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"My son's illness is eight years old and has no name. It started when he was fourteen. He is now twenty-two. It is taking away his ability to walk and to reason. It is getting worse, some years more rapidly than others."
These words begin the first section of Blue Peninsula, a narrative of a son's degenerative illness in thirty-three parts focused around poems that have provided companionship and sustenance to the author. When multiple diagnostic avenues delivered no explanation for the worsening disabilities of her older son, Ike, Madge McKeithen "became a poetry addict--collecting, consuming, ripping poems out of magazines, buying slender volumes that would fit in my pocket or pocketbook, stashing them in loose-leaf notebooks, on shelves, stacking them on the floor. In the midst of all this grief, I had fallen in love. With words. Poems, especially. And just in time."
McKeithen draws on a wonderfully wide ranging group of of poets and lyricists--including Emily Dickinson, the Rolling Stones, Paul Celan, Bruce Springsteen, Marie Howe, Walt Whitman, and many others--to illuminate, comfort, and help to express her sorrow. Some chapters are reflections on friendships and family relationships in the context of a chronic and worsening illness. Some consider making peace with what life has dealt, and others value intentionally reworking it.
Not written to suggest easy solace, this powerful work aims to keep company, as would any individual whose loved one is on a course in which the only way out is through.

• Sales Rank: #1614854 in Books
• Published on: 2006-04-04
• Released on: 2006-04-04
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Dimensions: .87" h x 6.24" w x 7.50" l,
• Binding: Hardcover
• 240 pages

From Publishers Weekly
The stiffening of McKeithen's eldest son Ike's legs was the first symptom of an undiagnosable disease that would gradually debilitate the 14-year-old with ever-worsening maladies: brain atrophy, dementia and blood abnormalities (though he's still alive). McKeithen, a former teacher, researcher and editor, renders the first eight years of her life strained by Ike's illness; she watches Ike's physical pains increase and social abilities decline, worries over her other son's reaction, loses connections with friends and alters plans for Ike's future (her husband isn't mentioned much). More significantly, the book chronicles McKeithen's love affair with poetry. Each chapter opens with a poem from an eclectic range of bards to whom the author looks for answers: Paul Celan, Emily Dickinson, George McDonald, Walt Whitman. Some put words to emotions that feel indescribable; some provide guidance unattainable elsewhere; some propose hope in the most dire moments. Dissecting the poems as meticulously as she does her son's disease, McKeithen finds the multiplicity in poetry enables her to shift her perspective and approach reality from different angles. For instance, poetry's permission to elude a singular meaning comforts her anxiety over Ike's fate and excuses the lack of explanation for his illness. Readers will come away reminded of poetry's powerful ability to enlighten personal struggles. (May)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Review
"A mother with a passion for poetry, Madge McKeithen shows us by example how to find comfort in verse as she lives with the agonizing burden of her son’s mysterious illness. In her words and those of others, she reveals a creative way to bear the pain of unresolved loss and grief. Poignantly, she finds strength and resiliency as poetry offers the solace of some truth when the ambiguities of life cannot." —Pauline Boss, author of Ambiguous Loss and Loss, Trauma and Resilience

"Madge McKeithen treats poetry as what Kenneth Burke calls ‘equipment for living.’ Poems become her abiding companions as she lives through and confronts her son’s devastating unnamed illness. Blue Peninsula is a deeply moving book that, like good poetry itself, disturbs and consoles." —Edward Hirsch, author of Poet’s Choice

"’After great pain,’ Emily Dickinson wrote, ‘a formal feeling comes.’ And after the great pain of her son’s grievous illness invaded Madge McKeithen’s life, the formal grace of poetry came to her—or she to it. In that turning to poetry she has given us an extraordinary document of human solidarity and uncommon courage. We are always glad of a great poet in our midst. But it may be rarer still to find a great reader of it, to see embodied in a life the reason poetry matters at all. In her modest, steadfast encounter with individual poems set against the harrowing downward spiral of her son’s life, McKeithen becomes what every writer longs for—the dreamed of ‘dear reader’ that literature lives for. Out of such pain to have fashioned such a heartening book—a remarkable achievement." —Patricia Hampl, author of I Could Tell You Stories: Sojourns in the Land of Memory

"BLUE PENINSULA is a sequence of meditations on poems not by a literary critic but by a mother who is fighting despair over her young son’s bewildering and protracted sickness. Madge McKeithen tries on these poems—ranging from John Clare to Diane Ackerman—like garments to fit the changing shape of her sorrows, and she holds onto each one to keep herself from falling into the well of grief. Here—let there be no doubt-- poetry makes something happen." —Billy Collins

About the Author
Madge McKeithen was born in Fayetteville, North Carolina, and attended the College of William and Mary and the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. She has been a teacher, and a researcher and editor for a U.S. congressman and the World Bank. She lives in New York City. Blue Peninsula is her first book.

Most helpful customer reviews

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful.
not to get over, only to bear grief
By Carol Peters
Madge McKeithen writes:

"How much I need someone to know that the well is deep, that its substance is grief, that the water we drink is black, that when I am down there, I cannot breathe, and that I am screaming, screaming that I had wanted something else."

Yet every page of Blue Peninsula witnesses McKeithen rising from the bottom of the well, discovering poetry as a rope to climb, to knot, to unravel and reweave.

The author begins each chapter by quoting from a poem that has helped to leaven her grief. For example, T. S. Eliot, from "East Coker," Four Quartets:

". . . the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.

Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:

So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing"

McKeithen's son suffers from an illness that can not be named, solved, or recovered from. As I read this beautiful book, the author's grief, her losses, allow me to better bear mine.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful.
Grief, poetry and courage in a wonderfully readable book.
By gloriana
In this amazing book, Madge McKeithen not only uses the poetry she loves for her own comfort, but to help inform her own understanding of a life that has broken off from the one she intended to live. Her son, Ike, is ill. No one knows what to call the illness, no one can predict its duration nor offer treatment. A mother alone in the wilderness of emotions and yet stuck in the daily grind of obligations, work, and relationships in the face of the dreadful, terrifying illness of her child.

McKeithen's book is astounding and courageous, beautiful and fresh.

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful.
A book I couldn't put down
By Susan Meyers
Blue Peninsula, its author Madge McKeithen says, "is not about resolution, but about connection." McKeithen turns to poetry to make some kind of sense of the chaos that has engulfed her world since her son Ike was diagnosed with a degenerative, but unnamed, illness nine years ago. The poems include favorites that I too might have chosen--Whitman's "A Noiseless Patient Spider" and Rilke's "Sunset"--as well as surprising choices that taught me deeper ways to think about the griefs and complexities of life--poems, for example, by Alan Michael Parker, Kenneth Koch, and Carl Phillips. One of the most moving, especially in the context of Ike's illness, is Elizabeth Bishop's "One Art."

But it's not just the poetry. It's McKeithen's honesty, her skill as a writer, and her determination to tell the story that had to be told--that's what makes this a book I couldn't put down until I read it all the way through.

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!! Ebook Free In America, by Susan Sontag

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A glorious, sweeping new novel from the bestselling author of The Volcano Lover.

