Product Description
In the future, as Manhattan descends into chaos and poverty threatens her family, twelve-year-old Lola Hart is forced to trade her past life of privilege for life in Harlem, where she begins a terrible metamorphosis. 20,000 first printing. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (33)

A PEEK INTO OUR POSSIBLE FUTURE
Random Acts of Senseless Violence is the story of the deterioration of society from the diary of a young girl
As the story begins, she is a normal 12 year old girl living at a time when things are deteriorating around her, but her parents are trying to keep things normal... business as usual.
But things begin to get worse and the family must move to a 'not so nice' section of town... they live in NYC
There the girl meets new girls her age ... ones that have had a much harsher life. They introduce the 12 year old to a whole different way of life. They talk a 'street lingo' that I found a little hard to follow at times. The 12 year old writing the diary begins to change. It is a subtle change at first, but becomes much more pronounced... as the world around also begins to deteriorate even more
The book shows how easy it is to delude ourselves into thinking things will get better, as things are falling apart around us. And how people can change in ways that they never believed possible

Dare to face the present or suffer the future
Womack presents the story of a society's collapse in a very personal way through the diary of Lola, a 12-year-old girl living in New York some time in the very near future.Like any girl her age, Lola is primarily interested in her family, her friends, and her burgeoning sexuality.The economic collapse, political instability, breakdown of law and order, etc... are presented through her eyes in how they affect her personally - in her parents' financial problems, the city's deterioration, the riots and chaos all around her.While Lola takes much of this in stride, the reader gets just enough background information to understand what's really going on.

Womack is not shy about placing the blame for society's ills squarely on the shoulders of Lola's parents, who despite their dire financial straits insist on spending money like there was no tomorrow - even continuing to send their daughters to expensive private schools.They represent the immediate gratification generation, and lack the strength of will required to make even the smallest sacrifices.Tellingly, Lola and her little sister playfully call each other "Boob" and "Booz" - names that evoke a generation's obsession with sex and drugs.

After her family is forced to move to a seedier part of town, Lola makes friends with a group of girls who call themselves the "Death Angels" - Iz, Jude and Weez.Iz still lives with her parents and follows their rules, but she is streetwise in ways that Lola can't fathom.Jude has recently left a desperate home situation and lives alone in an abandoned building, while Weez has grown up wild, dangerously violent, and completely unpredictable.As the story progresses, we see Lola's transformation from naïve child to reckless young woman, and Womack makes a point of showing this regression in her writing style as well.While this technique works thematically, and Lola's New Speak is very entertaining and probably the best part of the book, it's ultimately not very convincing: this reviewer found it hard to believe that her mode of written expression would change so dramatically over so short a time.

Sci-fi fans will notice that the story isn't very science fiction-y - there's some implication that it takes place in the future, but I can't recall anything in this story that couldn't happen today.Womack isn't interested in science or technology, but in how our personal choices affect society at large, and vice versa.Adults should find this cautionary tale easy and fascinating reading, but some pretty strong lesbian overtones make it unsuitable for children.

You can't judge a book by its title...
Or, in other words, after reading *Random Acts of Senseless Violence* I still wish there was a book out there that goes with this terrific title. The novel presently under consideration, alas, doesn't. To be honest, if I hadn't read Jack Womack's absolutely terrific *Let's Put the Future Behind Us* ((see my droolingly positive review of this title for more details)) I probably would have put this one down after the first 40 pages or so. I was hoping that at some point *Random Acts* would turn a corner and travel into the darkly hilarious neighborhoods of the human psyche Womack visited in *Let's Put the Future Behind Us,* but this is a very different sort of book, almost by necessity.

The novel is written in diary-format by a twelve-year-old girl named Lola Hart. Think of her as a kind of urban American Anne Frank recording her coming-of-age during the apocalyptic collapse of a nation torn apart by racism, poverty, and violence. The problem--as I see it--is precisely that it's a twelve-year-old girl doing the narrating: so we don't get any idea of how America has come to this state of affairs, no `big picture,' no analytic perspective. After all, how sophisticated and savvy can even an intelligent twelve-year-old girl be? And, although Womack tries, how much violence--random, senseless, or otherwise--can a good little Jewish girl from a well-meaning if slightly daft family possibly witness, nevertheless perpetrate? Answer--not enough for my ultra-violent tastes. How cynical and world-weary can an adolescent be even under the worst of circumstances compared to someone who's been walking this miserable planet for three or four decades? To a sub-nihilist such as myself, I found Lola Hart to be quaint at her darkest, no more than a baby devil, a vicious little cherub.

Unlike some reviewers, I didn't find that Womack crossed any lines or challenged any dictates of good taste in *Random Acts,* and more's the pity. That he has Lola recounting the details of her awakening homosexuality and her innocent exploratory dalliances with an equally young, if slightly more seasoned, girlfriend is hardly revolutionary, distasteful, or even particularly lurid inasmuch as Womack treats the issue with a mildness and non-explicit tact that only the extremely prudish--or the most homophobic could possibly object to. Writing about the sexual awakening of 12-year-olds doesn't automatically qualify you as a cutting edge avant-gardist, but at the same time, it doesn't automatically make you a child pornographer either. We've all been twelve-years-old people. Describing the experience--sexually or otherwise--is part of a writer's job if he decides to explore this territory through a character like Lola Hart. One might argue that Jack Womack has no idea what being a twelve-year-old girl is like and I can't vouch for the experience either, but if we made first-hand experience a requirement for writing about a subject or a character we'd condemn everyone to autobiography. My sense is that Womack does a credible enough job rendering Lola. She seems real enough to me. Just limited, as any twelve-year-old girl is likely to be. She's simply a disappointing character to star in a novel called *Random Acts of Senseless Violence." On the whole, I'd say this book read more like a particularly dark YA novel better suited to sophisticated thirteen-year-olds than adults.

I stuck it out, though, and it's an easy enough read, partly because Womack replicates the relatively straightforward and uncomplicated voice of Lola as she writes in her diary. There's also enough ominous goings-on in Lola's immediate world--a Manhattan rapidly degenerating into wholesale civil strife, economic collapse, and military occupation by an increasingly paranoid and oppressive government--to hold your interest, as well as a continuing series of heartbreaking tragedies that tears apart her once close-knit family. The result is that Lola ends up running the streets with a girl-gang called the Death Angels. Much is made of the urban street rap these girls share and the metamorphosis ((or degeneration, perhaps)) of Lola's own language as evidenced in her diary as she becomes part of the streetwise world of the Death Angels. How language, social disenfranchisement, and violence fuse to produce a new native tongue of revolt among the oppressed is one of the main points of *Random Acts* but I found the patois of Ebonics-inspired inner-city slang that Womack casts a good deal of the last third of the novel to be, while at time creative and entertaining, tiring and even annoying after awhile. This isn't *Clockwork Orange,* after all, and what Lola has to say doesn't become any more interesting because she's forgotten--or no longer cares to use--the rules of common English grammar. What she says only becomes more difficult to understand. Lola just isn't an interesting enough character to pull this off for long. What you end up with is the dated, somewhat silly, and embarrassing feeling one gets when hearing someone use last year's slang. Like hearing some middle-aged white guy trying to sound cool at the office by saying "Hey dog, what up?" You hope he's kidding. If not, you cringe as if at the thought of being covered in spiders. You write in slang, it gets old fast.

