Amazon.com
Best known for his Border Trilogy, hailed in the San Francisco Chronicle as "an American classic to stand with the finest literary achievements of the century," Cormac McCarthy has written ten rich and often brutal novels, including the bestselling No Country for Old Men, and The Road. Profoundly dark, told in spare, searing prose, The Road is a post-apocalyptic masterpiece, one of the best books we've read this year, but in case you need a second (and expert) opinion, we asked Dennis Lehane, author of equally rich, occasionally bleak and brutal novels, to read it and give us his take. Read his glowing review below. --Daphne Durham
Guest Reviewer: Dennis Lehane
Dennis Lehane, master of the hard-boiled thriller, generated a cult following with his series about private investigators Patrick Kenzie and Angela Gennaro, wowed readers with the intense and gut-wrenching Mystic River, blew fans all away with the mind-bending Shutter Island, and switches gears with Coronado, his new collection of gritty short stories (and one play).
Cormac McCarthy sets his new novel, The Road, in a post-apocalyptic blight of gray skies that drizzle ash, a world in which all matter of wildlife is extinct, starvation is not only prevalent but nearly all-encompassing, and marauding bands of cannibals roam the environment with pieces of human flesh stuck between their teeth. If this sounds oppressive and dispiriting, it is. McCarthy may have just set to paper the definitive vision of the world after nuclear war, and in this recent age of relentless saber-rattling by the global powers, it's not much of a leap to feel his vision could be not far off the mark nor, sadly, right around the corner. Stealing across this horrific (and that's the only word for it) landscape are an unnamed man and his emaciated son, a boy probably around the age of ten. It is the love the father feels for his son, a love as deep and acute as his grief, that could surprise readers of McCarthy's previous work. McCarthy's Gnostic impressions of mankind have left very little place for love. In fact that greatest love affair in any of his novels, I would argue, occurs between the Billy Parham and the wolf in The Crossing. But here the love of a desperate father for his sickly son transcends all else. McCarthy has always written about the battle between light and darkness; the darkness usually comprises 99.9% of the world, while any illumination is the weak shaft thrown by a penlight running low on batteries. In The Road, those batteries are almost out--the entire world is, quite literally, dying--so the final affirmation of hope in the novel's closing pages is all the more shocking and maybe all the more enduring as the boy takes all of his father's (and McCarthy's) rage at the hopeless folly of man and lays it down, lifting up, in its place, the oddest of all things: faith. --Dennis Lehane
Customer Reviews:
A little too much.......2007-09-19
His writing style didn't bother me. I could accommodate the lack of usual punctuation quickly. His jerky narrative ... no problem. It even enhanced the experience a bit. The conversations weren't bad either. How would YOU pass the time in a post-apocalyptic landscape?
However ... I think he could have achieved what he did achieve in about 85 to 100 pages.
Just my opinion.
A must read!!!!.......2007-09-09
What can you say about an author that can say sooo much by not having to spell it all out for us. There isnt any clear explaination for the reason things are the way they are, yet its allows you to just experience their journey with them instead of throught the view point of the narrarator. I love his style. Its genius. When you finsh with at resounding "WOW"; that pretty much sums up your time spent. McCarthy is an artist among authors in American Litature.
WOW.......2007-09-06
McCarthy has often been a bit inaccessible, especially when his western stories mix spanish with english in the most descriptive scenes. The Road is blatantly clear, a short insightful trip into darkness. Brilliantly moody, with only peeks at decent life. It can't get this bad, thank God.
Exceptionally long with repetitive sequences...........2007-08-24
I found ths book well written from the standpoint that you are instantly swept away into McCarthy's futuristic world. It is absolutely wonderful in the description of a world gone mad.
My problem with the book is it never fully explains why they are going cross country and places that would have made sense (the abandoned fall out shelter full of food) are abandoned in this mind numbing attempt to get to a coast that is no different from the hell they have left behind.
Sad & poignant, worth the read, just not a great book for me.
The Road.......2007-08-13
This book really make you think about the way of the world. Totally different perspective than Stephen King's "The Stand".
Amazon.com
It's difficult to imagine a harder first act to follow than The Kite Runner: a debut novel by an unknown writer about a country many readers knew little about that has gone on to have over four million copies in print worldwide. But when preview copies of Khaled Hosseini's second novel, A Thousand Splendid Suns, started circulating at Amazon.com, readers reacted with a unanimous enthusiasm that few of us could remember seeing before. As special as The Kite Runner was, those readers said, A Thousand Splendid Suns is more so, bringing Hosseini's compassionate storytelling and his sense of personal and national tragedy to a tale of two women that is weighted equally with despair and grave hope.
We wanted to spread the word on the book as widely, and as soon, as we could. See below for an exclusive excerpt from A Thousand Splendid Suns and early reviews of the book from some of our top customer reviewers.--The Editors
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An Exclusive Excerpt from A Thousand Splendid Suns |
We have arranged with the publisher to make an exclusive excerpt of A Thousand Splendid Suns available on Amazon.com. Click here to read a scene from the novel. It's not the opening scene, but rather one from a crucial moment later in the book when Mariam, one of the novel's two main characters, steps into a new role.