The Volcano Lover, Susan Sontag's bestselling 1992 novel, retold the love story of Lady Emma Hamilton and Lord Nelson with consummate power. In her enthralling new novel-once again based on a real story-Sontag shows us our own country on the cusp of modernity. In 1876 a group of Poles led by Maryna Zalewska, Poland's greatest actress, travel to California to found a "utopian" commune. Maryna, who has renounced her career, is accompanied by her small son and husband; in her entourage is a rising young writer who is in love with her. The novel portrays a West that is still largely empty, where white settlers confront native Californians and Asian coolies. The image of America, and of California-as fantasy, as escape, as radical simplification-constantly meets a more complex reality. The commune fails and most of the migrs go home, but Maryna stays and triumphs on the American stage. In America is a big, juicy, surprising book-about a woman's search for self-transformation, about the fate of idealism, about the world of the theater-that will captivate its readers from the first page. It is Sontag's most delicious, most brilliant achievement.

Susan Sontag is the internationally acclaimed author of three novels, a volume of stories, and six collections of essays. In 1990 she received a five-year fellowship from the MacArthur Foundation. She lives in New York City.

• Sales Rank: #1413002 in Books
• Published on: 2000-03
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Dimensions: 1.27" h x 6.31" w x 9.31" l,
• Binding: Hardcover
• 387 pages

Amazon.com Review
As an essayist, Susan Sontag has tended to stick pretty rigorously to the modern age, whether she's anatomizing the wild world of camp or roasting Leni Riefenstahl over the coals. But in her fiction--particularly in such fin-de-siècle productions as The Volcano Lover--she's clearly felt the allure of the past. And In America, which chronicles the travails of a late-19th-century actress, shows Sontag in top time-traveling form. What's more, it illuminates her motives for glancing so persistently backward. "Almost everything good seems located in the past," she notes in a first-person prologue, "perhaps that's an illusion, but I feel nostalgic for every era before I was born; and one is freer of modern inhibitions, perhaps because one bears no responsibility for the past." There's nothing, it seems, like the age of innocence--a golden moment before we moderns had the curse of self-consciousness brought down on our heads.

It's ironic, then, that In America revolves around a regular paragon of self-consciousness: a brilliant Polish diva named Maryna Zalezowska. The year is 1876, and this Bernhardt-like figure has decided to abandon the stage and establish a utopian commune in (you guessed it) California. Not exactly a logical career move, is it? Yet this journey to America does involve a major feat of self-reinvention, for which Maryna may be uniquely qualified. Writing a letter home from the brave new world of Hoboken, New Jersey, she argues against the idea that "life cannot be restarted, that we are all prisoners of whatever we have become." And once she arrives in Anaheim with her husband, child, and fellow utopians in tow, she does seem to slough off the skin of her older, European self. She is now that exotic creature, an American, existing in an equally exotic landscape--which happens to elicit some of Sontag's most lyrical prose: They had never felt as erect, as vertical, their skin brushed by the hot Santa Ana wind, their ears lulled by the oddly intrusive sound of their own footfalls.... Hardly anything is near anything here: those slouching braided sentinels, the yucca trees, and bouquets of drooping spears, the agaves, and the squat clusters of prickly pears, all so widely spaced, so unresembling--and nothing had to do with anything else. Like every utopia in human history, Maryna's is a failure. Following its collapse, she is moved to return to the theater--but as an American, now, plugged securely into the middlebrow culture of her adopted land. The rest of the novel charts her brilliant career among the philistines, along with a number of heated erotic detours.

Given its subject matter, Sontag's novel is oddly anti-dramatic: she juggles a half-dozen narrative strategies but seldom allows us to sink our teeth into a prolonged scene. Yet she delivers a great many other riches by way of compensation. Her take on the perils and pleasures of expatriation is worthy of Henry James (who actually makes a cameo appearance, assuring Maryna that England and America will morph into "one big Anglo-Saxon total.") And she includes a superbly entertaining portrait of theatrical life, culminating in a virtuoso monologue from Edwin Booth that suggests a Gilded Age Samuel Beckett. As always, there is the pleasure of watching the author's formidable intelligence at work, immersing us in the details of a character or landscape and then surfacing for a deep draught of abstraction. Perhaps Sontag is too cerebral to ever produce a straightforward work of fiction. But this time around, anyway, she brings both brains and literary brawn to bear on what Henry James himself called "the complex fate" of being an American. --James Marcus

From Publishers Weekly
As she did in The Volcano Lover, Sontag crafts a novel of ideas in which real figures from the past enact their lives against an assiduously researched, almost cinematically vivid background. Here again her signal achievement is to offer fresh and insightful commentary on the social and cultural currents of an age, with a distinctive understanding of how historical events forged character and destiny. If the story of renowned Polish actress Maryna Zalewska cannot compare in drama to that of Admiral Nelson and the Hamiltons (as a protagonist, Maryna remains somewhat shadowy and elusive), Sontag succeeds in conveying how the political and intellectual atmosphere of Poland and the U.S. in the late 19th century affected her heroine's life. Beautiful, famous and restless at 35, Maryna decides to leave her native land, suffering under Russian occupation. She convinces her husband, Count Bogdan Demboski, her would-be lover, journalist Ryszard Kierul, and various other members of the Warsaw intelligentsia to emigrate to America, where, influenced by Fourier's social philosophy, they will establish an experimental farm commune in southern California. Predictably, the community fails to prosper and falls into debt; idealism gives way to disillusionment; Maryna decides to resume her career, achieving immediate acclaim; and the romantic triangle moves to a new stage. Meanwhile, Sontag makes meaningful associations between a woman's need for freedom and independence, a nation's suffering under a conqueror's heel and the common human quest for "newness, emptiness, pastlessness... this dream of turning life into pure future" that colored many immigrants' views of America. She leads readers into the book via a long, breathless, one-paragraph prologue, narrated as if in a fever dream; indeed, it is not until many pages into the novel that the date and the geographical setting are established. Exemplary at imagining an actor's needs, impulses and sources of inspiration, Sontag also conveys the theatrical world of the time (East Lynne was the most popular play; Sarah Bernhardt reigned in Paris) almost palpably. There are few dramatic peaks and valleys in Maryna's story, but the historical backdrop--with pithy and evocative descriptions of American cities at the turn of the last century, cameo portraits of salty frontier types, and snippets of Western lore--supplies the vigor that the main plot often fails to engender. While this book does not exert the passionate energy of The Volcano Lover, it is a provocative study of a woman's life and the historical setting in which she moves. Author tour; U.K. rights to Jonathan Cape. (Mar.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
In 1876, 35-year-old Maryna Zalewska, Poland's brilliant, revered actress, packs up her 14-person entourage, including husband, child, maid, and assorted relatives and admirers, and emigrates to Anaheim, CA, determined to shed her glittering life and disappear into the unglamorous anonymity borne of the radical, hard-scrabble work of her commune. After a couple of years, with the failure of the farm looming, Maryna returns to the stage in a dazzling U.S. comeback that rockets her to renewed fame, fortune, and smashing success across the nation and overseas. Basing her new novel on the life of Helena Modrzejewska (stage name Helena Modjeska), Sontag uses dense, elegant language, inventive dialog, impassioned monolog, and diary entries to lure the reader more deeply into the fascinating historical journey of a powerful actress charging her high-energy way through the lives of her inner circle, leaving in her wake broken hearts, inspiration, and a sad inner core that may be forever masked by her inability to separate her actress side from her human one. Sontag triumphs once again with her gift for turning history into riveting fiction (Volcano Lover). Encourage readers to get beyond the annoyingly contrived first chapter with its invisible observer.
---Beth E. Andersen, Ann Arbor Dist. Lib., MI
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Most helpful customer reviews

