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The Men's Club: A Novel (FSG Classics), by Leonard Michaels

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Seven men, friends and strangers, gather in a house in Berkeley. They intend to start a men's club, the purpose of which isn't immediately clear to any of them; but very quickly they discover a powerful and passionate desire to talk. First published in 1981, The Men's Club is a scathing, pitying, absurdly dark and funny novel about manhood in the age of therapy. "The climax is fitting, horrific, and wonderfully droll" (The New York Times Book Review).

• Sales Rank: #1527109 in Books
• Published on: 2008-07-08
• Released on: 2008-07-08
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Dimensions: 8.50" h x .44" w x 5.50" l, .40 pounds
• Binding: Paperback
• 192 pages

Review

“Chekhov and Kafka, after consulting Chaucer, might have collaborated on The Men's Club. It is excellent.” ―John Leonard, The New York Times

“Leonard Michaels's stories stand alongside those of his best Jewish contemporaries--Grace Paley and Philip Roth. Like theirs, Michaels's vernacular achieves the level of song.” ―Mona Simpson, The New York Times

“Leonard Michaels was an original; everything he wrote, like it or not, came alive. His prose moved at a fast clip and paid readers the compliment of assuming they could match his mental velocity, with a concise, pungent and pyrotechnic style that tolerated no flab.” ―Philip Lopate, The Nation

About the Author

Leonard Michaels (1933–2003) was the author of five collections of stories and essays―Going Places, I Would Have Saved Them If I Could, Shuffle, A Girl with a Monkey, and To Feel These Things―as well as two novels, Sylvia and The Men's Club. All of his fiction will be reissued as FSG Classics.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
The Men's Club
ONEWomen wanted to talk about anger, identity, politics, etc. I saw posters in Berkeley urging them to join groups. I saw their leaders on TV. Strong, articulate faces. So when Cavanaugh phoned and invited me to join a men's club, I laughed. Slowly, not laughing, he repeated himself. He was six foot nine. The size and weight entered his voice. He and some friends wanted a club. "A regular social possibility outside of our jobs and marriages. Nothing to do with women's groups." One man was a tax accountant, another was a lawyer. There was also a college teacher like me and two psychotherapists. Solid types. I supposed there could be virtues in a men's club, a regular socialpossibility. I should have said yes immediately, but something in me resisted. The prospect of leaving my house after dinner to go to a meeting. Blood is heavy then. Brain is slow. Besides, wasn't this club idea corny? Like trying to recapture high-school days. Locker-room fun. Wet naked boys snapping towels at each other's genitals. It didn't feel exactly right. To be wretchedly truthful, any social possibility unrelated to wife, kids, house, and work felt like a form of adultery. Not criminal. Not legitimate."Cavanaugh, I don't even go to the movies anymore.""I'm talking about a men's club. Good company. You talk about women's groups. Movies. Can't you hear me?""When the phone rings, it's like an attack on my life. I get confused. Say it again.""Listen to me, man. You're one of my best friends. You live less than a mile away, but do we see each other three times a year? When is the last time we talked to each other, really talked?""I lose over a month a year just working to pay property taxes. Friendship is a luxury. Unless you're so poor it makes no difference how you spend your time.""A men's club. Good company.""I hear you."But I was thinking about good company. Some of my married colleagues had love affairs, usually with students. You could call it a regular social possibility. It included emotional chaos. Gonorrhea. Even guilt. They would have been better off in a men's club."What do you say? Can we expect you?""I'll go to the first meeting. I can't promise more. I'm very busy.""Yeah, yeah," said Cavanaugh and gave me an address in the Berkeley flats. A man named Harry Kramer lived there. I was to look for a redwood fence and pine trees. 
The night of the meeting I told my wife I'd be home early. Before midnight, certainly. I had to teach the next day. She said, "Take out the garbage." Big sticky bag felt unpropitious and my hands soon smelled of tuna fish. After driving only five minutes, I found the place.The front of the house, vine-covered, seemed to brood in lunatic privacy. Nobody answered when I knocked, but I heard voices, took hold of a wroughtiron handle and pushed, discovering a large Berkeley living room and five men inside. I saw dark wood paneling and potted ferns dangling from exposed beams. Other plants along the window ledges. A pottedtree in a far corner, skinny, spinsterish-looking. Nervous yellow leaves filled its head. Various ceramics, bowls on tabletops and plates on the walls beside large acrylic paintings, abstractions like glistening viscera splashed off a butcher block. Also an amazing rug, but I couldn't take it in. A man was rising from a pillow, coming toward me, smiling."I knocked," I said."Come in, man. I'm Harry Kramer.""I'm Cavanaugh's friend.""Who isn't?""Really," I said, giving it the L.A. inflection to suggest sympathetic understanding, not wonder. Kramer registered the nuance and glanced at me as at a potential brother.His heavy black hair was controlled by a style, parted in the middle and shaped to cup his ears in a way that once belonged to little girls. It was contradicted by black force in his eyes, handshake like a bite, and tattooed forearms. Blue, winged snake. Blue dagger amid roses. They spoke for an earlier life, I supposed, but Kramer wore his sleeves rolled to the elbow. It was hard to connect him with his rug, which I began to appreciate as spongy and orange. I felt myself wading and bouncing through it as Kramer led me toward the men.Shaking hands, nodding hello, saying my name, each man was a complex flash--eyes, hand, name --but one had definition. He was graphic; instantly closer to me than the others. Solly Berliner. Tall, skinny, wearing a suit. Dead-white hair and big greenish light in his eyes. The face of an infant surprised by senility. His suit was gray polyester, conservative and sleazy. Kramer left me with Berliner beside the potted tree, a beer in my hand. A man about five foot six or seven came right up to us. "Care for a taste?" In his palm lay two brown marijuanas, slick with spittle. I declined. Berliner said, "Thanks, thanks," with frightening gratitude, and took both cigarettes. We laughed. Then he dropped one back into the man's palm. Turning toward the others, the man said, "Anyone care for a taste?"The sound of Berliner's voice lingered after the joke; loud, impulsive. Maybe he felt uneasy. Out of his natural environment. I couldn't guess where that might be. He was a confusion of clues. The suit wasn't Berkeley. The eyes were worlds of feeling. His speedy voice flew from nerves. Maybe the living room affected him. A men's club would have seemed more authentic, more properly convened, elsewhere. What did I have in mind? A cold ditch? I supposed Kramer's wife, exiled for the evening, had cultivatedthe plants and picked the orange rug and the luscious fabrics on the couches and chairs. Ideas of happiness. Berliner and I remained standing, as if the fabrics--heavy velvets, beige tones--were nothing to violate with our behinds. It was a woman's living room, but so what? The point of the club was to be with men, not to worry about women. I turned to Berliner and asked what he did for a living."Real estate," he said, grinning ferociously, as if. extreme types were into that. Wild fellows. "I drove in from San Jose." He spoke with rapid little shrugs, as if readjusting his vertebrae. His eyes, after two drags on the cigarette, were full of green distance. He was already driving back to San Jose, I figured. Then he said, "Forgive me for saying this, but a minute ago, when Kramer introduced us, I had a weird thought.""You did?"His eyes returned to me with a look I'd seen before. It signaled the California plunge into truth."I hope this doesn't bother you. I thought ..."I waited."Oh, forget it, man.""No, please go on. What did you think?""I thought you had a withered leg.""You did?""Yeah, but I see you don't. Isn't that weird?""Weird that I don't have a withered leg?""Yeah, I thought your leg was all screwed up. Like withered."I wiggled my legs. For my sake, not his. He stared as if into unusual depths and seemed, regardless of my wiggling, not convinced. Then he said, "I'm forty-seven.""You look much younger." This was true. But, with the white hair, he also looked older."I stay in shape," he answered, marijuana smoke leaking from his nostrils. "Nobody," he said, sucking the leak back against crackling sheets of snot, "nobody else in the room is forty-seven. I'm oldest. I asked the guys."He gagged, then released smoke, knifing it through compressed lips. "Kramer is thirty-eight."I wondered if conversation had ever been more like medical experience, so rich in gas and mucus. "I'm always the oldest. Ever since I was a kid I was the oldest." He giggled and intensified his stare, waiting for me to confess something, too. I giggled back at him in a social way. Then the door opened and Cavanaugh walked in."Excuse me," I said, intimating regret but moving quickly away.My friend Cavanaugh--big, handsome guy--hadheroic charisma. He'd been a professional basketball player. Now he worked at the university in special undergraduate programs, matters of policy and funding. Nine to five, jacket and tie. To remember his former work--the great naked shoulders and legs flying through the air--was saddening. In restaurants and airports people still asked for his autograph.Things felt better, more natural, healthier, with the big man in the room. Kramer reached him before I did. They slapped each other's arms, laughing, pleased at how they felt to each other. Solid. Real. I watched, thinking I'd often watched Cavanaugh. Ever since college, in fact, when he'd become famous. To see him burn his opponent and score was like a miracle of justice. In civilian clothes, he was faintly disorienting. Especially his wristwatch, a golden, complicated band. Symbolic manacle. Cavanaugh's submission to ordinary life. He didn't burn anybody. He'd once said, "I don't want my kids to grow up like me, necks thicker than their heads." He wanted his kids in jackets and wristwatches.He stopped slapping Kramer's arms, but Kramer continued touching him and looked as though he might soon pee in his pants. People love athletes. Where else these days do they see such mythic drama? Images of unimpeachable excellence. I was infected byKramer's enthusiasm, a bit giddy now at the sight of Cavanaugh. When Kramer left to get him a beer, we shook hands. He said, "I didn't think I'd see you tonight." There was mockery in his smile."It's not so easy getting out of the house. Nobody but you could have dragged me to this.""You open the door, you're out.""Tell me about it.""I'm glad you're here. Anything happen yet? I'm a little late because Sarah thinks the club idea is wrong. I'm wrong to be here. We argued at dinner." He whispered, "Maybe it isn't easy," and looked at his wristwatch, frowning, as if it were his mind. Kramer returned with the beer just as a phone started ringing.