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Early Buzz from Amazon.com Top Reviewers |
We queried our top 100 customer reviewers as of March 6, 2007, and asked them to read A Thousand Splendid Suns and share their thoughts. We've included these early reviews below in the order they were received. For the sake of space, we've only included a brief excerpt of each reviewer's response, but each review is available for reading in its entirety by clicking the "Read the review" link.
Joanna Daneman:
"His style is deceptively simple and clear, the characters drawn deftly and swiftly, his themes elemental and huge. This is a brilliant writer and I look forward to more of his work." Read Joanna Daneman's review
Seth J. Frantzman:
"Khaled Hosseini has done it again with 'A Thousand Splendid Sons', presenting a new, dashing and dark tale of two generations of women trapped in a loveless marriage, bracketed by great events." Read Seth J. Frantzman's review
Donald Mitchell:
"Khaled Hosseini has succeeded in capturing many important historical and contemporary themes in a way that will make your heart ache again and again. Why will your reaction be so strong? It's because you'll identify closely with the suffering of almost all the characters, a reaction that's very rare to a modern novel." Read Donald Mitchell's review
Lawrance M. Bernabo:
"All things considered, following up on a successful first novel is probably harder than coming up with the original effort and Hosseini could have rested on his laurels in the manner of Harper Lee, but as "A Thousand Splendid Suns" amply proves, this native of Kabul has more stories to tell about the land of Afghanistan." Read Lawrance M. Bernabo's review
Amanda Richards:
"There are parts of this book that will have grown men surreptitiously blotting the tears that are on the verge of overflowing their ducts, and by the time you get to the middle, you won't be able to put it down. Hosseini's simple but richly descriptive prose makes for an engrossing read, and in my opinion, "A Thousand Splendid Suns" is among the best I have ever read. This is definitely not one to be missed." Read Amanda Richards's review
N. Durham:
"All that being said, "A Thousand Splendid Suns" is a bit more enjoyable than Hosseini's previous "The Kite Runner", and once again he manages to give we readers another glimpse of a world that we know little about but frequently condemn and discard. However, if you were one of the many that for some reason absolutely loved "The Kite Runner", chances are that you'll love this as well." Read N. Durham's review
John Kwok:
"Khaled Hosseini's "A Thousand Splendid Suns" is a genuine instant literary classic, and one destined to be remembered as one of 2007's best novels. It should be compared favorably to such legendary Russian novels like "War and Peace" and "Doctor Zhivago"." Read John Kwok's review
Thomas Duff:
"Normally I'm more of an action-adventure type reader when it comes to novels and recreational reading. But I was given the chance to read A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini (author of The Kite Runner), so I decided to try something out of my normal genre. I am *so* glad I did. This is a stunning and moving novel of life and love in Afghanistan over a 30 year period." Read Thomas Duff's review
Charles Ashbacher:
"This book manages to simultaneously capture the history of Afghanistan over the last thirty years and how women are treated in conservative Islamic societies.... In many ways it is a sad book, your heart goes out to these two women in their hopeless struggle to have a decent life with a brutal man in an unforgiving, intolerant society." Read Charles Ashbacher's review
W. Boudville:
"Hosseini presents a piognant view into the recent tortured decades of the Afghan experience. From the 1970s, under a king, to the Soviet takeover, to the years of resistance. And then the rise and fall of the Taliban. An American reader will recognise many of the main political events. But to many Americans, Afghanistan and its peoples and religion remain an opaque and troubling mystery." Read W. Boudville's review
Mark Baker:
"I tend to read plot heavy books, so this character study was a definite change of pace for me. I found the first half slow going at times, mainly because I knew where the story was going. Once I got into the second half, things really picked up. The ending was very bittersweet. I couldn't think of a better way to end it." Read Mark Baker's review
Grady Harp:
"Hosseini takes us behind those walls for forty some years of Afghanistan's bloody history and while he does not spare us any of the descriptions of the terror that continues to besiege that country, he does offer us a story that speaks so tenderly about the fragile beauty of love and devotion and lasting impression people make on people." Read Grady Harp's review
Robert P. Beveridge:
"When I was actively reading it, the pages kept turning, and more than once I found myself foregoing food or sleep temporarily to get in just one more chapter. When I had put it down, however, I felt no particular compulsion to pick it back up again. It's a good book, and a relatively well-written one, but it's not a great book. Enjoyable without leaving a lasting impression." Read Robert P. Beveridge's review
B. Marold:
"While the events in Afghanistan and the wider world create a familiar framework for the stories of these two women, it is nothing more than a framework. The warp and weft of everyday life, and the interaction of the two women and their close relatives is the heartbeat of the story." Read B. Marold's review
Daniel Jolley:
"Khaled Hosseini has written a majestic, sweeping, emotionally powerful story that provides the reader with a most telling window into Afghan society over the past thirty-odd years. It's also a moving story of friendship and sacrifice, giving Western readers a rare glimpse into the suffering and mistreatment of Afghan women that began long before the Taliban came to power." Read Daniel Jolley's review
Book Description
After 103 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list and with four million copies of The Kite Runner shipped, Khaled Hosseini returns with a beautiful, riveting, and haunting novel that confirms his place as one of the most important literary writers today.
