P.G. Wodehouse : Five Complete Novels (The Return of Jeeves, Bertie Wooster Sees It Through, Spring Fever, The Butler Did It, The Old Reliable)

Customer Reviews:

Unexpected Results of a Marital Tontine and a Trio Tango!.......2005-01-23

Fans of P.G. Wodehouse often refer to Jeeves as a butler, but as Bertie Wooster reminds us, Jeeves is actually a gentleman's gentleman, a valet. But on occasion, Jeeves is pressed into service as a butler, and performs quite well.

Imagine the surprise that many P.G. Wodehouse fans have when they open The Butler Did It and find that the butler in question is a Mr. Augustus Keggs, the English butler for one J.J. Bunyan, an American multimillionaire. But this Keggs is a worthy character who fans of Jeeves will find to be very rewarding.

The book has one of the most intriguing plots in all of the Wodehouse novels. As the story opens, it is the night of September tenth, 1929, just before the collapse of the American stock market. Bunyan is entertaining a group of bored millionaires who are having a hard time deciding how to spend the money they are raking in. Among his guests is Mortimer Bayliss, his art curator, who cannot help but want to stir up the philistines. Bayliss proposes that the men each put up $50,000 with the proceeds of the tontine to go to the last of their sons to marry. Naturally, they have to keep the whole matter a secret or deny themselves the possibility of ever having grandchildren.

The book then glides forward in time to the mid 1950s in England as the end game of the tontine arrives. Mr. Keggs is a fellow tenant with Lord Uffenham (who has fallen on hard times), whom he formerly served as a butler, and his niece, Jane Benedick. Mr. Kegg's own niece, Emma, is engaged to marry Roscoe Bunyan, son of the late J.J. Bunyan, of the tontine. Like the wise and omniscient butler he is, Mr. Keggs had recorded the conversation that night and knows all about the tontine. The tontine is down to Roscoe and one other. Mr. Keggs decides that the time has come to intercede.

Jane is engaged to one Stanhope Twine, a hopeless sculptor, but the two cannot marry because Twine hasn't the funds. Mr. Keggs suggests to Roscoe that Twine is the other member of the tontine, and that Twine will marry in a heartbeat if he can get hold of some money. Keggs suggests that Roscoe buy a percentage of Twine's future earnings in exchange for a payment now. Keggs naturally hopes to be well paid for his advice, and is thoroughly annoyed when Roscoe only gives him fifty pounds for information about a tontine payment of over a million dollars.

Here's where the plot begins to unravel. Twine takes the money and jilts Jane. Roscoe jilts Emma, and Cupid is not exactly being served.

But Keggs has been playing a game. Twine isn't really in on the tontine.

Next, Keggs sells the information to Roscoe for $100,000. Roscoe doesn't want to pay and hires a detective to get back the agreement as well as Roscoe's letters to Emma.

In the meantime, Bill Hollister falls head over heels for Jane and she for him . . . having known each other as children. Bill Hollister's name really is in the tontine, and Mr. Keggs has to try to sort out all of the romances and the money. Ultimately, he succeeds . . . but in a way that no reader could hope to anticipate. It's a marvelously funny story with great plot complications.

To my way of thinking, The Butler Did It is one of the five best P.G. Wodehouse books I have read.

Capital! Capital! Capital!

Towards the end of his career, P.G. Wodehouse found himself charmed by the idea of reprising the characters who and plot lines that provided the greatest triumphs in his earlier books. Bertie Wooster Sees It Through is a worthy sequel of that sort.

In the earlier book, you may remember that Stilton Cheesewright and Bertie Wooster had been schoolmates in preparatory school, at Eton and at Oxford. Stilton chose to become a policeman and his career led him to become very serious and strict in his outlook, so that Bertie thinks of him as "that blighter Stilton." Love transformed his life when he fell for the writer, Florence Craye. But Florence is also apt to respond well to Bertie, and Stilton takes that personally. When we last saw them, Florence and Stilton were engaged.

In this story, Bertie's Aunt Dahlia enlists him to come to her country home, Brinkley Court, to help her entertain a family by the name of Trotter. The assignment seems to be off to a rocky start, however, when the Trotters' stepson, Percy Gorringe, calls Bertie to hit him up for 1,000 pounds. That seems like too much entertaining and Bertie declines.

