I willingly admit that I did not expect a book about training and rowing at the 1936 Olympics to make me cry. I am not particularly a sports fan and aI willingly admit that I did not expect a book about training and rowing at the 1936 Olympics to make me cry. I am not particularly a sports fan and all I have ever thought about rowing crew is that it is, like polo, a sport for the wealthy. But these boys were not wealthy; they were farmers, lumberjacks, and working stiffs. They struggled to make enough money to stay in the university, and they rowed with the same kind of heart with which they lived.
Of course, one of the things that made their story so dramatic was the time and place in which it occurred. The 1936 Olympics were Hitler’s showcase, his propaganda extravaganza to hide his sinister reality from the world. These boys were a tiny thorn in his thumb, but they symbolized everything America would then come to be in the war that followed–tenacious, determined, capable and faithful.
This was my father’s generation; that unbelievable era of good men, who stood, without hubris, and challenged the world of the Great Depression and the inhumanity of World War II. We have lost almost all of them now. My father is gone, his friends are all gone, and these boys–the men that they became–gone as well. They are gone, but the idea of them, the truth of them, lives on for some of us. I hope it will live on for most of us.
In speaking of this generation, Daniel James Brown, says:
...I was swept with gratitude for their goodness and their grace, their humility and their honor, their simple civility and all the things they taught us before they flitted across the evening water and finally vanished into the night.
I’m sure no one could ever had said it better.
The book is marvelously written. It centers on Joe Rantz, telling his story in detail, but not failing to bring to life each and every one of the men involved in this enterprise, including the coaches and the amazing Englishman, George Pocock, who handmade the boats the boys used.
The rowing events are painted in descriptive terms that bring the action to life. I could feel the burn in the muscles, the exhaustion after the long races, the cold of winter practices. That these young men were both willing and able to do this is incredible in itself. What they learned from doing it was something they could carry with them all of their lives, and something that enriched them beyond measure.
Like so much in life, crew was partly about confidence, partly about knowing your own heart.
If this story proves anything, it proves that these were men who knew their own hearts....more
Stepping into the world of Guinevere Pettigrew is like stumbling upon a county fair when you were on your way to the dentist. You forget all about youStepping into the world of Guinevere Pettigrew is like stumbling upon a county fair when you were on your way to the dentist. You forget all about your obligation because you are having too much fun on the ferris wheel. I only meant to sample the book to see if I wanted to join the buddy read, and I stayed on the ride until the operator said, “sorry, but we are closing for the night.”
Miss Pettigrew lives for a day and we live right along with her, laughing as we go, and hoping she doesn’t get some rude awakening. I imagine Winifred Watson was told one too many times about the things “ladies do not do”; she convinced me we should try them all at least once in life, even if we think we are too old! She gave us a jewel in the person of Miss Pettigrew....more
When Emmett Watson is given an early release from Salina, a juvenile prison, due to the death of his father, he has a plan. He will take his younger bWhen Emmett Watson is given an early release from Salina, a juvenile prison, due to the death of his father, he has a plan. He will take his younger brother, Billy, and they will head for Texas and a new life. But, he hasn’t figured on Billy, who has a plan of his own to find their long lost mother, whom he believes is in California. His plan involves following The Lincoln Highway from their home in Nebraska to San Francisco, but there is almost an immediate wrench in the works with the arrival of two of Emmett’s fellow inmates who have escaped Salina. What ensues is a mad road trip and a lot of character revelation.
This book is a metaphor for life. Like life, you may plan the trip, think you know exactly where you are going and how to get there, in fact, plot it out neatly on a map, but it is not only unlikely, but impossible, that your plans will be followed, for life has a mind of its own. Just when you seem to be on track, life will throw you a detour, a roadblock, a missed turn or a side trip. What you will find, if you are perceptive, is that the journey is far more important than the destination, that what makes it worthwhile, or not, is usually the company you keep along the way, and one true friend to share your room in the Howard Johnsons is worth a suite of rooms in the Hilton alone. What you will also find is that you have your own destiny, with disappointment and heartache, and while you share the road with others, the choice for your future is yours alone.
Towles has created a cast of characters that are distinctive, believable, lovable and pitiable, but never dull. I find him to be the best of the modern writers, proving time and again that he can write about completely different subjects in equally enthralling ways. I count A Gentleman in Moscow and Rules of Civility among my favorite books. I wondered if he could do it again. I am not on the fence; I loved this book. ...more
This novel is my first Jack London that is not an animal or nature tale, but then it mostly deals with the animal nature of a man, so maybe not that dThis novel is my first Jack London that is not an animal or nature tale, but then it mostly deals with the animal nature of a man, so maybe not that different. The Sea Wolf is Captain Wolf Larsen, a seaman who believes in nothing but his own welfare, and stops at no atrocity if he finds it to benefit his own desires. He is materialism and atheism run amok. He is intellectual, without emotion, values nothing but money, including anyone’s life aside from his own, and he has no moral code of any kind.