Propelled by the same superb instinct for storytelling that made The Kite Runner a beloved classic, A Thousand Splendid Suns is at once an incredible chronicle of thirty years of Afghan history and a deeply moving story of family, friendship, faith, and the salvation to be found in love.
Born a generation apart and with very different ideas about love and family, Mariam and Laila are two women brought jarringly together by war, by loss and by fate. As they endure the ever escalating dangers around them-in their home as well as in the streets of Kabul-they come to form a bond that makes them both sisters and mother-daughter to each other, and that will ultimately alter the course not just of their own lives but of the next generation. With heart-wrenching power and suspense, Hosseini shows how a woman's love for her family can move her to shocking and heroic acts of self-sacrifice, and that in the end it is love, or even the memory of love, that is often the key to survival.
A stunning accomplishment, A Thousand Splendid Suns is a haunting, heartbreaking, compelling story of an unforgiving time, an unlikely friendship, and an indestructible love.
Customer Reviews:
A Thousand Splendid Suns.......2007-10-10
This book was excellent; even better than The Kite Runner. What an eye opener to the series of horrific acts that befall women in the middle east.
A vibrant, intense, and emotionally wrenching book.......2007-10-09
"A Thousand Splendid Suns" is a gripping novel that left me with a profound respect for women who struggle and flourish under restrictive regimes and repressive religions. I could almost feel the pain, fear, anger, frustration, hope and courage these women endure each and every day. The author faithfully delivers an emotionally taut epic that will strike a chord with many. I hated and loved this story all at the same time.
Tragic Journey of Love.......2007-10-08
A Thousand Splendid Suns is an absolutely wonderful story about the things that keep us going, even when our world falls apart. You will find yourself pulled into this tragic story, unable to put the book down. This book will touch your heart on a very real level. I can't wait to read it again.
terrific book, but left with some mixed feelings.......2007-10-08
I just finished this audiobook in a straight 10-hour period while I listened to my iPod as I refinished my deck. This book certainly does not leave your emotions untouched and most certainly gets you involved intimately with the characters that Hosseini develops. It is difficult at this point to catalog the full range of emotions that I felt while reading this book. Righteous indignation may be the main emotion I can recall from most of the pages. How much I, as a man, wanted to swoop in and solve away all of their problems with my western life of abundance. On examining this particular desire, perhaps the true message of this book comes out. It is written completely and totally in a worldview that is very different from us Western readers. The themes of survival, fate, endurance, are not ones that come to the fore in our minds. Concepts so important to us in this part of the world such as ambition, achievement, and discovery of dreams keep a place in the forefront of our minds.
This is particularly pointed in my mind, since I had just visited DisneyWorld days before reading this book. Their theme is that every girl wants to be a princess and at one point they had the audience chant that "Dreams come true" and remarked how every boy wants to be a pirate and every girl a princess. The interesting thing is what our dreams are. They are not the dream shared by the characters in the novel of independence, a motherhood, and freedom from fear. This disney dream is the idea that we will be exalted above our peers, that our extreme abundance will be greater than the extreme abundance of those around us. That our difference, our individuality will give us significance, only possible at the expense of others.
This is perhaps why the novel hit me as such an unfamiliar, foreign thing. I was depressed by how everything seemed to go bad for the characters on how there was not a hero -- not a constant juxtaposition of good and bad, of hope and disappointment, that is such a similar genre or phrase used in our modern stories. Eventually as the story waged on, it seemed that surely the scars created in the characters must be too deep, too unrecoverable for there to be a happy, Disney style ending. So at some point in reading this book I became very frustrated with the seeming desolateness of the emotional landscape, the lack of a knight in shining armor that I wanted to project myself in to the story.
In the end, however, I found that redemption was there. When Lila thought of Miriam as a young girl and I thought of the hopes and dreams of a young girl and how tragically shattered they were, this touched deep inside me and created a desire to be a father who nurtured and protected the sanctity of his child's dreams. Not dreams to be a princess, but dreams to be a mother themselves dreams to be free from fear and dreams to hope and a future. I closed the book resolute to make these dreams a reality for all daughters.
Strong but disturbing.......2007-10-07
After The Kite Runner, I looked forward to Hosseini's next book. From a literary standpoint, A Thousand Splendid Suns certainly did not disappoint. He weaved personal stories into the social and historic framework of Afghanistan, and the result was wonderful. This is a very sad book, though. Also, while the character of Mariam was strong and endearing, I couldn't feel quite as strongly about Laila.