A three-star novel with a five-star title, *Random Acts of Senseless Violence* is an earnest attempt to write an "important" novel with a profound message--in other words, an almost surefire prescription for a weak dose of second-rate medicine. It mighta done me some good when I was ten. I need big people's medicine now.

Random Acts of Perversity
Womack's book is truly inspiring! After reading this book and then realizing that this trite tale of the downward spiral of American civilization as told through the eyes of a 12 year old Manhattanite's diary entries was actually published, I am inspired to write.Hell, if this could get published so can I!Even the editors of this book could not finish this book as evidenced by a lack of punctuation, quotation marks and intelligible narrative in the latter half of the book.Maybe for my book I will take a page, or rather several pages from Jack Womack and relate the adventures of young 11-13 year old girls' sexuality by having them undress and wrestle while I describe their sweaty bodies and then thinly veil my titillation as character development in a declining world.Or perhaps I will have 3 out of 5 of the 11-13 year old girls raped as a rite of passage--two by their fathers.Random Acts of Senseless Violence is nothing short of an erotic teenage boy video game complete with bombings, cops, military men, guns, violence and of course hot little girl on little girl action.

Best of Series?
I'd heard the name 'Jack Womack' beaten around as one of those Sci-Fi writers who goes beyond the genre to tell a genuinely good story. So I decided to check him out, but Random Acts of Senseless Violence was the only Womack book [that the local store hadd]. So I read it, despite the fact that it was mid-series.

And I loved it. Sure, there's plenty of dystopia writing out there already, and it's all been said before, and blah blah blah. But it's a good story, so forget the fact that it's probably been said before. It's very engaging, and it feels real enough that it's actually pretty horrifying.

I liked it enough that I'm now working my way through the rest of the Ambient series, chronologically (not that it really seems to matter which order you read them in). They're good, but they're just basic sci-fi (not that I'm knocking that)--techy gadgets, a new dialect (this is one of the funnest dialects I've read), a dirty and crumbly setting, and lots of mean people.

But the basic sci-fi of the rest of the series (so far, anyway--I still haven't finished the whole series) isn't what I would've expected after having started out with Random Acts. Which is disappointing in a way, but oh well. They're still good reads. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (7)

A Vividly Rendered Vision of Hell on Earth
"Ambient" was assigned reading in my science fiction class at UC Santa Cruz 10 years ago.Expecting something like Asimov or Heinlein, I was unable to wrap my head around the seeming gibberish and put the book down quickly.

I've returned to it now and it remains a difficult read, as most of the novel is written in a future slang a la Clockwork Orange.Womack also chooses to vividly render his future world rather than go for quick, easy action.And what a world it is: a tiny elite controls everything, cavalierly exterminating those of the lower classes for dropping books at the bookstore, or hunting them down on their estates.This world is light years beyond Gibson in darkness and grittiness, and I found myself wondering if a society with such an absolute disregard for human life could exist.

If you are new to Womack's work, I would recommend "Random Acts of Senseless Violence."It is the first in the Dryco series chronologically and brings the reader gradually into the futurespeak and nihilistic chaos, presented in the form of a young girl's diary as New York collapses and burns around her.It is more powerful because it shows the transition period, making Womack's future that much more real.

I found it irritating
Its pretty rare that I don't finish a book, unfortunately this was one of those cases. If I missed anything like a dramatic change in prose style (I stopped halfway through the book) then I apologise.

I found the positioning of 'Ambient' to be (as other reviewers have mentioned) an attempt at lying somewhere between cyberpunk and Burgess's classic Clockwork Orange. However in terms of actual implementation, the prose irritated me beyond all belief. The characters speak like drunken yodas. Don't get me wrong I'm fully in favour of taking dialects to the extreme to make a point in literature (Trainspotting by Irvine Welsh being an exemplary example) but I found page after page of this annoying doublespeak too much to bear.

When other reviewers say "this is a hard book to read" they are damn right. For me the return on investment wasn't worth it.

A Splendid Mix of Anthony Burgess and William Gibson
"Ambient" is William Gibson's cyberpunk vision cloaked in a future English quite akin to Burgess' in "A Clockwork Orange". Womack's daring, original prose is coupled with his stark, bleak vision of a future United States in which New York City has virtually succumbed to urban rot and environmental degradation, resembling a vast maximum security prison under martial law by the United States Army. Overseeing most of the economy is Dryco, a private firm run by Thatcher Dryden, an avaricious, insane version of Orson Welles' Citizen Kane. The story is narrated by Seamus O'Malley, Dryden's security guard, who lusts after Avalon, Dryden's girl Friday. This is a provocative, difficult novel to read, but one which brilliantly shows Womack's ample literary talents.

Circling the Drain
In a world that sleeps as soundly as this one, Womack assails the capitalist *carnivora* with a feral eye and acid pen, beating on the reader's sensibilities as one would a Hitler pin'ata. Jack the world! Jackit up, hombre! Let's see, how to describe Womack's prose style.... A bomblaced with nails? A mechanosphere of vision-forming events? Aneuro-syphilitic bundle of cliches? How about crash-compatible? Or a blastof heat from the pavement grate? Or a purling sewer rich with the gastricsludge of readerly motion-illness? "Experimental" is perhaps thewrong word here. Gamblers don't gamble, after all, and Womack knows thestakes of writing a novel in "Ambientspeak" this late in literaryhistory (after Burgess, after Russell Hoban, et al.), as the bathos ofdialogic exchange in the Dryco universe runs through its formulae, a dismalscreech of hackneyed argot like fingernail on slate. I swear that once Mr.Womack learns how to balance his jargonautical neologisms with a subtlerknowledge of myth and narrative (like a Hollywood with better acting), hemay very well attain the eminence of a Don DeLillo, or a Cormac McCarthy,both key influences on the Dryco novels.... Yet out of all the writerswho've made a habit of predicting and inventing the future, Womack iscertainly the most charming, possessing a dashing narrative charisma thatgenerates moments, images, elbow-nudging good times, on nearly every page.Very reassuring when we take into account his inevitable subject matter,the madnesses of socioeconomic inequality and exploitation.... Capitalism'spredatory agenda to protect corporate interests at all costs, ambitionswhich entail the humiliation of the underclass (a group that is easy toidentify, dislike, and control), cash cows that never see the light of dayand are fed on gov't distillery slops; a society terrorized into stupidityby the commodified and the superficial. When Womack informs us that ourcorporate-owned U.S. Army has been waging a 20-year campaign against thecitizenry of Long Island, the reader is compelled to chuckle, then sigh,then consider, then shudder. To what length would our gov't go to protectits commercial interests, whether they involve petroleum, narcotics, arms,or the minds, souls, and yoked bio-power of its starved-out citizenry?"It's true, do you think?" "Only the craziest parts."We let a world like this happen.... Add this novel to your shopping cart,friends, savor and enjoy it, all the while praying for Womack's futuredevelopment, that he may one day stand in the square where martyrs aremade.

