Product Description
"The permanent popularity, now of mythic intensity, of Romeo and Juliet is more than justified," writes eminent scholar Harold Bloom, "since the play is the largest and most persuasive celebration of romantic love in Western literature."

William Shakespeare (1564-1616) based his early romantic tragedy on Arthur Brooke's 1562 poem The Tragicall Historye of Romeus and Juliet. Shakespeare's resulting masterpiece, in turn, has inspired countless retellings around the world in mediums that include literature, dance, stage, and screen.

"It is Shakespear all over, and Shakespear when he was young," declares William Hazlitt (1778-1830), acclaimed British essayist and critic, in his exuberant Introduction to this Modern Library edition.

"Two households, both alike in dignity, In fair Verona, where we lay our scene, From ancient grudge break to new mutiny,Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean.From forth the fatal loins of these two foes, A pair of star-cross'd lovers take their life; Whose misadventuríd piteous overthrows, Do with their death bury their parents' strife."
--Prologue


From the Hardcover edition. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (14)

A pair of star-cross'd lovers take their life
Two teenagers from rival families fall in love, marry secretly, and take their own lives rather than live without each other. Despite the teenage melodrama, "Romeo and Juliet" remains one of Shakespeare's most enduring and popular plays, even if it wasn't his best -- lots of death, teen lovers and enchanting dialogue.

In the city of Verona, the Montagues and Capulets are locked in a deadly feud. Then a Montague teen named Romeo, infatuated with a Capulet girl named Rosaline, sneaks into a party to see her.... but instead encounters another Capulet girl named Juliet, and the two immediately fall in love. Since their families hate each other, their love must be expressed in secret.

Hoping to unite the two families, the kindly priest Friar Lawrence assists the two in marrying in secret. But then Juliet's cousin Tybalt challenges Romeo to a duel, leading to the death of two men -- and Romeo's exile from Verona. Even worse, the Capulets have decided to marry Juliet to Count Paris -- leading to a desperate plan that goes horribly awry.

"Romeo and Juliet" is a play that is hard to pin down -- some see it as the poetry-laden embodiment of romantic love, while others view it as Shakespeare's witty jabs at fickle teenage infatuation and how melodramatic the kids are (Juliet is only thirteen!). But whatever you think it is, it's undeniable that it's a beautifully written, often-wrenching story.

Despite the simplicity of the story, Shakespeare spins it in a silken web of lush poetry ("O swear not by the moon, the inconstant moon/That monthly changes in her circled orb") and the famous speeches where Romeo and Juliet speak at night on a balcony. The mostly romantic play takes a dark turn towards the end, when only a few minutes might have changed the fates of "Juliet and her Romeo."

And Shakespeare seems rather fond of his characters here, depicting Romeo as a passionate young boy and Juliet as rather sweetly insecure young girl; there's also a fairly good cast of young men whose spirits are more elevated than their brains, and the kindly friar who rather naively hopes to use the kids to create peace.

But Shakespeare was also clearly aware that passionate teenage love is not necessarily the truest love ("Young men's love then lies/Not truly in their hearts, but in their eyes"), and leaves you wondering what might have happened if Romeo and Juliet had lived.

Whether a gentle mockery of young love or a passionate, idealized romance, "Romeo and Juliet" is a timeless and lovely little play. Not the best of the Bard, but still quite good.

have not received my order
I have this recording on audio cassette, and I was very excited to find the same version on CD. However, after a month of waiting, I still have not received my order. I was not notified by the company in any way that the order had been back-ordered, but they certainly did not hesitate to go on and take the money out of my bank account. I thought that normally when items were backordered, they waited to charge your account once the product was en route. I only discovered the backordered status after I contacted the company to ask where my order was located. I am sure that if I ever receive the product I will be quite pleased with it, but I am incredibly impatient, and I would have at least liked to have received a courtesy email detailing the delay. I don't think that is too much to ask.

My "Romeo and Juliet" personal opinion
We like and sometimes didn't like this book. "Romeo and Juliet" is based in an "impossible " love. We recommend you not reading this book if you don't like romantic stories.
Also this book didn't like us because it was boring and very difficult to read. I understand that was Shakespeare language but for these new generations is very difficult. In the other way, we like it because the characters did everything for completing their dreams.We could see that Romeo did every thing for being with Juliet.
Thank you for giving us this place for expressing our ideas.

