guide.<br /><br />In contrast, I bought Lett's revision guide for an Inspector Calls and the difference couldn't be bigger. <br /><br />I can't believe that schools are actually using this rubbish too.<br /><br />Corinne Lowry<br />

Tributes

These poems are a tribute to art, love and loss.<br /><br />Perhaps the strongest volume of poems since Douglas Dunn's ELEGIES<br /><br />We are uplifted and redeemed by a terrible sadness. Highy recommended.<br /><br />

An enduring delight

The joy of this book lives on. My grand daughter adores it and loves looking for the witch.

Very good and helpful

this study guide gives you some key notes on the poems from different cultures from the english gcse course. This is higher tier. It also provides information on how to plan and answer your response in the exam. <br />It is nicely layed out, colourful and interesting yet has lots of helpful information.<br />i highly reccomend this if only for the how to plan section.<br />includes poems like: limbo, presents from my aunts in pakistan. cluster 1 and 2.

Power and the dilemma of morality

Machiavelli raises the worrisome spectre that power is a stranger to morality. The atrocious standards of ruthlessness that a ruler often has to observe to acquire and maintain power buttress the claim that absolute power corrupts absolutely; because great men are almost always, bad men. It is the authentic bible of the cult of power.<br />The Prince is a jarring testament that the gilded corridors of power as portrayed by the kleiglights only mask the true pathway, a road filled with the blood and corpses of the squeamish and fainthearted. These same words Alexander the Great had put accross with robust military poetry: fortuna favore fortis!<br />Indeed, power is not everything. It is the only thing.

York Notes" Of Mice and Men"

The book arrived quickly and was in excellent condition. I would certainly recommend this seller.

Not All Poems for Higher Exam in here

Only Three of the Eight poems featured in the AQA Booklet (Higher) I received in January are in here.<br />I'm studying with ICS and have a full time job, so some of these poems have never been discussed in my course so this book is excellent but not as helpfull as I was hoping

Absolutely brilliant!!!

This book is worth its weight in gold for anyone who needs to write essays and I have recommended it to many of my friends. I have always been able to write decent enough essays, getting A grade GCSEs and A/ B grade Alevels, but my undergraduate essays never quite seemed to reach the top marks. I couldn't quite understand this though because I always got top marks for my scientific reports, literature reviews, and exams yet my essays never seemed to go above a 2:1. If I put in a huge amount of effort I would be able to reach a high 2:1, while hardly any effort would get me a low 2:1, I just couldn't seem to break out of it! That was until I read this book.<br /><br />This book was an absolute delight to read. It is extremely well written, interesting and engaging. To be honest, I just couldn't put it down. It was as though everything clicked into place for me - I could see exactly where I'd been going wrong. The book breaks down the process of essay writing into steps starting from how to think about essay questions, how to make notes and read background material, right through to writing style and proof reading. It is broken down in a way which is easy to follow and apply. But more than just improving your essays, this book provides advise on how to think more creatively - so you can reach those 1st class grades. However good your essays currently are, Greethams book will undoubtedly improve them, and I would reccommend it to every undergraduate!<br /><br />Before I read this book I always found essay writing a laborious and painful process which I usually procrastinated about and spent many days dreading having to actually get down and do. This book actually made the whole process of essay writing much more enjoyable, and actually much quicker. My essays now take much less time (from background reading to final draft), get better marks, and are more enjoyable to write - what more could any student want. The first essay I wrote after finishing this book got a 1st, and I have never got anything less than a 1st for any essay since. <br /><br />It is now nearly 2 years since I read this book and I have recently graduated (with a 1st). I deceided to write this review because I feel so indebted to Greetham's book for transforming my academic experience.

A great book

The comments included and the text analysis is such a help that make the reading an absolute enjoyment.

Very enjoyable play

A really great play - I would highly recommend this to anyone who loves a bit of harmless comedy. Quite easy going considering the era it was written in and thoroughly enjoyable once you get into it. I would recommend watching the TV production as well because it makes the storyline a bit clearer. <br /><br />This is a very short play and doesn't take at all long to read - great for a bit of light reading in the evenings.

mesmerising

I started reading this by accident and then found that I could not stop! Having only read 'Christine' before, many years ago, I had forgotton what a fantastic storyteller Stephen King is. I laughed and cringed my way through the autobiograhical section, mused and wrote my way through the teaching part and empathised and winced through the part where he tells us IN GRAPHIC DETAIL about the injuries he sustained when hit by a van while out for a walk in Maine (skip this part if you're squeamish - I wish I hadn't started reading this bit, but even here his writing compelled me to read on!). I even liked the short story at the end written by a competition winner. <br />I'm not sure how useful some of the advice is, but I like it i.e Read a lot. I can do that - there's even a reading list at the back of the book that is wonderfully (there's an adverb I would get criticised for!) unpretentious - Harry Potter anyone?!

An Inspector Calls - York Notes

York notes i would rate as one of the most helpful study guides available. They give you them vital pieces of information needed to form a well writen and researched coursework piece. Being a GCSE student, it is sometimes hard to deal with pages and pages of reasearch, i found that these books contain most of the info you need, and they were understandable, plus they devide them into clear and easy to find sections.

The book, An Inspector Calls, i found to be quite a simple book, but you can still miss out on some of the key facts. For example who actually was the Inspector? And that taking responsibility was one of the main themes in the play. These guides explain all of these factors and more.

