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Sights & Sounds of the Pan American Exposition
$9.95This illustrated, informative booklet offers a bird’s-eye view of the Pan-American Exposition. Review the grounds which were located between what today are Elmwood and Delaware avenues. See the sights that were seen then, when electricity was a novelty. And hear the sounds of the Pan-Am. A delightful CD of the music of the Pan-American Exposition as it was played by John Philip Sousa in 1901 – on player piano rolls – is tucked inside a colorful back pocket. A great way to experience a momentous event, when Buffalo came to be known as the City of Light.
Yamini –
The book is an interesting take on the works of Shakespeare. It has categorized various of his plays, dramas and other works into different sections of Witches, Afterlife, Ghosts, Faeries, Enchanted forests, and more.
After my recent hetric of pretty average reads, happy to find something with a fresh perspective and an unorthodox retelling. The book picks and translates various phrases.
This book can be a great read for Shakespeare fans who would like to have a quick revisit of different characters. But would I ever reread this? Probably not.
I would give this a happy 🤗🤗🤗🤗/5 hugs for reminding me of all the Shakespearean memories 💖
Sage S. –
This is a really weird book. Snodgrass appears to be a religion professor, not a Shakespearean scholar, and so his treatment of the plays and the theatre is focused on analyzing the supernatural and pagan elements. The book organizes the plays by the season of the solar year and the ecumenical calendar. There is a great deal of tracing various plays’ plots to their medieval source works, which is great, and a fair amount of response to quotations from Paglia, Bloom, Hughes, Asmiov (who did write a book on Shax way back when), Fraser, Frye, and Graves. However, the tone of the volume is a strange mixture of academic study and casual snark. That’s the part where I trip, tbh, because sarcastic commentary undermines what is otherwise a really interesting examination of the premodern seasonal and semi-pagan folkloric context of Shax, the theatre-goers, and the text of the plays themselves…when ghosts were real and queens ruled by divine right. Besides all that, there are some lovely woodcuts illustrating the seasons. I would have appreciated more notes referencing historical sources but the bibliography seems sound.
Kalle N. –
Supernatural Shakespeare is a non-fiction book about (surprise!) the supernatural elements in Shakespeare and further cultural context surrounding the use of the supernatural in the plays. I am a fan of Shakespeare and folk beliefs, especially from the Early Modern period, so I was excited to give this book a read!
I definitely learned more about what people believed during Shakespeare’s time. It was interesting to see how the fantastical elements differ from more modern beliefs surrounding ghosts, fairies, etc. I loved reading about things that are not present in our folk beliefs today, such as Queen Mab, and why she was portrayed the way she was in the plays. I feel like I got more context and like that, I have a different lens through which to view the stories.
Stephanie Khattak –
This was a really enjoyable book! The author offered a fresh and unique perspective on Shakespeare’s plays that made me want to reread Shakespeare myself. It made me realize that no matter how well we might know works of classic literature, there is always more to learn and new depths of understanding.
Mollie Ficarella –
I am not a Shakespeare fanatic by any means but I have enjoyed studying his work in school and attending performances at the Chicago Shakespeare Theater. This felt like I was reading a graduate thesis from a university rather than a new exploration of the work but that is my own bias going directly from fiction to nonfiction. It was interesting to learn more about the oral traditions that Shakespeare codified and the author expressed perfectly that it does not matter who wrote Shakespeare’s plays but it matters who he was writing for and who was watching it live. If you want to know more about Shakespeare, you cannot go wrong with this book.