Books about Decimus from Amazon.com

" . . . gives us all sixteen of the satires in the tough, slashing manner of the original, unheard in Dryden and the few others who tried it..
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"Despite the resurgence of interest in the field of late antiquity, there are still too few authors from the period available in translation--and of the few who are translated, most, like Ausonius, are available only in arcane and unreadable English. Ausonius is one of the more accessible late antique writers, and Slavitt's choice of texts to translate reflects his accessibility--the Cento gives us a taste of Ausonius's bizarre sense of humor, and the Commemorations gives us a glimpse into his personal network of friends, teachers, and relatives, and into the everyday life of a wealthy provincial city. Slavitt's translations are simple, direct, often very funny, and sometimes moving. His Cento is a tour de force recreation."--Martha Malamud, editor, Arethusa Ausonius, the most famous of the learned poets active in the second half of the fourth century, was born at Bordeaux and taught school there for 30 years before being summoned to court to teach the future emperor Gratian. He subsequently held important public offices, returning to Bordeaux and private life after Gratian's death in 383. The subjects of many of his poems are typical of the academic world of the time. His Commemorations of the Professors of Bordeaux, a sequence of light verse obituaries of local teachers, in which people are honored--or gossiped about--in their daily occupations, has been called an illustrious poetic precedent to Edgar Lee Masters's Spoon River Anthology. To a literary verse translation of the Commemorations David Slavitt has added versions of Ausonius's Nuptial Cento, assembled from snippets of Shakespeare (Ausonius's original is a pastiche of Virgil), and selected epigrams. "Skill, wit, learning, poetic dexterity, and flabbergasting irreverence--very Ausonian, very amusing and impressive too."--Classical ReviewDavid R. Slavitt has published more than sixty books: original poetry, translations (recently Broken Columns, of Statius and Claudian, available from the University of Pennsylvania Press), novels, critical works, and short stories. He worked for seven years as a journalist at Newsweek and continues to do freelance reporting and reviewing. With Palmer Bovie he coedited the Complete Roman Drama in Translation series and the Penn Greek Drama Series. Also of interest: Epinician Odes and Dithyrambs of Bacchylides Translated by David R. Slavitt.
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This delightfully subtle second novel about Omar Kohn of Charleston, South Carolina, recalls his fifteenth summer, marked by playing baseball, writing for a newspaper, reading about the Civil War, daydreaming, and going on his first date. Underneath such ordinary events, enormous personal changes happen to Omar. He learns about his parents' frailties and their very different family backgrounds as he sorts through questions about his own identity and destiny..
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"A Memory of Trains is a book about trains like Mark Twain's Life on the Mississippi is a book about steamboats—which is to say, it is about trains, but it is about so much more. It is social history, memoir, and—as the author says at one point—a journey toward a vocation," writes Fred Hobson in the introduction

“As the son of a railroad conductor and product of a railroad town (Hamlet, N.C.) I'm a passionate railway buff. But in this wonderful reminiscence of old trains great and small, North and South, freight and passenger, smoke and whistle, illustrated by his own photographs, Louis Rubin shows himself King of the Buffs and Master of the Tracks. You can almost hear someone shouting "all aboard!" says Tom Wicker.

"Railfans will find all the material they crave about the webs of passenger and freight routes that once plied those parts of the nation ... Rubin's work is also a literary elegy of trains and the culture they bore ... a handsome volume ... Trainspotters everywhere will love it," says Publishers Weekly.

"It is his beautifully written narrative, humble and elegant, that makes the book such a gem," wrote Preservation magazine. And the photographs "convey the power, grace, movement, and beauty of the speeding train."

"The author's photos accompany the well-written chapters, leave readers saddened by all that was lost when railroads lost their grandeur, but they will appreciate the memories this autobiography stirs," says Roger Carp in Trains magazine.

"His photographs, 122 in number, are pure nostalgia; freight trains, passenger trains, trains rolling across trestles and heading into small-town stations, cabooses, water towers, and a carnival train with gaudily painted flatcars ... For readers old enough to remember the book is a joy; for readers too young to remember, here is a chance to share the joy," says George Cohen in Booklist magazine.
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