!1: Now is the time Red Sky at Morning: A Novel (Perennial Classics) Order Today!
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Over All Rating Reviews : Great Deal : $3.39
Date Created : Oct 15, 2010 17:19:05
The classic coming-of-age story set during World War II about the enduring spirit of youth and the values in life that count.
!1: Best Buy Red Sky at Morning is a fine coming of age novel, albeit a relatively quiet one. Unlike another reviewer at this site, I don't think it has the power or emotional depth of Catcher in the Rye, but then, few novels do. There is some intensity in the conflict between the narrator, 17-year-old Joshua Arnold, and the neighborhood tough, Chango, and the absence of Joshua's father that compels his transition to adulthood is well handled. Many of the episodes in Joshua's life are amusing and a few are downright funny, making this an enjoyable read.
So here are my quibbles, preventing me from giving the novel five stars: I enjoyed the banter between Joshua's father and the employee he left in charge of the shipyard, and between Joshua's father and Joshua. But when the same kind of light-hearted sarcastic dialog was taken up by his friends Steenie and Marcia, it seemed to me that too many characters were speaking in the same voice, as if they had all been cloned from Joshua's father. More importantly, I was left with the feeling that the novel was striving relentlessly to be light-hearted even in the face of circumstances in Joshua's life (unnamed here to avoid spoiling the plot for those who haven't read the book) that should have been tragic. Finally, I didn't buy Chango's character change at all. I can accept that the events in the novel would have had an impact on Chango, but the immediate and extreme alteration of his personality that Joshua describes isn't credible.
I came to this novel late in life. Perhaps if I'd first read it as a teenager or young adult, or perhaps if I had ever lived in the southwest, it would have left a greater impression. At any rate, I'd give it a solid four stars, but to me it lacks the depth that others see and therefore falls short of greatness. on Sale!
!1: Now is the time Crow Lake (Today Show Book Club #7) Order Today!
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Over All Rating Reviews : Great Deal : $4.00
Date Created : Sep 17, 2010 11:15:28
Crow Lake is that rare find, a first novel so quietly assured, so emotionally pitch perfect, you know from the opening page that this is the real thing–a literary experience in which to lose yourself, by an author of immense talent.
Here is a gorgeous, slow-burning story set in the rural “badlands” of northern Ontario, where heartbreak and hardship are mirrored in the landscape. For the farming Pye family, life is a Greek tragedy where the sins of the fathers are visited on the sons, and terrible events occur–offstage.
Centerstage are the Morrisons, whose tragedy looks more immediate if less brutal, but is, in reality, insidious and divisive. Orphaned young, Kate Morrison was her older brother Matt’s protegee, her fascination for pond life fed by his passionate interest in the natural world. Now a zoologist, she can identify organisms under a microscope but seems blind to the state of her own emotional life. And she thinks she’s outgrown her siblings–Luke, Matt, and Bo–who were once her entire world.
In this universal drama of family love and misunderstandings, of resentments harbored and driven underground, Lawson ratchets up the tension with heartbreaking humor and consummate control, continually overturning one’s expectations right to the very end. Tragic, funny, unforgettable, Crow Lake is a quiet tour de force that will catapult Mary Lawson to the forefront of fiction writers today.
From the Hardcover edition.
!1: Best Buy I really, really enjoyed this book. I come from a town that is surrounded by farmland (although decreasing in size as the town booms) and grew up with lots of farmers' kids etc.
Well, this story is great if you want to feel like you are really being pulled into the farming life, with it's early morning, harsh winters, crop issues etc. It's written in a time where kids did not necessarily go on to school after high school, so that made it all the more interesting, as the kids in the book are really smart.
There is educational writing here, but not to where you might become bored. The main character tells us, in detail, about her favorite childhood place, a lake near her farm. That's all I'll say because I don't want to give anything away.
Crow Lake was a book I enjoyed so much, from cover to cover (okay, the ending could have had a little more closure imo) that I have been looking for similar books since. I did read her other book, but this one stands out.
±1±: Now is the time A Popular and Practical Treatise on Masonry and Stone-Cutting Order Today!