Amazon.com
Settle down to enjoy a rousing good ghost story with Diane Setterfield's debut novel, The Thirteenth Tale. Setterfield has rejuvenated the genre with this closely plotted, clever foray into a world of secrets, confused identities, lies, and half-truths. She never cheats by pulling a rabbit out of a hat; this atmospheric story hangs together perfectly.
There are two heroines here: Vida Winter, a famous author, whose life story is coming to an end, and Margaret Lea, a young, unworldly, bookish girl who is a bookseller in her father's shop. Vida has been confounding her biographers and fans for years by giving everybody a different version of her life, each time swearing it's the truth. Because of a biography that Margaret has written about brothers, Vida chooses Margaret to tell her story, all of it, for the first time. At their initial meeting, the conversation begins:
"You have given nineteen different versions of your life story to journalists in the last two years alone."
She [Vida] shrugged. "It's my profession. I'm a storyteller."
"I am a biographer, I work with facts."
The game is afoot and Margaret must spend some time sorting out whether or not Vida is actually ready to tell the whole truth. There is more here of Margaret discovering than of Vida cooperating wholeheartedly, but that is part of Vida's plan.
Margaret has a story of her own: she was one of conjoined twins and her sister died so that Margaret could live. She feels an otherworldly aura sometimes or a yearning for a part of her that is forever missing. Vida's story involves two wild girls--feral twins (is she one of them?)--who would have been better off being suckled by wolves. Instead, their mother and uncle, involved in things too unsavory to contemplate, combine to neglect them woefully. There's also a governess, a Doctor, a kindly housekeeper, a gardener, and another presence--a very strange presence--which Margaret perceives as a ghost at first. Making obeisance to other great ghost stories, there is a deadly fire, a beautiful old house gone to ruin, and always that presence....
The transformative power of truth informs the lives of both women by story's end, and The Thirteenth Tale is finally and convincingly told. --Valerie Ryan
Customer Reviews:
Don't Take This Book to Bed With You!.......2007-10-09
It starts out well. Our heroine, Margaret, is the daughter of a dealer in old and rare books, the kind that can support the family on a handful of special sales per year. She has worked with her quietly doting father from earliest childhood, learning to love both their trade and the many books upon their shelves. Then, on a day like any other, she receives a summons from the most published, and yet personally unknown, author in England. Vida Winters, known for telling a new and different scenario to reporters whenever asked about her past, has decided to finally tell the true story of her life to someone, and she has chosen Margaret.
Leaving the shop, her agoraphobic and distant mother, and her beloved books, Margaret takes with her a ream of paper, twelve shiny red pencils, and the discovered secret that her parents think is safely sealed away in a tin under the bed.
Miss Winters' story, she says, must be told in its proper order, without interruption by questions, with no looking ahead. And she must tell it before the wolf, eating her from the inside, finishes her storytelling forever. Margaret's plan to decline the job suddenly is overwhelmed by the hints of love, loss, tragedy, and deranged secrets.
The daily sessions of story-telling begin with the loss of a mother, the depression of a father, and the rearing of the product of their union. And then the story begins to darken.
Ms. Setterfield creates, with a masterful use of vocabulary and phrasing, a virtual "train wreck" of events. As the reader watches the engine approach, an inner sense of disaster perceives that the trestle ahead is weak. One by one the cars of the train follow along, swaying and groaning with the stress, starting to tumble into the abyss. Surely the train will stop and the last few cars, at least, will remain in safety. Surely the disaster cannot become worse....
Raised in a house with a reclusive uncle, a housekeeper with dementia, and a taciturn gardener, young Vida suddenly finds herself in charge of the comings and goings of all the residents of the lonely estate, responsible for their needs and for keeping anyone living in the village from intruding on their lair lest they find out their gruesome secrets.
When it seems impossible for any good ending (happy is perhaps too strong a word here), Ms. Setterfield snatches real life away from the horrors of the fire and the insanity, and carefully wraps up all the stories in a satisfactory manner. Whew!
A good, and compelling, read, The Thirteenth Tale will hold your attention and require you to continue to the very end.
Just don't take this book to bed with you.
Too many crazy people in the attic... (contains spoliers).......2007-10-05
The Thirteenth tale is a nice pseudo-gothic novel, inspired by classic English Victorian novels. It has all the mandatory characters and events, and in abundance. In place of one crazy wife in the attic, Ms. Setterfiled generously provides us with several generations of a mad family. There are abandoned children, mixed up twins, a fire and a ghost. The plot is quite engaging though hard to believe. The characters are poorly developed one-dimensional figures; the flow of events is just superficially glued together, leaving loose ends and blank gaps here and there.
The story of Vida Winter was rather a disappointment, after the first dozen of pages that had promised some dark story about a bookish girl in the world of old dusty books, diaries of dead people and forgotten pages. I wish I read about this one. Then I wouldn't have had all these silly questions that kept me from enjoying the book: why everybody would go nuts about the childhood of a popular writer, meaning the events that happened before she even started to write? How come a child lives in a family (though a nuts family but anyway) and doesn't have a name? Why did Vida's mother abandon her? Why did Vida love retarded Emmeline so much, that chose her over the boy she liked? If Emmeline and Adeline were so different, why was it impossible to tell one from another? Why was it such a bad idea to separate the twins?...
