Great product!, September 28, 2000

The only downside I can see is that Palm was not able to come up with a decent solution for carrying the product around.

Ten strong though little-known short plays, September 26, 2000

All of the plays except the three-act work Servitude are only one act and under thirty pages long. Presumably, O'Neill felt a lot more comfortable at this point in his career sticking to short treatments of matters that were close to him, and this appears to have been a good idea. Pretty much all of the plays in this collection show definite signs of the powerful tragedy for which O'Neill is known, and, considering how short they are, many of them are quite moving and haunting. While O'Neill had not yet reached his full maturity at this stage, he definitely was well-enough prepared to write very good one-act plays. His later, longer and more demanding works are very justifiably more famous than these ones, but if you enjoy O'Neill's better-known plays, his earliest works provide a very good view of the development of his style and talents, and you will probably enjoy them as well.

Great literature, mediocre philosophy, September 24, 2000

Dostoevsky is notoriously good at investigating the psychology of his characters, and from that standpoint his treatment of Raskolnikov is probably the best in all of his work. While, as in many of his works, Dostoevsky includes a meek saint-figure (in this case Sonia, the prostitute mentioned above) through whose Christian love the other characters will hopefully be redeemed, Dostoevsky's most remarkable characters tend to be not the ones he idolizes but rather the "devil's advocates" with whom he disagrees, and Raskolnikov is probably the finest example of that. There are lots of other interesting characters too, and the plot is fairly action-packed with many moving and haunting scenes (Katerina Marmeladov's final descent into consumptive madness especially comes to mind), making the novel a surprisingly quick and enjoyable read considering its length and depth.

Unfortunately, there seems to be a tendency among some readers of the novel to be interested in it exclusively for Raskolnikov's proto-Nietzschean philosophy of the "Extraordinary Man" who, like Napoleon and, or so he believes, Raskolnikov himself, has a duty to overstep the most basic bounds of morality in order to achieve a high end. I say this is unfortunate for a couple of reasons: First, the majority of the action of the novel has nothing directly to do with the idea of the Extraordinary Man, so a reader who is concentrating exclusively on Dostoevsky's treatment of this idea will be missing out on the many other redeeming qualities of the book and will probably find most of the book a bit boring as a result. Second, especially from a modern, post-Nietzschean, point of view, Dostoevsky's treatment of the Extraordinary Man doesn't strike me (especially after a second reading, by which time the novelty had worn off) as being especially interesting philosophy. Granted, given that he was writing in 1866, it does seem somewhat impressive, but I'd have to say Nietzsche advocated the position better than Raskolnikov does, and I'm not sure how much enduring value there really is in this philosophical aspect of the novel. There is, however, immense enduring value in both the characters and the action of Crime and Punishment, and that strikes me as clearly the best reason to read the book. If you read Crime and Punishment in hopes of deriving as much as you can from the work, and not just in order to read arguments about a once-fashionable philosophical idea, I can't imagine that you'll disagree with myself and the vast number of others who regard this as one of the greatest works of world literature.