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Watchmen

Alan Moore

Watchmen Alan Moore Amazon Price: $11.99
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Total reviews: 651 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

Has any comic been as acclaimed as Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' Watchmen? Possibly only Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns, but Watchmen remains the critics' favorite. Why? Because Moore is a better writer, and Watchmen a more complex and dark and literate creation than Miller's fantastic, subversive take on the Batman myth. Moore, renowned for many other of the genre's finest creations (Saga of the Swamp Thing, V for Vendetta, and From Hell, with Eddie Campbell) first put out Watchmen in 12 issues for DC in 1986-87. It won a comic award at the time (the 1987 Jack Kirby Comics Industry Awards for Best Writer/Artist combination) and has continued to gather praise since.

The story concerns a group called the Crimebusters and a plot to kill and discredit them. Moore's characterization is as sophisticated as any novel's. Importantly the costumes do not get in the way of the storytelling; rather they allow Moore to investigate issues of power and control--indeed it was Watchmen, and to a lesser extent Dark Knight, that propelled the comic genre forward, making "adult" comics a reality. The artwork of Gibbons (best known for 2000AD's Rogue Trooper and DC's Green Lantern) is very fine too, echoing Moore's paranoid mood perfectly throughout. Packed with symbolism, some of the overlying themes (arms control, nuclear threat, vigilantes) have dated but the intelligent social and political commentary, the structure of the story itself, its intertextuality (chapters appended with excerpts from other "works" and "studies" on Moore's characters, or with excerpts from another comic book being read by a child within the story), the finepace of the writing and its humanity mean that Watchmen more than stands up--it keeps its crown as the best the genre has yet produced. --Mark Thwaite

Atlas Shrugged

Ayn Rand

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 1556 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Atlas may have shrugged, but I really cringed 2 out of 5 stars.
1 of 3 people found this review helpful.

** Spoiler Warning ***

Oh, boy, where do I start? First, let me say this: that hero of hers may have stopped the motor of the world, he certainly could not slow down Ayn Rand's FURIOUS typewriter. This edition has 1,168 pages in tiny fonts. It should have been, and easily could have been, condensed to 300-400 pages. At most.

As a literary work it is flawed. There is not much I want to add to what other reviewers have already commented: it is long, the characters are two-dimensional, the dialogs long and repetitive, etc.

The only good thing I can say about this book is that it exposes the hypocrisy of those "benevolent social planners". Read in light of our current times of government bailouts and "wealth spreading", it is eerily familiar (for this I give it more than the minimum 1 star).

But it is not a novel in the traditional sense, it is a vehicle for Ayn Rand to expound her philosophy. And expound she did, with a vengeance.

Maybe one day I will write a full review of her philosophy, which I think is also flawed (though it has some good elements). Why is it called "objectivism" anyway? It sounds more like "subjectivism" or "absolutism" to me: she views everything as black-or-white, there is no middle ground, and those who do not agree with her are branded "irrational".

Since this is a review of the book, let me focus on it now. It being a vehicle for her philosophy which presumably she wants the user to apply in real life, then the fictional world she constructs must be at least somewhat realistic. But it is not. It is populated with three types of people only: 1. the industrialists whose only goal is to maximize his or her profit; 2. hypocrites who pay lip service to the abstract concepts of "social justice", "equalization of opportunity", but whose real purpose is to restrict the freedom of the industrialists and 3. the gullible "public", waiting to be rescued by their heroes. Aside from the fact that there are more types of people in the real world, even the ones in the book are not believable. The villains are singlemindedly against the heroes, to the point of absurdity (and Ayn Rand thinks herself as the champion of reason). For example, why is Jim Taggart so against his sister's success when he is the president of the same company? He stands to profit from it! Yet he persistently tries to run his own company to the ground. All the villains are absurd caricatures in her book.

Even the "good guys" are not believable, and their relationships are just bizarre. Consider the following conversation between Rearden and Dagny, after they had sex for the first time (Keep in mind these are two main characters and heroes of the book, they went on to have a long relationship, which is fraught with contempt, despisement and violence).

Rearden: I want to you know this. What I feel for you is contempt. But it's nothing, compared to the contempt I feel for myself. I don't love you. I never loved anyone... I wanted you as one wants a whore .. You're as vile an animal as I am. .. I held it as my honor that I would never need anyone. I need you. ...
Dagny: I want you, Hank. I'm much of an animal than you think. .. You'll have me any time you wish, anywhere, on any terms. .. If I'm asked to name my proudest achievement, I will say: I have slept with Hand Rearden. I had earned it.

Yet this is supposed to be a model relationship between the good guys. Now ask yourself if you would speak like this and have a relationship on such grounds. And Dagny is supposed to be a driven, shrewd and rational businesswoman. Give me a break. With heroes like these, who needs villains?