Most helpful customer reviews

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful.
The Evolution of Men's Club
By Murray Browne
Originally published in 1981, the Men's Club is set in the Bay Area during the late 70s. A psychologist named Kramer gathers a small group of men in their mid-to-late thirties together to discuss guy stuff. The club starts out, writes Michaels, "trying to recapture high-school days. Locker-room fun. Wet naked boys snapping towels at each other's genitals." There's some drinking and pot smoking before the men migrate into more dangerous territory-a refrigerator stocked full of food for tomorrow's luncheon - a woman's group hosted by Kramer's wife.
Mixed in with the bacchanalia are men talking about themselves. These aren't men talking about sports or power tools, but strange, sometimes sad, stories about their relationships with women - sometimes their wives -- who they've connected with, but are still trying to process. Michaels does a satisfying job tying up the story with a cohesive ending and the writing is terse and engaging.
Also, it's not an especially dated book, because men haven't evolved much in the last 20 years.

11 of 13 people found the following review helpful.
A truly funny novel that brings news from the gender wars
By A Customer
Seven men, some acquainted and some strangers, meet one night to begin a club. This won't be a working man's club named for a large four-legged mammal or a toney businessman's city athletics and dinner club; instead it's a club dreamt up by a psychotherapist, modeled on the women's consciousness raising groups of the 1970s. Without an agenda, the men immediately focus on one subject -- women. They tell stories of bafflement, need, love, abuse, and marriage. They listen and they argue. They eat and drink and smoke and fight and break things. Their stories are outrageous and they sound true. Most of all, these men pay serious attention to one another. Michaels's masterful prose brings each man to life with gestures and dialogue and unforgettable stories. This is a small novel, but it brings important news from the gender wars. Women should read it, because it is both amusing and horrifying. These are characters you can hate and love just as if you knew them. In fact, you do know them. They are your brother, father, son, husband, lover, or friend.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful.
I'm Okay and You are Crazy!
By Randall L. Wilson
Recently I heard a New Yorker fiction podcast of Leonard Michael's short story, "Cryptology" and it made me want to read more of his work. I picked up "The Men's Club" at a used bookstore and found it bracingly dated. It captured the baby boomers in their first flush of adulthood and full of the seventies psychobabble.

Six men come to Kramer's house for the first meeting of the "Men's Club." The entire novel takes place over the span of an evening and the early morning. The men vent about women troubles as they become increasingly stoned, drunk or more accurately, primal. The novel is about stripping away civilization's veneer to get at the base core of men. The irony is that here they are celebrating an advancement in human development - the therapy group - they end up figuratively sitting around a cave fire competing for the alpha male position.

I say bracingly dated because the language while no longer pure, resonates with us today in its ridiculous avoidance of real life in favor of self absorption. My only quibble is that the novel feels like a stunt and the characters don't completely come alive outside their context of their usefulness as mouthpieces. Still the language, energy and satire keeps the work alive even as the characters in the book are now in their retirement years.

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~~ Get Free Ebook The Nimrod Flipout: Stories, by Etgar Keret, Institute for Translation of Hebrew Literature

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From Israel's most popular and acclaimed young writer―"Stories that are short, strange, funny, deceptively casual in tone and affect, stories that sound like a joke but aren't" (Yann Martel, author of Life of Pi)

Already featured on This American Life and Selected Shorts and in Zoetrope: All Story and L.A. Weekly, these short stories include a man who finds equal pleasure in his beautiful girlfriend and the fat, soccer-loving lout she turns into after dark; shrinking parents; a case of impotence cured by a pet terrier; and a pessimistic Middle Eastern talking fish. A bestseller in Israel, The Nimrod Flipout is an extraordinary collection from the preeminent Israeli writer of his generation.

• Sales Rank: #247649 in Books
• Brand: Keret, Etgar/ Shlesinger, Miriam (TRN)/ Silverston, Sondra (TRN)
• Published on: 2006-04-04
• Released on: 2006-04-04
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Dimensions: 8.29" h x .54" w x 5.50" l,
• Binding: Paperback
• 167 pages

Features

• Etgar Keret
• Middle Eastern
• short stories

From Publishers Weekly
Keret, an Israeli writer who also writes children's books and collaborates with illustrators on graphic stories and novels, specializes in brainteasing short short stories reminiscent of the "Shouts and Murmurs" section of the New Yorker—30 are packed in this thin volume. A typical Keret situation is enacted in "Your Man": the narrator finds that his girlfriends inexplicably break up with him in the back of taxicabs while the radio always announces a caller from a certain address. He goes to the address, finds photos of his exes tacked to the wall and erupts in violence, with repercussions that give new meaning to masochism. Dogs play a role in Keret's stories similar to the sly role they assume in Thurber cartoons, hovering between the fantastic and the everyday, and sex is an obsession ("Actually, I've Had Some Phenomenal Hardons Lately" is one story's title.) In "Fatso," a man's girlfriend confides a secret: she turns into a rotund male at night. Like French surrealist Marcel Aymé, Keret keeps his stories one dimensional, but it's a dimension he has mastered, one that peels away the borderlines of normalcy. (Apr.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist
Once you know that Keret's work has been featured on NPR's This American Life and Selected Shorts, it becomes hard to think of these 30 pieces as short stories. The adenoidal 35--going-on-13 tones of the former program's host grate in the mind like the voices of Woody Allen, Shelley Berman, and other ur-stand-ups, and the veil is parted. These aren't stories, they're routines! They're mostly told in the third person by the same kind of guys (once, gal) as the protagonists: schlemiels, though the singles among them are also slackers.^B They're modern young Israelis fixated on sex, unable to make lasting connections, frustrated to quiet madness, and feckless as . . . a stand-up's persona. Most of their stories are could-be realistic, a few are ultimately sentimental, and the best are arguably the fantasies, such as the volume opener, whose protagonist has a girlfriend ("the sex is dynamite") who becomes a fat, hairy, party-animal guy at night, and is still as much fun to be with. Vulgar, sad-sacky stuff, but amusing. Ray Olson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Review