78 of 86 people found the following review helpful.
Rich in ideas, disappointing in ending
By Candace Siegle, Greedy Reader
Reading this book is like having someone snatch a particularly juicy feast out from under your nose before you've had the chance to enjoy it properly. "In America" is a rich tale to savor, but slices of it are underdone and it comes to such an abrupt end that the reader is left wondering what happened to the final course.
Starting the novel with an awkward Zero chapter--meant, I think, to better explain the characters--Susan Sontag tells of Maryna Zalezowska, the leading Polish actress of the 1870s, who comes to California to open a utopian commune near Anaheim. The commune quickly fails, and Zalezowska begins the task of reinventing herself as an American actress. She does this brilliantly, and begins a new career traveling across the United States in a private train car performing everything from Shakespeare to the 19th century's favorite sob-fest, "East Lynne."
The sections on how an actress of that age learned and prepared roles, and the insight into nuts-and-bolts workings of 19th century American theater are marvelous, as are the stunning monologue chapters expressing the three main characters' internal and external struggles (the book ends with a devastating monologue by Edwin Booth that is one terrific piece of writing). On the other hand some of the characters are barely sketched and "In America" simply ends. There's no resolution, no sense that the last page of the book should be the last page-in fact, you'll probably turn that page expecting a concluding chapter. And you'll feel cheated.
There's something mean about allowing readers such access to characters' minds and emotions and then chopping the narrative when there is obviously so much to come. Is it that Sontag can't sustain the narrative? The novel reads that way.
It is hard to know how many stars to give "In America." I found much of it fascinating, but felt slighted by the lack of resolution. Yes, even though I know that the real-life model for Maryna, Helena Modjeska, had a long and successful career before retiring to the remote Southern California canyon that still bears her name, I feel robbed of the chance to follow her there, guided by Sontag's masterly hand.

15 of 15 people found the following review helpful.
Lazy readers writing unfair reviews
By Eric Maroney
Generally, the reviews of In America here are dazzylingly unfair. Certainly, reading this novel is not like sitting down and watching TV, or even reading the Sunday New York Times. The novel demands that the reader read changes of style, tone, shift in narrative focus, change from letters to first person narrative back to third person narrative, to a sort of interior monologue. What is wrong with this, if it is done with control, as Songtag does, except for the fact it demands that readers fail to be lazy? So, this is not a novel for the easily frazzled. It demands faith from the reader, but rewards the reader for this trust with a deep investigation of what it means to be an American and human.

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful.
A Listless Tale That Glides On A Sparkling Smooth Surface
By A Customer
The plot of "In America", Susan Sontag's National Book Award-winning novel, is adumbrated in her introductory note, where she describes the real historical life that inspired the fictional work. In Sontag's words, the novel was "inspired by the emigration to America in 1876 of Helena Modrzejewska, Poland's most celebrated actress, accompanied by her husband, Count Karol Chlapowski, her fifteen-year-old son Rudolf, and the young journalist and future author of `Quo Vadis' Henryk Sienkiewicz, and a few friends; their brief sojourn in Anaheim, California; and Modrzejewska's subsequent triumphant career on the American stage under the name of Helen Modjeska." While Sontag strongly emphasizes that the characters and actions depicted in her novel are purely invented (and there is no reason to believe the contrary), the plot largely follows the biography that inspired it.
"In America" begins in a post-modernist fashion, the book's "Chapter Zero" being the first person narrative of a contemporary authorial voice who finds herself coming out of the cold winter of an unidentified Eastern European city, shivering, into a party in the private dining room of a hotel more than a hundred years earlier. There is seemingly a disjunction of time and place. The narrator does not understand the language the people are speaking, "but somehow, I didn't question how, their words reached me as sense." From this point, the authorial voice, the imagination, begins naming the people in the room-in effect, begins creating the characters that will populate the tale to follow-and begins probing the animated conversation she overhears, the snippets of enigmatic dialogue that will gradually accrete into the novel. As the narrator suggests at the end of this Chapter Zero, in words resonant of a theme by Virginia Woolf, "each of us carries a room within ourselves, waiting to be furnished and peopled, and if you listen closely, you may need to silence everything in your own room, you can hear the sounds of that other room inside your head." Thus, in typical Sontag fashion, the novel itself begins with a self-conscious intrusion of theory and authorial presence.
From this interesting and auspicious beginning, "In America" seamlessly glides into the narrative proper, the story of Maryna Zalezowska, a much beloved Polish actress who, together with her husband Bogdan, her son Piotr, her paramour Ryszard, and an entourage of friends and followers, emigrates to America in 1876. Landing in New York, the group spends a brief period living in Hoboken, visiting the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia and exploring New York City before embarking on a voyage to the West. After a brief sojourn in San Francisco, they move down the coast to Southern California, where they establish a small settlement in Anaheim. Maryna, the leader of her band of ardent disciples, sees their vineyard and farm in Anaheim as a kind of acting out of Fourieristic ideals, a little Brook Farm of Polish emigrants in the Wild West. Life is hard, however, and the utopian dream soon becomes a dystopic unraveling as Maryna goes back to San Francisco, has a brief affair with Ryzsard and returns to the theater. Her husband, Bogan, remains at the Anaheim settlement until it can be sold and then rejoins Maryna in San Francisco, where she has become an overnight theatrical sensation, her Polish stardom now burning brightly in America.
From this point, the novel becomes almost exclusively the story of Maryna. She changes her name to Marina Zalenska, travels to Virginia City and, eventually, New York City (and even, briefly, London), and attracts fans and admirers wherever she goes. Her life becomes a self-centered, exhaustive tour of America, performing with her own repertory company and making stage appearances with the Edwin Booth, the most renowned actor of the time. Pushing the narrative's other characters into the shadows, Marina Zalenska makes America her own, "In America" being not so much the story of what it was like for a group of Eastern Europeans to emigrate to America, but, rather, the story of Marina Zalenska's personal triumph in America.
Susan Sontag is a brilliant writer, her prose supple and lithe. Reading this book is effortless. Sontag also uses a range of stylistic devices-journal entries, letters, theatrical dialogue, monologue-which make "In America" a fascinating literary construction. However, the quality of the writing does not redeem the listless tenor of the tale or the shallowness of the characters and ideas which Sontag propogates. At one point, Maryna says, "an actor doesn't need to have an essence. Perhaps it would be a hindrance for an actor to have an essence. An actor needs only a mask." Unfortunately, Maryna's view of acting seemingly permeates this novel, the view of the character becoming the practice of the author: the characters and the ideas of "In America" are not essential, but only superficial. Like the post-modernist beginnings of Chapter Zero, the reader only gets a shallow tale, a tale that glides on a sparkling smooth surface with trivial and uninteresting characters; while the writing is easy, the story fails to hold the reader's interest and, hence, the reading becomes difficult and soporific. "In America" is perhaps worth reading, but it is not deserving of the National Book Award.

