The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

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In the decades that have followed Sylvia Plath's suicide in February 1963, much has been written and speculated about her life, most particularly about her marriage to fellow poet Ted Hughes and her last months spent writing the stark, confessional poems that were to become Ariel. And the myths surrounding Plath have only been intensified by the strong grip her estate--managed by Hughes and his sister, Olwyn--had over the release of her work. Yet Plath kept journals from the age of 11 until her death at 30. Previously only available in a severely bowdlerized edition, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath have now been scrupulously transcribed (with every spelling mistake and grammatical error left intact) and annotated by Karen V. Kukil, supervisor of the Plath collection at Smith College.

The journals show the breathless adolescent obsessed with her burgeoning sexuality, the serious university student competing for the highest grades while engaging in the human merry-go-round of 1950s dating, the graduate year spent at Cambridge University where Plath encountered Ted Hughes. Her version of their relationship (dating is definitely not the appropriate term) is a necessary, and deeply painful, complement to Birthday Letters. On March 10, 1956, Plath writes:

Please let him come, and give me the resilience & guts to make him respect me, be interested, and not to throw myself at him with loudness or hysterical yelling; calmly, gently, easy baby easy. He is probably strutting the backs among crocuses now with seven Scandinavian mistresses. And I sit, spiderlike, waiting, here, home; Penelope weaving webs of Webster, turning spindles of Tourneur. Oh, he is here; my black marauder; oh hungry hungry. I am so hungry for a big smashing creative burgeoning burdened love: I am here; I wait; and he plays on the banks of the river Cam like a casual faun.

Plath's documentation of the two years the couple spent in the U.S. teaching and writing explicitly highlights the dilemma of the late-1950s woman--still swaddled in expectations of domesticity, yet attempting to forge her own independent professional and personal life. This period also reveals in detail the therapy sessions in which Plath lets loose her antipathy for her mother and her grief at her father's death when she was 8--a contrast to the bright, all-American persona she presented to her mother in the correspondence that was published as Letters Home. The journals also feature some notable omissions. Plath understandably skirted over her breakdown and attempted suicide during the summer of 1953, though she was to anatomize the events minutely in her novel The Bell Jar.

Fragments of diaries exist after 1959, which saw the couple's return to England and rural retreat in Devon, the birth of their two children, and their separation in late 1962. An extended piece on the illness and death of an elderly neighbor during this period is particularly affecting and was later turned into the poem "Berck-Plage." Much has been made of the "lost diaries" that Plath kept until her suicide--one simply appears to have vanished, the other Hughes burned after her death. It would seem rapacious to wish for more details of her despair in her final days, however. It is crystallized in the poems that became Ariel, and this is what the voice of her journals ultimately send the reader back to. Sylvia Plath's life has for too long been obfuscated by anecdote, distorting her major contribution to 20th-century literature. As she wrote in "Kindness": "The blood jet is poetry. There is no stopping it." --Catherine Taylor

Book Description

First U.S. Publication

A major literary event--the complete, uncensored journals of Sylvia Plath, published in their entirety for the first time.

Sylvia Plath's journals were originally published in 1982 in a heavily abridged version authorized by Plath's husband, Ted Hughes. This new edition is an exact and complete transcription of the diaries Plath kept during the last twelve years of her life. Sixty percent of the book is material that has never before been made public, more fully revealing the intensity of the poet's personal and literary struggles, and providing fresh insight into both her frequent desperation and the bravery with which she faced down her demons. The complete Journals of Sylvia Plath is essential reading for all who have been moved and fascinated by Plath's life and work.

Customer Reviews:

insightful.......2007-05-30

i watched this thing on tv once about sylvia plath, & this college professor said that every single year she's taught, at least one out of a class full of girls studying sylvia plath will feel that she is sylvia plath reincarnated. and what's funny is that after reading this, i absolutely understand why! that in itself really explains what i'm trying to get across here. something about this really affected me - everything she says sounds just like something i've written, thought, or experienced in the past. this is most definitely worth your time & money.

If you're literate, this is a must own........2007-04-29

As a woman deeply affected by poetry and great literature, of course I would stumble across Plath. However, it wasn't in my studies that I came to know her work, but through the charming compliments of someone who felt I earned her poems as a description- I believe he was nuts- but the work, the words, no, no, THAT was brilliance! These journals are an archive of mid 20th century America and a veritable gold mine of insight into one of the world's premiere writers (female or no). The entries, although privately recorded and oft scandalized by the Ted Hughes/marriage fiasco, come off as less of a personal musing than a practice run for print. Plath does a darling job of explaining the mundane but the undercurrent of inferiority and rapture for writing come through like a beacon in her quest for talent in a sea of self-doubt. Plath is a prolific writer (the volume is a heap of dead weight paper) and not a page is wasted with her thoughts. For anyone looking to understand one woman's intelligent foray into her own psyche, collegiate literary yearnings, and the basis of her thoughts and feelings pre/antedating her marriage: BUY THIS! This is one set of pages that will alter your perception and it is made all the more poignant by her publicized suicide. Plath, thank you!