Like "Clockwork orange" with a cyberpunk feel.
This is not an easy book to read. It contains a lot of violence, both physical and moral, combined with a very poetic language, which makes it reminiscent at times of mr Burgess great "Clocwork orange".However, you shouldn't expect a copy of that. "Ambient"'s hero isconcerned with different subjects to those of Alexander de Large, and thisstory will be enjoyed by those who feel there's a certain amount of clichesin most cyberpunk novels nowadays and want to read something new. This is abook which makes you think, and that altogether makes it both dangerous andseductive ... Read more

Product Description
Elvissey is Jack Womack's most ambitious novel to date. At once brilliant satire & taut, fast-paced adventure, Elvissey is the story of a troubled couple who voyage across time on a desperate mission -- to kidnap the young Elvis Presley at the dawn of his career, & make him a demigod in a decadent urban future. A poignant, unforgettable tour-de-force of the imagination, Elvissey is a darkly comic vision of a violent, paranoid world struggling for redemption & hope. ''A great way to mess with your mind.'' A savagely brilliant novel of apocalypse, redemption, & rock 'n' roll by a daring & imaginative new writer.Amazon.com Review
A troubled couple sets out from a dismal future to retrieve Elvis Presleyfrom an oddly different 1954. They need the King to be a savior to what'sleft of humanity, but he's a murderous freak with no desire to be anyone'sgod. Elvissey is set in Jack Womack's maybe-not-cyberpunk future,where the Dryco corporation runs everything, and everyone has been or willbe "regooded," for their own good. Womack writes in an evolved language,full of odd verbs and newspeak: "He unpocketed a bottle of small bluepills; Dryco's standard eyedots and smile were imprinted upon each tablet.Three hours sole could pass between dosings, no more, no less. Swallowingdry, he fixed a doorways stare; shook, and resettled.... Regooded or not,his unscratchables still itched."

This is a bleak tale, buzzy and complex, full of human failings. Elvis is adisgusting jerk. The United States of Dryco is horrifying and manipulative.And Iz and John are mutually lonely, despairing in their failing marriage,and betrayed by Dryco. Despite its darkness--or maybe because of it--youowe it to yourself to read Elvissey.Womack is one of the mostinteresting writers in the business, and nobody does cultural sciencefiction funk like he does. --Therese Littleton ... Read more

Customer Reviews (8)

Hard to Read, Yet Harder to Put Down
In the future, Elvis Presley has become a religious figure. Like all events in history, certain details have become distorted over time. Agents time travel back to the Fifties to find the original Elvis in an alternate universe and kidnap him.Author Womack has done his homework, and he clearly is an Elvis fan.His details are based on real events found in any Elvis biography and his insights on Presley's behavior are accurate. Unfortunately, "Elvissey" is written in a style similar to "Clockwork Orange".How can you go to the next chapter when you can't be sure you understood what you just read?If the language had been simplified, this book would have been incredible.Most people will probably give up after the first chapter, but I had to find out what happened.If you like Elvis and Science Fiction, get this book.

Jack Womack Is Too Clever For His Own Good
This is a hard book to read, similar to Clockwork Orange. The language is so abstract that you have to continuously attempt to understand what is being said you know what is going on. I struggled though it and I liked it, but it could have been so much better if it had been simplified. Most people will give up.

Brilliant Look At A Sinister Media Culture Future
"Elvissey" is the first Jack Womack novel I have read; I eagerly look forward to reading the rest. Without a doubt, Womack is one of the most interesting writers to emerge out of science fiction since William Gibson hit the stage with his brilliant "Sprawl" short stories, culminating with his amazing "Cyberspace" trilogy of novels. He's certainly among the most bizarre stylists I've come across, echoing Anthony Burgess' "A Clockwork Orange" with his own poetic usage of Dryco's newspeak. "Elvissey" is a brilliant satire of our own obsession with rock and roll stars and other transient entertainment celebrities. It is also a fascinating look at how a psychologically troubled couple from 2054 meet a homicidal Elvis Presley in an alternative 1954. Equally appealing is how Elvis struggles to cope with his new found fame in 2054, after learning he is regarded as a saint by millions of adoring fans. I strongly emphasized with Isabel "Iz" Bonney's struggle to hold onto her sanity as her health and her relationship with John, her psychotic husband, dissolve through the course of the novel. Anyone expecting another excursion into William Gibson's "Cyberspace" future may be disappointed; Womack isn't quite as visionary as Gibson, though his prose is just as poetic. Instead, prepare yourself for a startling fresh, unique view of what a media-dominated future might look like.

SHOULDN'T BE YOUR FIRST WOMACK
Elvissey is my second-least-favorite of the Dryco Chronicles series ( we'll see where it ranks after Going, Going, Gone hits my mailbox ), but not for the reasons you might expect.Allow me to explain.

It was the first Jack Womack book I ever bought - the Gibson blurb on the back sold me - but I couldn't understand a word of it and shelved it.Somehow, a year later, I wound up with a used copy of Terraplane.I had to re-read the first chapter three times to make sense of the language, but eventually I put everything together; now it's probably my favorite.This led me to collect his other books from used bookstores, and then finally to tackle Elvissey.

Elvissey is a remarkable achievement, particularly in its funhouse-mirror distortion of the the 1954 we knew on our planet.Having said that, it's also by far the most depressing of Womack's books.Which is saying something.The odyssey of pregnant security operative Isabel and her psychologically-unraveling husband John leads them to an American South where black people no longer exist and Elvis killed his mother.Their return to 2054, and subsequent attempted conversion of Elvis into a corporate messiah, is utterly heartbreaking.This is the Womack book which I've only re-read once.