That London manages to make this character seem real instead of caricature is a bit of miracle in itself. As a foil, London has Larsen impress into service a shipwreck victim, Humphrey Van Weyden. To Hump, as he is called, Larsen expounds upon his philosophy and he and Hump argue the existence of the soul or the worth of a life that is not your own. For me, the repeated conversations became tiring. It was as if London was pounding the issue, but perhaps he was simply engaging in his own struggle with his own beliefs.
What I did like about this book were the passages related to life at sea. I could feel the rising of the storms and the swaying of the ship, and there is a very detailed description of an engineering feat that is so intricately described that you know it would be exactly how the maneuver would be achieved. There is extreme brutality, but it is necessary to the tale being told and it is not so graphic as to make it intolerable to read.
I try not to superimpose the beliefs of an author over the fiction that he writes, but that was hard to avoid with this book. London was an atheist and a socialist, and I am wondering how comfortable he was with either position based upon his arguments in this book.
Finally, there is a love story introduced late in the book that I found improbable, to say the least. I thought about the other London’s I have read and realized none of them contained any women or love stories; they are about rugged individualism and animal instinct. I think he is better suited to that subject.
All in all, I had hoped to like it better. I’m sure I would have liked it less had I been reading alone and not sharing the experience with a group of very savvy readers who helped to keep my interests alive and brought me a balanced view of the extreme philosophy expressed here. ...more
But the sea is a different sort of enemy. Unlike the land, where courage and the simple will to endure can often see a man through, the struggle agBut the sea is a different sort of enemy. Unlike the land, where courage and the simple will to endure can often see a man through, the struggle against the sea is an act of physical combat, and there is no escape. It is a battle against a tireless enemy in which man never actually wins; the most that he can hope for is not to be defeated.
Wow, who knew an account of a failed expedition across Antarctica could be so emotional. I feel I crossed a continent with these men and that I was cold and hungry and wet, always wet. And, it was miserable, but these men were amazingly optimistic and congenial and stoic. I am sure I would have been worthless and depressed just watching the ship, the Endurance, fall into the sea, crushed by ice pressure. I know I would have been devastated by some of the difficult tasks they had to perform and some of the things they were required to eat.
The heart of this journey was Ernest Shackleton himself, a man who led quietly and competently and never despaired; a man who showed great care and concern for his men and made tough decisions without looking backward; and a man who never gave up his faith or tenacity in the face of unbelievable odds.
When I had finished reading the book, I went online to find the pictures were taken on the voyage and survived. They were amazing and reinforced, even more, the courage and resilience needed to endure this catastrophe.
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I enjoyed every page of this book, and as I always say when I have finished such an historical account, I need to read more non-fiction! ...more
This book is a loosely constructed narrative, with Gosta and a few other recurring characters pulling it together from time to time, but mostly seeminThis book is a loosely constructed narrative, with Gosta and a few other recurring characters pulling it together from time to time, but mostly seeming like disconnected tales of Swedish life. Some of the vignettes were priceless and moving.
The base story is a Faustus tale. The estate at Ekeby’s mistress, the Major’s wife, takes in wayfaring cavaliers, among them is Gösta Berling. As their leader, he makes a pact with Sintram, a representative of the devil, ousting the Major’s wife and giving the cavaliers control of the estate, which they will retain if they manage to do nothing worthy for an entire year. As the group is rendered, this would seem to be a fairly easy bargain to keep.
After having done so much good for others, the Major’s wife is turned out of her home and made to be destitute and a beggar.
“It had become a matter of conscience with them, poor cavaliers, to persecute the Major’s wife. People so often have been cruel and persecuted one another pitilessly in trying to save their own souls.”
The saga is interwoven with tales and folklore and history, which I thoroughly enjoyed, and laced with a bit of humor.
A bullet of mingled silver and bell metal, cast on a Thursday night at new moon in a church tower, without the priest or sexton or any other living mortal knowing about it, would certainly bring him down, but such a bullet was not easy to procure. Indeed.