“His enchantingly witty stories suggest that a keen intelligence can still flourish even when the air is full of flying metal ... Our best chance is that Etgar Keret will become a craze, a craze for sanity.” ―Clive James

“The best work of literature to come out of Israel in the last five thousand years--better than Leviticus and nearly as funny. Each page is a cut and polished gem. Do yourself a favor, walk over to the counter and buy this book now.” ―Gary Shteyngart, author of THE RUSSIAN DEBUTANTE'S HANDBOOK

“Stories that are short, strange, funny, deceptively casual in tone and effect, stories that sound like a joke but aren't--Etgar Keret is a writer to be taken seriously.” ―Yann Martel, author of THE LIFE OF PI

“Keret's short stories are filled with antiheroes. There are no brave Maccabees, no swashbuckling warriors. Instead, his sketches dramatize the mundane details of daily life. "When you wake up in the morning," he says, "before you've had your first cup of coffee, what you think about is not, Why isn't there a Palestinian state? You say, 'Why doesn't my girlfriend love me?' Or 'I hope somebody didn't steal my car.' "
Stories can be dreams, of a sort, and Keret's seem to promise that there is more to life than Merkava tanks and suicide killers, more even than nanotech or IPOs. His quirky collections--which have sold more than 200,000 copies in Israel--offer a glimpse into the Israeli subconscious. They satisfy jumbled, humble hopes--not the high-blown fantasies of the original frontiersmen.” ―Kevin Peraino, Newsweek

“Etgar Keret's short stories are fierce, funny, full of energy and insight, and at the same time they are often deep, tragic, and very moving.” ―Amos Oz, author of A Tale of Love and Darkness

“To try to describe Keret's work in fewer words than the work itself is a project perverse, paradoxical, modern, and strange--in short, it is like an Etgar Keret story, except not as funny and not as interesting. So I ask you to open the book and read.” ―Neal Stephenson, author of Cryptonomicon

“Etgar Keret is the voice of young Israel . . . [His] stories still seemed to deal with all the important things, friendship, sadness, fear . . . Unlike anything else the country [is] producing.” ―Linda Grant, The Independent

Most helpful customer reviews

0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.
Quirky Humor
By Valerie P.
The stories are very funny, but they start to get a little overwhelming when I read several of them in a row; the quirkiness can be a bit much all at once.

27 of 29 people found the following review helpful.
When he's good, he's good . . .
By KH1
There are many fantastic short stories in this collection, _The Nimrod Flipout_, by Israeli author Etgar Keret. There are also many that are reminiscent of first drafts from a night-school creative writing class. When he's good, Keret is a fantastic new talent, full of humor and existential angst, but when he's not - he's trite, cliche, and boring - one more young guy writing about getting stoned and laid.

The titular story "The Nimrod Flipout", is one of the best in the entire collection. Three young men are possessed, in turn, by the spirit of their friend, Nimrod, who killed himself after his girlfriend broke up with him. [Variety is also not Keret's strong suit. There are at least two other stories where someone kills themselves because they've been dumped.] After the narrator, the last to succumb to the spirit of his deceased friend, the possession repeats itself starting over again with Miron, the first to be possessed. It's a touching story about the frivolity of youth, and deeply tragic, as well; its also one of the funniest stories in the collection.

"Fatso", the opening story, I also loved. It is about a guy whose girlfriend turns into a fat, drunk, soccer-loving man after the sun goes down, and how, after spending many nights going out and watching soccer at the bar with this character, he begins to love his girlfriend, too.

This collection has its shining moments, and is highly recommended to fans of short fiction. However, don't be surprised if some of the stories dissapoint.

22 of 26 people found the following review helpful.
so-so
By concerned reader
Some of these stories are brilliant, first round knockouts. Others are shtick-yawns. The best are like the wondrous short-short stories of Spencer Holst. The worst are whines from the slacker you'd never listen to for five minutes if you bumped into them at a bar. Buy the book for the wonderful, but expect a very mixed bag.

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From a renowned sociologist, the wisdom of saying goodbye

Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot is enthralled by exits: long farewells, quick goodbyes, sudden endings, the ordinary and the extraordinary. There's a relationship, she attests, between small goodbyes and our ability "to master and mark the larger farewells."

In Exit, her tenth book, she explores the ways we leave one thing and move on to the next; how we anticipate, define, and reflect on our departures; our epiphanies that something is over and done with.
Lawrence-Lightfoot, a sociologist and a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, has interviewed more than a dozen women and men in states of major change, and she paints their portraits with sympathy and insight: a gay man who finds home and wholeness after coming out; a sixteen-year-old boy forced to leave Iran in the midst of the violent civil war; a Catholic priest who leaves the church he has always been devoted to, he life he has loved, and the work that has been deeply fulfilling; an anthropologist who carefully stages her departure from he "field" after four years of research; and many more.

Too often, Lawrence-Lightfoot believes, we exalt new beginnings t the expense of learning from our goodbyes. Exit finds isdom and perspective in the possibility of moving on and marks the start of a new conversation, to help us discover how we might make our exits with purpose and dignity.

• Sales Rank: #1239042 in Books
• Published on: 2012-05-22
• Released on: 2012-05-22
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Dimensions: 9.37" h x .93" w x 6.30" l, 1.03 pounds
• Binding: Hardcover
• 272 pages

Review
With her trademark grace and insight, Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot has added exit lines to her repertoire. in Exit, she is a superb storyteller and a wise guide to the inevitable farewells that punctuate our lives and often set us free. (Ellen Goodman, author of Paper Trail: Common Sense in Uncommon Times)

In searching for the grace and courage of exits at every stage in the life cycle, Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot offers insights into the deeper continuities that exits can affirm, binding us together and emphasizing the meaning in the composition of our lives. She argues the need for our culture to evolve rituals that express these enduring values in facing the unknown. (Mary Catherine Bateson, author of Composing a Further Life: The Age of Active Wisdom)

The resonant testimonials Lawrence-Lightfoot spotlights nicely dovetail into a conclusion befitting her research into the inevitability of departures and our individual choice to accept or bemoan them. A finely researched examination that sheds a new light on the catharsis of goodbye. (Kirkus Reviews)

Lawrence-Lightfoot has penned an examination of how people exit careers, countries, and even life. Believing that the small departures we make daily prepare us for the large ones--emigration, divorce, death--the author argues that each is a drama of ambivalence, decision-making, and epiphany . . . (Publishers Weekly)

About the Author

Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot, a MacArthur prize-winning sociologist, is the Emily Hargroves Fisher Professor of Education at Harvard University, where, since 1972, she has studied the culture of families, communities, and schools, and the relationships between human development and social change. She is the author of ten books, including The Third Chapter, Respect, The Essential Conversation, and Balm in Gilead, which won the 1988 Christopher Award for "literary merit and humanitarian achievement." In 1993, she was awarded Harvard's George Ledlie Prize for research that makes "the most valuable contribution to science" and is to "the benefit of mankind." She is the recipient of twenty-eight honorary degrees and is the first African-American woman in Harvard's history to have an endowed professorship named in her honor.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
One
 