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Manila, 2000. Forty-four-year-old Roger Caracera returns to his birthplace after nearly three decades in the United States. He has come to bury the corrupt, charismatic head of the family sugar dynasty: his estranged father, Jesus. To Caracera's chagrin and pleasure, he is now viewed by his countrymen as the representative American; a local tabloid even refers to him as a General Douglas MacArthur look-alike. And when his father's will is read, Caracera is stunned to discover that he has been left half a million dollars.

Unable to live with this burdensome inheritance, he decides to give his money away. But who among the millions of needy Filipinos is he to focus on?

Traversing high and low life, societies rank and respectable, and with a cast of characters that includes a slum-dwelling boy hustler, a middle-aged American pederast, a rising Filipino tennis player, a calculating society matron, and a Peace Corps worker turned trophy wife, The Disinherited is an incisive and illuminating exploration of the impulse to do good in the world and the paradoxical harm brought on by generosity.

• Sales Rank: #3448878 in Books
• Published on: 2004-09-02
• Released on: 2004-08-12
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Dimensions: 9.00" h x 1.27" w x 6.00" l,
• Binding: Hardcover
• 384 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Charity proves complicated in MacArthur Fellow Ong's second novel (after 2001's Fixer Chao). After making a fortune in sugar production in the Philippines's Negros Occidental province, corrupt family patriarch Jesus Caracera dies, unexpectedly leaving his 44-year-old, disaffected, Americanized son, Roger, much of his fortune. Stunned and appalled by his legacy, Roger announces his plans to give the money away, and much of the book portrays the hapless Roger, like a gloomy twin of the Magic Christian, going into the slums of Manila and the violent province of Negros to give away cash. His family is not really alarmed, however, until he decides to reward his late Uncle Eustacio's sexual obsession, Pitik Sindit, aka Blueboy, a boy prostitute and stripper whose fans, watching him gyrate awkwardly to ABBA songs, are moved to ejaculatory ecstasies. Pitik mistakes Roger's gesture as a seduction ploy. Or hopes that it is: Pitik falls hard for Roger, who is terminally straight or spiritually frigid—even Roger can't decide which. Pitik's crush is echoed by the more mercenary desire of a young Manila tennis player. Ong is a first-rate cartographer of the cultural map of Manila, and his novel is bracingly honest, with some standout scenes. But Roger's perpetual stasis—his "programmed funk"—isn't transformed by art into something the reader can fully sympathize with.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Review
"Ong [has a] gift for quick, acerbic caricatures and piercing observations about contemporary culture." --Janet Maslin, The New York Times

"Han Ong is at the forefront in an emerging canon of global novelists. He faces the worst injustice: the world economy multiplying some people's wealth while trapping others in unsolvable poverty. The Disinherited asks, What can individuals possibly do? How can they endure this tragic new world?" --Maxine Hong Kingston

About the Author
Han Ong is the author of a novel, Fixer Chao (FSG, 2001). A MacArthur Fellow, he has written several critically acclaimed plays. He lives in New York City.

Most helpful customer reviews

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful.
"We were raised in a convent, then released into Hollywood"
By A Customer
When Roger Caracera returns to the Philippines for his father's funeral, he gets more than he bargained for. Although never very close to the wealthy sugar magnate, Jesus Caracera, Roger is chosen as the chief inheritor to the old patriarch's immense fortune, giving him a tidy sum of $500,000, perhaps in an effort for Roger to reestablish a connection with his birthplace.

Roger has had an uneasy relationship with his homeland. More American than Philippino, Roger has long since rejected much of his restrictive, conservative upbringing, preferring to adopt the freewheeling "western ways." Now living in New York City and teaching writing at Columbia University, his return to Manila is viewed with suspicion and a certain chagrin by his older and cynical uncles and aunts.

For the Caracera family has been hiding a dark secret: Apparently Roger's Uncle Eustacio Caracera was gay and had willed a sizeable sum to Pitik Sindit, a child whore; a young, poor prostitute with whom he had fallen in love with. Shamed by his brothers and sisters, Eustacio had sequestered himself from his own immediate family, undertaking a willed ostracism, a careful quiet mutiny.

Annoyed that his family tried to derail Pitik's rightful inheritance, and full of guilt over his family's feudal wealth, Roger decides to track him down as well to give him his rightful bequest. While his relatives begin to view him as the "unearther, the burrower, and the formenter of old and new troubles," Roger comes to believe that he wants to leave some kind of signature behind, his actions reflecting a bedrock of selflessness.

Roger's journey leads him into the midst of Manila's most horrible slums as he witnesses the city's barely underground gay sex trade. Pitik also goes by the name of Blueboy, and works as exotic dancer; employed by a vicious Philippino woman who also pimps him, he's constantly tempted by a self confessed American pedophile. Roger, who considers himself a confirmed heterosexual, tries to go out of his way to save Pitik from this squalid life, but he finds himself forming a strange connection to this boy, who is simultaneously seductive and naïve, bit also manipulative, and quite repellent.

Author, Han Ong weaves an exotic tale of family intrigue, set against the background of a country where the demarcation between the rich and poor, the haves and the have-nots have never been more finely drawn. Roger starts out with good intentions, determined to end the line of what he sees as a decrepit dynasty, but he is constantly confounded by the world around him.

His Aunt Irene warns him, trying to set him straight, in her world "there are the servers and those whom are served." She possesses a ruthless, clear-eyed logic that aims to cut through the "liberal pretensions and foggy romanticism" of her nephew. This is reflected in Ong's own view of the Philippines, a world of elite tennis clubs serving as pockets of peace, members and patrons shielded from the cries of so much teaming poverty, "a country where money has a tactile presence; its power put plainly was supernatural."

Ong is notably quite damning of his homeland, hardly sympathetic to his country's plight, which continually excused it's poverty, its lack of education, its deplorable standard of living, and it's history of willing subjugation first to conquerors Spanish, Japanese, and American, and more recently to a string of mad despots.

The Disinherited is a big, sweeping saga; with the characters speaking in paragraphs and thinking in essays, long diatribes, the style reflecting this, deliberately convoluted and elaborate. The prose is studied, exquisite, and beautiful, as Ong steadily weaves a web of the Philippines, showcasing its history, class warfare, politics and cultural clashes; there's no doubt that the book is epic in tone and in theme.

In Roger, Ong has created a subtle and complicated character, caught up in the changing tides of his culture he's a man whose values are undoubtedly anchored in the West, but he still feels the ineffable pull of his birthplace, the old world with all it's chaos, corruption, poverty, and organized mayhem. Mike Leonard January 06.

