SWIFT

A friend recommended this book to me after I explained how much fun I was having after leaving work in DC, returning to Minnesota, playing with my kids, joining a mountain biking team and genuinely enjoying my unemplyed status for 9 months. She said it was a philosophical book.

I spent the entire book trying to figure out why she thought of this book after I got through telling her how great my life was at the present. Mr. Polly clearly was not living a great life and always seemed to be on the wrong side of circumstance. It wasn't until the very end of the book that I realized the context my friend applied to my happenings.

The book, for it's strange accents and period vocabulary, was as riveting as any Grisham or Baldacci novel. I don't really know why - but it was. And the last few pages makes one think very hard about the meaning of life, which even for an unemployed child-at-heart, is important to do now and again.

The climactic and hilarious confrontation between Mr. Polly and the low-life ruffian Uncle Jim is so masterful that one might forget all the other comic gems included in this novel. At the same time, the reader will feel the power of Wells' legendary intelligence on every page. The History of Mr. Polly is loaded with thought-provoking observations on the topics of marraige, love, business, education, friendship, insurance fraud and -- most of all -- happiness.

I finished reading this novella a few days ago. I must first admit that for the first 25 or so pages, I wasn't particulaly tuned into what the book was about. It is, as Wells mentioned, a history, so I was rather thrown at the beginning. Once I got the gist of it, particularly the gist of Mr. Polly and his eccentricities, I thoroughly enjoyed this book.

The only other Wells book I had read was the Island of Dr. Moreau, which, like his other romantic science-fiction novels he is famous for, was somewhat plot-driven rather than character-driven. This book, is, as the title would lead you to suspect, character-driven.

We begin our read with the bored, frustrated Mr. Polly, what he is feeling and how he deals with his life in general. Then the actual history starts, and Wells's beautiful, if somewhat excessive vocabulary answers the reader's question of who this Mr. Polly is. I found him to a be a very refreshing hero, being rather ordinary, and dealing with the concerns of anyone's life, particularly that of a middle-aged man. He does not "save the day" by perfoming any conventional (or even moral) acts, but this only makes him more real. Mr. Polly's passion for epithet is absolutely delightful, and gave me a great sense of pleasure to watch him go about his transformation.

This was a terriffic, merry little book, with a central character worthy of some of the finest in literature, at least from the limited literature I have read. Don't be fooled by the humorous facade however; there is a deeper message, one which will become relevant at some time in all our lives. It isn't one of Wells's most well known books, but it should be. A superb little gem.

The Historical Maps of North America, written by Michael SWIFT published by PRC is an excellent book on old North American maps and Canada is included in this book, too! If you're into family history buff and you're researching your old lineages dating back to the early 1700's - then this book is for you! You'll learn fast about border changes and whether the French or Britsh ruled any particular area which will also help you understand why "example": your MYERS were MOYER in one part of the country, as compared to seeing it spelled as MEYER or even MEIER in another part. This book is simple and easy to understand, as well, if you're anything like me you like to keep it simple. I love mine so much so, that I'll probably never part with it because I still refer back to it time and time again. It's the next best thing to being able to "afford" the chance to get up to the Library of Congress and the National Archives and hunting down and copying the old maps yourself. NOTE: This isn't a bad book for your school aged children aiding them with their history homework, either!

This is a really good collection of colour reproductions of early maps of Ireland, taken from the English Public Record Office, and well organised. The best are the very early (16th & 17th century) ones, but there are also interesting later ones. The book has two flaws. The major one is that there are no PRO reference numbers, making it hard for anyone to go and search out the originals, the lesser one is that the introduction is a long historical essay about Ireland covering the last two thousand years. I don't see any need for this in a book of this sort, though the essay is, in itself, unobjectionable.