First-timers should read Womack's books in this order: Random Acts of Senseless Violence, Heathern, Ambient, Terraplane, Elvissey.You'll gradually come to understand everything about the strange future Womack paints, and recognize recurring characters.

Enjoy the ride.You won't forget it.

Unbeatable!
"Elvissey" is a wacky, haunting (and occasionally terrifying) novel--one of most original and uniquely affecting novels I've ever read. Womack's vision is fresh, thoughtful and touched by an studious eye for the bizarre. The plot, in essence, is pretty straight-forward: members of a scheming, dystopian near-future travel back in time to kidnap Elvis Presley, who has achieved posthumous god-status. The protagonists try to present the future-shocked King to the people of the future to satiate their escalating craving for a messiah. But what does Elvis think of his role in this scheme? And is time-travel really as easy as a century's worth of science fiction would have us think? Womack's answers to these questions make "Elvissey" the delight it is. William Gibson has called this novel "a jarringly potent kick in the head." What else is there to say? ... Read more

Product Description
Jack Womack's Ambient novels have been acclaimed as a "feat of brilliance...speculative fiction at its eerie best" by Entertainment Weekly. Now he delivers the sixth and final book in the series, a breathless and brilliantly imagined story that is a cautionary tale of contemporary society. Walter Bullitt is a freelancer for the U.S. government, testing new psychotropics on himself and groups of unsuspecting citizens, and generally "fixing" things. His conscience has never impeded his work, until he's asked to get involved in a murderous plot to sabotage Bobby Kennedy's presidential campaign. Then a pair of ghosts start turning up in his apartment, begging him to provide some kind of help. While he's enjoying a Velvet Underground show at Max's Kansas City, two outre femmes fatales frogmarch him out, straight into a mission to save the world, both his own and the alternate one they've arrived from. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (7)

Tsk Tsk, what a shame...
My name is Whitney and I have three words to describe the book. Waste of time. This book was by far the worst piece of literature that I have ever read. The dialog was well written but the descriptions went on forever and half the time was using 1960/70s lingo and not being from that era made it rather difficult to decode. I would not recommend this book to anyone and I advise you to pick another.

...and it all comes together
Sort of...

Womack's style is so unique, I might suggest re-reading each book upon completion.His "vernacular" is so compelling, I actually find myself emulating it in e-mails to my friends (and perhaps his prophetic truncated style of speaking is an extrapolation of "e-mail-speak").This book (or any of the books in the series, for that matter) are not suggested reading for the optimistic sort.He has as bleak an outlook of post-apocolyptic Earth as any author I've read, yet his vision also seems to be the most realistic.His works reap the seeds that our society is presently sowing, and he does it with STYLE.

While our government was fooling around with MK Ultra, Womack's more perverse parallel universe finds an accelerated plan far more sinister, even if it isn't fully explained.No need!He leaves enough room for you to plug in your own worst fears.

Sadly, I picked up "Random Acts" for a buck at a book surplus store (It was also, incidentally, an ideal place to start the Ambient series).While it was a great value for me, I find it unfathomable that Womack isn't as widely accepted as Frank Herbert.His vision is just as lucid, and, like Herbert's "Dune" series, I envy anyone who gets to experience it for the first time themselves...

Psychedelic Fun
I never would have thought that I would enjoy a book that contains abundant drug use to the degree that I enjoyed Jack Womack's newest novel._Going, Going, Gone_ is a witty and psychedelic alternate history/time travel/parallel universe/ghost story all-in-one.The narrative flows easily once the reader becomes accustomed to Womack's out-there jargon.

The protagonist, Walter, is a counterculture government freelancer who's hired by the Kennedy family (indirectly) to convince Jim Kennedy to assassinate Bobby.Walter is perplexed by the ghosts floating in his living room and moaning his name.And he's not quite sure what to make of the gorgeous woman and her muscular companion that speak in bizarrely mangled English and who appear and disappear with regularity.

As the story progresses the various threads weave together in a surprisingly coherent (given the disparate threads)narrative.This is Book 5 in Womack's 'Ambient' series.It's not necessary to have read the previous 4 to enjoy this one but you'll soon find yourself searching for the other books in the series.Highly enjoyable throughout.Recommended.

More Whimper Than Bang
This novel demonstrates again Jack Womack's amazing talents, especially with language. One of the strongest aspects of the novel is the clash of the protagonist's hip talk with the Dryco-speak of his visitors.

However, I did not quite like this novel as much as the others in the series, and I definitely would ot recommend it as the first Womack novel to read.

A winner!
In 1968 independent researcher Walter Bullit tests new psychotropics mostly experimenting on himself as the guinea pig. At times, Walter accepts a job from the Feds to test one of his products on selected individuals. Perhaps because he is stoned so often, Walter has no remorse about what happens to his subjects.

His latest assignment is to insure Robert Kennedy does not run for the presidency, currently encumbered by Henry Cabot Lodge. However, this time Walter runs into problems as ghosts suddenly share his apartment and two strange females (Big Girl and Little Mod) literally abduct him from a concert. Eulie and Chlojo need Walter who is the nexus between two dimensions to save New York City that is two cities of New York, one in his world and the other in the home realm of the two weird women.

This book is not for everyone as the hip language will sound foreign to some readers even as it sets the tone and ambiance of the plot in a clockwork rose colored way. The story line is amusing as Jack Womack slices and dices society. Readers who enjoy offbeat alternate history will want to read this novel and the previous "Ambient" series books as Mr. Womack ends his wild ride with a stickball hit that is GOING GOING GONE over the tenement building roof.

Harriet Klausner ... Read more

Product Description
A retired general and his hit-man kidnap a Russian scientist and travel through time to an alternate New York of 1939. Plenty of high-tech glitz charges this powerful, breakthrough science fiction novel by the author of Ambient. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (6)

One of my very, very favourite books.
I've fallen in deep intellectual love with this series, and this is my favourite of the lot (I've not yet bought Elvissey, but won't be long 'til I do.) It's the language style that makes this stuff so indescribably charming - and though the source gets all too little recognition, the Womack trademark "nouns-to-verbs" style of speech seems to actually be becoming a realworld phenomena here and there.

The story is - in a word - cinematic.This really should be a movie, hopefully with narration here and there to capture the lingo.I could see the people, places and changes of time's evanescent scenery through Luther's eyes and mind.Hollywood? Knock off the remakes and sequels and look to this man for a great movie book that's a great reading experience as well.Few cinematic stories touch me this way.This touched, shook, slapped, embraced and knocked me upside the head a few times in the process.