HOME
 
 
When most of us think about home, we picture a physical place: the house where we grew up, the address we learned by heart in case we got lost, the room we painted hot pink when we turned eight and our parents allowed us to choose the color, the crack in the third flagstone step leading to the front door, the way no one used the front door anyway, since everyone came in through the back door right off the kitchen. Or our vision of home might be of the house where we now live with our children, where we make the mortgage payments each month and pay the electricity and oil bills, where we have set up a basketball hoop in the driveway for the kids to practice for the big games on Friday night up at the school, where we have barbeques for the neighbors on hot summer evenings, where the traffic and chaos of kids and dogs and busy schedules and homework are both comforting and exhausting. Our vision of home, whether it is the home of our childhood or the home we are creating as adults, has a location, an address, a mark on the map. It is a physical, tangible place. We have photo albums that chronicle our growing family over the years, everyone lined up on the front steps in the same pyramid arrangement—parents on top, kids on the bottom—with smiles that stay the same even as the bodies get bigger and bulkier.
Home is also the place where life is most familiar, where we fall into old patterns, where our roles become scripted and predictable, where there is a fine line between the bonds that bind and constrain. It is also a place where we live by secret codes and allusions that outsiders—even intimate outsiders—don’t understand or appreciate. In her beautiful essay “On Going Home” (1961), Joan Didion speaks about the power and pull of home.
I am home for my daughter’s first birthday. By “home” I do not mean the house in Los Angeles where my husband and I and the baby live, but the place where my family is, in the Central Valley of California. It is a vital though troublesome distinction. My husband likes my family but is uneasy in their house, because once there I fall into their ways which are difficult, oblique, deliberately inarticulate, not my husband’s ways. We live in dusty houses (“D-U-S-T,” he once wrote with his finger on the surfaces all over the house, but no one noticed it) filled with mementos quite without value to him (what could the Canton dessert plates mean to him? How could he have known about the assay scales, why should he care if he did know?) …1
Home, here, is defined as much by those who are outsiders—who have no real clue of what is going on, where signals seem opaque and oblique—as by those who have the inside track, who know the secrets and shadows, the habits and artifacts, the history of the family that lives in this house. Home is made more vivid by the contrasts that get drawn between the outsider’s discomfort and cluelessness and the insider’s ancient and intuitive understandings.
In his biography of the poet Wallace Stevens (1968), Robert Pack echoes Didion’s portrayal of going home, drawing the connection between the intimacy and belonging that home represents and the intimacy with his readers that Stevens achieves through his poetry. Stevens translates the language, rhythm, and cadence from his childhood home into his verse, capturing the themes of family and the feelings of familiarity with which we can all identify. Writes Pack:
Home is the place where one understands the routine, knows the secret rhythms of family activity and communication, and feels the fullness of the presence of the familiar objects. It is this sense of intimacy that Stevens seeks with the world, and it is this sense of order a poet achieves that makes this intimacy possible.2
Here we get a sense of home as the place where we learn to interpret the noises and the silences, the texts and the subtexts of our lives, where the layers and subtleties of our communication are inscribed in our hearts and minds, our bones and bodies, eventually turning up—at least in Stevens’s and Didion’s case—in the form and texture of their art.
The novelist Paule Marshall takes us a step further into the auditory dimensions and cadences of home. In her autobiographical novel, Brown Girl, Brownstones, she offers an evocative and searing portrait of an immigrant family transplanted from Barbados to Brooklyn, and she speaks about home as the sound of the language of the Bajan women as they sit talking in the kitchen.3 It is a language that Marshall herself heard as a child as she sat on the edges of the women’s circle soaking up the gossip, the stories, savoring the rhythms and poetry of their words. In “From the Poets in the Kitchen,” a short essay published in The New York Times, Marshall speaks about the language of home—particularly the talk among the women in the kitchen—that carried with it beauty, wisdom, poetry, and culture, that survived the transplantation from the blue-green sea and open horizons of Barbados to the city streets and brownstones of Brooklyn.
I grew up among poets—whatever that breed is supposed to look like. Nothing about them suggested that poetry was their calling. They were just a group of ordinary housewives and mothers, my mother included, who dressed in a way (shapeless housedresses, dowdy felt hats, dark, solemn coats) that made it impossible for me to imagine they had ever been young.4
So whether we envision home as a place, a physical location on the map that we can now google for directions; whether we feel it in the familiarity, obliqueness, and intimacy of family; or whether we hear it in the language and poetry of our mothers, home is the place we return to. It is the place that forms us, that embraces and inhibits us, that shapes our identity. It is a place where our arrival is awaited.
The tales of exit found in this chapter reframe and transfigure the meaning of home. The two stories—of a teenage Iranian boy escaping the political strife and violence in his war-torn country to come to America, and of a middle-aged gay man reflecting on his long and brave exit from the closet—shape a view of home that is earned and discovered after the protagonists have traveled far away, literally and figuratively, from their family’s place of origin, far away from the cultures and communities that nourished and raised them. The lens of exit in both narratives points to the emotional and spiritual construction of home as a hard-won place of comfort, safety, belonging, and love. Finding home requires leaving and searching, trials and tribulations, and many exits along the way.
HUNGRY FOR HOME
“I’ll go.”
It did not hit him that he was actually leaving—his family, his country, his life—until he arrived at the airport in Tehran, surrounded by his parents and siblings and a huge crowd of aunts and uncles, some of whom had traveled hundreds of miles to say goodbye. He was carrying one small cardboard suitcase, and his mother had sewn a zippered pouch into his underwear to hide the $3,000 he was taking with him. His father had had to sell a plot of land, use all of the family’s savings, and borrow from his uncles in order to come up with the money that Bijan Jalili needed to travel to the United States.
Suddenly the fear swept over him, and he froze. How could he have said—in a moment of weakness—that he would go to school in America? How could he have committed to something that now seemed so scary and wrong? How could he leave all those he loved and the life he knew? This was unbearable. “Just then it hit me … What have I done! But it was too late to back out,” says Bijan, his whole body shivering as he must have done on that fateful day. “I couldn’t stomach it … my belly was burning. I was scared out of my gourd … I was like a child afraid of the dark … I felt like I was lost in the jungle, being swallowed up by dangerous creatures.”
Bijan looked over at his father, whose head was bowed in prayer, his face washed in tears, a picture of agony and faith. His mother couldn’t stop crying—huge, sobbing wails that echoed through the airport lounge—as she clung to him for dear life. Finally his plane was announced and the waiting was over. Bijan hugged everyone hard and kissed them each on both cheeks before beginning the long march down the ramp to the plane. “Leaving my parents behind was unbearable. My feet were like Jell-O. I could hardly move them. I thought that I would just collapse.” Bijan had never even seen an airport before, never been on a plane. He stowed his suitcase and climbed into the window seat. “The fear was overwhelming as I looked down after takeoff and saw Tehran disappear behind me.” I look across the table and see the sixteen-year-old scared boy. It is thirty years later, and Bijan’s face is contorted in a grimace. He looks down to wipe away the tears with the back of his hand.
The plane touched down at Kennedy Airport at 8:00 p.m. As he heard the screech of the landing gear, Bijan’s fear took over his body and he started to shake. He looked out the window and saw the city stretched out below, “an ocean of light.” “I was new to electricity,” says Bijan as he remembers the strange sensation of seeing a whole city of twinkling lights that seemed to form the shape of “a fiery dragon.” His only thought was that he wanted desperately for the plane to turn around so he could go home. “I wanted to go back to my mom, to bury my head in her bosom … to have her hold me again.”
Once he was off of the plane, the scene was shocking. “I thought to myself, Everything in New York looks so big! I had never seen people over six feet tall … and there...