Romeo & Juliet
Romeo & Juliet takes place in Verona in Feudal times. In that times women weren't given any rights. They couldn't hold property or discuss with their husband. This is shown during the whole book. Another thing different from nowadays was the language. Shakespeare uses a language, which I can't understand. So, in some parts were I don't know what a word means, the book becomes boring. Shakespeare, in a way, wrote female characters more intelligent and reflective than male, which in those times, women were objects. The story has different little stories in it. For example; the quarrel between the Capulet's gang and the Montague's; the impossible love between Romeo and Juliet; the trouble that Romeo has in Verona after killing Tybalt; Juliet has to marry Paris but she doesn't want and discusses bravely against her father; these make the story more interesting and it attracts the reader until the end.

Romeo and Juliet
I think that this is a great book because it tells you how much two people can really love each other and they gave up their lifes for their love.
I have seen the movie version about Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet and still love the book every time I revisit the story. Every word fascinates the reader into truly feeling the passion and tragedy of these two lovers. Even a character such as Tybalt Capulet won me over as far as description goes. Shakespearean writing is very much complex and confusing but it has a touch romance and anger which adds to the emotion of the story.
Is an excellent story for teenagers, read this classic book of love, hate and tragedy! ... Read more

Product Description
The Captain is an enigma and someone who has exerted an extraordinary influence on Jim's life. In his early twenties, Jim attempts to put together the Captain's bizarre story. This is a new novel from the author of such classics as, "The Power and the Glory" and "Our Man in Havana". ... Read more

Customer Reviews (10)

a very spare but not minor novel at all...."what is love anyway?"
Graham Greene's "The Captain and the Enemy" is a touching meditation on love that is challenging because of its spareness and the tone in two acts. Among the last things Greene wrote, he has clearly pared this down to the minimum.

In the first parts, Greene's stage is the familiar forgotten byways of depressed England, with characters that cling not so much to respectability but mere function in a notch above those on the public dole and in council flats.

The story is a love triangle, but the mystery is all why, and perhaps even "if" there is real love. All the characters are flawed and warped, and the tale is narrated by a boy-child, who remembers but is not haunted by his mother's death, and also is strangely disaffected by his father's absence and near abandonment in a scruffy public school. He is almost sketched as a person without feelings, and has a tenuous attachment to filial duty: feelings being the romantic form of love, and duty being the mature form of love.

Our no-wave anti-hero is plucked from this dull obscurity to go on an adventure writ small: an adventure simply because of its bizarre nature. He is "won" by a con-man and sometime associate of his father, and led away from school to live as the child of a broken woman in the basement of an abandoned Victorian home turned into unrented dead-end flats. His life with the woman, the comings and goings of his new foster father "The Captain" and the occasional appearance of his father, "the Devil" populate his memory in a diary he keeps.

In the second part of the novel, the woman has died, and the child, now a young man on his own, travels to "Greeneland" the far-away dysfunctional half-colonized frontier land of Panama just before the transition to sovereignty. He must tell his absent foster father The Captain of her death, but cannot bring himself to do so until his own place in the The Captain's life is secured or defined. In this section there is both intrigue and mystery, dark dealings with spies, politics, money, possibly drugs, possibly guns, and a rickety plane. But the real underlying question remains the most pressing mystery: did this most dysfunctional of families made up of such broken people, ever love each other?

Clever readers will see that Greene has once again woven Catholicism's deepest questions into the narrative, for the "family" mirrors The Holy Family of Jesus, Mary and Joseph, while "The Devil" -our narrator's real father- incarnates a fugitive and absent malevolence as each character gropes emotionally toward the other in an attempt to solidify a sense of themselves as loved, loveable, and capable of love.

One of Greene's finest works, and profoundly moving.

Alone in the world
This is a minor novel by Greene, although his major themes are here. It was his last and the feeling that prevails is the loneliness of life, the feeling of being a permanent outsider. Victor is the son of a cruel man and a deceased mother, miserably living in boarding school. On his twelfth birthday, instead of his father a complete stranger shows up to pick him up and take him to lunch and maybe a movie. But instead of returning the boy, the stranger, known only as "The Captain", tells him he has won him at backgammon, and proposes him to go and live in London. Hating boarding school, Victor decides to go to London, where he is placed in a young woman's apartment, to live there as a kind of stepson. The woman is the occasional mistress of the Captain and former lover of Victor's father. Victor adopts the new name of Jim. The Captain, who is obviously a criminal, appears at increasingly longer intervals. In the meantime, Jim and the woman, Liza, develop a kind of mother-and-son relationship. Eventually Jim grows up and becomes a journalist. When the woman dies, Jim looks for the Captain and finds out he is living in Panama, where he travels to meet him. There he discovers the Captain is involved in drug-dealing.

Although this is not at the level of Greene's masterpieces, it is an interesting one to read, because Greene's obsessions are present in a haunting way: moral dilemmas, solitude, the strange relationships we develop with the people our fate brings us close to. Worth a try.