A rewarding transtemporal love story
"Terraplane," Womack's earlier novel, is a rewarding transtemporal love story that shares a great deal of its plot with "Elvissey": visitors from our future go back in time--not to 1950s Memphis, but to a deranged alternate 1930s where slavery was only recently abolished and the AIDS epidemic has been prefigured by an extraterrestrial virus that causes heightened dexterity, intelligence--and certain death. Womack's skewed look at our past is as frightening as any imagined future. "Terraplane" is a haunted examination of what it is to be human, laced with wit and sad romance. Definitely a trip worth taking.

Like Maus?
The complaints raised against this compelling and important work are meaningless. This novel is masterpiece, and the comments it makes about race history in America and slavery as part of our nation's serious underside are profound, important, and impossible for 99% of SF nerds to understand. Let them go back to the easy answers in Heinlein. For many people, "Maus" by Art Spiegleman brought home the horrors of the Holocaust. This novel did the same thing for slavery that Maus did for 1940's Poland.

Great SF is not writing about the future, it is a way to get us to start thinking about the present. For those with the courage to challenge themselves and their thinking, few books are going to go as far as this one. Like PKD and Orwell, Womack is a master who writes literature, not SF. Not sure of where genre ends and literature begins? Grow up and buy this book.

Black Ship to Hell
The buzzsaw prose, the narrative dash, the pure killing purpose, everything that made Womack's promising debut *Ambient* a terrific read andyet somehow...less, somewhat...rushed; too sloshed and unwieldy,scatterbrain and pretzel-plotted, with the jittery sense of a novel writtenunder deadline. The book opens brilliantly, a near-future capitalist Moscow(*Terraplane* was written on the eve of Yeltsin's coup) blazing red neonlike an outdoor casino (the fruits of *sozializtkapitalizm*), a wrathwearyAmerican general and his enforcer contracted for a zany bit ofindustrial-espionage, a Fourth World romp in search of bizarre and unlikelyTeknologische. The narrative quickly snaps through its first of manytripwires, lurching from one burst of surreal violence to another, themeta-urban swagger hemmed in by some of the most pretzelled andoverreaching dialogue we've seen in a "genre" novel since*Riddley Walker*. The time-travel premise, however shakily postmodern, hasinfinite promise. (The book is brilliantly subtitled A Futuristic Novel ofNew York, 1939.) The reader can already feel pangs of daguerreotype-ladennostalgia (the TB-infected annals of Old New York, so luridlysado-picturesque when you don't have to actually live through it) just byreading the jacket blurbs. But somehow the story rarely exceeds thenarratological Rube Goldberg contraption of hack-and-slash plotting, abreakneck Shadow Run of brass-knucks humor steering jerkily through thecartoon planet of Womack's novelistic sound-stage. It must have been a hootfor the author to *conceive* of such a storyline, the imagineering triumphof actually making it work as a novel...an entirely different story. (Ifone were perverse enough to produce, market, and release "The Makingof *Terraplane*: Behind the Scenes of Womack's Retro Timescape", wemight imagine Mighty Jack slapping furiously at his laptop, multipleceiling-mounted televisions tuned vicariously to CNN, the History Channel,Bravo, IFC, MTV, BET, and PBS, working the flows of these projections intothe preposterous schizo-text we have before us.) What remains is some ofthe most robust, zestfully obscure syntax this side of Thunderdome, oddbits of futureal rhetoric that transcend the amateurishly calibratednarrative clockwork, as in this tidbit, relating the Russian new worldorder of forcefed consumerism: "Citizens passed as if on forcedparade, many pushing red carts topful with freezers, washers, TVCs,copiers; all manner of technological flotsam. Staring into their puffy,bloodshot eyes disconcerted. Refugees' faces held similar looks in everyland I'd troubled; the look of these fit naught but for breathing andrunning, forced by us to abandon home and race the roads before the otherteam, purposeful and timeshort, landed to steal their daysaway"(14).

It was, in fact, Bruce Sterling himself who wrote thefirst and most influential review of *Terraplane*(NYRSF, #3, Nov.'88),applauding the brave gamble of Womack's vast and promising sensibility, yetequally peeved by the matte-black two-dimensional futurity of the book'spostindustrial trappings. "It bores Womack to see people cope, even ifthey do it cleverly. In *Terraplane*, prosperity and security of any kindis essentially unthinkable. There are divorces but no weddings; sex but nochildren; laws but no justice; politics but no hope for change"(3).The human relationships which thread and splint this violent text seemridiculous against the forced backdrop of bloodspattered concrete pillars,characters raging and storming through this black-toothed libretto offuturistic Gallows Opera, the narrative snags universally resolved with apre-Tarantino passion for machine-pistols and assault weapons,jargonautical dialogue leading up to the Big Splatter. Sterling perceivedWomack's narrative voice as symptomatic of science-fiction's long-standingdisruption of dramatic authenticity (i.e. a moving "human" story)with its over-the-top ecophilosophical speculations (i.e. balderdash SFcartooning). "There's a general genre difficulty in mounting thepulpit to denounce the iniquities of an imaginary world. It's hard to makethis carry any serious moral authority.... One cannot join AmnestyInternational to defend the human rights of hobbits....[!] Concentrationcamps happened; concentration camps for Martians are not compellingemotional realities, but merely unpleasant conceits"(3). Caught in thesticky clutches of this old-school genre Catch-22, Womack's characters aregasping for life, for a humanistic depth beyond the plastic of thepostmodern. Meanwhile, the reader is forced to treat the text as justanother clever piece of Mall Mythology, a tongue-in-cheek post-Pynchonian"black comedy" chewing the ashes of literary belatedness.

Butdespite all obstacles and shortcomings, I am fascinated enough to continuereading Womack, to see whether the demonry of this confused little bookfinds a tighter and more credible narrative weave in the Dryco novels tocome.... If the rumors are true, I will not be disappointed.

Left me wanting more...
I was enjoying the heck out of this novel, and all the sudden it was over!Womack creates a dark and detailed alternate past, drops in some interesting characters from an equally dark future, makes up an original lanquage, throws in some ultra-violence and a famous Blues musician, then seems to have given up on it all tacked on a Deus Ex Machina ending.Did his deadline come up, or what? There was so much more that could have been done with the story.Personally, I thought we were going to the Worlds Fair to consult Tesla on time travel. Womack seemed to have it all set up and it could have been really interesting, but then...nothing.I still recommend this book for its rich texture and some nice surprises, but it should be twice as long as it is. ... Read more

Product Description
The tale of a new messiah's rise and fall is told by Joanna, a corporate executive and mistress whose deadened sensibilities are awakened by the religious leader. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (5)

Death by Misadventure
Dare we remember Katherine Anne Porter�s polite scorn for E. M. Forster?�The kettle is warm, but there ain�t going to be no tea.�As a wary admirer of Womack�s *Ambient* and *Terraplane*, I had high hopes for this one, even as I found myself gravely putting my tea-set back into its hoary cupboard, piece by disappointed piece.

