Review A Book

[Visionary3]

Couple of quotes from the book:
10/10 KitKats![/QUOTE]

Until I got on this site I didn't realise how many books I have not read but have seen the films, although I read every day. They did a masterful job of filming this story.

[Visionary3]

[QUOTE=arabian night;98007]The recent one i finished is :
Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe.

Have you seen the Uncle Tomas dance in The King & I musical where a concubine wanted to leave and marry a young man? That really brought tears to my eyes.

[Visionary3]

[QUOTE=mono;99566]Earlier today, I finished reading Aurora Leigh by Elizabeth Barrett-Browning.

Thanks for this one; I love Browning's poetry and didn't know about this bookl

[Visionary3]

[QUOTE=Darlin;103677]Oh, last book I read was yesterday, 'The Angry Wife' by Pearl S. Buck.


I always loved Peal Buck's books long time ago, and didn't know about this.Thanks!

[Visionary3]

THE BESTSELLER by Olivia Goldsmith is not a new book,1996, but the story is classic. It goes back and forth between various writers and their publishing lives. One character is a mother trying to get her daughter's book published after she had committed suicide in discouragement of not being able to. Another is a college professor who stole his wife's book and passed it off as his. Another is a junior publisher who juggles the figures to his advantage in the company for his unpopular books. There is a popular romance writer who has grown older and is trying to keep pace. One female author lives in Rome working as a tour guide when she meets a bachelor with a terrible secret and has a sister in publishing.
Several publishing house characters give a lot of insight into the publishing world and how it all works. I don't know how much of this is true but it was a revelation.


HOUSES OF STONE by Barbara Michaels was a fascinating read. A female English professor discovers a battered, faded poetry manuscript written by an early 19th century female. Her book seller friend has another manuscript by the same author and sells it to her for the highest bid offered by other universities. She finds the house where the author had lived and moves into town to do research where she encounters the owner who is a handsome bachelor, her landlady who is a deep-south snoop, and other professors who are determined to get the manuscript away from her. She and another lady friend professor duck and dodge the others and discover a stone house on the property used to jail slaves where they discover the bones of the authoress. The characters were all interesting and the plot moves quicky so I was never bored for one minute.
The touch of how female authors were viewed by men authors in that period was enlightening.


THE PROPHETESS by Barbara Wood, a once popular author, was written in 1996 although I just recently discovered this book. As Millennial fever grips the earth, in the Sinai desert the heroine who is an archaeologist, unearths scrolls whose revelations could shatter every article of faith humankind has known. Powerful people are after her scrolls and we read her attempts to allude them. One wealthy collector uses every method he can to track her...spies, her phone, her friend's phones, and the internet and would stop at nothing to gain his objective. Her new found friend, a priest, helps her until it is known that the Catholic Church had sent him after her too. The internet chases were unbelievably clever. The ending was not too satisfying but action moving right along made the book well worth the read.


WHAT THE BLEEP DO WE KNOW by William Arntz, Betsy Chasse, and Mark Vicente is intelligent, enthralling, and mind-bending. A layman's guide to quantum physics with 17 scientists contributing. I found Dr. Emoto's water crystal studies fascinating. His photos of water crystals that had had words of love and peace on them previously were in beautiful patterns. The water with words of hate were distorted and ugly. Each scientist adds their bit including a reach out into the realm of spirituality. If thoughts are more than just random neural firings then consciousness is more than an accident; a higher power exists but is it truly out there? Where is the dividing line between out there and in here? There are mind stretching questions. This book shows not the path but endless possibiities.The universe is so wild and full of possibilities why are our thoughts about our own lives so limited? I highly recommend this book.

[Janine]

[QUOTE=Visionary3;406983]

Oh, last book I read was yesterday, 'The Angry Wife' by Pearl S. Buck.


I always loved Peal Buck's books long time ago, and didn't know about this.Thanks!

Hi Visionary and Darlin, you two are the first persons on this site that mentioned Pearl S. Buck. Years back I went through a stage of reading her books; Imperial Woman, The Good Earth, The Exile, The Goddess Abides, just to mention a few. I have never heard of The Angry Wife. Was it good? Have either of you read any of the ones I mentioned? I loved them all. I happen to pick up a biography book on Buck recently in my libary freebie bin. I was more than delighted, but I have not read it yet.

[Scharphedin2]

Michael Ondaatje is a Canadian author, who has just published Divisadero, his sixth novel* in a career spanning more than 40 years. Ondaatje's books combine literariness with a strong sense of experience lived, and they display a huge imagination; the language in which he writes is lyrically beautiful, and the structures of his books are to some extent elliptical. There are in other words no other writer, whose works closely resemble Ondaatje's, but readers who are fond of Kundera, Eco, Rushdie, de Bernière, and Border Trilogy Cormac McCarthy will probably enjoy Ondaatje's books.