5 of 7 people found the following review helpful.
too bad
By Mark Chow
I cant get through the book. Compared to fixer chao is just terrible, I am SO disappointed. I read the first 3 chapters and had no idea whats going on. I guess like everyone else in hollywood, success has spoiled this artist who I was once obsessed with after reading Fixer Chao. Moral of the story: Just because they come out with one good book doesn't mean you should run out and buy their next book. Han Ong, what were you thinking? Stylistically its out of control, you used to be so candid and honest and straightforward, now your words only confuse and depress me. I just cant recommend this book although Fixer Chao was the best book I read in 10 years, hands down.

0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.
Challenging in every way.
By John E.
The author's style and structure for "The Disinherited" are a challenge. This book is an even more serious challenge because there are no characters with whom most readers can easily or fully identify or sympathize. Their lives and living conditions are so far removed from American culture. The circumstances under which the main character (Roger Caracera) returns to and remains with his family in Manila are not welcoming, loving, pleasurable, or rejuvenating. He is accosted, hustled, patronized, politicized, and condemned. He is emotionally and intellectually unprepared to face the past and the unanticipated position in which he is placed -- the demand to know who he is and why. It would have been far easier if he had been disinherited, instead of the opposite.

All of that is what makes this an exceptional novel -- a challenge to read, and a challenge to like.

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Fresh-squeezed Lexicology, with Twists

No man of letters savors the ABC’s, or serves them up, like language-loving humorist Roy Blount Jr. His glossary, from ad hominy to zizz, is hearty, full bodied, and out to please discriminating palates coarse and fine. In 2008, he celebrated the gists, tangs, and energies of letters and their combinations in Alphabet Juice, to wide acclaim. Now, Alphabetter Juice. Which is better.

This book is for anyone—novice wordsmith, sensuous reader, or career grammarian—who loves to get physical with words. What is the universal sign of disgust, ew, doing in beautiful and cutie? Why is toadless, but not frogless, in the Oxford English Dictionary? How can the U. S. Supreme Court find relevance in gollywoddles? Might there be scientific evidence for the sonicky value of hunch? And why would someone not bother to spell correctly the very word he is trying to define on Urbandictionary.com?

Digging into how locutions evolve, and work, or fail, Blount draws upon everything from The Tempest to The Wire. He takes us to Iceland, for salmon-watching with a “girl gillie,” and to Georgian England, where a distinguished etymologist bites off more of a “giantess” than he can chew. Jimmy Stewart appears, in connection with kludge and the bombing of Switzerland. Litigation over supercalifragilisticexpialidocious leads to a vintage werewolf movie; news of possum-tossing, to metanarrative.

As Michael Dirda wrote in The Washington Post Book World, “The immensely likeable Blount clearly possesses what was called in the Italian Renaissance ‘sprezzatura,’ that rare and enviable ability to do even the most difficult things without breaking a sweat.” Alphabetter Juice is brimming with sprezzatura. Have a taste.

• Sales Rank: #1079340 in Books
• Published on: 2011-05-10
• Released on: 2011-05-10
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Dimensions: 9.33" h x 1.00" w x 6.37" l, 1.15 pounds
• Binding: Hardcover
• 304 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. The humorist and panelist on public radio's Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me pours a tall glass of wordplay, witticism, curmudgeonry, and anecdote in this beguiling follow-up to Alphabet Juice. Leafing through the Oxford English Dictionary and other respectable sources, Blount compiles his own facetious lexicon of terms that pique his interest and prod him into a ramble. "Sonicky" words always get high marks for sheer auto-evocativeness- " âÇÿsplotch' explodes from the mouth and makes an unmissable mess of itself"-but any dubious etymology, quaint and off-color usage, or over-reaching lexicographer's dictat is liable to get him going. Then he's off into historical digressions ("not until 1598 did prick appear as an insult"), grammatical rants (you-all is not singular, Yank), miscellaneous peeves (Karl Rove's prose, people who think somebody else wrote Shakespeare's plays), and, always, a shaggy-dog story he wants to tell. Such is the force of the author's free-associational logic that the entry on meta-narrative carries us straight through Jean-François Lyotard's theory of the postmodern to international news reports of a rash of hog- and possum-hurling misdemeanors in Mississippi. Blount's hilarious collection of riffs and raves adds up to a cantankerous ode to the English language in all its shambling grace. (May)
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

From Booklist
Lamenting critics of finicky language users, humorist Blount declares that when it comes to language, he intends to �finick� until the day he dies. And finick he does, with joy and curiosity and a great appreciation for words. In this follow-up to Alphabet Juice (2008), Blount contends that letters and sounds are not arbitrary, as some linguists claim, but are connected to our senses. Savoring the juiciness of some words that connect to our senses of sight and sound, Blount introduces the concept of �sonicky,� the satisfying or curious sounds of words. His collection is a discourse on oddities of origin, meaning, and pronunciation. His sources are as venerated as the Oxford English Dictionary, as contemporary as urbandictionary.com and YouTube, and as eclectic as his own tastes and experiences. Blount�s selection of words is particularly �sonicky� and is accompanied by amusing facts and anecdotes and crazy stories that show the peculiarities of etymology and definitions and the deep and abiding beauty of words. Writers and readers will love this book. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Well-known humorist and library panelist Roy Blount Jr. follows up Alphabet Juice (2008) with another entertaining look at language, which will be supported by an author tour and a national advertising campaign. --Vanessa Bush

Review
"Blount's selection of words is particularly 'sonicky' and is accompanied by amusing facts and anecdotes and crazy stories that show the peculiarities of etymology and definitions and the deep and abiding beauty of words. Writers and readers will love this book."—Booklist “The humorist and panelist on public radio’s Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me pours a tall glass of wordplay, witticism, curmudgeonry, and anecdote in this beguiling follow-up to Alphabet Juice. . . Blount’s hilarious collection of riffs and raves adds up to a cantankerous ode to the English language in all its shambling grace.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

Most helpful customer reviews

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful.
Tangy and tasty, but on the pulpy side
By Jean E. Pouliot
Lovers of word origins are sure to flock to Roy Blount Jr.'s "Alphabetter Juice" for a reinjection of Blount's trademark folksy erudition. The book is an alphabetical listing of essays on the origins and uses of words and phrases (flies, gillie, institutional memory, etc.) spiced with frequent Blount tangents. It's fascinating reading, mostly at the edge of comprehensibility. Blount seems hell bent on pounding into the reader's head his favorite concept of "sonicky" words. Sonicky words (unlike the closely-related onomatopoeia) are those whose pronunciation bears some resemblance to the meaning of the word. Take "push" and "pull." Push starts out with a plosive "P" sound that mimics the instant of propulsion, while the soft, lingering "sh" follows the poor devil's flight into the void. Pull, on the other hand, while starting with the same instant of the action's beginning, uses the long "l" sound to draws the word to an indefinite end. I found the concept of sonicky words interesting, though I'm not convinced that words are created this way. Wouldn't various languages have sonickiness that draws similar-sounding words for the same concept? Yet they don't. Maybe sonicky words are sonicky because we tend to pronounce them according the their meaning? Like the unconsciously long draw of "puuuuulllllll",

Which brings me to others reason for the lost star.