Most helpful customer reviews

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful.
Good concept, but the final result was disappointing.
By Celia Caro
Lawrence-Lightfoot's believes that we do not pay enough attention to the exits in our future-oriented culture. By recognizing that exits are part of life and honoring them with ritual and honest reflection, she feels we can actually feel liberated by the choices and changes we make, however difficult or painful they may be. Unfortunately, the choice she makes of focusing her chapters on individuals who have made big exits in their lives is too narrow, leaving the reader sifting through these highly personal anecdotal accounts for more universal and useful strategies about making their own exits in life.

4 of 8 people found the following review helpful.
Exit: The Endings That Set Us Free
By Louise Tramontano
I was not at all impressed by this book. I expected more information about endings and how to free yourself from them. However, it seemed as though each example simply reiterated the same manner in which people free themselves.

18 of 20 people found the following review helpful.
Don't Exit
By GabiStyle
I had leaved jobs, friends, family, three different degrees, my country ... and I still do not know how to make peace with the exit process. This book give me lots of insides and new ways to see this never-ending process exit. If you ever had avoid to say good bye, read it! Amazing book!

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* Fee Download The Fun Stuff: And Other Essays, by James Wood

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The Fun Stuff: And Other Essays, by James Wood

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Following The Broken Estate, The Irresponsible Self, and How Fiction Works―books that established James Wood as the leading critic of his generation―The Fun Stuff confirms Wood's preeminence, not only as a discerning judge but also as an appreciator of the contemporary novel. In twenty-three passionate, sparkling dispatches―that range over such crucial writers as Thomas Hardy, Leon Tolstoy, Edmund Wilson, and Mikhail Lermontov―Wood offers a panoramic look at the modern novel. He effortlessly connects his encyclopedic, passionate understanding of the literary canon with an equally in-depth analysis of the most important authors writing today, including Cormac McCarthy, Lydia Davis, Aleksandar Hemon, and Michel Houellebecq. Included in The Fun Stuff are the title essay on Keith Moon and the lost joys of drumming―which was a finalist for last year's National Magazine Awards―as well as Wood's essay on George Orwell, which Christopher Hitchens selected for the Best American Essays 2010. The Fun Stuff is indispensable reading for anyone who cares about contemporary literature.

• Sales Rank: #274625 in Books
• Published on: 2012-10-30
• Released on: 2012-10-30
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Dimensions: 8.56" h x 1.13" w x 5.93" l, 1.04 pounds
• Binding: Hardcover
• 352 pages

From Booklist
What makes Wood such a forceful critic is the drilling down of his intelligence, the rigor of his close scrutiny, and the precision, luster, and thrust of his prose. The title essay in his third collection, a book of 23 sit-up-straight critiques, provides intriguing clues to the source of his expressive powers. One of his subjects is Keith Moon, the late, legendary drummer for The Who. Wood’s strategy to unlocking Moon’s “many-armed, joyous, semaphoring lunacy” involves describing his own “austerely Christian upbringing” and “traditional musical education, in a provincial English cathedral town,” and secret devotion to playing the drums. So when he writes that Moon’s drumming “is like an ideal sentence of prose,” we think, ah ha! And so we read to the propulsive beat of his assured and vivid dissections of the writings of George Orwell, Geoff Dyer, Ian McEwan, Cormac McCarthy, Aleksandar Hemon, and Marilynne Robinson. Of particular note is how, in his delving essay on fellow critic Edmund Wilson, Wood parses the tricky art of literary criticism, a form much enlivened by his purposeful flams, rolls, and paradiddles. --Donna Seaman

Review

“Wood is one of the best readers writing today. Devouring these pieces back to back feels like having a long conversation about books with your most erudite, articulate, and excitable friend. To read his essays on the works of Norman Rush, Aleksandar Hemon, Leo Tolstoy, or Lydia Davis is to relive the specific brand of joy created by a particular work of genius. Wood's reviews are never just evaluations; more often they are passionate, sensitive discourses on the variations of authorial voice, the nature of memory, or the burden of biography. … Wood's veneration of virtuosity reminds why we're reading at all--because we still believe that it's possible to find transcendence in great art. Isn't it fun to think so?” ―Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“Wood is now unquestionably one of the most influential voices in contemporary literary criticism.” ―The Millions

“Literary criticism sometimes takes itself too seriously, so it's a pleasure to see that preeminent literary critic Wood's very title reminds us what literature is really about: fun. Here he offers his heartfelt views on writers ranging from Thomas Hardy, Leo Tolstoy, and Mikhail Lermontov to Cormac McCarthy, Lydia Davis, and Michel Houellebecq. . . Get ready for some bracing delights.” ―Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal

About the Author

James Wood is a staff writer at The New Yorker and a visiting lecturer at Harvard University. He is the author of How Fiction Works, as well as two essay collections, The Broken Estate and The Irresponsible Self, and a novel, The Book Against God, all published by FSG.

Most helpful customer reviews

18 of 20 people found the following review helpful.
Good Stuff
By Charlus
This is yet a third collection of Wood's essays and reviews, gathered from The New Yorker, The London Review of Books and The New Republic. While most are book reviews, the first title essay is an homage to the Who's drummer, Keith Moon and the last to his father-in-law. The pieces in this collection are far more accessible than those gathered in his first two, perhaps because of a gradual change in personal style but more likely due to the change in audience, The New Yorker having a wider readership than The New Republic, where he was originally writing many of his pieces. Nonetheless, the acute intelligent analysis remains the same even if the language has become less metaphoric.

An early piece on Sebald's novel Austerlitz represents Wood at his finest. Besides analyzing the themes of the novel, he discusses Sebald's use of photography to illustrate his novel and the blurring of reality with fiction:

"In Sebald's work, then, ... we experience a vertiginous relationship to a select number of photographs of humans - these pictures are explicitly part of the story we are reading, which is about saving the dead; and they are also part of a larger story that is not found in the book, which is also about saving the dead. These people stare at us, as if imploring us to rescue them from the banal amnesia of existence".

There is enough variety of subject matter to (hopefully) silence some of his critics who accuse him of being irrepressibly highbrow (clearly a bad thing in their estimation) and of not liking anything more current than, say, Saul Bellow, but in these pages he champions writers as diverse as David Foster Wallace (who he justly describes as being able to write ideal sentences of prose), Geoff Dyer, Lydia Davis, and Marilynne Robinson. He has more mixed things to say about Paul Auster, Ian McEwan and Alan Hollinghurst.

When referring to Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go, he marvels at "the way it rubs its science fiction narrative from the rib of the real, making it breathe with horrid plausibility, and then the way it converts that science fiction back into the human, managing to be at once sinister and ordinarily affecting". He appreciates Norman Rush's ability to write a sentence which "reproduces the crawling movement of identification by which thought moves".

All this may enrage his critics who accuse him of microanalysis and ignoring the big picture as here he repeatedly demonstrates how style and language work to support content and how attention to such details allows the critic to better explain why a novel works or doesn't. And apparently one person's accusation of "jargon" is another person's ability to recognize the use of the precise word at the right time.

Every reader will have literary critics that he or she will find useful mentors in unlocking the riches that good literature has to offer and teaching one how to read better. James Wood is clearly one of mine.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful.
"literary journalism" at its best
By Stanley Crowe
James Wood is a literary journalist with one foot in academic life -- he teaches at Harvard for part of the year. Reading his work, one finds it easy to believe that he could, if he so wished, have a very successful academic career. He has read everything, as they say, and he writes with exemplary clarity and a welcome freedom from jargon. It's tempting to think that that freedom from jargon represents for him one of the benefits of not being fully committed to an academic career. He writes mostly about books and writers, and there is really only one test that a writer like him must pass for a reader -- does he make one want to read the books and writers he is writing about (or reread and reconsider them if one once has done so)? The answer in his case is a definite "yes."