Editorial Review:

At last, Ayn Rand's masterpiece is available to her millions of loyal readers in trade paperback.

With this acclaimed work and its immortal query, "Who is John Galt?", Ayn Rand found the perfect artistic form to express her vision of existence. Atlas Shrugged made Rand not only one of the most popular novelists of the century, but one of its most influential thinkers.

Atlas Shrugged is the astounding story of a man who said that he would stop the motor of the world--and did. Tremendous in scope, breathtaking in its suspense, Atlas Shrugged stretches the boundaries further than any book you have ever read. It is a mystery, not about the murder of a man's body, but about the murder--and rebirth--of man's spirit.

* Atlas Shrugged is the "second most influential book for Americans today" after the Bible, according to a joint survey conducted by the Library of Congress and the Book of the Month Club

The Catcher in the Rye

J.D. Salinger

The Catcher in the Rye J.D. Salinger Amazon Price: $11.19
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Total reviews: 2794 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

Since his debut in 1951 as The Catcher in the Rye, Holden Caulfield has been synonymous with "cynical adolescent." Holden narrates the story of a couple of days in his sixteen-year-old life, just after he's been expelled from prep school, in a slang that sounds edgy even today and keeps this novel on banned book lists. It begins,

"If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth. In the first place, that stuff bores me, and in the second place, my parents would have about two hemorrhages apiece if I told anything pretty personal about them."

His constant wry observations about what he encounters, from teachers to phonies (the two of course are not mutually exclusive) capture the essence of the eternal teenage experience of alienation.

The Shack: Where Tragedy Confronts Eternity

William Paul Young

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 2215 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Really deceptive! 1 out of 5 stars.
1 of 2 people found this review helpful.

There are some truth regarding the Lord Jesus Christ, but most of it is deceving! I would not recommend this book for a young believer nor for anyone else who is not a strong believer in the Bible, for that matter, for it has so much untruth intraspersed with some truth that it would do more harm than good if the reader is not well read and informed with the Bible. I really can't see how a true believer of Christ could recommend this book and to compare it to John Bunyan's Pitgrim's Progress is really preposterous! That person could not possibly know his Bible!

Flora J. Scott

Editorial Review:

Mackenzie Allen Philips' youngest daughter, Missy, has been abducted during a family vacation and evidence that she may have been brutally murdered is found in an abandoned shack deep in the Oregon wilderness. Four years later in the midst of his Great Sadness, Mack receives a suspicious note, apparently from God, inviting him back to that shack for a weekend. Against his better judgment he arrives at the shack on a wintry afternoon and walks back into his darkest nightmare. What he finds there will change Mack's world forever.

The Great Gatsby

F. Scott Fitzgerald

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Total reviews: 1124 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

In 1922, F. Scott Fitzgerald announced his decision to write "something new--something extraordinary and beautiful and simple + intricately patterned." That extraordinary, beautiful, intricately patterned, and above all, simple novel became The Great Gatsby, arguably Fitzgerald's finest work and certainly the book for which he is best known. A portrait of the Jazz Age in all of its decadence and excess, Gatsby captured the spirit of the author's generation and earned itself a permanent place in American mythology. Self-made, self-invented millionaire Jay Gatsby embodies some of Fitzgerald's--and his country's--most abiding obsessions: money, ambition, greed, and the promise of new beginnings. "Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter--tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther.... And one fine morning--" Gatsby's rise to glory and eventual fall from grace becomes a kind of cautionary tale about the American Dream.

It's also a love story, of sorts, the narrative of Gatsby's quixotic passion for Daisy Buchanan. The pair meet five years before the novel begins, when Daisy is a legendary young Louisville beauty and Gatsby an impoverished officer. They fall in love, but while Gatsby serves overseas, Daisy marries the brutal, bullying, but extremely rich Tom Buchanan. After the war, Gatsby devotes himself blindly to the pursuit of wealth by whatever means--and to the pursuit of Daisy, which amounts to the same thing. "Her voice is full of money," Gatsby says admiringly, in one of the novel's more famous descriptions. His millions made, Gatsby buys a mansion across Long Island Sound from Daisy's patrician East Egg address, throws lavish parties, and waits for her to appear. When she does, events unfold with all the tragic inevitability of a Greek drama, with detached, cynical neighbor Nick Carraway acting as chorus throughout. Spare, elegantly plotted, and written in crystalline prose, The Great Gatsby is as perfectly satisfying as the best kind of poem.

Slaughterhouse-Five

Kurt Vonnegut

Slaughterhouse-Five Kurt Vonnegut Amazon Price: $11.20
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Total reviews: 712 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

Kurt Vonnegut's absurdist classic Slaughterhouse-Five introduces us to Billy Pilgrim, a man who becomes unstuck in time after he is abducted by aliens from the planet Tralfamadore. In a plot-scrambling display of virtuosity, we follow Pilgrim simultaneously through all phases of his life, concentrating on his (and Vonnegut's) shattering experience as an American prisoner of war who witnesses the firebombing of Dresden.