For all the wonderful material in the book (and there is a ton of it!) Blount sometimes can't seem to get out of his own head. More than a few of the entries were so loaded with clever wordplay and inscrutable allusions as to be incomprehensible. (What is it with his obsession with Frisian?) It's almost as though Blount was writing an ode to his own braininess, forgetting to let the reader in on the story as well. And his etymologies tended to be hard to follow, and hence unconvincing.

Best about the book were Blount's forays into personal anecdote. He is clearly a well-read and smart fellow. His asides - whether on Chesterton's verse, or salmon fishing in Iceland with a local girl, or pig-tossing in Mississippi - were as entertaining and lucid as parts of the rest of the book were not.

Lots of carping about a 4-star book, no? But there you have it. Roy Blount is a brilliant writer whose writing occasionally chases its own tail into the antechamber of oblivion. Squeeze as much out of "Alphabetter Juice" as you can, but don't worry if you run into some dark, soft spots.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful.
Folksy and funny
By K.M. Weiland, Author of Historical and Speculative Fiction
I wasn't sure what I was getting in this book. Mostly, I bought it just because it was a buck fifty and pushed me over the Free Super Shipper Savings on Amazon. An annotated dictionary about the history of words. As a word nut, that sounded attractive. But it could very easily have ended being super tedious.

Not so. Not so at all. This book is a charmer from start to finish. Folksy, funny, self-indulgent in all the best ways, and downright educative. It's not juicy, so much as chewy - in a salty, lip-smacking, can't-eat-just-one sort of way.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful.
Educational and Entertaining
By P. Miller
This title grabbed my eye on the new books shelf at the local public library, and I've laughed aloud more in the past two days reading it than in the past several months combined. It is both educational and entertaining. I'm ordering a copy as birthday gift for my son, who is an English major and has of late taken to referring to himself as "a scholar." It's the ideal busy thinking man's bathroom book, filled with etymologies and definitions that are brief, informative, and humorous.

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As editor of the Guardian, one of the world's foremost newspapers, Alan Rusbridger abides by the relentless twenty-four-hour news cycle. But increasingly in midlife, he feels the gravitational pull of music―especially the piano. He sets himself a formidable challenge: to fluently learn

Chopin's magnificent Ballade No. 1 in G minor, arguably one of the most difficult Romantic compositions in the repertory. With pyrotechnic passages that require feats of memory, dexterity, and power, the piece is one that causes alarm even in battle-hardened concert pianists. He gives himself a year.

Under ideal circumstances, this would have been a daunting task. But the particular year Rusbridger chooses turns out to be one of frenetic intensity. As he writes in his introduction, "Perhaps if I'd known then what else would soon be happening in my day job, I might have had second thoughts. For it would transpire that, at the same time, I would be steering the Guardian through one of the most dramatic years in its history." It was a year that began with WikiLeaks' massive dump of state secrets and ended with the Guardian's revelations about widespread phone hacking at News of the World. "In between, there were the Japanese tsunami, the Arab Spring, the English riots . . . and the death of Osama Bin Laden," writes Rusbridger. The test would be to "nibble out" twenty minutes per day to do something totally unrelated to the above.

Rusbridger's description of mastering the Ballade is hugely engaging, yet his subject is clearly larger than any one piece of classical music. Play It Again deals with focus, discipline, and desire but is, above all, about the sanctity of one's inner life in a world dominated by deadlines and distractions.

What will you do with your twenty minutes?

• Sales Rank: #368223 in Books
• Brand: Brand: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
• Published on: 2013-09-17
• Released on: 2013-09-17
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Dimensions: 9.18" h x 1.41" w x 6.41" l, 1.38 pounds
• Binding: Hardcover
• 416 pages

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• Used Book in Good Condition

From Booklist
The editor of The Guardian recounts his quest to master a notoriously difficult piano piece in this inspiring book, a tale of perseverance in the face of enormous odds. During a period of more than a year marked by the WikiLeaks and phone-hacking scandal stories, amateur musician Rusbridger carves out the time in his demanding schedule to learn Chopin’s “Ballade No. 1 in G minor.” With great detail, down to the fingering of the piece, the series of diary entries will interest the musically minded most strongly, although it’s possible for nonmusicians to comprehend. Rusbridger speaks to experts and enthusiasts in several different fields to deepen his understanding of the piece and the impact of making music on the brain. Like the Chopin piece, reading this account requires dedication but holds rewards for those who make the effort. As his deadline looms, the drama mounts. Can he master the Ballade and answer his questions about the quest: Is there time for such an endeavor, or is it too late to try? --Bridget Thoreson

Review

“This wonderfully illuminating and entertaining chronicle shows Mr. Rusbridger's incredible dedication and energy in pursuing the mastery of an iconic Chopin piano work. He is an amateur of the piano in the way that we all should be--he truly loves the music and the instrument. I am inspired by his example.” ―Emanuel Ax

“This is not only the diary of a sixteen-month challenge but also an extended essay on beauty, memory, and performance; on time and how we use it; on work and what we do it for. A wonderful book.” ―Sarah Bakewell, author of How to Live: or, A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer

“Music is not just for professionals. It is a universal art form--to be treasured, shared, and enjoyed by amateurs. Play It Again is the inspiring story of how an exceptionally busy editor makes the time in his life for the piano--and one piece in particular, the fearsomely difficult Chopin G minor Ballade No. 1. If it encourages others to find the space for music, I, for one, would be extremely happy.” ―Daniel Barenboim

“This captivating book masquerades as the journal of a magnificent obsession, but you soon realize that it's wider-ranging than that, and far more endearing. The story pivots on a feeling that many of us share: a deep and abiding love of music coupled with a daydreamer's challenge to master one truly great work. With an exegetical discussion of Chopin's masterpiece, Alan Rusbridger insists we step inside the music with him and consider the score with the probing mind of a dedicated amateur. A remarkable tour de force.” ―Thad Carhart, author of The Piano Shop on the Left Bank

“In this dazzling, dizzying memoir, one of the world's leading newspaper editors tells of learning to play Chopin's formidable Ballade No. 1 in G minor against a backdrop of phone hacking and WikiLeaks espionage. The day-to-day counterpoint of piano practice and breaking news is a compositional feat in itself: you have the impression of a wide-awake, fearless mind.” ―Alex Ross, author of The Rest Is Noise

About the Author
Alan Rusbridger has been the editor of the Guardian since 1995. Born in Northern Rhodesia, he was educated at the University of Cambridge and lives in London.

Most helpful customer reviews

25 of 25 people found the following review helpful.
Play It Again
By S Riaz
Alan Rusbridger is the editor of the Guardian, so has little time for hobbies, but has a passion for music and for playing the piano. At an annual 'piano camp' he is inspired when a fellow attendee plays Chopin's Ballade No 1 A piece, which inspires dread in even professional pianists. Rushbridger is now in his fifies and restarted piano lessons in his late forties. He has a demanding job in news, which is now updated constantly 24 hours a day, and has little time for anything outside work. Yet, despite all that, he decides to set himself a challange to pay the piece of music which both daunts and calls to him.