Wonderful content: terrible editing.......2007-03-19

Plath's journals are an excellent read. I gave it only 3 stars because the editing is terrible. I find myself constantly flipping to the back. Kukil included notes in the back instead of at the bottom of the pages where they would be more logical. She also included journal fragments in the appendix (there are 15). Plath's journals could have been edited much better.

Incomplete Journals of a monomaniac........2007-01-22

I wish I could have given this book 5 stars, the content is riveting, but I decided to give it four because of the editing by Karen V. Kukil.
The Journals of Sylvia Plath as we all know are incomplete, they were edited (sanitized) by her husband Ted Hughes. No doubt whatsoever that the material he 'lost' was detrimental to him. The only thing he allows in the book is her account of his dalliance with a student, after which she begins to see him in a different light. It leaves you at the end of the book feeling very sorry for this woman, and wanting to find out more. (Which one can't help feeling was a marketing ploy by Hughes, who sold the rights to her book the Bell Jar to the Americans after her death in spite of her mother's objections, so that he could raise the money to buy a third home).

Sylvia Plath was brilliant, sexy, vivacious and sociable. She was also completely obsessed with analyzing the working of her mind, her emotions and sensitivities. She was narcissistic, selfish and critical to the point of meanness. The rawness of her emotions is hard to take sometimes. What a normal person would consider to be a rough sea of life and cope accordingly, she turns into a force 10 hurricane. One cannot help feeling that the journals were written to be published, that the author KNEW someday they would be discovered and read by everyone. The writing is beautiful. The very first entry July 1950 is a delight:-

"I may never be happy, but tonight I am content. Nothing more than an empty house, the warm hazy weariness from a day spent setting strawberry runners in the sun, a glass of cool sweet milk, and a shallow dish of blueberries bathed in cream......"

Once started, it is hard to put the book down.

A word now about the editing. I think the book could have been better organized for the general reader, it is formatted like a text book. All the cross-referencing! I had to use two bookmarks all the way through the reading of the book. The 'Notes' could have been at the bottom of each page instead of hidden at the back of the book. The Appendices could have been Notes at the end of each appertaining journal section, and the Index could have been better arranged. The section on Sylvia Plath (which takes up 5 1/2 pages of the index) should have been separated from the rest, to make it less confusing.

An idiosyncratic pure beat and melodic force.......2006-08-28

Whether you read The Journals of Sylvia Plath as a writer's notebook, as scenes from a marriage, as social history, or as daily bulletins from one of the most star-crossed love stories of all time, the journal's words help to keep alive the writer who has been called "the literary girl's Elvis" while also bringing us news of how she thought, how she taught, what she read, how she wrote, along with the most primal news of her legendary marriage, a marriage that so often seemed golden, closer than close, but whose ardent claustrophobia was more precious to Sylvia than it was to Ted, and whose tragic aftermath also turned out to be notorious, horrible, with Assia Wevill (the woman Hughes left Plath for) killing herself in a copycat suicide, and also killing their little daughter, and with even Hughes's final wife (the non-writer and therefore the one who was supposed to be stable) threatening to kill herself when she discovered, not long before Ted's death, that he not only had a mistress, he had also over the years been the lover of a fair (no, make that unfair) number of others.

Plath also had to suffer the pain of seeing less gifted writers beat her out for literary prizes: "All I need now is to hear that GS (George Starbuck) or MK (Maxine Kumin) has won the Yale and get a rejection of my children's book..." And what reader (writer or not) will not empathize with "Must not be accusing, although I feel like it..."

As it turned out, George Starbuck did win the Yale and, reading this, I found myself wanting to say to Plath, "Listen, Sylvia, when we here in the twenty-first century hear the word `Starbuck,' we think of coffee, we don't ever think of George," and then not long after thinking this I discovered her similar wish to offer writerly comfort to Henry James ("I long to make known to him his posthumous reputation").

And how can you not to love a writer who, in notes to herself about a story she wants to write (in this case about George Starbuck and his mistress, the poet Anne Sexton) begins her notes this way: "The story about George, Anne and the children. An insufferable woman (myself of course) gets involved..."

