Authors Books - Page 15

Expecting Adam: A True Story of Birth, Rebirth, and Everyday Magic

Martha Beck

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 197 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

The "slyly ironic, frequently hilarious"(Time) memoir about angels, academics, and a boy named Adam...

A national bestseller and an important reminder that life is what happens when you're making other plans.

Put aside your expectations. This "rueful, riveting, piercingly funny" (Julia Cameron) book is written by a Harvard graduate--but it tells a story in which hearts trump brains every time. It's a tale about mothering a Down syndrome child that opts for sass over sap, and it's a book of heavenly visions and inexplicable phenomena that's as down-to-earth as anyone could ask for. This small masterpiece is Martha Beck's own story--of leaving behind the life of a stressed-out superachiever, opening herself to things she'd never dared consider, meeting her son for (maybe) the first time...and "unlearn[ing] virtually everything Harvard taught [her] about what is precious and what is garbage."

"Beck [is] very funny, particularly about the most serious possible subjects--childbirth, angels and surviving at Harvard." --New York Times Book Review

"Immensely appealing...hooked me on the first page and propelled me right through visions and out-of-body experiences I would normally scoff at." --Detroit Free Press

"I challenge any reader not to be moved by it." --Newsday

"Brilliant." --Minneapolis Star-Tribune

The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

Sylvia Plath

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 34 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Simply some of the best writing ever. Period. 5 out of 5 stars.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful.

This is clearly some of the best writing ever. Sylvia's journal, like all journals, was an outlet for her emotions, but she was using her journal as an opportunity to practice her creative writing. Many of her entries are worthy of stand-alone essays. Having read many, many journals; compilations of selected letters; and, biographies and autobiographies; I would have to rank this as perhaps the best I have ever read. Comparing Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf and Sylvia Plath is like comparing apples, oranges, and peaches. They are all wonderful in their own right, but today I prefer Plath and peaches.

The reader will get much more out of this book by reading one or two biographies of Sylvia Plath first.

The index is outstanding (26 pages of small font); the end notes are excellent (29 pages). It is a toss-up whether the journal would have been better served had the end notes been footnotes. There are advantages and disadvantages to both.

This book is one of the few that I recommend buying at the publisher's price rather than my usual recommendation to wait for a discounted copy. Instructors for college creative writing courses should put Sylvia's journals on their highly recommended list.

Editorial Review:

First U.S. Publication

A major literary event--the complete, uncensored journals of Sylvia Plath, published in their entirety for the first time.

Sylvia Plath's journals were originally published in 1982 in a heavily abridged version authorized by Plath's husband, Ted Hughes. This new edition is an exact and complete transcription of the diaries Plath kept during the last twelve years of her life. Sixty percent of the book is material that has never before been made public, more fully revealing the intensity of the poet's personal and literary struggles, and providing fresh insight into both her frequent desperation and the bravery with which she faced down her demons. The complete Journals of Sylvia Plath is essential reading for all who have been moved and fascinated by Plath's life and work.

This House of Sky: Landscapes of a Western Mind

Ivan Doig

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 28 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Great American literature 5 out of 5 stars.
6 of 6 people found this review helpful.

This is my all time favorite book. Period. Beautifully written, thought-provoking. It will make you want to move to Montana. It will make you love open sky and a horizon that goes on forever and the importance of family.

Beautiful 5 out of 5 stars.
3 of 3 people found this review helpful.

This book was one of the few memoirs I have read when in the end I placed the book down and sighed "wow." What a wonderful story. The author rolled experiences together in western Montana with his dad and grandmother and turned it into a lovestory for fathers and grandmothers, for people of Montana, and all that using very little dialogue. (That gave the book a sense of truthfulness, as who can recite full conversations that took place years ago?)

The constant struggle with man against nature, man against man and man against himself come alive in these pages. Despite many obstacles of every kind, his father never abandoned him and sacrificed what he had to to raise his son and to give him what he needed. Montana and its bittersweet closeness never leave the reader; its isolation and wide open sky are always in the background. Thus the title is so perfect for this beautiful memoir.

This was my first Doig book and I will definitely read more of him. I definitely consider this book one of the top ten in American 20th century writing.

Editorial Review:

This work introduced a major modern author to the reading public. Doig’s life was formed among the sheepherders and other denizens of small-town saloons and valley ranches as he wandered beside his restless father. New Preface by the Author.

Hunger

Knut Hamsun

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 82 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

The Master 5 out of 5 stars.
3 of 3 people found this review helpful.

I won't repeat the mainstream review material because its covered in depth around this snippit. Hunger is a short book, you can read it in a few hours, and spend days with it on your mind. If you liked Hesse you'll love the early Hamsun. If you like Hunger you'll probably like Pan and Mysteries [there's a lot of connection between them).