In the meantime, Bertie has started growing a mustache and Jeeves doesn't approve. In fact, no one else does either . . . except Florence Craye. That enrages an already touchy Stilton, who fears that Bertie is trying to steal Florence. Soon, Stilton is also sporting the hairy stuff on his upper lip. To make matters worse, Stilton has a large stake on Bertie in the Drones Club dart championship and decides that Bertie should starting keeping regular hours and keep off the sauce. And that's just why Bertie doesn't want to have anything to do with Florence, she's not only brainy . . . she also likes to improve her men. And Bertie likes himself just the way he is.

Stilton is also the jealous type and quickly turns suspicious when Bertie is picked up after a raid on a late-night bistro where Bertie had taken Florence at her request to do some research on local color.

But Aunt Dahlia has an even more serious problem. She has pawned her new necklace to buy the serial rights to a new story, and her husband, Uncle Tom, is about to have it appraised. She has been hiding the fact by wearing cultured pearls instead, but is about to be caught. Naturally, she decides to have Bertie steal the cultured pearls. And equally naturally, that proves to be more difficult than anyone can imagine and with unexpected consequences. And so the country farce begins!

Bertie Wooster Sees It Through has that nice combination of serious pending threats, irrational fears and hopes, and muddle-headedness that makes for such good social comedy. Like all of the best P.G. Wodehouse books, the language sparkles with original similes, metaphors and allusions.

Jolly good show!

Is an excellent Book........2002-02-16

It is a wonderful book with great humor.

Even Wodehouse's Weaker Novels Are Fun . . ........2001-09-23

but I wouldn't want anyone basing his/her opinion of the large and largely breathtakingly wit of Wodehouse's collected work based merely on this budget anthology.

The novels are set in post-World War II England, and as such they reflect those dispiriting times. The great mansions are in ruin from confiscatory taxation, TV distracts the intellect, Hollywood (not the London theater) dominates popular entertainment, and a loyal butler like Jeeves is clearly a holdover from a different era in which his employers were not, relatively speaking, impoverished.

Wodehouse's fans (of which there are many, both in the UK and the USA) will probably want to read these novels anyway. But if you are contemplating your first exposure to Wodehouse, I'd recommend instead any of his "classic" Bertie-and-Jeeves novels from the 1920s, when social class, punctilio, pith, dry wit and a plenitude of household help for the rich were integral elements of this type of humor. CARRY ON, JEEVES! happens to be my favorite, but there are plenty of other wonderful reads from this era.

Let Plum be Plum! As Always...Great Fun!.......2000-09-25

I was more disappointed with the reviews of this book on Amazon.com than with the book itself! O.K., maybe it is "post-war angst", maybe it's the Long Island malaise, these stories are a bit darker than the "classics" of Blandings Castle or the Drones Club.

But, dash it, they are Wodehouse and show an important part of his personality and the personality of his wonderful characters. Imagine a Jeeves-on-loan! Brilliant! It proves that Jeeves isn't only Jeeves at Bertie's side.

By the way, isn't "Bill" Shannon (aka, "The Old Reliable") an lovely example of the modern, liberated woman! "The Butler Did It" also takes a deserved, but painless, whack at modern art.

Don't let preconceptions tarnish what could well be "five of the best" from the master.

I enjoyed them immensely.

A Most Curious Collection.......1999-10-14

I'm a huge Wodehouse fan, and I find this to be the oddest of all collections. Unlike anything else I've read by Wodehouse, these tales take place after WWII, imbuing the normally bucolic Wodehousian universe with a discomforting sense of dread, of post-war angst. Wodehouse, who himself had much angst following the War, seems to let it show in these stories. A Postlapsarian Wodehouse is a very shaky Wodehouse indeed; oh, for the edenic airs of Blandings Castle, or the gentle hum of the Drones in the early afternoon. The reader is better off there.

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Walt Disney's Spring Fever Volume 1
Carl Barks
Manufacturer: Gemstone Publishing
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 1888472855

Book Description

This is the first of a new seasonal special from Gemstone. It will feature Spring-themed stories and new volumes will be published yearly. This volume contains the stories "Mystery of the Swamp" - a classic Donald Duck adventure by Carl Barks, "Lost on a Dog and Nap in Nature" - Uncle Scrooge and Donald Duck short stories by William Van Horn, "Spooks Island" - a vintage Mickey classic from the 1950s. Also contains Goofy and Chip 'N' Dale stories.