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Over All Rating Reviews : Great Deal : $20.00
Date Created : Sep 03, 2010 03:30:26
This is an EXACT reproduction of a book published before 1923. This IS NOT an OCR'd book with strange characters, introduced typographical errors, and jumbled words. This book may have occasional imperfections such as missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. that were either part of the original artifact, or were introduced by the scanning process. We believe this work is culturally important, and despite the imperfections, have elected to bring it back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide. We appreciate your understanding of the imperfections in the preservation process, and hope you enjoy this valuable book.
±1±: Now is the time Practical Masonry, Bricklaying and Plastering, Both Plain and Ornamental: Containing a New and Complete System of Lines for Stone-Cutting. for the Use of Workmen Order Today!
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Over All Rating Reviews : Great Deal : $19.48
Date Created : Jul 22, 2010 10:34:04
This is an EXACT reproduction of a book published before 1923. This IS NOT an OCR'd book with strange characters, introduced typographical errors, and jumbled words. This book may have occasional imperfections such as missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. that were either part of the original artifact, or were introduced by the scanning process. We believe this work is culturally important, and despite the imperfections, have elected to bring it back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide. We appreciate your understanding of the imperfections in the preservation process, and hope you enjoy this valuable book.
±1±: Now is the time Let the Great World Spin: A Novel Order Today!
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Over All Rating Reviews : Great Deal : $7.65
Date Created : Jun 24, 2010 03:21:24
In the dawning light of a late-summer morning, the people of lower Manhattan stand hushed, staring up in disbelief at the Twin Towers. It is August 1974, and a mysterious tightrope walker is running, dancing, leaping between the towers, suspended a quarter mile above the ground. In the streets below, a slew of ordinary lives become extraordinary in bestselling novelist Colum McCann’s stunningly intricate portrait of a city and its people. Let the Great World Spin is the critically acclaimed author’s most ambitious novel yet: a dazzlingly rich vision of the pain, loveliness, mystery, and promise of New York City in the 1970s.
Corrigan, a radical young Irish monk, struggles with his own demons as he lives among the prostitutes in the middle of the burning Bronx. A group of mothers gather in a Park Avenue apartment to mourn their sons who died in Vietnam, only to discover just how much divides them even in grief. A young artist finds herself at the scene of a hit-and-run that sends her own life careening sideways. Tillie, a thirty-eight-year-old grandmother, turns tricks alongside her teenage daughter, determined not only to take care of her family but to prove her own worth. Elegantly weaving together these and other seemingly disparate lives, McCann’s powerful allegory comes alive in the unforgettable voices of the city’s people, unexpectedly drawn together by hope, beauty, and the “artistic crime of the century.” A sweeping and radical social novel, Let the Great World Spin captures the spirit of America in a time of transition, extraordinary promise, and, in hindsight, heartbreaking innocence. Hailed as a “fiercely original talent” (San Francisco Chronicle), award-winning novelist McCann has delivered a triumphantly American masterpiece that awakens in us a sense of what the novel can achieve, confront, and even heal.
±1±: Best Buy This is a very good book. Don't get me wrong. It was a very enjoyable reading experience and I would recommend this book to anyone. That being said, I started reading this book with sky high expectations and I have to say at the end I was kind of disappointed. The book did not succeed in blowing me away, and I think I know why.
McCann is a superb writer and he really has a way with words. His imagery, diction, and the way he can so seamlessly slip into the heads of characters from different walks of life is pretty amazing. In this novel, he writes several spectacular short narratives and then falls short on cohesiveness when attempting to tie all the threads together at the end.
We've got some great characters: the heart-wrenching Corrigan, the warm, generous Gloria, or the painfully stiff and slightly pathetic Claire, who all arouse sympathy and are flushed out with mastery in their introductions to the story. They really come alive under Mccann's pen, but as the narrative moves forward their stories are swallowed by the confusion of characters McCann has constructed in his ambition. There are too many characters, and McCann did not do all of them justice. I read five pages of superb , profound prose about a graffiti tag photographer, and then he is never mentioned again save under a photograph-- clever, but unsatisfying. Three tech kids working in California appear in one chapter and then disappear forever. What's confusing is McCann picks and chooses the characters he wants to give endings to like he's playing favorites, and never gives a reason as to why some characters get a huge hunk more exposure than others.