Several Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.......2007-10-02
This book is overrated. The best thing about it, several references to fairy tales, ended an eighth of the way in: (p 34) "a single lupine exhalation could reduce it to rubble;" (p 40) "[the bed] was so lavishly covered with cushions that there could be any number of peas under the mattress and I would not know it...;" (p 47) "I have cried wolf too often." After an interminably long time, when the contents of the Thirteenth Tale was finally revealed, all I could do was resent the fact that Vida Winter insisted on telling the story in such a painstakingly slow manner (p 52) "beginning at the beginning, continuing with the middle, and with the end at the end. Everything in its proper place. No cheating. No looking ahead. No questions." The result being that readers were forced to trudge through the hundreds of pages of nonsense that made up the story of her unlikely life (which appears to include a major theme from the novel Middlesex and several characters who would have fit right in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's nest). The who's who of the family members was a boring lesson in inequalities, and the mental states of several characters only served to confirm why familial relationships are not generally allowed to stray into the forbidden zone. Far from the end, I was tired of learning the details about the reclusive writer's ultra-dysfunctional family members and their pitiable but uninterestingly messed up lives. Better: Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, Emma, Jane Eyre, The Woman in White, The Turn of the Screw, The Wings of the Dove, etc.
Storytelling At It's Best!.......2007-09-29
I've read so many wonderful books by first time novelists this year, and The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield will certainly join the ranks of Audrey Niffenegger and Elizabeth Kostova. This is another one of those unread treasures that has been sitting on my shelf and it makes me wonder what other visionary treats lie there in waiting.
The Thirteenth Tale is a prime example of storytelling at it's top form. Margaret Lea is a young woman who works at her father's bookshop which specializes in rare and antiquarian books. She's been surrounded by books throughout her life and has grown comfortable with the classics such as Jane Eyre, Middlemarch, The Woman in White, etc. and has shied away from more contemporary literature. That is, until she is summonsed by Vida Winter, a top selling novelist with a mysterious past who has requested that Margaret record the story of her life. Margaret is a bit leary of the commission, but accepts and finds that she must face her own ghosts while recording the ghosts of Ms. Winter's past - a past that reveals that the truth is often stranger than fiction.
There are so many things that I loved about this book. The characters are wonderful. Vida Winter is someone that I wish truly existed just so that I could sit in her library in front of her fireplace and listen to her tell me her stories. But of course, the wonderful Diane Setterfield, who wrote Vida Winter's character does exist ;) The storytelling aspect of this novel was just perfect. There wasn't a single moment in the novel when I was bored. There's constantly a hook to grab you and the story is always appealing.
I haven't read Daniel Wallace's book, Big Fish, but much of this novel reminded of a gothic version of the film. It's a tale of a past that's truly bizarre, yet grounded in fact. This novel could easily be translated to the big screen and make a beautiful film by the way. Setterfield paints a very vivid picture in her descriptions of the landscapes, her characters appearances, the libraries, etc.
I'm so glad that I've finally joined the other half of the world that's read this book! I've been saying this a lot lately, but here's another author that I really look forward to following throughout her career. Setterfield certainly has a promising future ahead of her if she continues to turn out novels that deliver as well as this one did.
Loved It !.......2007-09-28
: ) ***** Dark, gothic, absorbing. I just couldn't put the book down. ***** : )
Amazon.com
With this book, popular epic fantasy writer Niles begins a new series, the Seven Circles trilogy. Each of the seven circles of this new world is home to a different race (the usual dwarves, trolls, goblins, centaurs, etc.), and all are ruled by the wise elven Senate at Nayve, the great city in the Circle at Center, seat of the elven College and the mystical Grove where druids and enchantresses serve the One True Goddess.
The story gets going in the first circle, when evil Delver dwarves destroy the city of Axial, ancient home of the good Seer dwarves. Fearful of rising darkness, well-meaning druidess Mirandel summons human warriors from many different times in earth's history to teach her peaceful people how to fight, but gets more than she bargained for when one of them turns out to be an insane Crusader named Sir Christopher, who is bent on razing the Circles of "infidel" Goddess-worshippers. Sir Christopher murders the Keeper of the magical Stone of Command and uses the Stone to build an enormous army of Delvers, centaurs, and others who long to overthrow the elven hierarchy.
Although Niles's characters seldom rise beyond stereotype and the climactic outcome arises thanks to a convenient (and predictable) deus ex machina, Niles's many fans are sure to forgive these flaws in favor of the detailed setting and the excitement of a brisk plot filled with derring-do. --Charlene Brusso
Book Description
With his acclaimed Watershed Trilogy from Ace--and his phenomenally successful "Dragonlance" series from TSR--Douglas Niles became one of the most promising stars of epic fantasy adventure. Starlog magazine raved that Niles "writes so well that his characters come to life after only a few sentences." Now this gifted storyteller has created a rich and complex new trilogy filled with centaurs, goblins and trolls, druids, elves, and other fantastic beings who live in a world of peace--until now...