Don't let the ease of reading fool you--Vonnegut's isn't a conventional, or simple, novel. He writes, "There are almost no characters in this story, and almost no dramatic confrontations, because most of the people in it are so sick, and so much the listless playthings of enormous forces. One of the main effects of war, after all, is that people are discouraged from being characters..." Slaughterhouse-Five (taken from the name of the building where the POWs were held) is not only Vonnegut's most powerful book, it is as important as any written since 1945. Like Catch- 22, it fashions the author's experiences in the Second World War into an eloquent and deeply funny plea against butchery in the service of authority. Slaughterhouse-Five boasts the same imagination, humanity, and gleeful appreciation of the absurd found in Vonnegut's other works, but the book's basis in rock-hard, tragic fact gives it a unique poignancy--and humor.

A Manual for Writers of Research Papers, Theses, and Dissertations, Seventh Edition: Chicago Style for Students and Researchers (Chicago Guides to Writing, Editing, and Publishing)

Kate L. Turabian

A Manual for Writers of Research Papers, Theses, and Dissertations, Seventh Edition: Chicago Style for Students and Researchers (Chicago Guides to Writing, Editing, and Publishing) Kate L. Turabian Amazon Price: $11.56
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Total reviews: 35 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

Dewey. Bellow. Strauss. Friedman. The University of Chicago has been the home of some of the most important thinkers of the modern age. But perhaps no name has been spoken with more respect than Turabian. The dissertation secretary at Chicago for decades, Kate Turabian literally wrote the book on the successful completion and submission of the student paper. Her Manual for Writers of Research Papers, Theses, and Dissertations, created from her years of experience with research projects across all fields, has sold more than seven million copies since it was first published in 1937.

Now, with this seventh edition, Turabian’s Manual has undergone its most extensive revision, ensuring that it will remain the most valuable handbook for writers at every level—from first-year undergraduates, to dissertation writers apprehensively submitting final manuscripts, to senior scholars who may be old hands at research and writing but less familiar with new media citation styles. Gregory G. Colomb, Joseph M. Williams, and the late Wayne C. Booth—the gifted team behind The Craft of Research—and the University of Chicago Press Editorial Staff combined their wide-ranging expertise to remake this classic resource. They preserve Turabian’s clear and practical advice while fully embracing the new modes of research, writing, and source citation brought about by the age of the Internet.

Booth, Colomb, and Williams significantly expand the scope of previous editions by creating a guide, generous in length and tone, to the art of research and writing. Growing out of the authors’ best-selling Craft of Research, this new section provides students with an overview of every step of the research and writing process, from formulating the right questions to reading critically to building arguments and revising drafts. This leads naturally to the second part of the Manual for Writers, which offers an authoritative overview of citation practices in scholarly writing, as well as detailed information on the two main citation styles (“notes-bibliography” and “author-date”). This section has been fully revised to reflect the recommendations of the fifteenth edition of The Chicago Manual of Style and to present an expanded array of source types and updated examples, including guidance on citing electronic sources.

The final section of the book treats issues of style—the details that go into making a strong paper. Here writers will find advice on a wide range of topics, including punctuation, table formatting, and use of quotations. The appendix draws together everything writers need to know about formatting research papers, theses, and dissertations and preparing them for submission. This material has been thoroughly vetted by dissertation officials at colleges and universities across the country.

This seventh edition of Turabian’s Manual for Writers of Research Papers, Theses, and Dissertations is a classic reference revised for a new age. It is tailored to a new generation of writers using tools its original author could not have imagined—while retaining the clarity and authority that generations of scholars have come to associate with the name Turabian.

Fight Club: A Novel

Chuck Palahniuk

Fight Club: A Novel Chuck Palahniuk Amazon Price: $11.16
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Total reviews: 646 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

. 5 out of 5 stars.
2 of 2 people found this review helpful.

The First rule of FIGHT CLUB IS You do not talk about FIGHT CLUB.
The Second rule of FIGHT CLUB IS You do not talk about FIGHT CLUB.

A sacred, unique snowflake of special unique specialness. 5 out of 5 stars.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful.

Here's a word to describe the pervasive resonance this story has enjoyed.

Confrontational.

Fight Club is a pugnacious challenge to examine your life, in the form of a blunt instrument. If you want to get peoples attention these days, best be prepared to bludgeon them upside the head. We the ADD generations have no time for study and meditation. You have 5 seconds to deliver the message in an original and exciting way. Check and check.

Take a massively concentrated answer to the existential dilemma, throw in a couple themes of timely relevence, a sense of urgency, twisted humor and wrap up the whole enchilada in a transgressional tortilla and voila! A quintessential 90's literary masterpiece. Fight Club is the successor to Clockwork Orange.