The Journals also bring to vivid life many of the great (and also some of the less great) poets of the twentieth century: W. H. Auden ("his coarse, tweedy brown jacket and burlap-textured voice"); Ralph Rogers, with "his slick, nervous smile, his jittery huckster hand jiggling money in his pants pocket"; Adrienne Rich ("round and stumpy, all vibrant short hair" under a tulip-red umbrella).

As for the poems Hughes wrote to Plath in Birthday Letters, although they often seem clumsily self-justifying and garishly homespun, they do also contain moments that feel incredibly emotional, hacked out of real feeling. Plath's poems, on the other hand, are of a more stunning order, even the notoriously grandstanding poems like "Daddy," but this is even more true of the absolutely incandescent and astounding poems--"Sheep in Fog," "Letter in November," "The Rabbit Catcher," "Poppies in July," "Tulips," "Poppies in October," among many others--poems that move far beyond craft to the most startling and idiosyncratic pure beat and melodic force.

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The B-2 Spirit (U.S. Warplanes)
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Modern Bombers: An illustrated guide to bomber aircraft from 1945 to the second Gulf war, with 300 identification photographs Featuring the Boeing B-52 ... B-2 Spirit stealth bomber, and many more

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Modern Bombers: An illustrated guide to bomber aircraft from 1945 to the second Gulf war, with 300 identification photographs Featuring the Boeing B-52 ... B-2 Spirit stealth bomber, and many more
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This wonderfully illustrated book begins with a history of modern bombers, from the U.S.A.'s Beoing B-47 Stratojet and the Soviets Unions Tupolevs of the Cold War through to the Lockheed Martin F-117 A Nighthawk.

Stealth Bombers: The B-2 Spirits (War Planes)

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B-2 spirts
Stealth Bombers

Stealth Bombers: The B-2 Spirits (War Planes)
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Customer Reviews:

B-2 spirts.......2002-03-07

This book is about the B-2 Spirits.Whoever likes war planes will lo ve this book.This book tells you everything about the b-2 spirits.If there is any plane lovers out there then I would really recomend this book to you

Stealth Bombers.......2002-02-14

A look at the B-2 spirit stealth bomber: low observability is achieved in the B-2 bomber by a combination of materials, coatings, shape, and a design that ... article from: Advanced Materials & Processes

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A look at the B-2 spirit stealth bomber: low observability is achieved in the B-2 bomber by a combination of materials, coatings, shape, and a design that ... article from: Advanced Materials & Processes

Manufacturer: ASM International
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Binding: Digital

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This digital document is an article from Advanced Materials & Processes, published by ASM International on February 1, 2003. The length of the article is 1073 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: A look at the B-2 spirit stealth bomber: low observability is achieved in the B-2 bomber by a combination of materials, coatings, shape, and a design that reduces emissions of heat and sound.
Publication: Advanced Materials & Processes (Refereed)
Date: February 1, 2003
Publisher: ASM International
Volume: 161 Issue: 2 Page: 44(2)

Distributed by Thomson Gale

Book Description

An international bestseller, banned in Switzerland by the bin Laden family, FORBIDDEN TRUTH: U.S. -Taliban Secret Oil Diplomacy and the Failed Hunt for Bin Laden by Jean-Charles Brisard and Guillaume Dasquie shows how U.S. national security in Afghanistan was disastrously compromised by corporate oil interests and Saudi Arabia.

Author Brisard wrote the first intelligence report on the bin Laden financial networks which was used to close down fraudulent Islamic charities that funded terrorism, a report that President Jacques Chirac handed to George Bush on his visit to the US in the wake of 9/11.

Forbidden Truth reveals that French intelligence gave the FBI clear and unambiguous information that the so-called 20th hijacker, Zacarias Massaoui, was tied to Al Qaeda, a story Brisard broke to Salon magazine before Special Agent Coleen Rowley came out publicly to say the FBI stifled the investigation.

John O'Neill the former head of the FBI's antiterrorism division - who perished in the World Trade Center on September 11— told Jean-Charles Brisard in July 2001, "All of the answers, all of the clues allowing us to dismantle Osama bin Laden's organization, can be found in Saudi Arabia."

The result of three years of investigation by a leading French intelligence expert and investigative journalist, Forbidden Truth is the untold story of the Clinton and Bush administration's attempts to stabilize Afghanistan so that U.S. energy companies could build a pipeline. In particular, it details the secret and hazardous diplomacy between the Bush administration and the Taliban between February and August 2001 — a story still untold in the U.S. media — talks that ultimately led the US to make threats via Pakistani intermediaries to the Taliban in July 2001 that they were going to bomb Afghanistan if the Taliban didn't comply.