Selma Lagerlöf (1858–1940) was the first woman, and the first Swedish author, to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature, in 1909. In 1914 she also became the first woman to be elected to the Swedish Academy. Gösta Berling was her first novel, written at the age of 33, and it has stood as a classic since. ...more
At Christmas 1856, Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins and several other minor contributors published in Dickens’ publication, Household Words, a ChriAt Christmas 1856, Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins and several other minor contributors published in Dickens’ publication, Household Words, a Christmas installment which included The Wreck of the Golden Mary. As the title suggests, this is the story of a shipwreck and the aftermath as the survivors drift on the sea.
Using a form that is very Dickensian in nature, the Wreck employs the story within a story device. It felt a bit jarring to me to have the main story interrupted while the first mate recounts stories the members of the crew told one another while afloat. These stories were written by others, and several of them lack the finesse and depth that one always finds in Dickens himself. At least one of them had a distinct quality that easily identified it as the work of either Dickens or Collins, and I found it to be the most enjoyable of the set.
The main story is terrific, and without the interruption, a full 5-star story. The character development is surprisingly effective. I had a real attachment to both Captain Ravender and the first mate, John Steadiman. Steadiman’s name alone will tell you a lot about his character. I was made to think of Moby Dick, which was written only a few years before this tale and with which this one shares a kind of genuine seafaring atmosphere.
Dickens’ knowledge of ships and seafaring are quite impressive and the story has the same flow and captivating detail as his novels. I have found Dickens is as skillful with short fiction as he is with tomes, but then his novels were all written in serial form, so he is accustomed to producing even his long fiction in short form.
I loved Moll Flanders, the character and the book. They are bawdy, but in that eighteenth century way, that lays everything between the sheets betweenI loved Moll Flanders, the character and the book. They are bawdy, but in that eighteenth century way, that lays everything between the sheets between the lines, and lets you use your own imagination, if you will. Defoe makes this sometimes tragic tale a kind of frolic. There is humor, and you cannot help rooting for the woman who is breaking the law, engaging in indiscriminate sex and sexual manipulations, and robbing people blind, while protesting how sorry she is she had to do it. I confess to not feeling the least sorry for anyone Moll might have harmed, except her children, who were so briefly dealt with that we forget them almost as cavalierly as Moll does.
I suppose Moll is a hardened criminal. She might have had an honest life several times during the course of the novel and she failed to secure it. She gets more opportunities than most women in her situation would have gotten, but she seems destined to find herself in a boiling pot time and again. Marriage being one of the few ways a woman might improve her status, Moll never fails to take advantage of a marriage vow. However, even if you only consider her marriage debacles, which I will not discuss here as that would be a major spoiler, you have to admit fate is very unkind. So, she is a criminal, but she is also a survivor, and it is the survivor in her that wins out for me.
She is a precursor for every strong woman who refuses to accept her fate and makes the most of her talents to survive the unsurvivable. She is Amber St. Clare, Scarlett O’Hara, and Dickens’ Nancy, with a different outcome. She’s a roll in the hay, but with purpose. I totally enjoyed her story....more
Donald Ross is a pilot, trained by the Royal Air Force and then polished and honed flying the northern route in Canada after the war. A no nonsense maDonald Ross is a pilot, trained by the Royal Air Force and then polished and honed flying the northern route in Canada after the war. A no nonsense man, raised by a school-marm aunt, always capable and infinitely trustworthy, he is hired by an Oxford don, Mr. Lockwood, to pilot an archaeological expedition to Greenland at an ancient Viking settlement called Brattalid. Mr. Lockwood has an overbearing daughter who insists on accompanying her father on the trip, and it becomes immediately evident that she and the pilot will make up the most interesting part of this story.
This novel is not very like the Nevil Shute’s I know so well, even though it is written in his easy-going, detail-rich, captivating style. It contains a bit of magic realism, although when it was written that phase had yet to be coined. I was okay with that element, but it did seem to turn the novel from one kind of story to quite another. The transition seemed somewhat abrupt, as up to that point, the book was stark realism and detail. The extraordinary details of the flight and the obstacles of the trip, in fact, made me feel as if I were flying with this company of travelers. So, while the first 3/4 of the book worked well for me, the ending seemed weak.
An Old Captivity isn’t Shute’s best work, although it is completely adequate. It is obvious Nevil Shute understood the mechanics involved and also the mental and physical strength necessary to pilot under these conditions, and the sort of person who would be willing to take on such an adventure. I cannot help admiring the courage of those who would undertake such a potentially perilous journey in search of knowledge for mankind.
While I hope to keep reading his books until I can say I have read them all, I keep hoping there is just one more of his true masterpieces out there that I haven’t touched yet, but despairing of such a discovery. ...more
There is there all right, until a man gets to it. Then it ain’t there. It’s here, and here is what you wanted to get away from in the first place.There is there all right, until a man gets to it. Then it ain’t there. It’s here, and here is what you wanted to get away from in the first place.