Needless to say, this made the reading experience slightly disjointed, and I was disappointed that only some characters' stories were revisited. Note to author: If you're only interested in these characters, stick to them, or give everyone equal facetime at least. Of the stories that were flushed out, however, McCann does a great job at building intrigue, but he sometimes veers off into the realm of cliche and convenience. Many of the coincidences and connections between the characters in the novel seem improbable, and McCann's wish to make everything in the plot do double duty ends up making parts of the narrative seem forced and constrained.
Another thing that bothered me about this book was it's failure to draw up strong emotion. This may be cliche, but I usually know I've read a good novel when I've laughed, cried, and forgotten to eat too. I think i did chuckle while reading "Let The Great World Spin," but for such an ambitious, atmospheric title, the novel fell short on emotional delivery. There could have been so many emotional high points, with the turmoil and insanity of these character's lives, but I never felt tears well up in my eyes in empathy for any of these characters, and I found that extremely odd. This may have had to do with the too-many-characters-too-little-time-for-everybody problem that I mentioned earlier, but usually by the end of a great novel my breath is caught in my throat and goosebumps are running down my spine. I was disappointed that with "Let The Great World Spin," neither were the case.
Additionally, sometimes wording is awkward and plot development uncomfortable, with the last paragraph being extremely awkward in this regard as McCann describes an unlikely encounter between a certain important young woman and an Italian man. The chapter made me feel sleazy and a bit skeptical, especially with McCann's awkward brushing over of the sex scene as if he's not quite sure what to do with himself. Many other instances like that in the novel had an unpleasant jarring effect on the reading experience.
Of course, I'm being nitpicky here. I gave the book four stars and it deserves all four; McCann has written a very good novel that is much better than a lot of the other stuff out there. It deserves all the recognition it has gotten, and I only focus on the negatives in these reviews to put some of the over-praising odes into proportion. In my opinion, this novel was good, but not great. If you want an extraordinary book on 9/11, one that will blow you away and make you fall in love head over heels, read Foer's "Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close." This book tries, but in the end only partially succeeds. on Sale!
±1±: Now is the time Cutting for Stone (Vintage) Order Today!
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Over All Rating Reviews : Great Deal : $8.19
Date Created : Jun 16, 2010 05:47:16
Marion and Shiva Stone are twin brothers born of a secret union between a beautiful Indian nun and a brash British surgeon. Orphaned by their mother’s death and their father’s disappearance, bound together by a preternatural connection and a shared fascination with medicine, the twins come of age as Ethiopia hovers on the brink of revolution.
Moving from Addis Ababa to New York City and back again, Cutting for Stone is an unforgettable story of love and betrayal, medicine and ordinary miracles—and two brothers whose fates are forever intertwined.
±1±: Best Buy Wonderful book on a rich topic. I wanted to write about my impressions on some incidents in the book which might not be obvious to non-physicians.
Shiva has many characteristics of autistic spectrum, his silence, his compulsions, his indifference to schoolwork, and his empathy for the fistula patients. In the last chapters, Hema says that she recognized early that he is the needier twin. Because of the autism, he doesn't recognize the meaning that the sexual contact has for his brother. So Marion spends years of his life resentful of a betrayal that was unintentional. "Mirror image" twinning is a real phenomenon, but here it also represents opposites in personality and work.
Thomas Stone has Post Traumatic Stress Disorder secondary to his mother's death. The scar on his chest (from the thoracotomy for treatment of the TB that he contracted from his mother) is the permanent manifestation of the physical and emotional wound. The amazing scene in which he watches his mother bleed to death from the ruptured aneurysm caused by the syphilis contracted from her philandering husband is the symbolism of how he is also wounded by her tragic marriage.
Consequently, Thomas Stone has nothing in his life other than surgery, and his patients benefit from his wounds/sacrifices. Which is pretty common in the work of medicine.
There is symbolism in Marion's lethal illness from sexually transmitted Hepatitis B. Then his life is saved by his father, who abandoned him to pursue surgery. That gift of life is only possible because he has an estranged but identical twin who is willing to risk his life.
The author's references to the gratitude that physicians and surgeons feel for the teaching that passes on "the art" is very beautiful. His references to the British and "classical" medical education system are very rich and interesting. Ghosh's humanity, wisdom, and charm are wonderful.
The reference to the Hipocratic Oath evokes a lot of imagery. There is much of the oath which is reflected in the themes of this book. "Cutting for stone" refers to what is forbidden and, by extension, what is imprudent and dangerous. on Sale!
