Authors Books - Page 10

Wind, Sand and Stars

Antoine de Saint-Exupery

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 44 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

"The physical drama cannot touch us until someone points out its spiritual sense." 5 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

Like many of his contemporaries, European aviator Antoine de Saint-Exupery (1900 - 1944) was seeking the meaning of life in the post World War I world. He looked for it and often found it outside the bounds of quotidian existence. His job as a pilot for Aeropostale, the French air mail service, offered him a unique perspective as he encountered the elements up close and personal in small planes he guided over vast deserts, oceans and mountains, and through fog, storms and, in a memorable account, a cyclone. His survival depended upon a heightened awareness of nature's elements. His was a life lived large and he knew it; he pities the poor bureaucrat's confined existence; he pities even more the child who with the right "gardener" could become a prince or another Mozart but who is groomed rather to lead a circumscribed life.

His narrative never bogs as he connects the concrete elements of nature with abstract sentiments. He renders his adventures vividly, especially the climatic chapter in which he and his mechanic survive a crash in the Sahara with almost no provisions. A year after that, in 1936, he goes off to Spain and the Civil War to learn why it is that mankind reaches the flash point of war and willingly puts itself in harm's way. That experience and the lessons it divulges comprise the last chapter. Among his often surprising observations is the note on how wild geese flying overhead can stir domestic birds below.

The author speaks in the idiom of a masculine age and a self-assured European culture. The idiom is noticeable but does not diminish the vision or lyricism of the book. I read the 1967 Harvest edition of the book that offered a translation that preserved the authentic voice of the book.

Editorial Review:

Recipient of the Grand Prix of the Académie Française, Wind, Sand and Stars captures the grandeur, danger, and isolation of flight. Its exciting account of air adventure, combined with lyrical prose and the spirit of a philosopher, makes it one of the most popular works ever written about flying. Translated by Lewis Galantière.

Epilogue: A Memoir

Anne Richardson Roiphe

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 12 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

Widowed novelist, near seventy, ex-Park Avenue girl, ex-beatnik, ex-many other things too complicated to list here, loves big parties, summers at the beach, grandchildren, seeks interesting man for dinner and a movie.

Anne Roiphe was not quite seventy years old when her husband of nearly forty years unexpectedly passed away. But it was not until her daughters placed a personal ad in a literary journal that Roiphe began to consider the previously unimagined possibility of a new man. Moving between heartbreaking memories of her marriage and the pressing needs of a new day-to-day routine, Epilogue takes us on her journey into the unknown world of life after love.

Roiphe decides to reenter the dating world. But between new lunches, coffee dates, and e-mail exchanges, she wrestles with an unsettling loneliness. Recollections of marriage evoke complex, unexpected emotions on her journey through grief toward new companionship. In beautifully wrought vignettes, she recalls hailing a cab for the first time and learning to lock and unlock the front door—tasks her husband had always done.

Eloquent and astute, Epilogue tells the story of love rekindled and life remade. Roiphe offers us an elegant literary pastiche not of grief, but of hope and renewal.

One Drop: My Father's Hidden Life--A Story of Race and Family Secrets

Bliss Broyard

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 35 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

I only just heard about the anatole broyard story, and had to read this book! 3 out of 5 stars.
5 of 7 people found this review helpful.

I just finished reading a novel called Passin', by Karen E. Quinones Miller, and Broyard's father was mentioned in that book. What little I learned from Miller's book intrigued me, so I hurried up and purchased One Drop. It was a decent book, but not as interesting as I might have hoped.

She had me mesmerized when writing about her father's life, but then when she goes on her own journey to learn more about her African-American roots my interest began to wan. I tried to figure out why, and then realized it was because she was writing about it almost as a disinterested character herself! She never drew me in, because she wasn't that drawn in. So why did she bother with this odyssey to find her roots, I wonder? Maybe to write this book?

Also, and I saw this mentioned in a few other reviews, she seems to have some (residual?) racist views herself about blacks . . . and you out and out feel that she thinks it ironic that she's now part of a group she and her friends have always considered inferior.

If anyone ever writes a full biography on her father, I'd love to read it. But this memoir left me feeling a little on the exploited side, myself.

