Literary Books - Page 12

Founding Brothers

Joseph J. Ellis

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 390 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

An illuminating study of the intertwined lives of the founders of the American republic--John Adams, Aaron Burr, Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and George Washington.

During the 1790s, which Ellis calls the most decisive decade in our nation's history, the greatest statesmen of their generation--and perhaps any--came together to define the new republic and direct its course for the coming centuries. Ellis focuses on six discrete moments that exemplify the most crucial issues facing the fragile new nation: Burr and Hamilton's deadly duel, and what may have really happened; Hamilton, Jefferson, and Madison's secret dinner, during which the seat of the permanent capital was determined in exchange for passage of Hamilton's financial plan; Franklin's petition to end the "peculiar institution" of slavery--his last public act--and Madison's efforts to quash it; Washington's precedent-setting Farewell Address, announcing his retirement from public office and offering his country some final advice; Adams's difficult term as Washington's successor and his alleged scheme to pass the presidency on to his son; and finally, Adams and Jefferson's renewed correspondence at the end of their lives, in which they compared their different views of the Revolution and its legacy.

In a lively and engaging narrative, Ellis recounts the sometimes collaborative, sometimes archly antagonistic interactions between these men, and shows us the private characters behind the public personas: Adams, the ever-combative iconoclast, whose closest political collaborator was his wife, Abigail; Burr, crafty, smooth, and one of the most despised public figures of his time; Hamilton, whose audacious manner and deep economic savvy masked his humble origins; Jefferson, renowned for his eloquence, but so reclusive and taciturn that he rarely spoke more than a few sentences in public; Madison, small, sickly, and paralyzingly shy, yet one of the most effective debaters of his generation; and the stiffly formal Washington, the ultimate realist, larger-than-life, and America's only truly indispensable figure.

Ellis argues that the checks and balances that permitted the infant American republic to endure were not primarily legal, constitutional, or institutional, but intensely personal, rooted in the dynamic interaction of leaders with quite different visions and values. Revisiting the old-fashioned idea that character matters, Founding Brothers informs our understanding of American politics--then and now--and gives us a new perspective on the unpredictable forces that shape history.

House of Leaves

Mark Z. Danielewski

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 590 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

A Genre-Defying Monolith 5 out of 5 stars.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful.

It deserves more than five stars. For the sake of this review, pretend that a five-star rating on Amazon is some incredibly rare thing that almost never happens, except for the most deserving of all works.

"House of Leaves" is a very difficult book to describe. To take a stab at summarizing the plot in one go, it's about a hedonistic young man with a troubled past working in a tattoo parlor who discovers a blind man's life work: a lengthy academic criticism of a documentary that doesn't exist. The documentary is called "The Navidson Record," and tells the story of a famed photographer who moves into a new home with his family, only to discover that the house is bigger on the inside than it is on the outside.

If it sounds complicated, that's because it is. This is an intricate, surreal monolith of a novel, told from the perspective of several unreliable and probably even insane narrators. Depending on your interpretation, some of them may or may not even exist. Maybe none of it does.

Much attention is paid by readers and critics to the unconventional structure of the book, both in terms of formatting and plot. The word "house" is constantly written in blue, in every use and in every language. Stories within stories within stories are told through footnotes, appendices, and asides. Every once in a while, a simple internal citation will devolve into pages upon pages of apparently meaningless lists of names, books, or films, some of them fictional, some of them real. It certainly is a unique approach to telling a story.

But of course, fancy visual tricks and impressive packaging aren't worth a thing if the story itself isn't. Fortunately for anyone who picks this book up, it is. It really, really is. Within the full-color, maddening pages of "House of Leaves," Danielewski tells much simpler stories of isolation, depression, brotherly love, sibling rivalry, romantic love and the struggles of keeping a marriage together, bouts with drug abuse and meaningless, self-immolating sexual escapades. Though it might seem like an overly dark novel, it's interspersed with flashes of beauty reinforcing Danielewski's overarching message that love can hold strong in the face of that darkness. It's sentimental without being anything near sappy, and represents true human nature in all its strengths and weaknesses in a way that few artists can.

While it's certainly not for everyone, I would recommend "House of Leaves" to any open-minded, well-read individual, and certainly to anyone interested in surreal, genre-defying art. At the heart of it, though, it's a book about human struggles that everyone can relate to, presenting common themes without even dancing near cliché. It's certainly one of the most important novels of the 21st century, and one of the best I have ever read.

Editorial Review:

This book, Mark Z. Danielewski's experimental first novel, has been shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award, which aims to recogise and reward new writing across fiction and non-fiction. A special report featuring reviews, extracts and online resources for all the titles, plus talkboards and an online poll can be found

[online].