Womack has a strong, passionate literary intelligence.He is a crank and a bookworm, a polymath and a blowhard, he strives for the comedy gauntlet in every paragraph.His characters lock horns and break heads in the now-familiar backalleys of dystopian urban burlesque, and if his punchlines often seem forced and artificial, we feel honor-bound (given the massive potential of his two previous novels) to let the artist experiment with this new, plastic genre.He tries his darnedest to suspend our disbelief, to make this surreal �picnic in a graveyard� something worth caring about, something human.We know him as a invert -- yet one striving for the more conventional pleasures of readerly transport.

But *Heathern* (clearly written under deadline to fulfill a publishing contract) disappoints on too many levels.The liberties we were willing to grant him have gone stale in the interim.As a prequel to the Dryco Chronicles, Womack has seen fit to ease the throttle of his abounding, gutter-mouthed blarney (Ambientspeak has yet to dominate the Dryco universe), and the resulting text, cleansed of all overflow, is a cold naked testament to his limitations as a novelist, his faltering ability to make the surreal *real*.

You could say that Womack overloads the dice.His characters are no more or less plastic than those in early DeLillo, in Pynchon at his worst, in most award-winning science-fiction for that matter.But once the pyrotechnic distraction of his top-heavy prose-style is snuffed out, we realize that the book�s foundations are wormy, its characters hollow at the core, its engine of suspense unable to inject fuel, and what was once an opulent Style becomes a cloying distraction.

The reader�s syntactic eye is strained by the torsional buckling of his modifiers, the bulwarks, breakwaters, and stumbling blocks of his flexural, haphazard style.Womack strives to be �lapidary,� to push the linguistic envelope, to make his surreal narrative believable in the throes of gushing, mellifluent overabundance.But in *Heathern*, his key does not open the door.His characters are exposed for the tactless straw-effigies they are.

And it sucks.Oh how it sucks.

By concentrating the odium of capitalist villainy into one massive, megalithic metaphor (the Dryco Corporation), Womack simplifies the *real* terrors of our world into a seedy Japanimation serial about the Big Bad Megacorp and the network of mystic underworlders who nibble at its heels.The terrorist subplot seems thrown in as an afterthought, a conversation-piece for the author�s trash-talking finger-puppets.The relationships are as stodgy and wooden as a Punch and Judy spectacle trying to be deep and literary, while the villain of the piece (CEO Thatcher Dryden) is a B-movie troglodyte, a failed attempt to satirize the monopolist mindset, whose crimes and immoralities are far more subtle and convoluted than the cyberpunk excesses showcased herein.

And jeez, if you�re going to put a Messiah into your novel (yawn), his dialogue must rise above the usual string of crypto-theological sidebars and faux-Biblical irony -- presented in the form of wisecracks and prophetic conundrums, straight out of the �riddle-me-this-Batman� tradition.Womack doesn�t do quite as bad as some, I�ll admit.His street preacher Lester Macaffrey has something approaching a �real� personality, and the author may be attempting to show how Macaffrey�s stoical eccentricity, his suavely detached musings on theological issues make him the beacon of posthumanity in a world of protohuman cartoons.But the effect is fleeting, and Macaffrey�s sudden, epiphanic relationship with the narrator is hollow, contrived, asinine, as is nearly everything else in this novel.When one of the characters expounds his family�s relation to the Jewish Holocaust, the reader finds himself whistling in despair at this vinegary attempt to charge an insipid burlesque with humanistic �depth�.

I give this one two stars out of sympathy with the author�s boredom with conventional SF tropes and motifs, and his rigorous (if rushed and miscalculated) attempt to break onto the genre-scene with all guns blazing.But *Heathern* is Womack taking two steps back after the intriguing forward-tramp of *Ambient* and (parts of) *Terraplane*.Check out those books for Womack working more-or-less successfully in his essence.Leave this one in the remaindered bin.

The stuff of millennial nightmares
Womack's "Heathern," another installment in his brutal near-future satire (collectively known as the "Dryco Chronicles"), hinges on concerns expressed in "Elvissey" and "Terraplane" (and, to a lesser extent, his ultraviolent "Ambient"). When a schoolteacher demonstrates the ability to resurrect the dead, marketing kingpin Thatcher Dryden launches a campaign to exploit his potential as a messiah. The world outside Dryden's corporate corridors has fallen into ecological and social catastrophe: a haunting, utterly dehumanized caricature of late 20th century. Womack's narrative skill lies in his ability to make his future, as well as his characters, seem inevitable. This is the stuff of millennial nightmares.

Good but perhaps not Womack's best
Heathern is the third installment in the Ambient series.I must admit that I accidentally picked this one up without reading the second, Terraplane, so I can only compare it to the first of the series,Ambient.

Heathern sees Womack showing a bit of restraint.While hisstory is brutal in its own right, its much more tame compared with Ambient(or Random Acts of Senseless Violence which might be seen as thepredecessor to Ambient).Because of his focus on the story, the reader isleft guessing about certain developments in this futuristic New York City.

All in all, a good story but its not as strong as the beginning of theseries.

This one's not a "smirker"
If you're looking for a messiah,look no further than the pages of Jack Womack's novel Heathern.This novel tells the story of the marketing of a reluctant messiah and is set in a futuristic New York City that defies theword condemned. If you aren't looking for a Christ child, believe me, baby,the future according to Womack is desperate for deliverance.The reader isthrown headlong into the deceptive and duplicitous dealings of a man namedThatcher Dryden who is rumoured to have gained control of the city, thepresident, and quite possibly, the world. His discovery of the fact that anunemployed school teacher is working miracles in the gang-infested slums ofNew York leads him to try to gain control of the one thing that would offerhim the key to total population control: redemption.The story travels tothe top of the anthill, where the rich and overfed survey their lessersfeeding upon themselves like so many rats; to the intestines of the earth,where mutants and other castoffs of humanity fester in abandoned subwayterminals; and provides the reader with a compelling, satirical look at thefuture, its progeny, and the power and commodification of a messiah.

Quite simply, SF for adults
I used to think whimsy was incompatible with a world-toughened, gimlet-eyed take on reality. That's until I started reading Jack Womack. Not *only* does he write works of lucid and humane beauty (which aretypically if regrettably marketed as genre SF by the same boneheaded quantswho sent PKD to his early grave), but he's the most incisive critic ofEnglish-language-as-annihilator-of-meaning since George Orwell. Read*Heathern*. Then go get *Elvissey* and *Random Acts*. For a non-SF,non-Dryco, bitterly funny book, try *Let's Put The Future Behind Us*.