In the third installment of A.B. Guthrie’s Big Sky series, Guthrie continues the story of Dick Summers, mountain man and wagon train guide and, now, a man searching for a way to face life in a changing west. Setting out to revisit the wild places of his youth, Summers and his friend, Higgins, stumble across Teal Eye, an Indian girl from Summers’ past.
Perhaps the tales of how the West was won have become cliches, but the plight of the Indians and the destruction that came with the taming of the West are very hard to witness in the hands of a skilled storyteller. I mourned for their way of life, disappearing before their eyes, and for the inability of the army and settlers to recognize them as human beings and offer any respect or concern.
There is a new character, a Methodist preacher named Potter, who contributes another view of the well-intended, but sorely misguided, missionary. I loved his goodness and his philosophy concerning God. Too few of those around him heeded his advice.
“I worship a glad lord,” Potter told him. “We have set our faces against sin, as indeed we must, but in doing it I fear we have lost sight of joy. Joy, Brother Summers, delight in what we are given. Often I think God not only wants us to be good but to be radiant.”
Dick Summers will go down in my ledgers as one of the most wonderful characters ever written. In a preface, Guthrie tells us this book was written much later than the earlier ones and was intended to fill a gap that had been left. I, for one, am so glad he decided to fill that gap. I would have hated to have left this part of Dick Summers’ story untold--to have just seen him wander off, seeking wilderness, at the end of The Way West, and never to have been heard of again.
So many good men who have lived have been forgotten and carried all they knew and loved to the grave. In fact, that is the case with most men, but, even unremembered as individuals, they may have had a huge impact on the shaping of a country and the lives that came after them.
“Live and Learn, they say, but don’t say all the while you’re learnin’, you’re forgettin’, too, until maybe at the last it’s just a big forgettin’. ...more
The Big Sky is the first in A.B. Guthrie’s series of novels about the settling of the American West. It is the story of three men, Boone Caudill, Jim The Big Sky is the first in A.B. Guthrie’s series of novels about the settling of the American West. It is the story of three men, Boone Caudill, Jim Deakins, and Dick Summers, each of whom braves the unknown and difficult life in the cold mountains west of civilization, for his own unique reasons. It is a portrait of what a mountain man was and what it took to be such an adventurer.
There is nothing sugar-coated in this book. It is often raw and coarse and startling.
They were a heap better than squaw meat, which men had been known to butcher and eat, probably after bedding with the squaws first.
This is a hard, cruel and unforgiving life, and the men who live it are sometimes little more than animals. Boone Caudill, fleeing an already hard and abusive life with his father, becomes a kind of savage survivalist. Dick Summers, in many ways the most skilled and intuitive of the three men, is only half a mountain man. He has altered his life, but not his soul. He likes to get to town and doesn’t mind the idea of farming, and he is the only one who still manages to fit into the world of white men.
One of the main characters of The Big Sky is the West itself. Guthrie paints it the way Ansel Adams photographed it, large and beautiful and powerful.
From the top Boone could see forever and ever, nearly any way he looked. It was open country, bald and open, without an end. It spread away flat now and then rolling, going on clear to the sky. A man wouldn’t think the whole world was so much. It made the heart come up. It made a man little and still big, like a king looking out.
This is God’s country, but even the men who love it and choose it, question what kind of God rules in such a wilderness. Jim Deakins contemplates his relationship with God and what God expects from him fairly frequently, and I particularly enjoyed his thoughts, because I think having such close connections to nature, but also experiencing its cruelties up close, would raise doubts and wonder.
These men are like the wildness of the country they inhabit, they are being worn away, being lost, becoming the last of their kind. The country is on the cusp of westward expansion, the buffalo are being slaughtered into extinction, Greeley is about to urge young men to go west, and the young men are going to take young women with them and build and plow.
It was strange about time; it slipped under a man like quiet water, soft and unheeded but taking a part of him with every drop--a little quickness of the muscles, a little sharpness of the eye, a little of his youngness, until by and by he found it had taken the best of him almost unbeknownst.
A historical picture of life in 1830s Montana, The Big Sky is also about change--the change in the country and the change in the people who populate it. There is no room for the Indians in the society that is coming, and there is no room for the mountain men either. Both are dying breeds. Both are living on borrowed time.