Divisadero opens in the Pacific North West of the United States, and paints a portrait of a family that consists of a single father, his daughter, the adopted "twin" of the daughter, and a boy (a couple of years older than the girls) orphaned and likewise adopted by the father. In the first third of the novel, Ondaatje proceeds to describe the lives of these disparate members of the family, the immediate past that has landed them together, and the more distant past of their family's origin in America. It is a wonderful piece of Americana, written with true understanding of what it means to live on and of the land, the sense of belonging and the dreams of leaving. There is the yearning for tenderness, and there is the almost subterranean current of sexual longing. Carried away by Ondaatje's enticing depiction of the lives of these individuals, the tragedy that irrevocably changes all of their lives, and sends the individual characters careening across the landscape of the rest of the novel, strikes swift as lightning.

As I recall, there are no very clear indications of the specific time in which the first part of the book takes place. In a sense it could have been any time during the middle of the twentieth century. With the opening of the second part of the novel, taking up some 15-20 years after the end of the first part, it becomes clear that the first part took place in the late sixties/early seventies. We follow the three surrogate siblings, one of whom has entered the legal profession, one has embarked on an academic career than has taken her to France in pursuit of the whereabouts of an elusive French author, and the third has entered into the world of high stakes poker. Ondaatje zooms in on a few select moments or days in the lives of the three characters, but the narrative contracts and expands to paint the canvas of the shapes their lives have taken since the end of the first part of the book, as well as the psychological reality that they inhabit. In the background of the story, recognisable events from the international socio- and political history of the late twentieth century pass in the blink of an eye.

The third part of the novel takes a turn so radical that it will baffle, and possibly infuriate, many readers. Ondaatje is not an author, who serves up books that are ready-made microwave dinners, and thus the final part of this book departs on a storyline that is only connected to the rest of the novel by the most silken of threads. It is a fantastic story in its own right, and it reflects and complements the stories of the three characters depicted in the first two parts of the novel. In the end, the novel folds in upon itself, and Ondaatje's project becomes obliquely apparent.

I first came to Ondaatje's books with In the Skin of the Lion in the early nineties. It is one of his most straightforward novels, and a good point of departure for a reading of his works, as it were. Very shortly afterwards, The English Patient was published. At least in part due to the film that followed, this is the most famous of the author's works, and although I personally admire the film, there is no substitute for reading this wonderful novel. It does carry over one very notable character from the former novel, and so, depending on how deep one would like to go with Ondaatje, it may be advisable to begin one's reading with Skin of the Lion. It would be ten years, before the publication of Ondaatje's next novel -- Anil's Ghost -- which is really no less fascinating than The English Patient. Here, the author takes the reader to Sri Lanka, where he was born, and tells a harrowing tale of love and civil war. Another five years, and we now have Divisadero. All of these books are magnificent, happy reading!


* This number discounts a memoir, but includes his first "novel" - The Collected Works of Billy the Kid, which struggles to fit that description, being at least in equal measure a collection of poems. And, it should be added that Ondaatje has also published three volumes of poetry.

[quasimodo1]

Making History



Published: July 1, 2007
To the Editor:

Walter Kirn’s review of my book “A Young People’s History of the United States” (June 17) attributes to me the belief that “telling the truth is not Job 1 for historians.” The reviewer seems to hold to the l9th-century von Ranke idea that there is one truth to be told. Most historians, and most intelligent people, including bright 12-year-olds, understand that there is no such thing as a single “objective” truth, but that there are different truths according to the viewpoint of the historian. Kirn is intent on giving a sinister ring to what is common sense.

Kirn is irritated because his “truth” is not mine. His truths — built around veneration of the “great men” of the past: the political leaders, the enterprising industrialists — add up to exactly the simplistic history fed to young people over the generations, which my book tries to replace. His kind of history produces a submissive population, always looking for saviors on high. I prefer that readers of history, including the young, learn that we cannot depend on established authority to keep us out of war and to create economic justice, but rather that solving these problems depends on us, the citizenry, and on the great social movements we have created.

My history, therefore, describes the inspiring struggle of those who have fought slavery and racism (Frederick Douglass, William Lloyd Garrison, Fannie Lou Hamer, Bob Moses), of the labor organizers who have led strikes for the rights of working people (Big Bill Haywood, Mother Jones, César Chávez), of the socialists and others who have protested war and militarism (Eugene Debs, Helen Keller, the Rev. Daniel Berrigan, Cindy Sheehan). My hero is not Theodore Roosevelt, who loved war and congratulated a general after a massacre of Filipino villagers at the turn of the century, but Mark Twain, who denounced the massacre and satirized imperialism.

Kirn is annoyed at my refusal to go along with the orthodox romanticization of Lincoln. I suspect he has not read the chapter on Lincoln in Richard Hofstadter’s classic, “The American Political Tradition,” in which Hofstadter brilliantly punctures what he calls the “Lincoln legend.”

Kirn says: “Writing about abolitionism, Zinn leaves the impression that freeing the slaves was not enough.” It seems he does not know of the work of W. E. B. Du Bois and Eric Foner, who document the betrayal of the freed slave after the Civil War.