In the realm of the Seven Circles, harmony has reigned since time immemorial. That is about to change....Disaffected members of all the races are gathering into a force that may spell the doom of the Seven Circles. Strangers to brutality and warfare, the inhabitants need a champion who can teach them to defend themselves. For this, they recruit warriors from a world where only the strong survive. A primitive world where life lasts only as long as you can fight for it...
A world called Earth.
"Absolutely nobody builds a more convincing fantasy realm than Doug Niles." --R.A. Salvatore, New York Times bestselling author.
Customer Reviews:
Clunky Prose.......2006-06-02
I did not care for Nile's style of writing. I felt like the prose was a huge distraction, and I kept "tripping" over his writing voice. It wasn't as bad as the Ill Made Mute, but just as annoying. Basically, it was not fun to read. things that usually is a staple in books I do not finish reading is noticing the writing style more than the story. I did so with this book. I will probably never read another Niles book because of it.
Mediocre at best.......2006-01-18
I have to say that this book was good, but not too good. What makes the book interesting is taking human warriors from earth and bringing them to nayve to help fight a war. Also, there are many different races to help add diversity to the book. There's even a talking dog named ulfgang! The things that I didn't like though was when belynda got raped by king christopher. Also, some of the things in the book come to quick and aren't explained as good as they should be. Also be aware of the sexuality, as it is common in the second book as well. Still, it was a good read.
Good Read.......2005-11-15
I have been an avid fan of fantasy since I was young, so of course I love watching movies and reading books about this fantastic subject. I was bored of watching television in my spare time, so I decided to take a chance on Circle at Center. I'm glad I did. This book did take some time getting used to with all the moving around, and fast paced plots, but once over that hurdle, it gets quite good. I have finished the whole series, and I believe that by far it is the best series that I have read- so far... I think it was a good blend of romance, action, lust, disgust, and a little bit of comedy. Sufficed to say, it will remain on my bookshelf for all to see and inquire about.
Never rises above a cliche.......2004-12-08
In addition to other criticisms about the book, I'd like to add that the world that Niles has created really doesn't make any sense. He has slapped to together a bunch of fantasy staples such as elves, druids, dwarves, etc. without much regard to how they arrived or fit in his world. Things are exist because he wrote it -- no internal logic is necessary.
Terry Pratchett's Discworld books make much more sense -- and we're talking about a parody where that world rests on the back of a giant space-faring turtle!
A Huge Plummet in Quality.......2004-09-20
I liked this book at first despite the sex which I think, was written in too much detail. Sex can be implied at various degrees in a story, but this was a bit too much. But still I would have still rated this book a 4 or 5. However I hated the part when the knight raped the elf queen. A sage ambassador with great magical powers. Maybe I'm too much of a softy, but I hate when the author does not respect the fate of his characters. I would rather have see the sage-ambassador die rather than the be raped, which truly disgusted me!
To quote my Enlish teacher "this was Douglas Niles' porn" (although actually he was referring to Anne Rice's "Queen of the damned but I'm sure one might get the idea). I did not personally like this book mostly because of the emotional response that it inflicted me with.
I do however recomend this book and I would be very willing to read any other of Douglas Niles' books, however never again would I read this series, however; maybe once I'm a bit more mature, I'm not sure.
Average customer rating:
- An excellent overview of a remarkable artistic group.
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The Covarrubias Circle: Nickolas Muray's Collection of Twentieth-Century Mexican Art (Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center Imprint Series)
Manufacturer: University of Texas Press
ProductGroup: Book
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ASIN: 0292705883 |
Book Description
New York in the 1920s and 1930s was a modernist mecca that drew artists, writers, and other creators of culture from around the globe. Two such expatriates were Mexican artist and Renaissance man Miguel Covarrubias and Hungarian photographer Nickolas Muray. Their lifelong friendship gave Muray an entrée into Covarrubias's circle of fellow Mexican artists—Frida Kahlo, Rufino Tamayo, Juan Soriano, Fernando Castillo, Guillermo Meza, Roberto Montenegro, and Rafael Navarro—whose works Muray collected. This outstanding body of Mexican modernist art, now owned by the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center (HRC) at the University of Texas at Austin, forms the subject of this beautifully illustrated volume.
Produced in conjunction with the Ransom Center's exhibition "Miguel Covarrubias: A Certain Clairvoyance," this volume contains color plates of virtually all the items in Nickolas Muray's collection of twentieth-century Mexican art. The majority of the works are by Covarrubias, while the excellent works by the other artists reflect the range of aesthetic shifts and modernist influences of the period in Mexico. Accompanying the plates are five original essays that establish Covarrubias's importance as a modernist impresario as influential in his sphere as Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, and Jean Cocteau were in theirs. Likewise, the essays reestablish the significance of Nickolas Muray, whose success as a master of color photography, portraiture, advertising imagery, and commercial illustration has made him difficult to place within the history of photography as a fine art.