I must note that the portrayal of the Indians in this book seems remarkably accurate to me. They are seen as both victim and aggressor, but neither the noble savage nor the devil’s spawn. The attitude of the white men toward them is primarily one of exploitation or dread, and only a few, like Boone and Summers, come to really know anything about them individually. There is a graphic chapter that deals with the devastating effects of smallpox on the Indian population, that is one I will find it hard to ever forget.
Wallace Stegner wrote the foreward to the volume I was reading. If you would truly like to recognize the importance and meaning of this novel, you need do nothing more than read it.
Boone Caudill is “both mountain man and myth, both individual and archetype, which means that the record of his violent life is both credible and exhilarating.” Don’t think anyone could have said it better than that. ...more
How did I get to this ripe old age of mine and never hear of Gertrude Bell? I knew about Lawrence, of course, and had a vague 3.5 stars, rounded down.
How did I get to this ripe old age of mine and never hear of Gertrude Bell? I knew about Lawrence, of course, and had a vague idea that the middle east was parceled out by a small group of Englishmen that included Winston Churchill, but never any inkling of what really happened in an Egyptian hotel that changed the shape of the world and created the fractional and dysfunctional Middle East we see today.
Agnes Shanklin is an American schoolteacher, whose entire family has died in the influenza epidemic of 1918. (Russell's descriptions of the epidemic and the feelings it engendered were somewhat eerie in light of our own recent history). Agnes' sister, Lily, had known T. E. Lawrence before he achieved his fame, and when Agnes meets with him in Egypt, Lawrence invites her to share time with him and subsequently with the diplomats who are carving out the Middle East after WW1.
Agnes, as a friend of Lawrence, is intimate enough with the group to be included in some sensitive conversations, but remote enough not to be personally involved and have an outsider's view. Enter a German by the name of Karl Weilbacher, and you have someone to provide a romantic interest, a reason for Agnes to discuss the progress of the conference, and a person to provide another point of view from which to evaluate the proceedings.
There is a good smattering of descriptions of the holy land and Egypt, both the physical terrain and the social environment, and this is excellently done. I felt at times that I was taking a personal guided tour, and could hear the bustle of the marketplace and feel the crowding at the holy shrines. I experienced the discomfort of riding a camel across the desert to see the pyramids, and in fact, my rear end still aches from the bouncing.
I am a huge fan of Ms. Russell, and her inimitable style is certainly present in this novel, but there were also things that kept me at an arm’s length from our main character and at least one device that really bothered me. A short way into the narrative, Agnes drops that she is telling this story from beyond the grave, and I really did not care for that approach. The story would feel immediate and then Russell would remind us that Agnes was not alive, and somehow that would take something away from the reading for me. I could not see how this added anything to the novel other than providing Russell an avenue for her last chapter, and I felt that such an accomplished writer could have found another way to include this information or might have done just as well to save the “beyond the grave” surprise for the end. The story is well-told and the historical background very interesting, but I never cared enough for Agnes, so there was no sense of urgency on her behalf at any stage of reading.
What this book did inspire me to want to do is to rewatch Lawrence of Arabia. I saw it moons ago, and realized while reading that there is actually very little of it I remember beyond the sweeping cinematography for which it is famous. I will take advantage the next time it airs to revisit a film which is a known masterpiece and see how much of this “unknown” history I might have already been aware of if I had been paying attention. ...more
Leif Enger stole my heart with Peace Like a River, holding me captive from the first page to the last. I was afraid he could not pull off that trick aLeif Enger stole my heart with Peace Like a River, holding me captive from the first page to the last. I was afraid he could not pull off that trick again, but he did. After the first few chapters, in which I was beginning to doubt, this book took off and sailed, dragging me along in its wake. It is not serious or wrenching like Peace Like a River, but it is endlessly entertaining, and who wants an author to write the same book twice?
There are three superb characters, offered up for our enjoyment. They populate the dying West, where the desperados are old, as are the lawmen chasing them. Monte Becket, a man who knows nothing of the West except the imaginings he has put into his surprisingly successful novel; Glendon Hale, a man with a past that he wants to atone for; and Charlie Siringo, a less than scrupulous Pinkerton man, find themselves locked into each other's lives and swept across the rapidly changing 1915 landscape from Minnesota to California . The book is a wild ride, with these three reminding me of the lost art of bronco busting, where winning or losing is always determined by who hangs on the longest.
The West here is a dying culture, where the only cowboys are in wild west shows, and names like Butch Cassidy are beginning to fade with the memories of the men who knew him. It is, also, a tale about redemption; a tale about finding out who you are, or who you can be, before it is too late.
You can’t explain grace, anyway, especially when it arrives almost despite yourself. I didn’t even ask for it, yet somehow it breached and began to work. I suppose grace was pouring over Glendon, who had sought it so hard, and some spilled down on me.