I think that a writer like Woods must have a faith that I find very engaging -- a faith that books can be enjoyed by reasonably well-educated readers and that literary journalists like himself are in the business of nurturing that enjoyment. In my own case, I've always believed that I enjoy and indeed admire Orwell, and especially his essays -- but I haven't read him in ages. Reading Wood's essay on Orwell in this volume makes me want to return to them. It's a fairly long essay, touching a number of issues, and not seeking to be the last word, but it's interesting and inviting, and it takes its starting point from an acute perception about Orwell: that while avowedly a socialist, she seems more interested in lambasting the privileged than in specifically addressing remedies for the poor and working folks. And his idea that Orwell is for revolution but isn't "a revolutionary" is worth pondering. It's the kind of judgment that makes you want to go back and test it. A similar essay, in that it has no single focus, is on Robert Alter and the King James Bible. It starts by discussing Alter's translation of the Pentateuch and moves on to questions of theodicy that have nothing really to do with Alter, but it's interesting anyway. The essay on Edmund Wilson is similarly multifaceted -- in that one, I was sort of expecting an analysis of Wilson's sympathy for modernism, but that is referenced rather than discussed, and Wood moves on to talk about Wilson's historical writing and personal writing. He has interesting things to say on it all, and it makes me want to plunge into "To the Finland Station." The essays on Tolstoy and Marilynne Robinson deftly balance criticism and appreciation, and this is one of the things that is so appealing about Wood's writing -- he seems to want to find reasons to be positive. This must come from an awareness that writing is hard to do well and that even things that don't work have taken time and thought and therefore deserve respect. In Robinson's case, he pretty much admits that the narrator of "Gilead" is boring -- but then by deciding to read the novel as a series of Emersonian essays, he finds reason to like it, and even be moved by it, after all. The most focused piece I've read (I haven't yet read every essay) is the one on Ian McEwan -- it traces a pattern of "manipulation" through much of McEwan's fiction, especially in the handling of what might be called the ordering of information. How this essay moves from criticism (Wood doesn't like the manipulation) to understanding of both McEwan and his audience is masterful.

There are a couple of more personal essays -- one on the WHO drummer Keith Moon and the other on his father-in-law -- that are different from the others and in their different ways engaging. Maybe we'll see Wood in future branch out even further to become a master of the "familiar essay' as well as the literary one. Highly recommended for folks who like books.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful.
A must read for lovers of contemporary literature.
By Noovella
Near the end of these twenty-plus essays I flashed back to being in college in the early 1980s and discovering Garcia Marquez, Borges, John Fowles, Andre Gide, Robbe-Grillet, Italo Calvino, Philip K. Dick and on and on. Amazing, fascinating, cutting-edge, avant-garde literature endures with new writers and their works continue to fill an artistic literary void. This book is one place to fill that emptiness.
The Fun Stuff starts off a little off-beat with a homage to Keith Moon's early success filled with "noise, speed, rebellion" and his eventual decline. The rest of the essays are literary critiques of quality writers and their writing and most of the time both. Woods delves deep, breaks down, tears apart a few times, comes from all directions to decipher the meaning he derives from each subject. His literary knowledge and scholarship is mind numbing as he makes complex connections between varied works that is astounding. In addition, you may need to have a dictionary close by if you read this.

And the subjects he chooses are, for the most part, extraordinary and challenging works of art and at least a few should be on any literature lover's Goodreads read, currently-reading or want-to-read lists. Here are a few of the writers and books he devours.

W.G. Sebald's "beautiful novel" Austerliz, filled with real but fictional photographs and the "rubble of history" and memory.

Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let me Go, an allegorical and tender novel that brings fantasy to an eery and hollow day to day life of clones who become aware of their reason for existing.

Norman Rush's three novels set in Botswana, particularly the masterful Mortals, and its fine intricate plotting and real sense of understanding a place and a marriage falling apart.

The theological questions in Cormac McCarthy's post-apocalyptic novel The Road.

The career of Edmund Wilson and the issues that affected the iconic journalist and critic's judgement and writing.

Joseph O'Neill's Netherlands and its colonial and colonist metaphor in New York City with the added bonus of the confused immigrant's sense of becoming American as well as the roots of a rootless man.

V.S Naipaul as the wonder and the wounded. A gritty tale of nastiness and personal demons that make you squirm.

The fascinating examples of Robert Alter's translation of the Bible that is startling because we're so used to the King James version.

Marilynne Robision and the the deep division's in a family where faith and pride and perhaps fanatical stubbornness rips a family apart.

Lydia Davis's literature of lives whose habits hide a biting loneliness that they acutely understand and question.

Ian McEwan as a manipulative novelist.

The shallowness of Paul Auster.

And, he rambled on finally getting to George Orwell's revolutionary mysticism as both contradictory and prescient. Orwell's as well as England's victory over Hitler was due to their winning combination of collectivity and individualism.

The magic realism of a mad-hatter Hungarian with a mad name: Laszlo Krasznahorkai.

Ismail Kadare, an Albanian, whose world, revolving around his battle against communism falling, evaporated when it did.

A fascinating final essay about packing up his father-in-law's library of four thousand books.

I particularly loved two essays: the Geoff Dyer piece that made me immediately purchase the novel Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi and the Alekzandar Hemon section and the extraordinary fact that he not only moved to the United States in 1992 and learned to read and write in English, but he became a master craftsman.

There were a few essays that I trudged through, e.g., Tolstoy, but that could be more about me. If you love Leo, you'll probably be engrossed in the rich analysis.

Woods is, to say the least, passionate about books and writers. His dazzling critiques are here for you to examine and discover and disagree, but ultimately he opens countless doors to the wonderful and bottomless worlds of fiction and nonfiction. A must read for lovers of contemporary literature.

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# Free Ebook Nicholas Miraculous: The Amazing Career of the Redoubtable Dr. Nicholas Murray Butler, by Michael Rosenthal

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The extraordinary accomplishments of a great educator and even greater self-promoter To those who loved him, like Teddy Roosevelt, he was "Nicholas Miraculous," the fabled educator who could do everything; to those who didn't, like Upton Sinclair, he was "the intellectual leader of the American plutocracy," a champion of "false and cruel ideals." Ezra Pound branded him "one of the more loathsome figures" of the age. Celebrated and reviled around the world, Nicholas Murray Butler, president of Columbia University for forty-four years, was a dominant personality for half a century. In this engrossing biography, Michael Rosenthal explores the many ways in which this extraordinary character seized and wielded power.

Recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1931 while simultaneously president of Columbia University, of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Butler imposed himself on America as did few others. Rosenthal's superbly researched, elegantly written narrative brings vividly to life the mania, narcissism, and genius that enabled "Dr. Butler" to transform Columbia into New York's major research university and at the same time to become an internationally recognized institution himself. Rich in social, cultural, and political insight, Nicholas Miraculous illuminates Butler's prodigious career and the complex nature of the age that nourished him.