As a whole, this publication of the Nickolas Muray Collection vividly illustrates the transgression of generic boundaries and the cross-fertilization among artists working in different media, from painting and photography to dance and ethnography, that gave modernism its freshness and energy. It also demonstrates that American modernism was thoroughly infused with a fervor for all things Mexican, of which Covarrubias was a principal proponent, and that Mexican modernists, no less than their American and European counterparts, answered Pound's call to "make it new."
Customer Reviews:
An excellent overview of a remarkable artistic group........2006-08-02
Miguel Covarrubias is a major caricaturist and painter who is long overdue for an appreciation in El Norte. This book details his 'circle', which included Kahlo and Rivera and the photographer Nickolas Muray. Their activities and art were well documented. Inspirations included dance and dancers; it's great to contrast Muray's photographs with Covarrubias' drawings of the same people.
The book is well written and provides much insight into the period and the people.
Book Description
“A JOLLY READ–McPhee’s characters are wonderfully weird. . . . Romance mingles with mind-swelling musings on superclusters and string theory. . . . The end equation is an elegant inquiry into the randomness of love and the glory of fate.”
–Entertainment Weekly
As a reporter for New York’s last evening tabloid, Marie Brown writes about the bizarre and the scandalous. But her life is hardly either. She’s too single, too tall, and too pragmatic for anything other than her routine–which consists of going to work and going to the library, where she indulges in her one passion, physics, and in conversations with Marco Trentadue, the strange “freelance intellectual” in blue pajamas. Then the trajectory of her life takes an unexpected turn.
Nora Mars–glamour girl, star of stage and screen–is near death. Marie has worshipped Nora since she was in high school. Naturally she will write Nora’s obit. When Marie meets Nora’s charismatic third ex-husband for an interview, she struggles between a reporter’s integrity and plain old lust. What Marie uncovers is a story of a starlet who took the exigencies of fame into her own hands–and the inspiration to do the same with her own love life.
Customer Reviews:
Celebrity death and Cosmology.......2003-01-06
If someone told me that an author would seamlessly incorporate obituaries, quantum cosmology, the public library and sibling separation into a captivating work of fiction, I would never have believed it.
But that is exactly what Jenny McPhee has done. In her debut novel, McPhee tells the story of tabloid obituary writer Marie Brown. Marie has three obsessions. She loves golden age movies to the point of memorizing their dialogue. She spends copious hours at her local public library doing research on a quantum science paper that she never finished before dropping out of graduate school. And she can't stop thinking about her estranged brother.
When her favorite golden age femme fatale actress lies in iminent death at a hospital, Marie decides to take a big chance and volunteers to write her biography/obituary for the tabloid. That decision turns into a crash course of self-discovery.
McPhee deftly weaves the disparate aspects of Marie's life into a satisfying and believable whole. Marie is the perfect antihero, a conglomeration of self-doubt, confusion and boldness whose humanity never grows old. The secondary characters, from the quirky library denizen Marie befriends to the celebrity's brassy sister, are equally human.
Despite all the elements McPhee wraps into her story, the plotline never loses direction and surprise twists and turns keep the reader on his/her toes. Though the author changes time frames frequently with little warning, these switches are logical and clear enough that confusion is minimal. Most gratifying to me is the novel's lack of explicit sex and gratuitous obscenity.
The biggest drawback to this novel is that the plot slows in the middle seemingly to spend more time with character development and background establishment. The heavy discussions on quantum cosmology may also put off readers unfamiliar and disinterested in quantum science and philosophy. But neither criticism should discourage readers who appreciate well-written, quality fiction. This novel is a piece of art and Jenny McPhee is an author to watch.
A Little Bit Technical.......2002-10-12
I think that it was a really good book, but was a little hard to follow. If your into science and the whole idea of quantum mechanics (im not) then I think your would understand it a little more than I did. It's not evening easy reading, however, once you start reading, you get really into the book and can really relate to the main charater.
A Book to Linger Over.......2002-10-07
Marie Brown is a tabloid writer in search of the explosive story about a dying movie star idol. Marie Brown is a too-tall half-deaf woman who hasn't spoken with her brother Michael in fifteen years. And Marie Brown is an aficionado of quantum mechanics who has been writing her philosophy of science paper for over a decade. How Marie centers her uncentered life makes for interesting reading in Jenny McPhee's The Center of Things, a unique novel about anthropocentric applications of theoretical science.
The chapters are arranged by topic: time, truth, beauty, jealousy, etc. Movie quotes, scientific theories, Marie's conversations with Marco Trentadue, Freelance Intellectual, and the plot itself all serve to explore the topic. Throughout the book, Marie develops her career-breaking tabloid scandal. The juxtaposition of her shallow aim with the depth of her approach demonstrates the potential of popular culture to capture real human experience.
There are some weak spots in this book. In some places the story becomes subsumed by its devices. Readers with not much science background will need to take it slowly to understand large portions of Marie and Marco's dialogue. Readers with lots of science background may find the anthropomorphizing of theoretical physics preposterous rather than whimsical. And in some places Marie almost gets lost as the dialogue takes over, but those spots make for the most fascinating reading.