The Memory Keeper's Daughter

Kim Edwards

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 889 Average rating: 3.0 of 5

Interesting read. provocative, worth the time 4 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

I picked this book up while in the middle of a 900 page tome that I am reading. This was a welcome break. The book kept my interest and made me think. It is mostly a sad tale with some humor and rededmption mixed in. The book reminded me that a long trail of deceit and sorrow can follow a quick decision. There are so many human dynamics to observe and ponder in this book starting with David's gut-wrenching decision. I would think that this would be a great choice for a book club; since it offers so much up for discussion.

Editorial Review:

Kim Edwards’s stunning family drama evokes the spirit of Sue Miller and Alice Sebold, articulating every mother’s silent fear: what would happen if you lost your child and she grew up without you? In 1964, when a blizzard forces Dr. David Henry to deliver his own twins, he immediately recognizes that one of them has Down Syndrome and makes a split-second decision that will haunt all their lives forever. He asks his nurse to take the baby away to an institution and to keep her birth a secret. Instead, she disappears into another city to raise the child as her own. Compulsively readable and deeply moving, The Memory Keeper’s Daughter is an astonishing tale of redemptive love.

For Whom the Bell Tolls

Ernest Hemingway

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 273 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

In 1937 Ernest Hemingway traveled to Spain to cover the civil war there for the North American Newspaper Alliance. Three years later he completed the greatest novel to emerge from "the good fight," For Whom the Bell Tolls. The story of Robert Jordan, a young American in the International Brigades attached to an antifascist guerilla unit in the mountains of Spain, it tells of loyalty and courage, love and defeat, and the tragic death of an ideal. In his portrayal of Jordan's love for the beautiful Maria and his superb account of El Sordo's last stand, in his brilliant travesty of La Pasionaria and his unwillingness to believe in blind faith, Hemingway surpasses his achievement in The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms to create a work at once rare and beautiful, strong and brutal, compassionate, moving, and wise. "If the function of a writer is to reveal reality," Maxwell Perkins wrote Hemingway after reading the manuscript, "no one ever so completely performed it." Greater in power, broader in scope, and more intensely emotional than any of the author's previous works, it stands as one of the best war novels of all time.

Midnight's Children: A Novel

Salman Rushdie

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 180 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

Winner of the Booker of Bookers
Saleem Sinai is born at the stroke of midnight on August 15, 1947, the very moment of India’s independence. Greeted by fireworks displays, cheering crowds, and Prime Minister Nehru himself, Saleem grows up to learn the ominous consequences of this coincidence. His every act is mirrored and magnified in events that sway the course of national affairs; his health and well-being are inextricably bound to those of his nation; his life is inseparable, at times indistinguishable, from the history of his country. Perhaps most remarkable are the telepathic powers linking him with India’s 1,000 other “midnight’s children,” all born in that initial hour and endowed with magical gifts.

This novel is at once a fascinating family saga and an astonishing evocation of a vast land and its people–a brilliant incarnation of the universal human comedy. Twenty-five years after its publication, Midnight’s Children stands apart as both an epochal work of fiction and a brilliant performance by one of the great literary voices of our time.

Downtown Owl: A Novel

Chuck Klosterman

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 62 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

New York Times Bestselling Author Chuck Klosterman's First Novel

Somewhere in North Dakota, there is a town called Owl that isn't there. Disco is over, but punk never happened. They don't have cable. They don't really have pop culture, unless you count grain prices and alcoholism. People work hard and then they die. They hate the government and impregnate teenage girls. But that's not nearly as awful as it sounds; in fact, sometimes it's perfect.

Mitch Hrlicka lives in Owl. He plays high school football and worries about his weirdness, or lack thereof. Julia Rabia just moved to Owl. She gets free booze and falls in love with a self-loathing bison farmer who listens to Goats Head Soup. Horace Jones has resided in Owl for seventy-three years. He consumes a lot of coffee, thinks about his dead wife, and understands the truth. They all know each other completely, except that they've never met.

Like a colder, Reagan-era version of The Last Picture Show fused with Friday Night Lights, Chuck Klosterman's Downtown Owl is the unpretentious, darkly comedic story of how it feels to exist in a community where rural mythology and violent reality are pretty much the same thing. Loaded with detail and unified by a (very real) blizzard, it's technically about certain people in a certain place at a certain time...but it's really about a problem. And the problem is this: What does it mean to be a normal person? And there is no answer. But in Downtown Owl, what matters more is how you ask the question.

Ishmael: An Adventure of the Mind and Spirit

Daniel Quinn

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 877 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Ew 1 out of 5 stars.
0 of 3 people found this review helpful.

I absolutely hated this book. It was a summer reading assignment for an AP World History and Culture class. Every single time I picked it up, I fell asleep after about five minutes of reading, no joke. I would NEVER recommend this book. In fact, avoid it at all cost. It's supposed to be a learning tool, and you're supposed to see the world differently thanks to this book, but the mere fact that a huge gorilla was used as the teacher, and he couldn't talk, he just like... mind-spoke with people, it's all just very stupid to me.

