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Review Date: 11/4/2006
6 member(s) found this review helpful.
"This fairy tale-philosophical essay shimmers throughout its 167 pages---as one reads he accompanies the boy on the strange and marvelous journey in quest of his dream. I'm very glad to have become acquainted with this gifted Brazilian author."
Review Date: 8/25/2008
4 member(s) found this review helpful.
"Of Annie Dillard's books, I read An American Childhood first, and that was fortuitous, because later, when I read Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, I felt like I had known Annie as a girl and was meeting her again. Annie Dillard the woman is a close, respectful and articulate observer of the world around her at her home on Tinker Creek, Virginia. Reading pilgrim Annie's book is an esthetic pleasure and a therapeutic one, too. There are many readers like the woman I met once at a baccalaureate at which the speaker had taken his 'text' from Dillard. The woman said......"It's time for me to read Annie Dillard again." I understand that perfectly."
Review Date: 8/22/2008
2 member(s) found this review helpful.
"Every person who seeks to understand the "Women's Lib" phenomenon is obliged to read this seminal work. It gives a look into the heart, mind and soul of a woman who burned to be more than a 'trophy' wife, a bed partner, a domestic factotum, and a bearer of progeny. How desperately she burned to live her own INDIVIDUAL life, secure education, develop skills, follow interests, and express her own thoughts, ideas and feelings will be made abundantly clear to any female reader, and will even give an insight to the male reader who approaches the book in an unprejudiced way."
Review Date: 8/15/2007
1 member(s) found this review helpful.
"Life draws together three women, each of whom has had a disastrous relationship with a man. Charlotte, a recently widowed archaeologist, an aging blue-haired widow who has inherited a wooden motor yacht, and a pregnant emotional 17-year-old become shipmates off the New England coast. A genuine bond develops between the three, and all begin to learn how to forgive themselves for earlier events in their lives, and how to "live forward"."
Review Date: 10/27/2009
"When I read this little book many years ago, I had no notion it was, sort of, a feminist novel. I was delighted when the heroine, upon her hypochondriac husband's retirement, sees "the handwriting on the wall" and reacts against his expectation of turning her into a private nurse-cook-laundress-factotum. I was pleased at that 'hinge' in the story, and then I further cheered for her when she went out, leaving the old parasite behind. She became a participant in LIFE, and a part of the scene, not just a slavish caretaker of a self-absorbed old crank. I think other readers will like getting to know Eva, too."
Review Date: 10/22/2006
1 member(s) found this review helpful.
"Long-married Ira and Maggie have a comfortably routine marriage, but on the road to a friend's funeral, they make some unexpected detours and discover how extraordinary their 'ordinary' lives really are . . ."
Review Date: 6/20/2012
"Annie Proulx, who plainly loves Wyoming and truly understands loneliness, offers eleven stories written in the "spare, gnarly prose" that her readers have become acqainted with through her novels, The Shipping News and Accordion Crimes, and other story collections. In the last story in this collection, Brokeback Mountain, she deals most effectively with the homoerotic strain in American culture, when she writes of Ennis Del Mar and Jack Twist and their 20-year relationship. This story was the basis of a film by the same name, featuring Jake Gyllenhaal and Heath Ledger."
Review Date: 4/29/2012
"It's not often there comes along a book whose denouement leaves the reader saddened, but not saddened, but this is one such book. It is an intriguing story of the inner lives of two persons, a 54-year-old widow who is the concierge of an apartment building in Paris, and a 12 and a half year old girl, the precocious daughter of one of the tenants. The concierge, Madame Michel, or Renee, has secluded herself from the larger world and its hypocrisies; the very intelligent pre-teen, Paloma, is secretly planning her rather dramatic suicide. Barbery uses interior monologues to acqaint us with the thoughts and feelings of the two. We also learn of the various tenants in the building, in particular, of the 'new' tenant, Monsieur Ozu, a highly cultured Japanese gentleman and scholar, who enters, briefly but significantly, the lives of both Renee and Paloma. Un livre charmant."
Review Date: 5/7/2009
1 member(s) found this review helpful.
"The intimate and insightful account of the marriage of two British intellectuals, the philosophical novelist Iris Murdoch, and the eminent academic, literary critic, and writer John Bayley. Reading this account by the widower Bayley reveals how and why the marriage succeeded and endured for decades, in part because neither partner demanded concessions from the other's individual integrity, as artist, or as scholar. Bayley's musings about the changes Alzheimer's disease caused in his brilliant novelist-wife are poignant to read. He is forthright about the vexations that led to occasional outbursts on his part, but even when he recounts such moments, the reader can plainly understand that his love is unfaltering, and so it remained, to the end. Iris Murdoch died in February of 1999."