Many of the events of the book would seem ludicrous in isolation and perhaps even in afterthought, but I believed this story and every event in the reading. I was there. I saw it, vividly. I pictured Hale and Siringo with weathered faces and western drawls that identified them as different, as relics, but with a kind of magical character that would be missed in the future from which they would shortly be missing.
I am so glad I took the time out of my planned reading to work in this delightful book. I was sad to relinquish these characters in the end, but I have no problem imagining where they are now, beyond the confines of the book, because the end is never truly the end in this one. ...more
An engineer is a man who can do for five bob what any bloody fool can do for a quid.
Keith Stewart is one of Nevil Shute’s wonderful, down-to-earth, smAn engineer is a man who can do for five bob what any bloody fool can do for a quid.
Keith Stewart is one of Nevil Shute’s wonderful, down-to-earth, smarter than they seem, characters. He invents miniature engineering marvels and writes articles and instructions for a magazine titled Miniature Mechanic. When, on the death of her parents, he is left as trustee to his niece, he finds himself faced with a tremendous task that he feels he must perform to fulfill the obligation. The novel is really the story of his fulfillment of that task and how it reveals who Keith Stewart is to himself and to the world at large.
I loved every moment of this book. Keith is a marvelous character, and there are several side characters that are also captivating, among them the wealthy financier, Sol Hirzhorn, and the unpredictable self-taught seaman, Jack Donelly. Shute knows how to spin a tale that is both informative (I know a bit more about engineering and sailing now) and enjoyable. Some of his books are emotionally stirring, like A Town Like Alice, but some are just good fun, like this one. He writes both kinds beautifully, making him one of my favorite authors to read....more
I know why I loved this as a kid. It is a raw adventure, with a natural charm, and the idea of a wild wolf-dog that is tamed by one man’s kindness wouI know why I loved this as a kid. It is a raw adventure, with a natural charm, and the idea of a wild wolf-dog that is tamed by one man’s kindness would have been irresistible to my nine year old self. Even as an adult, it reads like a heroic tale, as White Fang fights his way through life’s difficulties, like Odysseus trying to find his way home. There can be little doubt that Jack London understood the nature of a wild animal and the dangerous life in the Northern climes.
The descriptive powers of London made me shiver with the chill of the cold and the fear that must accompany a night spent with a fire being the only thing standing between a man and a hungry wolf pack. There are moments of animal cruelty and even nature’s cruelty that make one cringe, but the story is true to life, and life is often unkind. But there is also a feeling of hope, of the possibility of survival, and of the love that a dog, or even a wolf, can offer a man, whether he deserves it or not. ...more
A retelling of the legend of Theseus and the Minotaur, The King Must Die is a sweeping saga with the flavor of The Odyssey and the imaginings of CirceA retelling of the legend of Theseus and the Minotaur, The King Must Die is a sweeping saga with the flavor of The Odyssey and the imaginings of Circe.
For those who are familiar with the original legend, Renault attempts to answer some of the questions it leaves. How does Ariadne fall in love with Theseus to the point that she is willing to betray her father when Theseus is being held as a prisoner? Who/what is the Minotaur really? Why does Theseus deal with Ariadne in what seems such a cold and callous manner when she has given up all for love of him? Of course, the ancient Greeks explain it all with gods, but this is a human story, so there is a human element to be addressed.
Renault has done a good job of spinning out the missing pieces of the tale and making her reader believe in the possibility of what occurs, but this is a “just for fun” read. There is nothing deep or touching here, IMHO. I will probably read the next book in the series, The Bull From the Sea, but I will table it for a time when I have more leisure and a need for something light....more
In a momentary lapse of self-control, I picked up my copy of Lonesome Dove and got lost once more in the wonder that is Gus McCrae and Woodrow Call anIn a momentary lapse of self-control, I picked up my copy of Lonesome Dove and got lost once more in the wonder that is Gus McCrae and Woodrow Call and all the assorted characters that people their world. If anyone ever asked me if I had been to Montana, I would have to say “yes”, and every step of land between the Milk River and Lonesome Dove, Texas. Never has a story felt more real, been more packed with personalities, more genuine in its depiction of place, or more perfectly told.
Even the characters you do not admire, you sadly understand. When McMurtry says of Elmira Johnson:
She wanted July and Joe to be gone, suddenly, so she would not have to deal with them every day. Their needs were modest enough, but she no longer wanted to face them. She had reached a point where doing anything for anyone was a strain. It was like heavy work, it was so hard.
you momentarily understand what drives her. She is living a life she does not want in being a wife and mother, and the attempt to do that is a burden she can no longer carry. It doesn’t matter that her life is not a bad life, what matters is that it is not, any longer, “her” life.
