Book Description
The first exploration of the sex lives of modern teens, as reported from the frontlines by twenty-year-old Marty Beckerman.
Innovatively combining fact and fiction, the book is filled with mind-shattering stats, news reports, and confessions from adolescents nationwide about the new American "Hook-Up Culture," in which 7,700 kids lose their virginity every day.
Far from religious proselytizing, Generation S.L.U.T. seeks to find the balance between sexual freedom and sexual responsibility, and even the most cynical readers (not to mention parents) will find themselves speechless and heartbroken. Blunt and brutal, tackling everything from preteen oral sex to gun violence, sexual assault, and suicide, Beckerman's tour de force through contemporary adolescence will leave you stunned, breathless, and ultimately horrified.
Download Description
"The first exploration of the sex lives of modern teens, as reported from the frontlines by twenty-year-old Marty Beckerman. Innovatively combining fact and fiction, the book is filled with mind-shattering stats, news reports, and confessions from adolescents nationwide about the new American ""Hook-Up Culture,"" in which 7,700 kids lose their virginity every day. Far from religious proselytizing, Generation S.L.U.T. seeks to find the balance between sexual freedom and sexual responsibility, and even the most cynical readers (not to mention parents) will find themselves speechless and heartbroken. Blunt and brutal, tackling everything from preteen oral sex to gun violence, sexual assault, and suicide, Beckerman's tour de force through contemporary adolescence will leave you stunned, breathless, and ultimately horrified."
Customer Reviews:
No substance - No value.......2007-09-02
This book is very boring, full of stories that never end with ONE POINT: all teenagers have no respect for their bodies, and they are having sex like rabbits! The author tries to make his views more legitimate by providing so many statistics.
1. The book is not interesting
2. The idea of the book, teens and their instatiable desire for sex, is very old by now.
3. The book tries to scare people into moral panic rather than give a true picture of all types of teenagers.
Sadly True.......2006-10-05
What KIDS did in film, this book does for literature. It's a must read for any one who wants to know what their children just might be up to.
A justified middle-finger to American teenagers!.......2006-06-23
Finally, an exposition of the dark truth of American teenagers. This book definetely showed the horrific state of American teenager's lifestyles without holding back. It's a social necessity: this is an entire GENERATION that will damage America in the future if something isn't done. I can relate: in my school, the teens are HELLBOUND: they curse, drink, have sex, do drugs and God knows what else.
A shocking book.......2006-06-16
Beckerman is completely insane -- and that's a good thing. What he has done is to throw back the curtain to show us the horrible moral decay that has afflicted the children of the Woodstock Generation. The graphic language and sexual content may shock adults, but this is how young people talk and what young people do. Just when you think to yourself, "That's too far-fetched to ever happen," you turn on the TV or pick up a paper and see that it already HAS happened: Teenagers posting self-porn on the 'Net, the Duke gang-rape case, etc. Despite its pornographic content, Generation S.L.U.T. is fundamentally a socially conservative book, and Beckerman's a Robert Bork for the MTV era. Marty shows us the emotional and physical wreckage wrought by the serial betrayals of the "hook-up" age among kids with too much privilege and not enough supervision.
Awesome book........2006-03-22
I thought this was an amazing book. The mix of statistics, the author's own personal stories, and the short story all mixed together was original and great. Though many people didn't like that the book is published by MTV I thought that that just added to the fact that the author is a part of this generation that he speaks about in the book. This is definetly worth reading.
Customer Reviews:
Great Books!.......2007-08-09
My 7 year old daughter found this series while we were in London this June. Naturally they were a hit since horses and princesses are two of her favorite things. It also helps that there is a little mystery thrown in. She reads them from cover to cover in one sitting. And she often re-reads them when she is finished. The stories are appropriate and interesting and the characters are loveable.
Customer Reviews:
Great Books!!.......2007-08-09
My 7 year old daughter found this series while we were in London this June. Naturally they were a hit since horses and princesses are two of her favorite things. It also helps that there is a little mystery thrown in. She reads them from cover to cover in one sitting. And she often re-reads them when she is finished. The stories are appropriate and interesting and the characters are loveable.
Great series for pony-crazed girls.......2006-11-11
My 7 year old daughter discovered Princess Ellie books this past summer. She is always anxious to hear the next chapter every evening to see how Princess Ellie will solve her lastest problem revolving around ponies (hers or ones that show up in the books). We found this book fun because Princess Ellie is given instuctions how to deal with the press; and she has to figure out how to solve a mystery without breaking too many of her how-princesses-should-act rules.
Book Description
Princess Ellie has outgrown her Shetland pony, Shadow, and the King wants to sell him. Ellie doesnt like the idea of losing her beloved pony, so she comes up with a secret plan to save him.
Average customer rating:
- A social and also a coming of age novel
- Subtle and Excellent
- interesting, but...
