Remarkable for many great Kipling short stories, including his excellent if quirky "As Easy As ABC," which shows us the postwar Rudyard Kipling stung by the excesses of democratic government and modern journalism (the latter of which he also explores in the last chapter of his unjustly criticized "American Notes").

Also has two great "Stalky & Co." stories ("The Honours of War" and "Regulus") written, I suppose, after the collection of that name was compiled; those stories alone justify the acquisition of this volume.

Worth reading and having for your Ebook library if only for the finest science-fiction story written before 1940, "With the Night Mail" (with considerable notes not in other editions of that story in gutenberg.org) and a "Stalky and Co" story which is not in the collection of that name, "The Four Angels."

manybooks.net and gutenberg.org do us a considerable service by making the less well-known but just as fine stories of Kipling available with a few minutes' work on the Internet (and please donate to manybooks.net - I have).

Some of the finest short stories written in the English language. "The Phantom Rickshaw" deserves its fame; one of the few Kipling stories I note most of my friends have read. It's nearly a preternaturally good story.

This is classic Kipling the Journalist, playing the same game John McPhee and P.J. O'Rourke played - it's arrogance for us to call it the "New Journalism" when Rudyard Kipling did exactly the same thing almost a hundred years before our own journalists discovered the joys of conversational prose.

It's also Rudyard Kipling on a full allotment of testosterone, unsparingly critical of a country which he by and large seems to have loved as much as England or his native India. As an American I might bridle at some of the less fair shots Kipling takes in "American Notes," but have to concur with his assessment of Chicago as the American Calcutta, especially now that Chicago politics have irretreivably tarnished the building at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and imposed any number of nasty backroom deals with the health insurance industry and the labor unions on the citizens of a once-proud Republic.

What amazes me is how little the America Kipling shows us has changed in a little over a century after he wrote about it. If you have a sense of humor and objectivity, please read "American Notes," because Kipling rewards his reader with sharp wit and a valuable perspective not found often in overseas journalism (or domestic journalism, for that matter).

Rudyard Kipling is the Homer of the English language. During his life he captured things no other poet of the English language had until then. His poetry still has the power to move the heart, and to those who have known the rigors and tragedy of war, to draw tears.

This book belongs in any English speaker's library. I'm delighted it's available online.

Fast-paced, quirky, Douglas Adams with-an-edge-and-a-PhD-in-physics-style SF. Stross takes the reader on a fast trip through post-modern Europe in the first third of the book, then halfway across the Solar System in the next third, and then into utterly unimaginable places from there, never losing his wicked sense of humor (and it is VERY wicked) or his acuity of vision in the posthuman, postsingularity, and ultimately postbiological future.
A damn good read.