Editorial Review:

Ever since renowned literary critic Anatole Broyard's own parents, New Orleans Creoles, had moved to Brooklyn and began to "pass" in order to get work, he had learned to conceal his racial identity. As he grew older and entered the ranks of the New York literary elite, he maintained the façade. Now his daughter Bliss tries to make sense of his choices and the impact of this revelation on her own life. She searches out the family she never knew in New York and New Orleans, and considers the profound consequences of racial identity. With unsparing candor and nuanced insight, Broyard chronicles her evolution from sheltered WASP to a woman of mixed race ancestry.

Apples and Oranges: My Brother and Me, Lost and Found

Marie Brenner

Amazon Price: $10.20 List Price: $15.00 Not yet published By: Picador

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 11 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

fragmented fake memoir 1 out of 5 stars.
5 of 14 people found this review helpful.

Marie Brenner tells us right away in her author's note that she is untrustworthy, with her comment that "conversations, events and dialogue have been reconstructed." Reconstructed events? Come on. Not only that, but she doesn't seem to care about accuracy even to the geography of the area of Central Washington she's describing, such as calling the Wenatchee River the Columbia. Maybe this could be excused if she told a good story (and it was marketed as fiction) but she tries to cover her lack of a true story by fragmenting the chronology, dating some chapters, leaving others without dates, and jumbling the whole mess. There is a lack of insight or attempt to draw the reader closer to either of the characters. By the end, you can see why her brother was so annoyed with her.

Editorial Review:

Hailed by Michiko Kakutani in The New York Times as "extraordinary," Apples and Oranges asks a universal question: how can two people from the same family turn out so entirely different? Brenner’s brother, Carl, lives in the apple country of Washington state, cultivating his orchards, polishing his guns, and attending church, while Marie, a world-class journalist and bestselling author, leads a sophisticated life among the "New York libs" whom he loathes. In this affecting family saga, Brenner investigates their contentious history, and discovers how inspiring it can be to turn a brother into an ally. Honest, funny, and true, Apples and Oranges "grabs the problem of sibling rivalry by the throat...exposing the sweetness at the core of an embattled love" (O magazine).

A Three Dog Life

Abigail Thomas

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Total reviews: 75 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

When Abigail Thomas’s husband, Rich, was hit by a car, his skull was shattered, his brain severely damaged. Subject to rages, terrors, and hallucinations—and with no memory of what he did the hour, the day, the year before—he was sent to live in a nursing facility that specializes in treating traumatic brain injuries. This tragedy is the ground on which Abigail had to build a new life. How she built that life is a story of great courage and change, of moving to a small country town, of a new family composed of three dogs, knitting, and friendship, of facing down guilt and discovering gratitude. It is also about her relationship with Rich, a man who lived in the eternal present, and the eerie poetry of his often uncanny perceptions. Hailed by Stephen King as "the best memoir I have ever read," this wise, plainspoken, beautiful book enacts the truth Abigail has discovered since the accident: You might not find meaning in disaster, but you might, with effort, make something useful of it.

The Sum of Our Days CD: A Memoir

Isabel Allende

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 23 Average rating: 3.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

In this heartfelt memoir, Isabel Allende reconstructs the painful reality of her own life in the wake of tragic loss—the death of her daughter, Paula. Recalling the past thirteen years from the daily letters the author and her mother, who lives in Chile, wrote to each other, Allende bares her soul in a book that is as exuberant and full of life as its creator. She recounts the stories of the wildly eccentric, strong-minded, and eclectic tribe she gathers around her that becomes a new kind of family.

Throughout, Allende shares her thoughts on love, marriage, motherhood, spirituality and religion, infidelity, addiction, and memory. Here, too, are the amazing stories behind Allende’s books, the superstitions that guide her writing process, and her adventurous travels. Ultimately, The Sum of Our Days offers a unique tour of this gifted writer’s inner world and of the relationships that have become essential to her life and her work.

Narrated with warmth, humor, exceptional candor, and wisdom, The Sum of Our Days is a portrait of a contemporary family, bound together by the love, fierce loyalty, and stubborn determination of a beloved, indomitable matriarch.

On Cats

Doris Lessing

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Editorial Review:

Doris Lessing's love affair with cats began at a young age, when she became intrigued with the semiferal creatures on the African farm where she grew up. Her fascination with the handsome, domesticated creatures that have shared her flats and her life in London remained undiminished, and grew into real love with the awkwardly lovable El Magnifico, the last cat to share her home.