In fact, this book might mostly be about people seeking, often to their own detriment, the lives they have lost. Each of them has an ideal in their head that they are chasing: Call has Montana; Gus has Clara; Lorie has San Francisco; Ellie has Dee Boot; Clara has the idea of a son, all yearnings based on losses they have already experienced.
The book is peppered with wit and humor, and with wisdom. Even in its tragic moments, Gus is able to infuse both of those elements into the situation. He gives advice in such a folksy, off-hand, manner, but the truth lying beneath his observations is never lost on the reader.
Life in San Francisco is still just life. If you want one thing too much it’s likely to be a disappointment. The healthy way is to learn to like the everyday things, like soft beds and buttermilk--and feisty gentlemen.
This is the fastest 900 page novel you will ever read. It never slows or hits patches that you want to speed through. You feel the elements in the descriptions of the weather, the weight of the losses, the constant danger of just living in this place and time; but you never want it to stop. You want to travel beyond the next river, scrape off the mud, and then cross another plain or find another grassland. You want to sleep in the saddle because you are exhausted and then share a plate of Bol’s beans or Po Campo’s fried grasshoppers.
If there was ever a versatile writer, it was Larry McMurtry. This is far from being the only magnificent novel he produced, but it is far and away his best. It is iconic and unparalleled in its scope and its accomplishment. If you like character driven novels of epic proportions, but you’re thinking you don’t like “westerns”, don’t miss this remarkable book. It is a masterpiece that happens to be set in the West and deals with so much more than a simple review, like this one, can ever express. ...more
To see a World in a Grain of Sand And a Heaven in a Wild Flower Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand And Eternity in an hour A Robin Red breast in a To see a World in a Grain of Sand And a Heaven in a Wild Flower Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand And Eternity in an hour A Robin Red breast in a Cage Puts all Heaven in a Rage A Dove house fill’d with Doves & Pigeons Shudders Hell thr' all its regions. Auguries of Innocence by William Blake
This is a book of fiction that reads so true that I wondered if I had mistaken myself and wasn’t reading a book based upon the actual life of a historical figure. Of course, Ivey tells us in her endnotes that she has indeed drawn from the historical records, but neither Lt. Col. Allen Forrester nor his wife, Sophie, are real, except to those who have read of them.
Col. Forrester undertakes an exploratory trip to chart a part of Alaska that is previously unknown in the year 1885. His trip is eye-opening, the Indians are both perplexing and instructive, and Forrester finds that not everything in life is as simply explained as he had always believed.
I can find no means to account for all that we have witnessed, except to say that I am no longer certain of the boundaries between man & beast, of the living & the dead. All that I have taken for granted, what I have known as real & true, has been called into question.
This is probably a book that will be classified as magical realism, but it was a magic that belonged to the culture and myths of the indigenous people, that had a bit of the mystery of worlds we do not know, and that fit into the context of the tale seamlessly and believably.
It is, I think, in large a story about knowing yourself, about expanding your horizons, letting in the light, reaching for the unknown, finding out if We are brave, or we are cowardly. We are loving, or we are cruel. It is about a man’s journey to the wilderness, and it is a about a woman’s ability to find her own strengths and talents, apart from the place in life that a man gives her.
There is the beauty of the story, and then there is the beauty of the language. Ivey is a marvelous writer of poetic description.
Even after all these years I can taste the air with its marble dust and green summer leaves. I can hear the echo of mallet and chisel and feel the sunlight that filtered down through the canopy. I was nearly as wild as Father those summer days, my legs bare, my hair untied, and nose sunburned.
For me, that is powerful description. I see the dusty bits of marble that are being chiseled away, hanging in the air as they float to the ground, and the disheveled girl has substance and glistening sunburned skin. This book is littered with such vivid descriptions, and the people come alive, the Alaskan wilderness comes alive, and there is sight, sound, texture, and taste in the words.
Finally, as a photographer, Sophie made me ache for my old darkroom, where black and white prints could be manipulated into being from a solution bath. While her methods and equipment were much older than any I have used, I loved the description of the process and felt so familiar with the joy that accompanies a once in a lifetime image that comes from your own eye and soul.
