Product Description
This is an OCR edition without illustrations or index. It may have numerous typos or missing text. However, purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original rare book from GeneralBooksClub.com. You can also preview excerpts from the book there. Purchasers are also entitled to a free trial membership in the General Books Club where they can select from more than a million books without charge. Original Published by: R. Carter & Brothers in 1848 in 466 pages; Subjects: Bible; Sermons, American; Religion / Sermons / Christian; Religion / Christian Ministry / Preaching; ... Read more

Customer Reviews (9)

Muddy waters
I was surprised to find this book so highly rated by other reviewers.I found it frustrating--Mr. Sewell spends a great deal of time and effort telling about different theories for events in Emily Dickenson's life, and then telling the reader that "I don't think that can be true".However, he never seemed to give any of his own answers to this enigmatic life.This is the first biographyI have read about ED, and I come away greatly puzzled . . .

Agreat book!
If you are looking to buy just one biography of this great poet, this is the one to buy. Extremely detailed with a lot of period photographs of Emily and her family and friends. The appendixes are full of source documents, including excerpts from personal correspondence. Not easy reading, but well worth the effort. If you really want to know Emily Dickinson, get this book.

Not really a biography
I have just read this book and enjoyed it thoroughly. However, the title is somewhat misleading, as this is not a conventional biography. Other than a few chapters on her childhood and early education, the book is arranged in "theme" chapters, each focussing on a particular person or aspect of her life, illustrated, and heavily annotated, with letters and poems related to that theme.

I ended the book with more questions about her life than I had at the beginning. Many of them are barely addressed in the book, or just hinted at. Perhaps the book was intended for readers who are already very familiar with the biographical details.

Just as one example, the author mentions several times the eye problem that led to one of Emily's rare trips away from her home for treatement in Boston. I kept thinking that sooner or later some further details about this eye problem would be revealed, but there was never more than a few widely scattered sentences about it. Perhaps there isn't enough evidence to be able to conjecture as to the nature of the problem, but the author doesn't even seem to think it's an important enough detail to require a weighing of the evidence.

Likewise her mother's long illness, which played a role in Emily's withdrawal from the world, is mentioned but its nature is not discussed, other than a mention that she was paralyzed near the end of her life. Did she suffer a stroke? Was she lucid? Since Emily was her primary caregiver, it would seem that these details might bear on her own emotional state during the years of this illness and would warrant at least some speculation.

Even Emily's own final illness remains a mystery. We learn that her sister blamed it on the ill treatment received from her sister-in-law, and that her doctor attributed it to "nerves". However, from other hints, it seems to be a progessively debilitating illness. There is never as much as a paragraph in the entire book which speculates on the nature of this fatal illness or how much she might have been incapacitated between the first attack in June 1884 and her death in May 1885. "Nerves" seems to me to be an insufficient explanation for the death of the poet after an illness of eleven months. Are we sure the fainting spell was related to the final illness? Was she ill for the entire eleven months? For how long was she bedridden? The author doesn't even pose these questions.

In a book of 821 pages, there is no index entry for "illness". "Death [of ED]" has 7 widely scattered and brief entries, one of which is a footnote, one of which is a 13-sentence entry on how her death affected her brother, one of which is the text of her obituary and three of which describe her funeral(on pages 273, 575 and 667, to show how scattered they are). The seventh entry refers to her obituary, but seems to be a mistake, as I find no mention of her death or obituary on the page cited.

The book is especially good on the life of her brother Austin, and is also good on her father. Her mother and sister remain mysterious, probably because they were not much more exposed to public scrutiny than Emily herself was. It is obvious that her sister was nearly as much of a recluse as Emily, or at least was perceived as such by their neighbors.

In such a scattered book, there is inevitably a good deal of repetition of details. The three mentions of Emily's funeral cited above, for example, are mostly identical. Poems are also quoted in part or in their entirety multiple times.

There is an index of the poems and the pages on which they are discussed, which is useful for understanding the context of some of these, although the author acknowledges that the dating of the poems presents many problems.