Hamson, like Christiania, can't readily be left without it leaving a mark on you.

over-rated 1 out of 5 stars.
2 of 6 people found this review helpful.

I guess I'm a bit thick but I do not see what the big fuss is about. I picked this up because I had read somewhere that he was Bukowski's favorite author. This is the most boring book I have ever read. Yet it seems to get all kinds of praise ranging from "groundbreaking" to "revolutionary." The main character whines on endlessly about how the world is against him and how his genius is being ignored by publishers and therefore by the world in general. Instead of trying to find work he writes philosophical essays which he then tries unsuccessfully to publish then he attempts to pawn off what few belongings he has including a blanket, coat buttons, eyeglasses, hair-cut tickets. I won't spoil the end for you because I couldn't make it to the end. Page after page of this whining drivel was to much to bear and I gave up. (And I've finished some horrible books in my day.) This book should be titled pathetic. Not hunger. Hungry people beg or get a job. They don't write essays in the park. Save your money. I warned you.

Editorial Review:

This powerful, autobiographical novel by a Nobel Prize-winning author made literary history when it was first published in 1890. A modern classic about a penniless, unemployed young writer, the book paints an unforgettable portrait of a man driven to the edge of self-destruction by forces beyond his control.

The Story of My Life

Helen Keller

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 67 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Sightless and unable to hear, but hardly mute. 3 out of 5 stars.
0 of 1 people found this review helpful.

Helen Keller gives a sweetly innocent rundown of her life in this brief book. It's just enough to get a glimpse into her well publicized transformation into a girl lost in her own inability to communicate to a wonderfully prolific soul; a person who changed the world. She is disarming and self aware and isn't afraid to gloss over a little bit of the struggle to paint a journey of searching that led to many rivers of experience. It's a charming book and if one is curious about Helen Keller it is best to 'hear' the words from the author than another source.

Other Books 4 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

A deaf dumb and blind girl, but no pinball. Helen Keller, bereft of the senses that your average person is able to utilise, has to learn other ways to communicate. She is instrumental in forming systems that will lay the foundation to enable other people so afflicted to do the same, with the work she does herself, and with her tutors.

Well worth a look.

Editorial Review:

The Story of My Life is Helen Keller's own account of how she miraculously triumphed over blindness and deafness-and became one of the most inspiring and intriguing figures of our time.

The Education of a Coach

David Halberstam

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 57 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Halberstam's worst 1 out of 5 stars.
1 of 2 people found this review helpful.

I've read several of his books (although this was my first sports book of his) and I highly enjoyed them. Maybe it's because the subject is just not a very interesting person, but this book is just terrible. He tells us material that contributes nothing; who cares about about his grandparents and his wife family? He also gushes about the subject and his family. Is everything really so great? It's as if he chose an average person at random and wrote a biography about him. The average person doesn't lead a particularly fascinating life and the resulting biography would be dull. Just because he is a success as a coach doesn't necessarily make him a good candidate for a biography.

Editorial Review:

Bill Belichick+s thirty-one years in the NFL have been marked by amazing success-most recently, his wins in two of the last three Super Bowls with the New England Patriots. In this groundbreaking new book, David Halberstam explores the nuances of both the game and the man behind it. He uncovers what makes Bill Belichick tick both on and off the field, as a coach, a father, and a son. -I+ve been fascinated by Bill Belichick for more than twenty years, going back to the time when he was a young coach in his early thirties working with the linebackers on the Giants,+ Halberstam writes. -There was, I thought, a certain signature to a Belichick game+I was fascinated by that, and by the fact that he seemed so uncoachlike, or perhaps the prototype for a very different kind of modern coach in what is an increasingly complicated game+.+

Good-Bye to All That: An Autobiography (Anchor Books)

Robert Graves

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 49 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

In this autobiography, first published in 1929, poet Robert Graves traces the monumental and universal loss of innocence that occurred as a result of the First World War. Written after the war and as he was leaving his birthplace, he thought, forever, Good-Bye to All That bids farewell not only to England and his English family and friends, but also to a way of life. Tracing his upbringing from his solidly middle-class Victorian childhood through his entry into the war at age twenty-one as a patriotic captain in the Royal Welsh Fusiliers, this dramatic, poignant, often wry autobiography goes on to depict the horrors and disillusionment of the Great War, from life in the trenches and the loss of dear friends, to the stupidity of government bureaucracy and the absurdity of English class stratification. Paul Fussell has hailed it as ""the best memoir of the First World War"" and has written the introduction to this new edition that marks the eightieth anniversary of the end of the war. An enormous success when it was first issued, it continues to find new readers in the thousands each year and has earned its designation as a true classic.