The stuff is *that* good. You'll feel a little sadder and a little wiserand somehow more hopeful after having read *Heathern*, and you won't haveto have been polluted by "Touched By An Angel." Verily, if thewhole human race were on trial for its life, Jack Womack is the kind ofwriter you'd want to hold up and offer as evidence and argument forredemption. ... Read more

Product Description
Ex-bureaucrat-turned-successful Moscow businessman Max Borodin confronts the trials and tribulations of post-Soviet Russia as he copes with a nagging wife, exhausting mistress, troublesome brother, and the Russian mafia. By the author of Random Acts of Senseless Violence. Tour. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (9)

One death is a tragedy; everyone dying, that's life!

I very seldom laugh out loud while reading a book; in fact, I very seldom laugh at all. There's not a lot I find funny in this miserable pig-eat-pig, no-win situation we've agreed to call "life"--except, occasionally, the absurdity that most of us choose to go on enduring it what with all the rope, sleeping pills, razor blades, and guns readily available. But Jack Womack's *Let's Put the Future Behind Us,* actually had me chortling and snorting with ill-natured mirth. Truly this is one uproariously funny book: without a doubt one of the funniest I've ever read ((I'd also recommend Matthew Sloan's *Fake Girls*)) and I'd say you'd have to practically be embalmed not to crack more than a rictus grin while reading of the exploits of its anti-hero--and narrator--the sarcastic and cynical and ever-wisecracking, Max Borodin.

First off, one should make clear that the setting of *Let's Put the Future Behind Us* is Russia--the Russia after the fall of communism and the rise of organized crime, unscrupulous financiers, their corrupt government lackeys, and all the other virulent ills that early onset capitalism is heir to--and will eventually succumb to, altogether. It's the sort of place where one can always depend on Soviet-inspired "unobtrusive service"--a euphemism for no service at all--anywhere one goes and where to persuade even the lowliest clerk to provide you with the surliest attention requires a fist always equipped with a generous cash bribe. Womack gives the unmistakable impression that he knows this new Russia intimately--its people, its inner workings, its history, its landmarks and landscapes both famous, infamous, and obscure. He speaks so authoritatively and authentically through his Russian narrator, mimicking the syntax and rhythm of an intelligent but not-quite-native speaker of English to such perfection that you'd almost think he were writing in a second language. Borodin sounds a bit like a very savvy Borat at the start of *Future,* a Borat "in" on the joke, but as the novel unfolds the buffoonery becomes eclipsed by the ultra-violence of events and what emerges is the terrifying and diabolical face of evil which such buffoonery often conceals. Think Hitler. Think Stalin. Comical characters at first. Nothing funny about them later.

Max, a former bureaucrat under the old Soviet system of incompetence, is no different from any other entrepreneur let loose in the New Russia of unlimited opportunities. He's made a decent living for himself as a franchise "banker" and counterfeiter of official documents. But it's easy to find yourself sleeping with the wrong people as a businessman in the New Russia--and before too long, Max has got a veritable mad orgy of the very worst of the worst in his bed.

Things start to unravel for Max in more ways than it's easy to enumerate. Within the first 50 pages, Womack brings on the trouble from so many different directions you can't possibly figure out how it's all going to come together--or how Max will ever escape from this strafing crossfire of woes. But eventually everything that's begun hitting the fan from page one--his hilarious attempts to arrange a funeral for the deceased father of a client--does come together and when it does, Max finds himself in the midst of a bloody monsoon of greed, betrayal, stupidity, lust, corruption, and murder that's sure to bury him alive--if he can even stay alive that long.

And yet, Max, wisecracking even up to his chin in trouble, keeps you in stitches as his own life unravels. His barbed asides on the wonders of "democracy," "capitalism," and the new "free" Russia are as pointed as those on the atrocities of Stalinist Russia. Sarcastic and cynical, Max is nonetheless someone who cares deeply for his wife Tanya--and just as deeply for his mistress, the irrepressibly voluptuous Sonya. He's a liar, a swindler, a schemer, and a thief--but, as he makes it abundantly clear--this is what it takes to survive as a capitalist in the New Russia. It's survival of the fittest and if Max is a bit of a blackguard, he's a little less black than his comrades: it he's an out-and-out criminal, well, then his crimes are considerably less than those of the competition. What is survival, after all, but a crime at the expense of the survival of others to one degree or another? He's not exactly a man of honor; but he's not quite a man without honor altogether. He may do bad things, but he's not unaware of it: he knows what morals are, for instance. He also knows that too strict an adherence to too many of them is the surest and swiftest way to get yourself killed.

Let's say that Max is a pragmatist of the most radical sort. But what endears him to us most of all--even at his worst--is that he won't cut out anyone's eye balls without a perfectly good reason unlike the psychopathic brutes he's up against. And, of course, he keeps us laughing, and that's no small thing. Everyone likes someone who can keep them laughing--it makes it more bearable to ignore the corpses all around us, to accept the awful things we must do to walk from one end of our life to the other. Max, with a wink and a nod, has a highly developed sense of irony about his own dark side, which makes all the difference. There's nothing more unendurable than the morally self-righteous; nothing more banal than unconscious evil. At its most disturbing, *Let's Put the Future Behind Us* hints at what's behind those sly, glinting eyes of Papa Stalin--that, given half the chance, we're really no different than him.

My advice? Whatever you're reading now, finish it, and make *Let's Put the Future Behind Us* the next book you read. It's the sort of novel that could very well end up being one of the top five books you read this year. Of course, if you only read five books this year, it'll finish considerably higher.

From One of the Most Underrated American Authors
Womack's writing is incredibly similiar to Kurt Vonnegut Jr., but unlike Vonnegut, he is able to change the written voice seemlessly. The novel itself doesn't resemble Russian literature, or more accurately it doesn't resemble Russian literature that has been translated into English. Any Lit major will tell you that the majority of Russian novels translated do no justice for the writing. However, Womack's voice is believable without the trite and cliche signifiers American writers use to create a post-Communist scenario.

Although the writing style is far off, the character stylization and interaction is very similiar to Irvine Welsh. Each character symbolizes a much greater question in the protaganist's purpose as opposed to representing a well-rounded life simply interacting as is typical of Western existentialism. The subtle traits of the charcters draw the reader in through introspective comparison in an understated technique that is really what makes this style so enjoyable to read.