On Cats is a celebrated classic, a memoir in which we meet the cats that have slunk and bullied and charmed their way into Doris Lessing's life. She tells their stories—their exploits, rivalries, terrors, affections, ancient gestures, and learned behaviors—with vivid simplicity. And she tells the story of herself in relation to cats: the way animals affect her and she them, and the communication that grows possible between them—a language of gesture and mood and desire as eloquent as the spoken word. No other writer conveys so truthfully the real interdependence of humans and cats or convinces us with such stunning recognition of the reasons why cats really matter.

A Child's Christmas in Wales (New York Times Best Illustrated Books (Awards))

Dylan Thomas

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Total reviews: 24 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

Fifty years after its first publication in book form, Dylan Thomas's timeless prose poem is echoed by the rolling, evocative images of Caldecott Honor artist Chris Raschka — a beautiful gift for book lovers.

Bring out the tall tales now that we told by the fire as the gaslight bubbled like a diver. . . .

There are always Uncles at Christmas. And Aunts, of course, who might sing a little loudly after dinner. There are the neighborhood cats "sleek and long as jaguars and horrible-whiskered," the carols to sing at eerie houses, the Useful Presents and the Useless Presents, and the endless snow "shawling out of the ground." First published in HARPER'S BAZAAR some fifty years ago, A CHILD'S CHRISTMAS IN WALES showcases Dylan Thomas's genius for language and remains the poet's most popular prose work in the United States. Chris Raschka's fluid torn-paper illustrations honor the poet's words, evoking their musical cadences and bringing us a fresh appreciation for this most lyric work.

Gerard Manley Hopkins: A Life

Paul Mariani

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 1 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Unrivalled 5 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

Portrayed in his fullness as poet, spiritualist and Roman Catholic Jesuit amid Victorian England--Hopkins steps out of these pages. You can feel him breathe. This biography cancels out all others.

Editorial Review:

An insightful and inspirational biography of the heroic and spiritual poet.

Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–1889) may well have been the most original and innovative poet writing in the English language during the nineteenth century. Yet his story of personal struggle, doubt, intense introspection, and inward heroism has never been told fully. As a Jesuit priest, Hopkins’s descent into loneliness and despair and his subsequent recovery are a remarkable and inspiring spiritual journey that will speak to many readers, regardless of their faith or philosophies.

Paul Mariani, an award-winning poet himself and author of a number of biographies of literary figures, brilliantly integrates Hopkins’s spiritual life and his literary life to create a rich and compelling portrait of a man whose work and life continue to speak to readers a century after his death.

Night

Elie Wiesel

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 926 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

What eyes could not see 5 out of 5 stars.
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From the moment we had began on this book in our classes it was truly an eye opener. Words cannot describe the misery that was felt in each and every word this book had within. The book itself had casted night over all of us, especially me as we listened intently on what could be known as the most heart striking tale. From the start of the camp to the death marchings in the snow, the story gives a full eye account of the horror that was seen in the Nazi war. No story ever has been written so amazingly nor dramaticly as this. Yes, it touched me darkly and it burned deeply but this story, this story is something everyone should read because no one should forget what happened so long ago. You cant go your whole life without reading this book, its something that you should not miss.

I give it a rating of five stars and I hope you, the reader, can also find that too.

The Most Gripping Story I Have Ever Read 5 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

As an English teacher, I have my ninth graders read this memoir every year. And every year, I am moved to tears. Not only does Mr. Wiesel tell of his devastating experience of dehumanization in the Holocaust, but he tells it with such eloquence and mastery of the English language, that one would wonder if he was always a writer. This is his first book and it reads like a story written by some of the greatest writers of the literary canon. Be forewarned that his story will change your perspective on life and will most likely you move you to tears as well. If it doesn't, than as my Pastor would say, "your wood is wet."

You may be asking yourself, "why would I want to read something that will just get me upset?" My answer to that is that if we don't get upset, how can we facilitate change? Ignorance leads to bliss? No way--it leads to destruction. Furthermore, antisemitism hasn't gone away. And in the midst of the violence and hatred exploding in the middle east 63 years after Hitler was defeated, there are millions of people who once again want to annihilate the Jews and are devising plans to do just that. So this memoir must be read. Mr. Wiesels' story must be heard.

Editorial Review:

An autobiographical narrative, in which the author describes his experiences in Nazi concentration camps.