Review Date: 4/29/2007
"This story of an international cabal and its machinations behind the scenes during World War Two relates the "back stories" of a cast of characters some of whom were real persons and some of whom were fictional. Among the real characters are von Ribbentrop, Sir Harry Oakes, Charles Lindbergh, and the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. A strange but compelling novel."
Review Date: 12/7/2006
1 member(s) found this review helpful.
"The protagonist, Binx Bolling, the "moviegoer", inhabits a world that is a strange admixture of ordinary life and work in suburban New Orleans and the celluloid reality of the movies. Percy seduces the reader into this light-and-shadow realm with some expertly drawn characters.Binx is happy in a movie, even a bad movie; the reader will be held by this novel, unsettling though it may be."
Review Date: 11/28/2006
1 member(s) found this review helpful.
"This story of how the relationships between a seasoned foreign correspondent trying not to become "involved" in the fighting, a young American idealist whose grievously misguided policies lead to bloodshed, and a young Vietnamese girl all play out during the death throes of French colonial ambitions in Vietnam in the early 50s. It formed the basis of the 2002 Miramax film with Michael Caine and Brendan Frasier."
Review Date: 1/16/2007
"Short stories by writers whose names will be familiar to readers of The Huntsman trilogy and the Last Legionary series, the Tripods trilogy about the invasion of Earth, the Starstormers series, and/or the Xanth series of fantasy novels. This anthology also includes two stories about the adventures of the crew of the starship Falcon."
Review Date: 2/7/2007
1 member(s) found this review helpful.
"Fourteen-year-old Lily Owens has only a blurred memory of her mother, as she is growing up in Sylvan, South Carolina, with her daddy, T. Ray, and Rosaleen, her black "stand-in mother". It's the Sixties, and when self-respecting Rosaleen has a run-in with three of the biggest racists in town, Lily takes up her cause and engineers Rosaleen's escape, and her own. The two run away to the town written on the back of a mysterious photo that Lily feels holds the secret to her mother's past. They become members of the household of an eccentric trio of black beekeeping sisters. Lily learns about beekeeping, the Black Madonna, and the secret of her mother's past, and at last is able to reconcile with her 'unloving' father, and to move confidently into young womanhood."
Review Date: 10/27/2007
"Chief Inspector Morse of the Thames Valley Police investigates the death of the man in a colorful Rastafarian costume who wins First Prize at the New Year's Eve costume party at the Haworth Hotel in Oxford. The man is found dead the next morning in Room 3 of the hotel's annexe, without a scrap of identification. Six guests returned to the annexe after the party, and thus they make up Morse's list of suspects. But.....why have they all vanished? This title marks the seventh appearance of the idiosyncratic Morse, and of his subordinate and friend, the long-suffering Sergeant Lewis."
Review Date: 4/1/2007
3 member(s) found this review helpful.
"Zafon more than fulfills the author's duty 'to be interesting' with this intricately-woven, suspenseful, wonderfully hypnotic novel of a tragic love in Barcelona in Civil War days there that altered the lives of another set of characters a generation later in that Spanish city. A novel that calls for, and rewards, attentive reading."
Review Date: 8/17/2007
"Jerry, 18, meets Pookie Adams at an Oklahoma bus depot, and becomes secretly enchanted by her zany, rambling monologue enroute to Saint Louis, where (with a sense of relief) he leaves her behind and continues to New York. Then it's off to college for Jerry, but he begins to receive lengthy letters from Pookie, 17 of them, in fact. Before he knows it, he's involved with a seemingly crazy, startlingly honest girl who adores him. She helps Jerry leave behind the the hedonist, beer-swilling frat boy, and teaches him to open his heart to her. Then she disappears from his life almost as suddenly as she appeared in it. A funny, imaginative and pathetic story of a rapturous love affair between two crazy college kids."
Review Date: 3/9/2007
3 member(s) found this review helpful.
"This book, and Tim O'Brien's others, should be read by a lot of Americans, so that they will recall the experience of Vietnam. Iraq may overshadow their thoughts presently, but Vietnam should be remembered, and this first-hand account of American boys at war in a strange foreign land will help memory."
Review Date: 11/13/2006
2 member(s) found this review helpful.
"A romance, yes, but not an outlandish, impalusible fictional one---this is the tale of two people, not in the first blush of Youth, living in distant parts of the world from one another, who still in a strange and wonderful way (fate?), meet, are parted, and then reunited. This is the true story of a certain Italian gentleman and the American woman he waited for, wooed, and won."
Review Date: 10/22/2006
"first published in Paris in 1934, and not in Miller's own country until 27 years later....."brilliantly written, shamelessly shocking" said one critic."
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