The Best Novel About Post-Soviet Russia That I've Read
Jack Womack returns to the present in his sly, humorous tale set in contemporary Russia. Only a writer of Womack's prodigious literary gifts could pull off a great novel about Russia that isn't written by a native. He's done an excellent job examining both the business and political elites of Boris Yeltsin's Russia; every word sounds as though it could be written by a distinguished Russian author. His dense, descriptive prose runs wild through this well written tale of business intrigue and corruption, taking us on a mesmerizing literary joy ride laced with ample doses of black humor. At times I found the passages so funny that I nearly fell out of my chair laughing. "Let's Put The Future Behind Us" is yet another excellent novel by this underrated writer; one who deserves a broad readership beyond science fiction fandom.

Worth the price of admission
Snappy prose, well-paced narrative, sharp humor (a few actual 'I-laughed-out-loud-while-reading' sequences).

I think the book really caught a unique time and place in russia's history.The book would have amore topical impact to the reader of 1996-97 but it is still a great readfrom a talented writer.

Definately a page turner!
I have got to read Womack's other works!I have a friend who big into Russia and he was amazed by the accuracy (he noted especially the description of the Russian concept of "poshloi"), all from awriter who spent little time inthe New Russia.This book is well-pacedand full of intriguing characters (especially Max)--a must read for...well,anyone!Words fail to describe it; Just read it! ... Read more

Product Description
This is nonfiction commentary. Purchase includes a free trial membership in the publisher's book club where you can select from more than a million books without charge. Chapters: Going, Going, Gone, Elvissey, Terraplane, Random Acts of Senseless Violence, Let's Put the Future Behind Us, Ambient. Source: Wikipedia. Free updates online. Not illustrated. Excerpt: Going, Going, Gone is a 2000 alternate history novel by Jack Womack. As the sixth and final installment of his acclaimed Dryco series, the novel was the subject of much anticipation and speculation prior to its release, and critically well-received. Set in 1968 New York in an alternate universe to the Dryco universe of the previous five iterations of the series, Going, Going, Gone nevertheless disposes of several of the series' characters in its closing chapters. Its protagonist is Walter Bullitt, an egocentric expert in psychoactive substances who freelances for various branches of the United States government spy apparatus. Though he passes for white, Bullitt is in fact of African-American descent in a world where almost all full-blooded members of that race died sometime in the early twentieth century in an apparently engineered plague and all black music is banned. Walter becomes subject to increasingly strange experiences, hearing voices and seeing ghosts from a parallel New York which is blending into his one. Walter is taken to this alternative New York which has been flooded and moved north, populated by black people and an analogue of television absent from his world. The novel ends with the two epistemic worlds converging into a New York which is, in the words of critic Paul Dukes a "morally better place than either of the two which composed it". Going, Going, Gone was well-received critically. Publishers Weekly called it an "intriguing, clever novel", with the potential for crossover appeal as well as for satisfying fans of the series. Biopunk author and r...More: http://booksllc.net/?id=16176956 ... Read more

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This digital document, covering the life and work of Jack Womack, is an entry from Contemporary Authors, a reference volume published by Thompson Gale. The length of the entry is 1872 words. The page length listed above is based on a typical 300-word page. Although the exact content of each entry from this volume can vary, typical entries include the following information:

• Place and date of birth and death (if deceased)
• Family members
• Education
• Professional associations and honors
• Employment
• Writings, including books and periodicals
• A description of the author's work
• References to further readings about the author

Product Description
Purchase includes free access to book updates online and a free trial membership in the publisher's book club where you can select from more than a million books without charge. Chapters: Roy Paul, Richard Dryden, Wilf Grant, Danny Mclennan, George Armstrong, Frank Womack, Jack Russell, Ronnie Radford, Joe Smith, Andy Preece, Sid Wallington, Bill Thompson, Eddie Stuart, Bobby Shinton, Graham Newton, Graham Allner, Ally Robertson, Martyn Bennett, Ian Cooper, Frank Keetley, Alex Hair, Bob Jackson. Excerpt:Alex Hair (born in Glasgow , 9 March 1902) was a footballer who played with Partick Thistle , moving to Preston North End for the 1928-29 season . He scored 19 goals in his first season, but lost his first-team place and was transferred out. In the 1930-31 season he set the record for most league goals scored by a Shelbourne player in one season with a tally of twenty-nine in just twenty-two matches . This prolific scoring helped Shelbourne win their third league title. Hair returned to play for Colwyn Bay F.C. , and managed Worcester City F.C. References (URLs online) A hyperlinked version of this chapter is at Ally Robertson Alistair Peter "Ally" Robertson (born September 9, 1952 in Linlithgow ) is a Scottish former footballer who played as a central defender. Career Robertson joined West Bromwich Albion as an apprentice in July 1968 and turned professional in September 1969. He remained with the club until 1986, making over 500 appearances in the heart of the team's defence and playing under managers such as Alan Ashman , Don Howe , Johnny Giles , Ronnie Allen , Ron Atkinson , Ron Wylie , Nobby Stiles and Ron Saunders . The club spent all but three seasons in the top flight during his playing days. A tough defender, he held in high regard by the club's fans. However, he never won a Scotland cap. He moved to rivals Wolverhampton Wanderers in 1986 and played for four more years, enjoying back-to-back promotions under the management of Graham Turner and also cap... ... Read more

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Totkv Mocvse/New Fire presents the work of Earnest Gouge, an important early Creek (Muskogee) author, and makes available for the first time--in Creek and English--the myths and legends of a major American Indian tribe.

In 1915, Earnest Gouge was encouraged by ethnographer John Reed Swanton to record Creek legends and myths. Gouge's manuscript lay in the National Anthropological Archives for eighty-five years until two Creek-speaking sisters, Margaret McKane Mauldin and Juanita McGirt, and linguist Jack B. Martin, began translating and editing the document. In Totkv Mocvse/New Fire, Gouge's stories appear in parallel format, with the Creek text alongside the English translation.

The stories cover many themes, from the humorous allegories of Rabbit, Wolf, and other personified animals, to hunting stories designed to frighten a nighttime audience in the woods. An insightful foreword by Craig Womack and Jack Martin's introduction frame the stories within Creek literature and history. Martin and Mauldin also provide brief introductions to each story, highlighting key elements of Creek culture. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Impressed
As a member of the Poarch Creek Indians I have to commend this work.Some stories I've heard before, other's I have not.

Well translated, although the Mvskoke transcript has words in it I've never heard before.It's amazing to look back to the language 100 years ago.Perhaps we couldn't even understand someone from the early 1700's.Overall, I would say this is a must have for anyone interested in the Creek Indians, and/or their language.

Beware the fox's.

... Read more