And before you start thinking i'm too good for these books, I achieved A* grades thanks to them. So swallow your pride and get one!

York Notes Advanced on"Dr.Faustus"

This book is excellent, if you are doing the LTA3 exam then you should buy this. I just re took the exam and this book helped a lot. After reading this you gain more of an understanding and begin to appreciate the text. ITS EXCELLENT.

The World's Wife - Poetry by Carol Anne Duffy

This was an excellent book group book for the Christmas period! The poems varied in length from just a few lines to several pages = perfect for dipping in and out of! The poems were written by the wives of famous men from history - some funny, others more serious, but all excellently written and very clever. I'm not usually a poetry fan but loved this!

prompt delivert

This book was for my daughters school work, of which she says was a great read.

If you're doing A Level English these are the best

Barcode: 9780582823105<br /><br />So, like most people, i used CGP notes while doing my GCSE's and found them mostly good (especially on the poem anthologies) - the humour though, while sometimes fun on many occasions got in the way of serious learning and the notes were brief when dealing with full length plays and novels.<br /><br />Step in York Notes. For my A Level English i got one of these books for each of my set texts and they were massively helpful in prompting class discussions, writing essays and revising for the exams. They offer detailed chapter summaries and analyse them in an extremely informative way.<br /><br />There's quotes too, maybe a little too few, but the ones they pick out are good and then at the end of the book you get a wealth of extra info relating to characters, themes and symbolism. If you're an A Level English student or a parent who wants their kids to do well, i'd get these notes - they make your life a lot, lot easier.

York Notes on Shakespeare's"Othello"

A Level English Literiture isn't quite the walkover expected, and although it was plain sailing through the modern texts such as"The Handmaids Tale" and"The Worlds Wife", I came to abrupt block when I was given any texts featuring words such as"thee","thy""thence" and"how now"... otherwise known as pre-20th Century texts.
And so when Shakespeare landed on my desk last September, I cannot be blamed for breaking out into a cold sweat and feeling a big ball of dread in my gut and we opened up the play to Act 1, Scene 1.
But there was a light at the end of this dark tunnel. York Notes. I don't rate revision guides much, but York Notes saved me from failer for this module. It's clear and conscice, which is an immediate improvement on my Lit Teacher, and it is also organised into clear sections so you know what you are learning. The scene synopsis' were essential for me in learning to understand the play, and the analysis of LSF in later chapters was the perfect accompanyment to successful revsion.
What I also found a blessing was the guide highlighted key quotes, which made my revision ten-times simpler, and it also pre-analysed my quotes for me, so I didn't have to do the gruling task myself, all I had to do is memorize them!
And the Notes helped, I failed my mocks for this exam, and then after some good hard work on revision, I walked away from my exam with a happy A!
YORK NOTES ARE ESSENTIAL READING FOR LITERITURE STUDENTS!
10/10 - and york notes are avalible to accompany most books at GCSE and As/A2 Level, so have a bit of a search for other titles, they are not always simple to find on here, so try going to Waterstones where they sit together on the shelf!

Budding writer

This book was exactly what I was expecting and so is proving extremely useful as a source of viable publishers for my series of children's books. There is also much useful advice on how to cope with writing and publishing books.

Satire, soul and sincerity from Gil Scott-Heron

The gritty lyrical preoccupations and heartfelt vocal performances from Gil Scott-Heron have, over the years, invited a range of adjectival descriptions like, `reflective', `brooding' and `satirical'. Indeed, in a recent profile of Scott-Heron for The Observer journalist Sean O'Hagan talked to Jamie Byng - director of Canongate Books, who in 1996 republished his out-of-print novels The Vulture and The Nigger Factory - who spoke of his songs in such a fashion. He remarked:<br /><br />I still can't think of too many performers who have the intellectual range in their songwriting that takes in satire and social commentary apart from the early Bob Dylan and maybe the young Randy Newman... But there's also a great empathy there. Gil writes about the state of the world, but also about community, family and the plight of the individual.<br /><br />This compilation - which showcases Scott-Heron's half-rapped, half-sung vocals over hypnotic jazz, blues, soul and funk grooves - conveys the truth of that opinion. The empathetic vocals on `Pieces Of A Man', his mixing of funniness with frankness in the content of `Sex Education Ghetto Style' and the understanding of the transformative power of music on the intense `Lady Day And John Coltrane' should explain to the uninitiated why his comeback album of this year (`I'm Here Now') has caused such a brouhaha. However, The Revolution Will Not Be Televised should not be regarded as a definitive career overview; it draws solely upon material from his first three albums. Therefore, there is no space for other work, of comparable quality, such as his examination of the deleterious personal and social effects of alcoholism (`The Bottle'), or his denunciation of apartheid-era South Africa (`Johannesburg') nor even his deconstruction of US politics (`H20 Gate Blues').<br /><br />

The solution for creative block

As a full time graphic designer working in a demanding position where I am required to think constantly... I get days where my head just doesn't want to think or days that my mind is overloaded with too many information that I am too distacted to think. This is where The Art of Looking Sideways comes in... after reading a couple of chapters, I find myself able to put the book down and continue to work with a refreshed mind. Now this could be a coincidence and have absolutely nothing to do with the book but more about taking a break from a stressful environment... either way, it works for me and I'm happy to continue using the book as a solution for creative block and hopefully master the art of looking sideways one day. <br /><br />