To say that this book is unusual doesn't quite do it justice. This is a book to linger over, and read tidbits of aloud. It is a wonderful postmodern novel.
Fun Read.......2002-04-22
This is a fun, off-beat book and I thouroughly enjoyed the read. It's true that when Marie is remembering a science converstaion with her friend Marco where an old story about her past with her estranged brother comes up the story can get a bit muddled, but the story-telling easliy overcomes this unusual pattern. It was even nice to get this different approach. I really didn't quite grasp *all* of the scientific theories presented, but I was able to get a lot out of the book, just the same. It could be I was just too impatient to see what happened next. I was glad, in the end, that I gave this book a chance.
Particles & Photons Hamper the Plot.......2001-12-11
This first novel is highly imaginative and has a lot going for it. The first chapters are snappy and original, punctuated by amusingly cynical quotes from the dying actress Nora Mars. But for my money, the much-talked-about science isn't properly integrated into the plot. Marie the tabloid reporter goes to meet someone. In the midst of a riveting interview, she flashes back to chatting mainly about quantum mechanics with her weird friend Marco in the science library. And her conversation with Marco contains an anecdote about her estranged brother. A flashback within a flashback. Instead of intriguing the reader, somehow this manages to disrupt the flow of what plot there is. By the end of the novel the quantum mechanics and philosophy of science act like goop in a drain, practically preventing the plot from flowing at all. Nevertheless, I look forward to McPhee's next novel which I hope will prove just as strange and off-beat as this one.
Average customer rating:
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From Center to Circumference: God's Place in the Circle of Self
Elizabeth-Anne Vanek
Manufacturer: Paulist Pr
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
Inspirational | Catholicism | Christianity | Religion & Spirituality | Subjects | Books
Roman Catholicism | Catholicism | Christianity | Religion & Spirituality | Subjects | Books
Faith | Christian Living | Christianity | Religion & Spirituality | Subjects | Books
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ASIN: 0809136236 |
Book Description
Circular analyses of philosophical, linguistic, or computational phenomena have been attacked on the assumption that they conflict with mathematical rigour. Barwise and Moss have undertaken to prove this assumption false. This volume is concerned with extending the modelling capabilities of set theory to provide a uniform treatment of circular phenomena. As a means of guiding the reader through the concrete examples of the theory, the authors have included many exercises and solutions: these exercises range in difficulty and ultimately stimulate the reader to come up with new results. Vicious Circles is intended for use by researchers who want to use hypersets; although some experience in mathematics is necessary, the book is accessible to people with widely differing backgrounds and interests.
Customer Reviews:
First systematic exposition of the Anti-Foundation Axiom.......2006-04-23
As the title suggests, this is the first systematic exposition of classic set theory without the axiom of foundation. What replaces it, the anti-foundation axiom, allows sets to be members of themselves and it is this type of circularity that, as the authors claim, lies at the heart of understanding knowledge in interacting systems (like computing machines or game-theoretic agents or Liar-type sentences that refer to themselves).
What makes the whole endeavour work is that this new axiom is still consistent with the rest of ZF theory (a fact that is proved in the book) and in this sense the new theory can be thought as an "extention" of the traditional hierarchical construction of sets.
The book is written in textbook style in that it presents the material methodically and it is reasonably self-contained (a basic understanding of set theory and adequate motivation are enough).
I would have given 4 stars for poor binding and some typos (nothing serious though), but the quality of presentation and the fact that it includes answers to all problems more than make up for it.
Fasciniating look at a new extension of set theory.......1999-11-18
This book discusses recent advances in the general field of set theory. The authors study a variant of ZF in which the axiom of foundation is replaced by a new axiom allowing non-well-founded sets. Just as the naturals can be extended to the integers, and the integers to the rationals, and the reals to the complex numbers, in each case by positing new numbers that are the solutions to a class of equations, so this book posits an extension to any model of set theory consisting of the solutions to a class of (systems of) equations having no solutions in ZF. The simplest example is the equation
x = {x},
whose solution,
x = {{{{...}}}} (infinitely deep)
is not permitted in ZF, but exists and is unique in the authors' theory.
The purpose of this extension to ZF is to create a set theory in which certain circular or infinite phenomena from computer science and other fields, e.g. cyclic data streams, can be much more directly modeled than is now possible in ZF. Currently in ZF in order to represent a cyclic data stream one has to develop the aparatus for natural numbers, and then represent the stream to be a function from the natural numbers into some suitable set representing the type of data. But in the author's set theory the stream could be represented as an unfounded set that is the solution to a simple equation, and many of its properties could then be more easily deduced without resort to arithmetic.
I found this book absolutely fascinating, and I highly recommend it to anyone who has had a course in set theory. The theory in the book is quite elegant and satisfying.
I was delighted to learn that there is still room for new variations of the axioms of set theory, a subject I thought (probably naively) had been fairly static for 60 years.
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