Rimbaud: The Double Life of a Rebel

Edmund White

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 2 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

The distinguished biographer, novelist, and memoirist Edmund White brings his literary mastery to a new biography of Arthur Rimbaud.

Poet and prodigy Arthur Rimbaud led a life that was startlingly short, but just as dramatically eventful and accomplished. Even today, over a century after his death in 1891, his visionary poetry has continued to influence everyone from Jim Morrison and Bob Dylan to Patti Smith. His long poem A Season in Hell (1873) and his collection Illuminations (1886) are essential to the modern canon, marked by a hallucinatory and hypnotic style that defined the Symbolist movement in poetry. Having sworn off writing at the age of twenty-one, Rimbaud drifted around the world from scheme to scheme, ultimately dying from an infection contracted while running guns in Africa. He was thirty-seven.

Edmund White writes with a historian's eye for detail, driven by a genuine personal investment in his subject. White delves deep into the young poet's relationships with his family, his teachers, and his notorious affair with the more established poet Paul Verlaine. He follows the often elusive (sometimes blatant) threads of sexual taboo that haunt Rimbaud's poems (in those days, sodomy was a crime) and offers incisive interpretations of the poems, using his own artful translations to bring us closer to the mercurial poet.

The Water is Wide

Pat Conroy

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 56 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Great for both teenagers and adults 4 out of 5 stars.
2 of 2 people found this review helpful.

While reading The Water is Wide, I experienced exactly the kind of heart-warming, comical, enjoyable reaction Pat Conroy had in mind while writing the book. Several themes are apparent throughout, and it was easy for the reader to recognize the most important one. Pat Conroy taught his students and readers that no matter a person's race, literacy level, age, or gender, everyone matters, and everyone is equal.
Pat Conroy moved many times as a child, since his father was in the military. His first job was teaching English in Beaufort, South Carolina. He then found himself teaching on the remote Daufuskie Island, which was referred to as Yamacraw Island in the novel. This teaching job provided the inspiration and plot for The Water is Wide.
Pat Conroy, referred to as "Conrack" by some students, has an excellent way of teaching readers the importance of acceptance and equality. He does not preach or lecture his message, but his delivery of it through countless situations is just as effective. Sometimes his point is concealed by the amusement of the Yamacraw students, but by the end of each chapter, the reader will be reminded of the seriousness at hand.
The Water is Wide never failed to entertain me. The book takes countless turns in the plot, and each turn results in comedy, sincerity, or amusement. The reader finds him or herself relating to each character, even though the lifestyle on Yamacraw Island is much different from most of the United States. Pat Conroy made me realize how lucky I am to live in a society where education is important and emphasized. This book opened my eyes to how people in other, less fortunate areas of the world live. I recognized that education is imperative, and how much the average student takes for granted.
While Pat Conroy had no problems capturing my attention with plenty of interesting stories, he sometimes overwhelmed readers with his personality. Several parts of the book were filled with Conroy's strong opinion on characters and school rules. This sometimes interrupted the plot. Other than the occasional rant by Pat Conroy, the book flowed smoothly.
The Water is Wide was an excellent read for teenagers and adults, especially those interested in teaching. I enjoyed reading this book from cover to cover, and it influenced me in ways only exceptional literature can.

Editorial Review:

The island is nearly deserted, haunting, beautiful. Across a slip of ocean lies South Carolina. But for the handful of families on Yamacraw island, America is a world away. For years the people here lived proudly from the sea, but now its waters are not safe. Waste from industry threatens their very existence–unless, somehow, they can learn a new life. But they will learn nothing without someone to teach them, and their school has no teacher.

Here is PAT CONROY’S extraordinary drama based on his own experience–the true story of a man who gave a year of his life to an island and the new life its people gave him.

Common Sense 101: Lessons from G.K. Chesterton

Dale Ahlquist

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Total reviews: 11 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

Dale Ahlquist, the President of the American Chesterton Society, and author of G. K Chesterton -The Apostle of Common Sense, presents a book of wonderful insights on how to "look at the whole world through the eyes of Chesterton". Since, as he says, "Chesterton wrote about everything", there is an ocean of his material to benefit from GKC's insights on a kaleidoscope of many important topics. Chesterton wrote a hundred books on a variety of themes, thousands of essays for London newspapers, penned epic poetry, delighted in detective fiction, drew illustrations, and made everyone laugh by his keen humor. Everyone who knew Chesterton loved him, even those he debated with. His unique writing style that combines philosophy, spirituality, history, humor, and paradox have made him one of the most widely read authors of modern times. As Ahlquist shows in his engaging volume, this most quoted writer of the 20th century has much to share with us on topics covering politics, art, education, wonder, marriage, fads, poetry, faith, charity and much more.