A wonderful surprise
Publishers reprinting an author's entire opus are always claiming obscure works have been unfairly overlooked. In the case of "The Captain and the Enemy," that is surely true. Any reader will find all sorts of intrigues in this little-known work. But even for a Greene fan, like me, this was something of a revelation--one also made possible through the brilliant introduction by John Auchard. You'll gain more insight into a complex author from this short novel and new introduction than from three volumnes of most biographies. DGibson from Brooklyn.

Greene's Last Novel
I had read a few negative online reviews of this novel, had looked at the the cover (with King Kong standing there), and I had few hopes.I find the book a remarkable book---and just those qualities that some readers disliked were qualities which impressed me.The fact that some characters, most characters here, are not "fleshed out" is just right, for these people exist in a kind of spare landscape of slim hope and love, and they are no more attached to worldly things or even common social interaction, say, Ahab. As much as anything else here (and perhaps because the world depicted is somewhat vaguely suggested), we get the feel of Graham Greene's deep and mature consciousness, for in fact we are roaming around the inside of his mind more than around any landscape populated with Dickensian people (despite what one of the back-cover reviews says).Greene wrote this novel only three years before he died, and I found it a privilege to be in the company of his maturity, his encroaching despair, his sense of bleakness and crassness, all touched by hints of the power of love.It's a book that deserve more attention, and perhaps you need to be a bit older than younger to appreciate it.

Not Greene's best
This is not one of Greene's best books, but it is worth a read if you are a fan of his works. About a third of the way through this book I was ready to chalk it up as a major disappointment. The payoff comes late, and when it does it makes the read well worth the time. The last third of the book is a marvelous sketch of relationships and love. Greene really knows how to put the subtleties of life into words.

This isn't a "buyer beware," it's just a "buyer be patient!" The Greene touch is here, you just have to get to it. ... Read more

Product Description
The diary of Samuel Pepys, describing his political, musical and amorous adventures in 17th century London, read by Kenneth Branagh. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (13)

Peep Show
Reading Samuel Pepys diary is an extraordinary experience because it blends the intimate personal details of this very public man of the 17th century with some of the most dramatic moments in London history. Pepys moves back and forth insuccessive daily entries between recording his marital ups and downs , his personal struggles with temptations of the flesh and career successes and the tumultuous events that he witnessed first hand. His descriptions of the Plague of 1665 and the Great London fire of 1666 are unequaled. As an influential minister in the Royal Navy he had access to and was acquainted with much of the aristocracy in the England of his day and had direct knowledge and access to King Charles II during the restoration years. This edition of his diary is abridged and contains the years 1660 thru 1669. From the coronation and return to the monarchy through the Dutch-English war Pepys' perpective is enlightening and entertaining. I can't think of another book that I've read that places the reader in such intimate contact with a time and place so far removed. By the time you are finished with this you will have learned much and become acquainted with a pretty interesting and engaging character in Mr. Pepys. Highly recommended to anyone interested in this period and would enjoy an insiders view of restoration London.

This is an AUDIO edition!
The reading of this volume was almost unlistenable.It sounded like what I had heard described by a Kindle review describing the robotic delivery of "Kindle reading".I swear, the reader sounds as if he is imitating a machine with his odd and unnatural deflection.And, hey, other reviewer, this is not Richard Branagh reading this! Read the cover!

I wish I had the Richard Branaugh version because this is so tedious, I don't know if I can tolerate it.

Not as advertised
The posted reviews giving this a high rating are NOT OF THIS KINDLE EDITION, but are of the printed Latham-Matthews edition.That is a wonderful edition, but this one is the first, 19th-century bowdlerized version, which in particular glosses over Pepys's entertaining sexeual escapades.A modern reader should wait for something better to come along.

A fascinating reminder of why I keep a journal
Ever since I found a circa 1950's diary in an old attic rummage sale on a vacation in Maine when I was about 8, I've been fascinated by old diaries.It also helps that I'm fascinated by history in general.So bring together great historical periods (ie the Great Fire of London) with diaries (and such honest ones as this are rare) and you have a classic.The language was a bit challenging at first - but like reading Shakespeare, if you just get used to it, it suddenly seems normal (reading it out loud also helped me get in the 17th century zone).It was interesting to see so much history witnessed by a normal person (albeit one of the upper class).His personal life was quite "colorful" too, which added some flavor to it, too.Definitely worth the effort.

not pleased
This book is said to be "The Diary of Samuel Pepys" and true it is...however it is only part 2 of a 10 part diary but you wouldnt know that unless you bought it and saw that the book starts with the end of a sentence from the previous volume.very sad. ... Read more