It is difficult to describe this book. It is partly full of fascinating musical digressions, from the author's attempts to find the perfect piano for the music room he is building at his country cottage, to watching other amateur pianists performing the piece on YouTube, taking lessons and discussing the piece with musicians and partly it is a news diary. During the year that Rusbridger was desperately attempting to find time for practice, he was also dealing with some major news stories, such as WikiLeaks, phone hacking and the Arab Spring. The book jumps delightfully between topics, leaving you at times impatient to leave the news and get back to the music - as I am sure Rusbridger felt himself. At one part of the book he mentions a 'sneery' article about his love of music, but you can only applaud his passion for the music (and instrument) he obviously loves and the whole book is a pleasure to read, whether you are a musician or not.

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful.
Twenty Minutes a Day
By takingadayoff
Busy, successful people somehow seem to have more time than the rest of us. For instance, look at the politicians and businessmen who have huge responsibilities and many demands on their time. Somehow many of them find time for extramarital affairs and financial shenanigans.

Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger organized his hectic days to make room for learning a very difficult Chopin ballade. He wondered if it would be possible for him, in his mid-fifties to learn the song, which would require him to memorize big chunks of it, as it would be impossible to do the complex fingerwork and look at the music simultaneously. Even in his early piano playing days, he had always relied on his sight reading skills rather than memorization. And how would he manage to find a piano when he was often on the road? As luck would have it, two of the biggest stories in years were breaking the year he undertook his project, making it even more important to be on the spot for the Guardian. And of course, he also wrote this book in addition to everything else.

Play It Again is set up as a diary and covers the time from his decision to tackle the project to the finish. It's really quite inspiring and surprisingly, not at all boastful, which is quite an impressive trick. Even if you don't play piano, or any musical instrument, you can appreciate the account of covering the phone hacking and WikiLeaks stories, as well as accomplishing a personal challenge.

So next time you hear yourself saying you don't have time to learn a new language or take up kick boxing or whatever, think about Rusbridger and his twenty minutes a day.

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful.
The Guardian editor finds time for piano practice everyday
By kay Irwin
We think it normal for people in high-powered jobs to go to the gym regularly, but a work out on a very difficult piano piece provides a more challenging counterpoint to a very busy job. Two tense tales splendidly interwoven. When did he find time to write a book as well?

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> PDF Ebook Important Artifacts and Personal Property from the Collection of Lenore Doolan and Harold Morris, Including Books, Street Fashion, and Jewe

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A love story told in the form of an auction catalog.

Auction catalogs can tell you a lot about a person -- their passions and vanities, peccadilloes and aesthetics; their flush years and lean. Think of the collections of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Truman Capote, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor.

In Leanne Shapton's marvelously inventive and invented auction catalog, the 325 lots up for auction are what remain from the relationship between Lenore Doolan and Harold Morris (who aren't real people, but might as well be). Through photographs of the couple's personal effects -- the usual auction items (jewelry, fine art, and rare furniture) and the seemingly worthless (pajamas, Post-it notes, worn paperbacks) -- the story of a failed love affair vividly (and cleverly) emerges. From first meeting to final separation, the progress and rituals of intimacy are revealed through the couple's accumulated relics and memorabilia. And a love story, in all its tenderness and struggle, emerges from the evidence that has been left behind, laid out for us to appraise and appreciate.

In an earlier work, Was She Pretty?, Shapton, a talented artist and illustrator, subtly explored the seemingly simple yet powerfully complicated nature of sexual jealousy. In Important Artifacts and Personal Property from the Collection of Lenore Doolan and Harold Morris―a very different yet equally original book―she invites us to contemplate what is truly valuable, and to consider the art we make of our private lives.

• Sales Rank: #478645 in Books
• Published on: 2009-02-03
• Released on: 2009-02-03
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Dimensions: 9.25" h x .31" w x 7.50" l,
• Binding: Paperback
• 144 pages

Amazon.com Review
Amazon Best Books of the Month, February 2009: What is love? Artist Leanne Shapton may be the first person to answer this age-old question so persuasively, if not damn-near definitively. Her vision of love--that famously immaterial virtue--finds its best expression in the stuff of our daily lives. Which, of course, may not be as filled with the serendipitous charm that marks the courtship of her fictional lovers, but that doesn't make Important Artifacts and Personal Property from the Collection of Lenore Doolan and Harold Morris, Including Books, Street Fashion, and Jewelry feel any less universal. We meet Lenore and Hal after their relationship has ended; that the relics of their life--spent in fits and starts of togetherness--are presented in a Valentine's Day auction catalog has the potential to strike a bitter chord. What comes across instead is that these items, ranging widely from gifts, postcards, and photos to conspiratorial notes and precious evidence of daily rituals, deserve to be cherished for the love they still so clearly honour. --Anne Bartholomew

Review

“Taken together, the item descriptions provide a running, cumulative portrait of one couple's glorious rise and deflating fall. . . For people who have ever thought that the little gestures, tokens and inside jokes of their relationships were unique to them, Ms. Shapton's book comes as a poignant, jarring reminder of the sameness of the steps that so many couples retrace. . . Despite the mist of melancholy that floats amid this photographic record, there is also humor, caprice, knowingness and the implicit suggestion that changing feelings and fading possessions can't rob a true romance of the value it had at its height. As Lenore and Hal's remembrances show, a love affair is worth more than its trappings could fetch at a jumble sale.” ―Liesl Schillinger, The New York Times

“Important Artifacts . . . from the Collection of Lenore Doolan and Harold Morris may look like an everyday auction catalog. But the auction itself is a literary conceit: What this book-type object really does is show us the trajectory of a failed four-year relationship ― by showing us the physical detritus that two (fictional) lovers leaver in their wake.

Conceived and executed by the art director of the New York Times Op-Ed page, Leanne Shapton, the story concerns Lenore Doolan (a food writer for the Times) and Hal Morris (a photographer). Doolan appears to have been a clever and adoring girlfriend, who showered the often-absent Morris with confetti-packed envelopes (LOT 1126) and lavender pajamas (LOT 1061). Morris, who had commitment issues and a drinking problem, expressed himself via mixtapes (LOTS 1276 and 1044). What finally drove them apart? Each of the 331 lots provides another piece of the puzzle. Yes, breaking up is hard to do, but reading about it has never been so pleasurable.” ―Very Short List

“[Shapton's] book tells the story of a hopeful young New York couple and their four-year relationship almost completely through their things, many of which end up unceremoniously, and improbably, under the gavel: books, pajamas, bedside lamps, a stuffed squirrel, an astrakhan coat, the winning half of a wishbone and lots of notes, inscriptions and e-mail messages that start out giddy and become slowly more complicated, angry and sorrowful.
If there were a real failed-relationship auction house named Strachan & Quinn, where the sale is supposed to take place on Valentine's Day, the event might actually draw a modest crowd, if only because the fictional Hal Morris, a globe-trotting photographer in his early 40s, and Lenore Doolan, who is presented as a late-20s cake columnist for The Times's Dining section, are generally more meticulous than conspicuous in their consumption.” ―Randy Kennedy, The New York Times