"This is your life, and it's ending one minute at a time"

Consider yourself challenged.

Editorial Review:

The first rule about fight club is you don't talk about fight club.

Chuck Palahniuk's outrageous and startling debut novel that exploded American literature and spawned a movement. Every weekend, in the basements and parking lots of bars across the country, young men with white-collar jobs and failed lives take off their shoes and shirts and fight each other barehanded just as long as they have to. Then they go back to those jobs with blackened eyes and loosened teeth and the sense that they can handle anything. Fight club is the invention of Tyler Durden, projectionist, waiter, and dark, anarchic genius, and it's only the beginning of his plans for violent revenge on an empty consumer-culture world.

Fahrenheit 451

Ray Bradbury

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Total reviews: 1272 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

In Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury's classic, frightening vision of the future, firemen don't put out fires--they start them in order to burn books. Bradbury's vividly painted society holds up the appearance of happiness as the highest goal--a place where trivial information is good, and knowledge and ideas are bad. Fire Captain Beatty explains it this way, "Give the people contests they win by remembering the words to more popular songs.... Don't give them slippery stuff like philosophy or sociology to tie things up with. That way lies melancholy."

Guy Montag is a book-burning fireman undergoing a crisis of faith. His wife spends all day with her television "family," imploring Montag to work harder so that they can afford a fourth TV wall. Their dull, empty life sharply contrasts with that of his next-door neighbor Clarisse, a young girl thrilled by the ideas in books, and more interested in what she can see in the world around her than in the mindless chatter of the tube. When Clarisse disappears mysteriously, Montag is moved to make some changes, and starts hiding books in his home. Eventually, his wife turns him in, and he must answer the call to burn his secret cache of books. After fleeing to avoid arrest, Montag winds up joining an outlaw band of scholars who keep the contents of books in their heads, waiting for the time society will once again need the wisdom of literature.

Bradbury--the author of more than 500 short stories, novels, plays, and poems, including The Martian Chronicles and The Illustrated Man--is the winner of many awards, including the Grand Master Award from the Science Fiction Writers of America. Readers ages 13 to 93 will be swept up in the harrowing suspense of Fahrenheit 451, and no doubt will join the hordes of Bradbury fans worldwide. --Neil Roseman

Things Fall Apart: A Novel

Chinua Achebe

Things Fall Apart: A Novel Chinua Achebe Amazon Price: $8.76
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Total reviews: 536 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

One of Chinua Achebe's many achievements in his acclaimed first novel, Things Fall Apart, is his relentlessly unsentimental rendering of Nigerian tribal life before and after the coming of colonialism. First published in 1958, just two years before Nigeria declared independence from Great Britain, the book eschews the obvious temptation of depicting pre-colonial life as a kind of Eden. Instead, Achebe sketches a world in which violence, war, and suffering exist, but are balanced by a strong sense of tradition, ritual, and social coherence. His Ibo protagonist, Okonkwo, is a self-made man. The son of a charming ne'er-do-well, he has worked all his life to overcome his father's weakness and has arrived, finally, at great prosperity and even greater reputation among his fellows in the village of Umuofia. Okonkwo is a champion wrestler, a prosperous farmer, husband to three wives and father to several children. He is also a man who exhibits flaws well-known in Greek tragedy:
Okonkwo ruled his household with a heavy hand. His wives, especially the youngest, lived in perpetual fear of his fiery temper, and so did his little children. Perhaps down in his heart Okonkwo was not a cruel man. But his whole life was dominated by fear, the fear of failure and of weakness. It was deeper and more intimate than the fear of evil and capricious gods and of magic, the fear of the forest, and of the forces of nature, malevolent, red in tooth and claw. Okonkwo's fear was greater than these. It was not external but lay deep within himself. It was the fear of himself, lest he should be found to resemble his father.
And yet Achebe manages to make this cruel man deeply sympathetic. He is fond of his eldest daughter, and also of Ikemefuna, a young boy sent from another village as compensation for the wrongful death of a young woman from Umuofia. He even begins to feel pride in his eldest son, in whom he has too often seen his own father. Unfortunately, a series of tragic events tests the mettle of this strong man, and it is his fear of weakness that ultimately undoes him.

Achebe does not introduce the theme of colonialism until the last 50 pages or so. By then, Okonkwo has lost everything and been driven into exile. And yet, within the traditions of his culture, he still has hope of redemption. The arrival of missionaries in Umuofia, however, followed by representatives of the colonial government, completely disrupts Ibo culture, and in the chasm between old ways and new, Okonkwo is lost forever. Deceptively simple in its prose, Things Fall Apart packs a powerful punch as Achebe holds up the ruin of one proud man to stand for the destruction of an entire culture. --Alix Wilber


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