• Sales Rank: #2372675 in Books
• Published on: 2006-01-10
• Released on: 2006-01-10
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Dimensions: 1.69" h x 6.40" w x 9.22" l,
• Binding: Hardcover
• 544 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Butler (1862–1947), one newspaper commented three years before he received the Nobel Prize (1931), was "the most lavishly decorated member of the human race." Upon his death, the New York Times described him as "one of the best known Americans of his generation the world over." However, many of Butler's projects—such as the College Entrance Examination Board—are as familiar as he is now forgotten. As president of Columbia University from 1902 to 1945, Butler nurtured the school's growth from small college to major research institution. His involvement in Republican politics brought the friendship (and later the enmity) of several presidents, and as president of the Carnegie Endowment for Peace (1925–1945), his international stature grew. Although Rosenthal, a former Columbia dean of students, attends to the personal affairs of this man absorbed by institutions, Butler's life remains one of meetings, memos and minutes. The author uses an abundance of archival and published material judiciously; his style is felicitous, and the tale is enlivened by in-fighting and occasional scandal. Manipulator? Manager? Opportunist? Idealist? Sycophant? Pioneer? Rosenthal's skill in rendering a complex life in an absorbing fashion reveals them all. 16 b&w illus., 13 political cartoons. (Jan.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist
The animating question of this biography is, How does a once-famous civic leader fall into oblivion? Nicholas Butler autocratically ruled Columbia University from 1902 to 1945. No university president today could dispose of institutional affairs in Butler's I-know-best manner. In some ways, he did know best, expanding Columbia from a college into a world-class university with professional graduate schools; sections duly recount Butler's fund-raising and stag-club networking. What extends Rosenthal's biography from institutional to general interest is Butler's life in public affairs, where he was prominent in the Republican Party, seeking its presidential nomination in 1920. He also presided over the Carnegie Endowment, gaining prestige (and the Nobel Peace Prize) for promoting idealistic schemes of peace. Fair to Butler but arch about his unapologetic, unwavering elitism, Rosenthal delivers a profile that is far livelier than its academic ambience would initially suggest. Gilbert Taylor
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Review
“A first-rate biography of Butler, rescuing him from obscurity and describing the sometimes neglected political history of Butler’s era . . . A compelling read, opening a window on the world of early 20th century politics and explaining the rise of the modern university in America.” —Vincent Cannato, New York Post “[A] vividly written and meticulously researched biography . . . [Nicholas Miraculous] is a must for those concerned with the development of college and university education from its dry days in the nineteenth century to its bristling status today.” —Louis Auchincloss, BookForum "Even before he died, or as some say, died out, Butler was out of fashion, out of date, and therefore out of the American mind, which if it yet exists will require this savory memorandum of what a great man was once considered likely to be. It is Rosenthal’s saucy distinction to be aware of all these ‘outs’ and equally aware of the larger and longer ‘in’; what is centrally important about Butler propels him and his subject to necessary attention in our moment when so much has been taken away. A restorative, even a curative book." —Richard Howard
 "Masterful narration, a firm grasp of historical context, and an endless supply of anecdotes, both amusing and appalling, propel this major biography of a seminal figure in American education and political life. Writing with a stiletto-sharp pen, Michael Rosenthal brings back to clamorous life the tireless self-promoter who was Nicholas Murray Butler. A big, boisterous, and valuable book." —Laurence Bergreen
"Though his name is surprisingly little known, Nicholas Murray Butler was one of the most illustrious and influential Americans of the first half of the twentieth century, though he is largely forgotten today. In every way an outsized personality, he was at once a gifted yet imperious administrator and a canny, self-promoting egotist, a pioneering advocate for the modern university yet also a diehard establishment figure who resisted social change. His many-faceted career embraces much of the history of his times. Michael Rosenthal’s sardonic portrait is wonderfully readable and illuminating, critical of the man but respectful of his achievement in creating a great university and bending it to his will for more than four decades." —Morris Dickstein
 "An elegant, richly detailed and irresistibly readable portrait of a man who was arguably the greatest academic careerist and institution builder of the twentieth century. Michael Rosenthal has crafted an epic and novelistically well-written likeness—not, to be sure, as Nicholas Murray Butler himself would have carved it, in the Mt. Rushmore of his own imagination, but one equally generous in its steady reckoning both of Butler’s many gifts and his many foibles, at the head of which must stand a capacity for bloviation second to none in the history of American public life." —Ric Burns

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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful.
The Butler Did It
By Lowell P. Beveridge
Nicholas Miraculous: the Amazing Career of the Redoubtable Dr. Nicholas Michael Rosenthal's biography of Nicholas Murray Butler was fascinating reading for me because of Butler's position as my father's boss and major influence on the social, political and academic world in which he lived during the 1930's and early 1940's (my formative years). It was a world of clubby collegiality for those on the inside, formal social affairs, conservative politics, anti-Semitism, and class and cultural snobbery. Attitudes towards Franco's Spain, Mussolini's Fascism and Hitler's Nazis ranged from admiration to toleration - at least up to the time of the invasion of Poland in 1939. The issue of Negroes on the faculty or in the student body was so far from Butler's concern or concept of the way things should be that it is not even mentioned in his biography. Faculty members were free to exercise academic freedom so long as they did not publicly challenge any of the basic principles of the world of Butler and his colleagues. Those who did, were dismissed or passed over for promotion.
My father often complained about the internal politics he had to deal with at Columbia and I had assumed that this was a problem endemic to all academic institutions, but after reading this book I get the impression that it was worse at Columbia than other places because of the personality and policies of Butler himself who was not a very good administrator.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful.
Miraculous Biography of Shaper of Columbia University
By Reinerlaw
Professor Rosenthal has done a superb job of evoking the persona of the man who built Columbia, using his 44-year tenure as university president. The author has even succeeded in evoking the reader's sympathies for Butler, a powerful leader who, viewed in today's lights, was an autocratic megalomaniac who missed many opportunities to build an even greater educational institution on Morningside Heights.

This biography will be of great interest to anyone who spent time at Columbia (or its sister institutions) during the 20th century -- the years during which Butler's influence was at its zenith. It provides, perhaps for the first time, a background for some of the University's admirable traditions, balanced, wisely, by a few rather embarassing episodes in its history.

0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.
Must read for those interested in Columbia or the modern university
By Raphael Pope-Sussman
Fascinating story of a man who was a giant of his times but is now just a footnote, even at the university he helped build into a giant of an institution.

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>> Free PDF Counting One's Blessings: The Selected Letters of Queen Elizabeth the Queen MotherFrom Brand: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

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William Shawcross's official biography of Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother, published in September 2009, was a huge critical and commercial success.One of the great revelations of the book was Queen Elizabeth's insightful, witty private correspondence. Indeed, The Sunday Times described her letters as "wonderful . . . brimful of liveliness and irreverence, steeliness and sweetness."

Now, in Counting One's Blessings, Shawcross has put together a selection of her letters, drawing on the vast wealth of material in the Royal Archives and at Glamis Castle. Queen Elizabeth was a prolific correspondent, from her early childhood before World War I to the very end of her long life at the beginning of the twenty-first century, and her letters offer readers a vivid insight into the real person behind the public face.