There is a chronology at the beginning of the book, which really is the closest there is to a temporal ordering of the poet's life. I would suggest photocopying it and using it as a bookmark, because there is little chronological ordering, even within chapters at times. I found myself asking such things as, "Was this before her brother's marriage or after? Was her father still alive when this happened?" As a matter of fact, because I didn't have the chronology in front of me, I was surprised to realize, when I had almost finished the book, that Emily's father was still alive during the period of her most intense literary activity. After the early chapter devoted to her father's life, he is not often mentioned again, and I had somehow remained with the impression that he had died much earlier in her life.

Much as I enjoyed this book, I am left wanting another book to fill in the gaps. However, I learned enough about the partisanal nature of her biographers to be wary of choosing one.

Find an editor
Somewhere among the 800 pages of this tome is a great 250-page biography. Mr. Sewall has assembled a massively detailed account of ED's life. I know presenting myriad detail of a subject's life is the biographer's method for removing themselves from the reader's relationship and experience of the subject, but I find this current trend of unleashing 800 to 1200 page biographies very taxing on the general reader.Although I wasn't completely disappointed in Mr. Sewall's biography, I was hoping for a tighter depiction of ED's life.I'm a general reader, not an academician. I was simply looking for an account of ED's life that would help me better understand her sublime poetry.This book delivered too much matter and not enough essence for me. However, the final chapter of the book entitled "The Poet" was very enlightening and poignantly written. This last chapter deserves 5 stars, the rest of the book 2.

Great for College Courses
Emily Dickinson is easily my favorite poet (also see my review on "Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson", which every poetry lover should own). I took a college course that focused on Emily Dickinson and these were the two books used for that course (there were optional books, which I also read, but nowhere near as good as these). The author's analysis of some poems can be questioned (whose cannot?), but the wealth of material presented is incredible. This is THE reference book about her life. So, if you want details about the woman behind the beautiful words, then get this book. Also consider visiting her house in Amherst (MA), which still has tours during the warmer months. All three things will give you a very good look into her writing. ... Read more

Product Description
Contents Include :DE SOTO AND THE LAW By Samuel Dorris Dickinson RECONSTRUCTING A FRONTIER OLIGARCHY:ANDREW JOHNSONS AMNESTY PROCLAMATION AND ARKANSASBy Richard B. McCaslin ARKANSAS LISTINGS IN THE NATIONAL REGISTER By Kenneth Story ... Read more

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This volume provides a selection of the Internal Revenue Code and Treasury Regulations provisions relating to the income tax. The selection reflects the collective judgment of the seven tax teachers who constitute the Editorial Board. ... Read more

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To mark the centenary of Richard Trevithick (1771-1833) H. W Dickinson and Arthur Titley published a fascinating book on the engineer and his work. They succeed in producing a work which appeals to the scientist, the historian and the general reader, without feeling obliged to over-simplify the technical details. Today best remembered for his early railway locomotive, Trevithick worked on a wide range of projects, including mines, mills, dredging machinery, a tunnel under the Thames, military engineering, and prospecting in South America. The book and other centenary activities helped to restore Trevithick's rather neglected reputation as a pioneering engineer of the Industrial Revolution, although his difficult personality and financial failures caused him to be overshadowed by his contemporaries such as Robert Stephenson and James Watt. The book places his achievements in their historical context, and contains many illustrations of his inventions. ... Read more

Product Description
This digital document is an article from Naval War College Review, published by U.S. Naval War College on March 22, 2008. The length of the article is 685 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: Dickinson, H. W. Educating the Royal Navy: Eighteenth and Nineteenth-Century Education for Officers.(Book review)
Author: Richard Norton
Publication: Naval War College Review (Magazine/Journal)
Date: March 22, 2008
Publisher: U.S. Naval War College
Volume: 61Issue: 2Page: 143(2)

Article Type: Book review

Distributed by Gale, a part of Cengage Learning ... Read more