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Nearly Blandings Castle
A true Wodehouse

Spring Fever
P.G. Wodehouse
Manufacturer: Overlook Hardcover
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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ASIN: 158567575X

Customer Reviews:

Nearly Blandings Castle.......2007-08-09

This one-off novel, dating from 1948, follows just after a Jeeves novel, Joy in the Morning (1947), a Blandings saga, Full Moon (1947), and just before the excellent Uncle Dynamite (1948) and another Wooster, The Mating Season (1949). Arguably, it stems from the era of Wodehouse at the top of his form. Nevertheless, it seems to be pieced together from a musical comedy, with one of the longest and most unconvincing love scenes in his ouvre, a thin and unlikely plot, and the happy ending repeatedly dished so many times that the deus ex machina tie up seems almost anticlimactic when it comes.

Those would be major problems for most writers, but they are merely small oversights for Wodehouse, since this book yet contains some of his best sustained scenes and most quoted lines. Wodehouse liked it well enough to rehash it as The Old Reliable in 1951. It's almost a Blandings Castle novel, with Lord Shortlands instead of Emsworth, but with far more dialogue, as if written for the stage. Even after the main characters exit to the altar or registry, there are enough loose ends left to fill another novel, which likely suggested The Old Reliable. Not top drawer PGW, but a readable light novel just the same.

A true Wodehouse.......1998-06-22

Written in P.G.W's inimitable style, Spring Fever has as its principle characters a young man who looks like a greek god and has brains too ( Note: Brains preferring to ignore gentlemen with drop-dead-handsome good looks), a girl with equally good looks but not so sharp a brain, another young man with neither the looks mentioned above nor the brains, also mentioned above, and a Lord, given to uttering sudden exclamations, and not so given to contributing intelligent ideas to any conversation involving himself. Add to this lot of players a daughter hell-bent on keeping her father, the afore mentioned Lord, in proper discipline, a dashing butler with a cunning mind, and a stamp collector husband and you get a simply riotous tale. This tale, as every Wodehouse tale, has his usual ingredients - engagements between 'ladies' and 'gentlemen' being solemnised in every other chapter and broken in the very next, an amazing array of problems being solved equally amazingly as yet another amazin array of P. comes up. Simply lovely. Wodehouse ranks right up there with the best.

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A Book For Portrait Photographers
Not Up To Goldin Snuff
If you don't appreciate Nan Goldin's work, you are ignorant
A DUMB PHOTO BOOK OF ORDINARY JAPANESE PEOPLE

Tokyo Love: Spring Fever 1994
Nan Goldin , and Nobuyoshi Araki
Manufacturer: Scalo Publishers
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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Customer Reviews:

A Book For Portrait Photographers.......2005-03-17

As an amateur portrait photographer, both candid and posed, I was much taken by "Tokyo Love" by Nan Goldin and Nobuyoshi Araki, particularly the portraits by Araki. I'm familiar with Goldin's work through her book "Devil's Playground" as well as a feature on the book done late last year in "Aperture" and I'm familiar with Araki through his books "Araki by Araki" and "Shino".

I find Goldin's contributions consistent with her style in "Devil's Playground" and, I assume, in all of her collected work, while Araki's - and it's Araki's portraits in Tokyo Love I find so compelling - seems a departure from his usual almost numbing never ending "bad boy Araki" series of nudes.

The Araki "Tokyo Love" portraits have the feeling of snapshots, although they're clearly posed, if not in a studio, then against a portable background using strobe light: half of them with the subject entirely within the frame, often sitting on the floor (clothed, as it happens - unusual for Araki; Goldin is the one who finds many of her subjects in a state of undress); the other half with faces cropped tight, framed full face, staring into the lens. They look outward, not particularly trusting, poking their noses into the photographer's world, none of them professional models. All, I assume, representatives of a Japanese culture of a time and a place about which I know nothing, other than the fact I've heard it's a culture undergoing radical transformation.

"Tokyo Love" to some degree reminds me of the impossibly funky and fascinating Soichi Aoki's "Fruits", a book depicting a cultural (radical fashion) segment of young Japanese, published in 2001, some six years after "Tokyo Love". Will the "portrait" subjects in "Fruits" look like Araki and Goldin's "subjects" in "Tokyo Love" when they themselves are five or six years older? Will the age group of fashionistas found in "Fruits" splinter into the various factions in "Tokyo Love"? My own idiosyncratic reaction, of course, the reaction of the observer, but a not bad indication the photographs in "Tokyo Love" do elicit a reaction, a good sign something is happening.

So, even though there seem to be many who've been less than impressed, I say the hell with it, go out and buy "Tokyo Love". Gives you something to defend when you're arguing Art and Life among friends.