Customer Reviews:

Forbidden Truth: U.S.-Taliban Secret Oil Diplomacy, Saudi Arabia and the Failed Search for bin Laden.......2007-01-09

good

Authors publicly apologize for their own false statements.......2006-11-10

The book's authors recently published a full-page advertisement in the Economist, The Times (of London) and the Financial Times apologizing to two of the victims of their slander. The below apology was presented as a way for the authors to avoid very severe penalties after a libel suit which they lost. The authors' factual errors are many and obvious: dates wrong, names wrong, claims that public UN meetings were "secret," job titles that never existed, etc. A quick Google search will turn up dozens of pages breaking down the objective factual errors on which the authors built their flimsy conclusions.

And now, the apology itself:

We, Jean-Charles Brisard and Guillaume Dasquié, are the authors of Forbidden Truth, a book circulated widely since it was first published in the autumn of 2001. I, Jean Charles-Brisard, am also the author of a Report entitled Terrorism Financing published in December 2002.

The Book and the Report contain very serious and highly defamatory allegations about Sheikh Khalid Bin Mahfouz and Sheikh Abdulrahman Bin Mahfouz, alleging support for terrorism through their businesses, families and charities, and directly. As a result of what we now know, we accept and acknowledge that all of those allegations about you and your families, businesses and charities are entirely and manifestly false.

The allegations were based on information which we have now been able to establish has been largely withdrawn or refuted in the intervening years since Forbidden Truth was first published, and to our knowledge has never been verified. We did not anticipate at the time the Book and the Report were written that the information which we relied upon would later be withdrawn or refuted. Notwithstanding research into terrorism financing, we have learnt nothing since the publication of the Book and the Report which suggests there is any evidence supporting the allegations. We therefore now unreservedly withdraw all of the allegations about you both in the Book and the Report and confirm that we will never repeat them.

We appreciate the very serious damage that has been caused to your reputations by these allegations. We also accept that the allegations caused you and your family very great distress. For all of this we are truly sorry.

OK but not quite accurate.......2006-05-24

Number 1 Bin Laden did not attack the US on 9/11 that was a set up by THIS ADMINISTRATION that fully planned and allowed 9/11 to happen.
Bin Laden completely denied any involvement in 9/11 just a week or so after it happened.
It has been believed at least with 90% certainty the Bin Laden is dead and has been for about 5 years.
All these 'tapes" that magically appear each and everytime they are needed by these Treasonous War Criminals that have taken the Whitehouse in a coup are all fakes just like the obviously fake video they just happened to "find" in Afghanistan showing someone that is not even a good Bin Laden look alike admitting to something he just got through completely denying a month earlier.

I dont think the REAL tape was ever played here, was played all over the rest of the planet, the FAKE tape was played here adnauseam.

The author gets some of the similarities between Bush and Hitler, and the Nazi party Vs the Neocon party, and the connections between Big Oil and War.

But these Neofascist that have taken over this country are run by the PNAC group.
They got their "New Pearl Harbor" they wanted & "planned" on September 11th 2001.

I just hope the people of this country dont let them get away with it because the rest of the planet is not fooled and they are horrified at what this administration is being allowed to do.

Michael Moore's Lost Twin?.......2005-03-05

I got this book not too long ago based on some of the reviews here. Like everyone else I want to get to the bottom of the terrorist attacks on 9/11. I thought maybe this book would have the answer.

Well going through it the book does make a lot of sense. I can understand the attraction of the oil money and the involvement of politicians and other powerful figures.

But it kind of falls down when you look at the truth behind it. Some of the people in the book have taken the authors to court over what it says. And as far as I can tell the result was that the authors were wrong. Now I know it would be kind of hard to show that someone or other paid for the Twin Towers attacks and so on but you would think there would be enough to get it to hold up in court. But I am wrong about that!

So this book is kind of the twin to Fahrenheit 911. A lot of interesting stuff but you don't know if it is true or not. I tried looking at Brisard's company site and it seems to be shut down. I saw a web page that said one of the court decisions against him also included shutting down the company.

Now what I find really sad about this is that Brisard was helping the families of the 911 victims sue the terrorists. The US cannot even catch Ben Laden so it made sense to me that you could sue the Saudis and so on to get some justice. But I for one have to wonder if the court actions against Brisard are going to make it just a little harder for the families to get their fair day in court.

All in all the book is worth reading as it is pretty interesting even today but you just have to wonder how much is really true.

More Like Forbidden Libel.......2005-02-16

I found this book utterly fascinating when it came out and I have followed the contents and authors closely. Since then the authors have lost every libel action filed against them and the US has had to retract Mr. Brisard's congressional testimony. It also develops that he never did work for the United Nations despite saying so. Even though I used to think this book had the truth about 9/11 now I think it is just conspiracy theory and that's sad.

Gemma

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