• Sales Rank: #886985 in Books
• Brand: Brand: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
• Published on: 2012-11-27
• Released on: 2012-11-27
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Dimensions: 9.43" h x 2.11" w x 6.39" l, 2.22 pounds
• Binding: Hardcover
• 688 pages

Features

• Used Book in Good Condition

Review

“[The Queen Mother's letters] do offer a fascinating, provocative first-hand glimpse into another world . . . Perhaps the most endearing side of the collection is the sheer number of earnest thank-you notes, written for everything from gifts to visits, and a great many written to Elizabeth's mother-in-law, Queen Mary, with whom Elizabeth carries on a warm and intimate correspondence. Elizabeth clearly delights in her friends, and is charmingly quick to offer assistance, take an interest in others' lives, and have a laugh at her own expense . . . Read [Counting One's Blessings] for the sheer entertainment value.” ―Heather Horn, The Atlantic

“William Shawcross, a renowned writer and broadcaster who has been given access to nine decades of remarkable correspondence from Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother, has traced the stories the letters tell . . . From childhood onwards, her words danced on the page, teeming with vitality, ebullience and optimism . . . Her letters showed a relish for language and sparkled with the joy of living.” ―The Times of India

“The intriguing new book of letters shows the unlikely evolution of the former Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon, a charming, vivacious young woman who was one of the most sought-after debutantes of her day, into a gifted queen who became an enduring symbol of the British monarchy . . . she evolved into a curious, vital young woman who was an avid reader.” ―Lorna Koski, Women's Wear Daily

“With correspondents ranging from Kenneth Clark to Osbert Sitwell, as well as her parents-in-law, daughters and eldest grandson, the Queen Mother's selected letters--collated by her official biographer, William Shawcross--are seldom dull . . . [Counting One's Blessings] provides a study of maturing character against the background of great events . . . However fluffy the Queen may have seemed when young, she proved her mettle in 1939–45. Her wartime letters, showing her abnegation, selfless duty and distress, make impressive reading. They reach, at moments, an eloquent intensity . . . These letters exemplify the truth of a remark of Auden's. ‘Be good and you will be happy is a dangerous inversion,' the poet wrote. ‘Be happy and you will be good is the truth. Men often speak of their right to happiness. In fact, it is their only duty.' The Queen saw happiness as a duty--not an entitlement--because it was her route to good works.” ―Richard Davenport-Hines, The Times Literary Supplement

“One of the most appealing aspects of the Queen Mother was her zest for life to the end--her passion for the arts, horse racing, foreign travel and whizzing round the country in helicopters. She cared nothing about money; even the Queen complained wryly about her extravagance. ‘There's something about her that's kept very young,' Ted Hughes wrote . . . [Counting One's Blessings is] expertly edited and introduced by William Shawcross.” ―Sarah Bradford, The Literary Review

About the Author
William Shawcross became a writer after leaving University College Oxford in 1968. He was in Czechoslovakia during the Soviet occupation; this inspired his first book, a biography of Alexander Dubcek, the Czechoslovak leader, which was published in 1970. Since then he has written and travelled widely. In 1995 he wrote the BBC Television series Monarchy. In 2002 his BBC Television series and book, Queen and Country, celebrated the Queen's Golden Jubilee and examined the changing face of Britain during her reign. He is also the author of Justice and the Enemy: Nuremberg, 9/11 and the Trial of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (2012). He lives in England.

Most helpful customer reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful.
A long, long life, in letters
By SciFi Lover
This book contains many letters to Elizabeth's family and friends, written over almost all of the twentieth century. Elizabeth, the mother of Queen Elizabeth II, lived through the two world wars, and she played a major role in England's courageous response to Hitler's 1939 declaration of war as the consort of King George VI.

Many of these letters are thank-you notes, and the reader could not find better models for such letters. Perhaps Elizabeth overused the words heavenly and angelic, but her warmth and enthusiasm for gifts and entertainments come through.

The royal family's joys and sorrows are shared in the letters to family members. Political events are a frequent theme, too, with discussions of growing relationships with Churchill and others. She also describes the exhausting days on tour in faraway places as the royals endure heat and humidity to see their subjects.

Even if you stop reading after the death of George VI in 1952, this book is a fascinating look at the activities of the royal family and the life of a very popular English queen.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful.
Interesting selection
By D. Steele
While I have enjoyed this collection of letters and I know I don't know how the letters were selected and what letters were still available, and what ones weren't or just didn't exist anymore (plus you can't include them all) I wonder about the letters that seem to be missing. No letters after Churchill's death? No letters about the engagement and wedding of Prince Charles and Princess Diana? Maybe there weren't any. But the Queen Mother did seem to write so many notes and letters to so many people about so many other events, that it seems odd that events like these weren't written about in letters to someone. But all in all I have enjoyed this book. It did help that I had read his biography of the Queen Mother when it came out so that many of the letters fit into a time line.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful.
A remarkable woman
By Mark Hollingsworth
I read William Shawcross' biography of the Queen Mother in early 2012, and thoroughly enjoyed it. This book added to my knowledge, sympathy and understanding of this most remarkable woman. I am glad I read the biography first, because these letters enable you to not necessarily read the book in chronological order, but you can now revisit areas of the biography and read the detailed correspondence in full that Shawcross used to extract from and create his narrative.

In today's frenetic world with text messaging and e-mail speeding up so much of our communication I spent many enjoyable evenings reading the beautifully crafted letters in this book. Even more intriguing to me was to find that the style and tone, and above all graciousness, of the writing of the Queen Mother never changed over 80 years. She wrote with the same sense of warmth and humour when she was 101, as she had been writing when she was 21!

The Queen Mother never gave an interview to a journalist or the media in her entire life, that is why this book and these letters are so important, because it captures in a way that a journalist could never do the feelings of this most remarkable woman, and her perspective on the history of the 20th century.

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Why Me? The Sammy Davis, Jr. Story

• Sales Rank: #446160 in Books
• Brand: Farrar Straus & Giroux (T)
• Published on: 1989-04
• Ingredients: Example Ingredients
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 314 pages

Features

• Great product!

From Publishers Weekly
You name it and it sounds as if Sammy Davis Jr. has done it. In this sprawling, revealing, lively second autobiography (following the bestseller Yes, I Can , also coauthored with the Boyars) stories of money, sex, violence, drugs, booze, fame, luxury and extravagance spill out relentlessly. Superstardom, admits Davis, has always been his be-all and end-all, and the almost obligatory downside--failed marriages, sickness, age, his own personal IRS auditor--are featured heavily here, along with insider show-biz gossip. More up-tone tales involve life-long buddy and supporter Frank Sinatra, the Rat Pack, the Kennedys, Richard Nixon. At the core of the book is the extraordinary black experience of the last 50 years. Davis became a star in the '40s at a Vegas hotel where he could headline but not sleep. In the '70s, he slept in Lincoln's bed in the White House, guest of the president. Even Mr. Wonderful (Davis's first Broadway smash hit) couldn't top that. Photos.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Most helpful customer reviews

15 of 15 people found the following review helpful.
A FASCINATING LOOK AT BEHIND THE SCENES OF STARDOM
By Fiona Jean Mcleod
I really enjoyed this book, I had no idea what the blacks in the US had to go through, having grown up in Australia. Sammy had a big chip on his shoulder which he carried throughout his life but it is understandable when you read what he went through. This isn't just a boring story of a star's life, it is a fascinating look at racism, politics, being rich beyond your dreams and in debt for millions - a great read.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful.
Behind the glitz view of SuperStar life
By TwilightStar
Sometimes this book is a little hard to follow. The writers jump into topics suddenly. If you don't know a whole lot about Sammy Davis Jr. you can get mixed up. It is worth reading though. Davis had a hard life and worked very hard at being a star. He had flaws and he admits them. I wish he could have balanced his family and public life better. He thought he had to be spending $$$. drinking, drugging and fooling around with women to keep his image going and it hurt his family. He was very talented a superstar, that is what he should have focused on. Anyone wanting a show business career should take lessons from this book.

Davis did a great deal to help black people and often they misunderstood him and didn't appreciate him. The most shocking thing for me was how after he worked so hard to get JFK elected president JFK just dumped Davis -- uninviting him to the inauguration. I'd never have had anything to do with the Kennedy's after that. Davis was so polite and caring and he really suffered too. Richard Nixon respected Davis and invited him to Washington several times. Who would have thought that?

0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.
This is the continued biographical story of one of the greatest multitalented artist to ever live
By Gordon W.
In the condition and delivered on time as offered.
This is the continued biographical story of one of the greatest multitalented artist to ever live. The life of Sammy Davis Jr is an inspiration alone; this book and it's predecessor, "Yes, I Can",

See all 5 customer reviews...

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