Not Up To Goldin Snuff.......2003-01-22

If this collection of Goldin photographs demonstrates anything, it is fine wine, great paintings, loving relationships, and fine art education do not necessarily inspire, guarantee, or, in themselves, produce extraordinary photography. Whatever her experience might have been in Japan while making these photographs, the resulting images are, at the very most, photo album, vacation snap shots holding very little in substance and meaning to anyone except Nan Goldin. Goldin's effort here is one of self absorption which most artists bathe in on occasion. While the images in this edition, as boring and lacking in any form of specific or universal meaning as they are, can be 'blamed' on Goldin, the editorial decision to publish this book prove publishers continue to be a steady source for the 'bargain book' shelves at bookstores everywhere.

If you don't appreciate Nan Goldin's work, you are ignorant.......2002-03-10

Nan Goldin is one of the best photographers of our time. She is real, true and awesome. Her photographs are raw and unsensored. She doesn't just go out and photograph random people on the streets, which would not necessarily be a bad thing anyway... but she establishes real relationships with the people she photographs before taking their picture. Therefore, her images really show something true about the person. Her colors and compositions may seem simple or whimsical to a stupid person, but anyone with half a brain will see that they are actually carefully thought out. She is a master of color use in order to convey a certain mood. I love Nan Goldin and reccommend this book to anyone not looking for pretty nature photography or decorative type "art". Nan Goldin's photographs are raw, real, and powerful. ...

A DUMB PHOTO BOOK OF ORDINARY JAPANESE PEOPLE.......1999-11-23

Just an ordinary collection of young Japanese people in face or body shots wearing ordinary everyday street clothes. Very few nude or provocative shots. Was this someone's first intermediate school photo project? I am going to delete Nan Goldin's name from my hard drive.

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Very sweet book
Spring Fever

Spring Fever!: A Petal Tab Book

Manufacturer: Little Simon
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Board book

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ASIN: 0689874243

Book Description

Turn each shimmery flower-petal page and catch some spring fever!

Customer Reviews:

Very sweet book.......2006-04-11

This is one of the first books we ever bought for our daughter. At 2 months old the shiny flower petal tabs and bright colors held her attention. Now at 13 months she will sit and look at it alone and also with Mommy. Salina Yoon's illustrations are very bold and colorful. The lady bugs, blue birds, butterflys and flowers are captivating. The text is short and rhymes. Just right for a book beginner!

Spring Fever.......2005-12-19

This book is extremly cute. It tells young children about springtime in a way that rhymes. It tells you about the ladybugs, the bumble bees, the birds, and the butterflys. All in a way that younger kids can understand

Spy Kids Adventures: Spring Fever - Book #9 (Spy Kids Adventures)

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lets spy

Spy Kids Adventures: Spring Fever - Book #9 (Spy Kids Adventures)
Elizabeth Lenhard
Manufacturer: Miramax
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0786809892
Release Date: 2004-04-26

Book Description

It's a case of bad spring fever. When Carmen and Juni discover that an evil man is plotting to take over the world by attacking people with allergies, they need to take down the villain before he turns the whole world on its nose

Customer Reviews:

lets spy.......2005-08-02

this book was so good it made me want to go and spy right with them!

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Spring Fever
Dick Francis
Manufacturer: DH Audio
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Audio Cassette

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Sony WMFX479 Walkman

ASIN: 0886466369

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Spring Fevers
Martin Pyx
Manufacturer: Blue Moon Books
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 1562010271

Impossible Love: Or Why the Heart Must Go Wrong (Spring Fever)

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Wrong Love, Right LIfe

Impossible Love: Or Why the Heart Must Go Wrong (Spring Fever)
Jan Bauer
Manufacturer: Spring Publications
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 088214359X

Book Description

Some love affairs mark our lives forever. Jan Bauer examines the erotic structures of irresistible attraction with love stories of the classic past and the lives of people today.

Customer Reviews:

Wrong Love, Right LIfe.......2000-12-28

Although momongamy is heralded as a pillar of societal stability, Jan Bauer delves into the reality that love cannot be confined to moralistic prognostications nor legislative pronunciations. Bauer concentrates on why love affairs happen, without judgment of those who enter into one. This book is sorely needed by those who find themselves in an affair beyond their control and by those who feel victimized or betrayed by someone else's love affair. It brings a rational understanding and clarity to an unseemingly irrational occurence. It may not lessen the pain, but it goes a long way to help in the healing process.

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Spring Fever (Jellybean Books(R))
Sarah Albee
Manufacturer: Random House Books for Young Readers
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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ASIN: 0375811508
Release Date: 2001-02-27

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