I want young people to understand that ours is a beautiful country, but it has been taken over by men who have no respect for human rights or constitutional liberties. Our people are basically decent and caring, and our highest ideals are expressed in the Declaration of Independence, which says that all of us have an equal right to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” The history of our country, I point out in my book, is a striving, against corporate robber barons and war makers, to make those ideals a reality — and all of us, of whatever age, can find immense satisfaction in becoming part of that.

Howard Zinn

Auburndale, Mass.

To the Editor:

Howard Zinn’s reductive “stick-figure pageant of capitalist cupidity,” as Walter Kirn describes the “Young People’s History of the United States” condensed from his “People’s History,” is harmless here in the United States, where fuller, more credible takes on American history are available.

But we have cause for concern when an American studies program at a major university in the Middle East uses Zinn’s “People’s History” as the sole text from which graduate students are urged to learn about our country. This is the case at the University of Jordan in Amman, where my wife was the Fulbright senior lecturer in American literature in the fall of 2005. A Fulbrighter preceding her had suggested Zinn’s book, and our colleagues there took it up with enthusiasm. Retaliation for our superficial caricaturing of Middle Eastern social, cultural and political histories?

Kevin Lewis

Columbia, S.C.

The writer is an associate professor of religious studies at the University of South Carolina and was a Fulbright senior lecturer. quasimodo1 PS the disturbing thing here is not that history is again being written by the victors but by a young writer apparently unaware of the distortions provided to extemists because of his one-channel only take on history.

[Elinor Dashwood]

I Loved, loved LOVED this book. I had to study The Handmaid's Tale at school and so since then Iv always been interested in Utopian novels. This is one of them. The book is about a 31 year old woman who is looking back at her past. You spend the first 3/4 of the book piecing together how this world is different from ours. Its a very sad book and at the end it left me with a feeling of injustice for the main characters. I like the way Ishiguro doesn't impose any moral on the story, he leaves the judgement up to the reader. I had difficulty liking the main character, sometimes she seemed manipulative and the romantic relationship between her and another character seemed a bit flat, i'm not sure if that was intentional on the part of the author or not.

[Scharphedin2]

As a citizen of New York, and given that several of his past novels have concerned themselves with themes involving the Middle East, it was probably inevitable that Don DeLillo would eventually write a novel about the terrorist attack on World Trade Center. Falling Man is that novel.

I have read all of DeLillo's novels, and if I should point to some common qualities that I enjoy about his writing, it would be his ability to take current events and shape these into fiction in a manner that is very personal, and about people that I can recognise as living and breathing next door to me. In this way, I think DeLillo quite gracefully avoids being merely another polemical wrtier. Another aspect of his writing that I really enjoy is what I (in lack of a better term) would call kaleidocopic storytelling, in which he has several different threads of stories going on at the same time that mirror and comment on each other.

Underworld was published in the mid-'90s, and is DeLillo's greatest novel so far. It is an American cathedral of a book that spans the greater part of the 20th century, criss-crossing the lives of at least a dozen people, and managing to touch down on a great amount of small and big moments in American history... Everything from a legendary baseball game, with Edgar Hoover, Jackie Gleason and Frank Sinatra in attendance, and which was won by Bobby Thomson hitting a homerun for the Giants... to the nuclear test bombings in the desert of New Mexico... to the Zodiac killer (?) lurking in the hills above the Los Angeles highways.

The books that DeLillo has written since Underworld -- The Body Artist, Cosmopolis and now Falling Man -- have been underwhelming in comparison. Falling Man is in my opinion the best of these. It is split into three parts, beginning with one of the main characters emerging from the smoking, shaking hell of one of the twin towers, and the days immediately following; the second part takes up some weeks later; and the third part takes place 3 years afterwards. In each segment, DeLillo follows the developments in the lives of the man, his wife and their son, as well as the circle of people upon whom their lives touch. Each segment of the book closes with a brief chapter, detailing the preparations of the terrorists that partook in the terror act of September 11th. Without disclosing too much of the story, I can say that the book's structure folds in upon itself by the end. It is elegantly conceived and written, and it does paint a portrait of how this notorious event has affected the American psyche, and continues to do so.

[vheissu]

Sexing the cherry by Jeanette Winterson

Winterson seems to mix historical facts with more unreal circumstances in her book and her style of writing is verging towards poetic or at least to a game of words;this is probably what made me read the book in the first place.
It plays a lot with imagination, things that happened might have been distorted by the characters to suit their personal feelings and perceptions.
It's a very enjoyable book, but towards the end the timeline seems to shift forward without any real explanation and one of the characters seems to have 'survived' the passing of the years.

[jakedarobot]

I just finished Jack London's: The Call of the Wild and White Fang, about ten minutes ago..... i really enjoyed both of them!!

[Logos]

We now have a special forum for book reviews here
http://www.online-literature.com/for...lay.php?f=6877
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