“The task is daunting: How to render the dissolution of a relationship in a new way? Leanne Shapton succeeds against all odds with this wildly romantic and erudite book.” ―Dave Eggers, What is the What

“Leanne Shapton's splendid book is completely sensational and over-the-top great. I am nuts about it. This is the stuff of life, literally. Oh, love. Oh, despair. Oh, stolen salt shakers.” ―Maira Kalman, The Principles of Uncertainty

“Whenever I come across something of Leanne Shapton's--an illustration in The New York Times, or the wooden books she makes--I feel like I have found a hidden treasure. What a great idea--to create a fake auction catalog. It's so original, and the items are perfect and brilliantly displayed. Shapton thought of every detail. I truly am jealous.” ―Amy Sedaris, I Like You: Hospitality Under the Influence

About the Author
Leanne Shapton is an illustrator, writer, and publisher who was born in Toronto and now lives in New York. She is the art director of the New York Times op-ed page and cofounder of J&L Books, a nonprofit Publishing company specializing in new photography, art, and fiction. She is the author of Was She Pretty?

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15 of 17 people found the following review helpful.
Sweet, nostalgic and real
By Virgina Colson
Much has been made of how original and unusual the format of this book is--an auction catalog, selling off the ephemera of a failed relationship--and that's true, but it's also deliciously fun to read and a great love story. The particulars, such as 10 postcards sent by Hal to Lenore during an early business trip, one to "my gray-eyed princess" one reading "Pissing rain here, work boring, missing you and thinking of your face all the time/ all the time /all the time..." feel universal, and will be sort of heartbreaking to anyone familiar with early-stage besotment. About halfway through, I found myself starting to feel sad and worried that they're going to break up (you know it's coming) and wishing that they could just work it out. And not to give anything away, but the breakup is just as caddish and dirty and over-articulated as breakups are in real life. Leanne Shapton has proven herself to be brilliant with the telling, hilarious details of relationships (her last book entitled "Was she pretty?" for the question she asks about a boyfriend's ex-girlfriend) and the items in the catalog (the silver-plated cup the couple kept their toothbrushes in, Valentines Day menus, a collection of hotel key cards) are often as poignant as the words. I loved this book!

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful.
Objects as Witnesses
By dizzyweasel
The concept of this novel (photo essay? manifest? collage?) is to present the auction catalog of the property of defunct couple Lenore Doolan and Harold Morris as it relates to their relationship. Through the stark, material lot descriptions of the detritus of coupledom, the author presents the falling in and out of love in a plausible, understated manner. We see numbers exchanged on napkins, polaroids, emails, letters, gifts, menus, and agendas from the couple's 4-year courtship laid out in chronological order.

Some lots speak for themselves - letters exchanged by the couple, notes sent to friends, but the subtle nuances, the underlying evidence examines the psychology of a relationship. What the couple tells one another is contrasted and contradicted by letters sent (and, more poignantly, unsent) to friends, appointments made on the sly, possible betrayals (for example, Lenore makes a date with an ex-boyfriend, and later in the catalog we see Harold carrying an umbrella we are told belongs to the ex-boyfriend, left in Lenore's apartment - when was it left? did she cheat? we don't know). In notes to themselves, private musings, Harold and Lenore are ambivalent, doubt, make lists of pros and cons, visit therapists. But all the while, for a couple of years anyway, they present a loving, happy face to one another. Only later does the relationship collapse on itself, weighed down by the crushing force of incompatibility too long ignored. Harold reminiscences about ex-girlfriends, travels too frequently, gives Lenore gifts of things that belonged to other women in his life, resents Lenore's burgeoning career as a columnist. Lenore has a short temper, is much younger than Harold, cannot decide what she wants out of life, tries to daub the cracks in their love life with thoughtful gifts and food. Like most real world relationships, it ends not with a bang, but a whimper: trips ending in tears and indecision, a pregnancy scare, indifference, and finally a break that turns into a break-up.

One of the strengths of the novel is that the author has created a couple that puts on such a convincing show of functionality and appeal. If you knew them, you'd admire them. They seem so together and fun - they travel, fill their apartment with bizarre kitsch, dress in beautiful vintage clothing, photograph well, and in all respects put on the mask of perfection you so often see in couples with whom you're acquainted and wish you could be like. Perhaps the message is that underneath the trappings, the stuff, the facade, no relationship is ever what it seems.

All that said, I give this novel 3 stars, as it failed to arouse any strong feelings in me either way. Like a lengthy relationship that has long since reached its natural end, this book evokes neither love nor hate, just the resigned acceptance that it was what it was.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful.
With the Outcome Known.....Who are H & L?
By M. Majury
With the outcome known if you have read reviews or featured articles about the book, it is with a voyeuristic morbidity you view the book. You know they will not end up together and so you look for the clues to the unraveling of the relationship. It makes you think about your own archeological digs when contemplating an ended love affair which is rather depressing. The mood captured, either by intent or not, is of a dated perspective on love and relationships. It as if two people, too in love with living a lifestyle that ended thirty- to forty-years ago found each other, and got lost in the affectations of love, as opposed to the working on the reality of a relationship. And, maybe that's the point. It was hard to determine who the real Hal and Lenore were. Were they two people who loved vintage, literature to excess, vintage clothing and expensive gifts that captured their current mask? Or, were they just two people who were too narcissistic and self-absorbed in the persona they present to the outside world to drop it inside a relationship?

Even with these questions, there is a sense of doom from the moment you open the book and see the black and white photographs. You read it, examine their lives, analyze the meaning behind the items to be auctioned off, and know it all is leading to the dissolution of their relationship. This does not lead to a sense of optimism, but instead a practical dread of inevitability.

Ultimately, you wonder why they would then dump everything to do with the relationship if it was that painful. And, the "artifacts" do not indicate this was anything other than a passionate infatuation for two people who were trying on a "relationship".

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Hardcover with dustjacket

• Sales Rank: #2107832 in Books
• Published on: 1985-09-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Dimensions: 8.72" h x 1.06" w x 5.74" l,
• Binding: Hardcover
• 242 pages

From Library Journal
British director Boorman's insightful diary of his three-year effort to make The Emerald Forest is really a two-fold horror story: one concerns the harrow ing attempt to find a studio to back the projectan endeavor that takes rough ly twice the time of the film's produc tionand the other is the often disas trous tale of location filming in the tortuous wilds of the raw Brazilian rain forest. The book also sheds light on why the veteran Boorman's eccentric, ambitious films often fail: they simply do not forcefully convey to the audi ence the director's complex, interior mythic vision (released in July, The Emerald Forest has largely flopped at the box office), which is the powerful and elusive challenge that has enticed artists to work in film from its very be ginnings. David Bartholomew, NYPL
Copyright 1985 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful.
Emerald Forest in Danger
By Sandra Angell
An awesome story of aborigine people and how our modern world is taking away the rain forest and the way of life of these amazing people.

0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.
Five Stars
By Phoebe
Fun fun fun fun! Anyone who is interested in the making of movies should read this.

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