To say that I loved this book is understatement. It isn’t going to the donation box for the library bookstore, where most of my book purchases end up. It is going right on my own library shelf with books that I hope to find the time to read again someday. ...more
Butcher's Crossing is, in part, a coming-of-age story. Will Andrews, a young man of twenty-three, under the influence of reading Emerson, leaves HarvaButcher's Crossing is, in part, a coming-of-age story. Will Andrews, a young man of twenty-three, under the influence of reading Emerson, leaves Harvard and his Boston home and heads for the West and an untamed nature that he hopes will help him to define himself. He is offered a desk-job by Mr. McDonald, an old acquaintance of his father, but he decides instead to throw his lot (and all of his money) into a buffalo hunt with a wily and skilled hunter named Miller; Miller’s side-kick, Charley Hoge, who indulges his Bible and his whiskey bottle in equal measure; and a buffalo skinner named Schneider.
Sometimes after listening to the droning voices in the chapel and in the classrooms, he had fled the confines of Cambridge to the fields and woods that lay southwestward to it. There in some small solitude, standing on bare ground, he felt his head bathed by the clean air and uplifted into infinite space; the meanness and the construction he had felt were dissipated in the wildness about him.
He is green and inexperienced and he is going to have to grow up quickly to survive in this tough world he is entering. McDonald sees this; Miller probably sees it too, but he is a tough himself and believes whatever is green should be purged from a man. The whore, Francine, states it outright–she knows he will not return from this hunt the same young and gentle man, and she says so.
Almost from the moment Miller entered the story, I began to hear echoes of Moby-Dick or, The Whale. The buffalo are Miller’s white whale, and in many ways Andrews is Ishmael, observing and learning, as he is drawn into another man’s obsession. Miller is not going out into the wilderness separate from nature, as Andrews is--he is a part of this vast, complex ecosystem. He is an agent of destruction.
Often, as the group approached out of a hollow a slight rise of land, Miller, no longer outlined against the horizon, seemed to merge into the earth, a figure that accommodated itself to the color and contour of the land upon which it rode. After the first day’s journey, Miller spoke very little, as if hardly aware of the men who rode with him. Like an animal, he sniffed at the land, turning his head this way and that at sounds or scents unperceived by the others; sometimes he lifted his head in the air and did not move for long moments, as if waiting for a sign that did not come.
Williams explores so many themes in this work that one can barely touch upon them in a review. The descriptions of the senseless slaughter of the buffalo are chilling, but what is more chilling is the way in which Will Andrews changes from his initial distress to full acceptance. He has come to find himself, but we fear there is much of the better part of himself that might be lost.
...it came to him that he had sickened and turned away because of his shock at seeing the buffalo, a few moments before proud and noble and full of dignity of life, now stark and helpless, a length of inert meat, divested of itself, or his notion of itself; or it was not that self that he had imagine it to be. That self was murdered; and in that murder he had felt the destruction of something within him, and he had not been able to face it.
Butcher’s Crossing is a coming-of-age story, Will Andrew’s story; but it is also an Odyssey, a journey that is a search for self and for home; and it is strangely, at the same moment, Moby Dick, Miller’s story, a search for the white whale, a struggle to destroy nature or be destroyed by it.
John Williams was a subtle, understated writer, who gave us the incomparable Stoner, a quiet and introverted tale. He was also a writer of epic proportions, penning this boundless adventure tale that is as large as the wilderness it portrays. Vastly different, both are equally stirring, with characters that take hold of your imagination and which you know will now live with you forever.
I am elated that I still have Augustus ahead of me. I intend to savor it. ...more
4.5 I haven't enjoyed a book this much in a long time stars.
Reading Susanna Kearsley is such fun. I find that I both want to read faster so that I can4.5 I haven't enjoyed a book this much in a long time stars.
Reading Susanna Kearsley is such fun. I find that I both want to read faster so that I can see what will happen and read slower so that I can stay in this story and this world just a little bit longer. She sifts in just the right amount of romance, mystery and history to make a perfect cake, and she is one of the few writers who can keep me as interested in the modern-day story she is telling as the historical one. I typically find myself just wanting to get back to the past, but with Kearsley I am happy to follow the present as well.
This story begins with Carrie McClelland, who is writing a historical novel set in 1708 and dealing with the failed attempt to put James Stewart back on the throne in Scotland. The novel is meant to be about Nathaniel Hooke, an Irishman who is in the thick of the action at the time, but when Carrie decides to include a character named after her own ancestor, Sophia Paterson, she seems to lose control of the story to the events of the past.
The dynamics of writing a historical novel is something Kearsley obviously knows everything about, the research she does is meticulous and adds complete credence to her tale, and her handling of characters and dialogue is both charming and believable. I had determined to read all of her books after finding my first encounter with her so enjoyable--this book has convinced me that I made a great decision. ...more