Editorial Review:

The narrator of this extraordinary tale is a man in search for truth. He answers an ad in a local newspaper from a teacher looking for serious pupils, only to find himself alone in an abandoned office with a full-grown gorilla who is nibbling delicately on a slender branch. "You are the teacher?" he asks incredulously. "I am the teacher," the gorilla replies. Ishmael is a creature of immense wisdom and he has a story to tell, one that no other human being has ever heard. It is a story that extends backward and forward over the lifespan of the earth from the birth of time to a future there is still time save. Like all great teachers, Ishmael refuses to make the lesson easy; he demands the final illumination to come from within ourselves. Is it man's destiny to rule the world? Or is it a higher destiny possible for him-- one more wonderful than he has ever imagined?

The Dark Tower (The Dark Tower, Book 7)

Stephen King

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 698 Average rating: 3.5 of 5

In perfect condition 5 out of 5 stars.
1 of 3 people found this review helpful.

I purchased this, as well as another book at the same time. They both arrived securely and safely packaged, in a very timely fashion. There were no signs of wear on either book.

Exactly as described.

And so the saga ends... 4 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

The final battle is about to begin. Pere Don Callahan and Jake Chambers, as always accompanied by his pet Oy, get ready to enter the Dixie Pig, a New York restaurant on Lex and Sixty-first, to get face-to-face with the vampires. These evil foes are the only things that stand between the ka-tet and the door through which the pregnant Susannah-Mia disappeared. Susannah is going to give birth to something that might jeopardize their quest for the Dark Tower. But that is not the only danger, as Roland Dechain and Eddie Dean find out in the Main of 1977. The life of the `writer' turns out to be strongly linked with the existence of the Dark Tower and time is running out.

Writing the final episode of a great fantasy series that has captured the hearts of millions of readers was a lost cause right from the start. No denouement will ever satisfy fully the imagination of that massive audience. So, how do you deal with this if your name is Stephen King. You let the narrator state that the fun it is all in the journey itself and surely not in the finale. Also you make clear that the audience will be utterly repulsed by reading the conclusion, say true. So stop reading! Honest indeed. Even fair, if you are willing to ignore the fact that people pay some good bucks for the book. But why not pay more attention to delivering the promised excitement? After writing six wonderful novels and raising quite some anticipation on what the evil force will be all about, it is quite silly to portray the ultimate evil as something that can be wiped out without much fuss, not?

Although the story is decent and the narrative excellent, as can be expected from King, you better be prepared to be disappointed in the end. Maybe it will turn out to be not so bad after all? Let's hope.

Editorial Review:

Set in a world of extraordinary circumstances, filled with stunning visual imagery and unforgettable characters, The Dark Tower series is unlike anything you have ever read. The final book opens like a door to the uttermost reaches of Stephen King's imagination. You've come this far. Come a little farther. Come all the way. The sound you hear may be the slamming of the door behind you. Welcome to The Dark Tower.

Atlas Shrugged (Centennial Ed. HC)

Ayn Rand

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 48 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Next time you hear the word "bailout" in the news... 5 out of 5 stars.
3 of 3 people found this review helpful.

....reach for a copy of this book.

I decided to buy a copy of this book from Amazon after seeing it mentioned on several blogs I read. After having a tough time starting to read it - the initial chapters set the stage and introduce the characters, but are a bit dry - I was not able to put it down. Simply put, this book continues to be printed - and sold - because it is nothing short of brilliant.

Rather than attempt to explain the themes of the book (these can be easily found by Googling "Atlas Shrugged") I will instead tell you that the book is probably one everyone living in a capitalistic society should read - both as affirmation of the power of capitalism and its embrace of the power of the individual, and as a warning of where we *will* be headed if we ever lose the power of reason.

Next time you have a question you can't readily answer - for instance, why so many businesses that should be allowed to fail are instead being bailed out by our present government - just ask yourself, "Who is John Galt?".

Editorial Review:

The year 2005 marks Ayn Rand’s Centennial Year.

The astounding story of a man that said that he would stop the motor of the world—and did. Tremendous in scope, breathtaking in its suspense, Atlas Shrugged is unlike any other book you have ever read.

Liberation: Being the Adventures of the Slick Six After the Collapse of the United States of America

Brian Francis Slattery

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Total reviews: 4 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

From the author of the literary pulp phenomenon Spaceman Blues comes a future history cautionary tale, a heist movie in the style of a hippie novel.

 

Liberation is a speculation on life in near-future America after the country suffers an economic cataclysm that leads to the resurgence of ghosts of its past such as the human slave trade. Our heroes are the Slick Six, a group of international criminals who set out to alleviate the worst of these conditions and put America on the road to recovery. Liberation is a story about living down the past, personally and nationally; about being able to laugh at the punch line to the long, dark joke of American history.

 

Slattery’s prose moves seamlessly between present and past, action and memory. With Liberation, he celebrates the resilience and ingenuity of the American spirit.