- You're crazed if you read it too
- A fascinating commentary on the ills of Chinese society
|
The Crazed
Ha Jin
Manufacturer: Recorded Books
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Audio Cassette
 General
| Literature & Fiction
| Books on Cassette
| Audiobooks
| Formats
| Books
Unabridged
| Literature & Fiction
| Books on Cassette
| Audiobooks
| Formats
| Books
General
| Books on Cassette
| Audiobooks
| Formats
| Books
General
| Comic Strips
| Comics & Graphic Novels
| Subjects
| Books
General
| Comics & Graphic Novels
| Subjects
| Books
General
| Graphic Novels
| Comics & Graphic Novels
| Subjects
| Books
Contemporary
| General
| Literature & Fiction
| Subjects
| Books
Literary
| General
| Literature & Fiction
| Subjects
| Books
ASIN: 1402524986 |
Amazon.com
Set during the Tiananmen Square uprising of 1989, The Crazed, a novel from Ha Jin, the award-winning author of the bestseller Waiting, unites a prominent Chinese university professor who suffers a brain injury and Jien Wen, a favorite student and future son-in-law who becomes his caretaker. As Professor Yang rants about his earlier life, his bizarre outbursts begin to strike Jien as containing some truth and, considering the uncertain times, he puzzles over their meaning. When Jien realizes that his additional responsibilities make sitting for his Ph.D. exams impossible, Meimei, his fiancée, promptly discards him, branding him as unloving, since passing the exams would have ensured they would both have attended graduate school in Beijing. Unmoored from the university, and unconnected to anything else, Jien joins the student movement and as a result becomes a police suspect.
Problematic to the plot is that Meimei is hardly warm to Jien; their relationship never appears to be anything but doomed. The professor's hallucinatory diatribes comprise the bulk of the novel, and initially it seems unlikely that a story will ever evolve from these ramblings. But with Yang indisposed, minor characters from the university conspire to devise means to further their personal agendas. A mystery results, as university and literature department personnel plot to have someone other than Jien marry Meimei. Jin's prose is succinct, but the most interesting parts of Jien's life occur, unfortunately, at the end of the book, leaving readers who fell for Waiting wanting more. --Michael Ferch
Book Description
Since the appearance of his first book of stories in English, Ha Jin has won the National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award, and garnered comparisons to Dickens, Balzac, and Isaac Babel. “Like Babel,” wrote Francine Prose in The New York Times Book Review, “Ha Jin observes everything . . . yet he tells the reader only—and precisely—as much as is needed to make his deceptively simple fiction resonate on many levels.”
In his luminous new novel, the author of Waiting deepens his portrait of contemporary Chinese society while exploring the perennial conflicts between convention and individualism, integrity and pragmatism, loyalty and betrayal. Professor Yang, a respected teacher of literature at a provincial university, has had a stroke, and his student Jian Wan—who is also engaged to Yang’s daughter—has been assigned to care for him. What at first seems a simple if burdensome duty becomes treacherous when the professor begins to rave: pleading with invisible tormentors, denouncing his family, his colleagues, and a system in which a scholar is “just a piece of meat on a cutting board.”
Are these just manifestations of illness, or is Yang spewing up the truth? And can the dutiful Jian avoid being irretrievably compromised? For in a China convulsed by the Tiananmen uprising, those who hear the truth are as much at risk as those who speak it. At once nuanced and fierce, earthy and humane, The Crazed is further evidence of Ha Jin’s prodigious narrative gifts.
Customer Reviews:
A social and also a coming of age novel.......2007-10-06
"The Crazed" is a social novel depicting the stultifying impact of living under a corrupt Chinese regime at the time of Tiananmen Square. At the same time, it is a coming of age novel, with a protagonist, Jian Wan, who is a wonderfully human character. In a society which is so regimented, he does not comes of age until his twenties, as his blinders come off, and for the first time he must make decisions as to who he is. While many of Jian Wan's challenges result from the type of society he lives in, there is also a universality to various aspects of his predicament: what constitutes the "good" life; does the study of literature contribute as much to society as more "practical" endeavors; to what extent should one compromise one's own ambitions for the sake of a mate.
I have some problems with another important character, Jian Wan's Professor, who has varying degrees of lucidity as he lays in a hospital bed recovering from a stroke. The Professor is a complex character, and seeing him only through the utterances of a clouded mind makes it that much harder for the reader to become comfortable with him. Also, in Margot Livesey's "The Missing World", in which an important character suffers from amnesia, Livesey discusses the factual basis for her take on amnesia in an after word; I would have appreciated some after word on stroke as it relates to the Professor from Ha Jin.
While the prose is simple, Ha Jin does convey an appreciation of nature which provides a welcome counterpoint to the themes of the novel. There is also a bit of humor, such as: "It was common knowledge that after studying a foreign language for some years, some women tended to become effusive, romantic, and even warmhearted".
Subtle and Excellent.......2007-06-21
This is the first novel of Jin's that I've read. I was not disappointed and give this book a loud, standing ovation.
After his academic advisor and prospective father-in-law collapses from a stroke, Jian, a graduate student studying poetics, is assigned to care for the professor. As Professor Yang grows increasingly more neurotic with each passing day, Jian faces a devastating personal crisis within himself while pondering the mysteries and paradoxes pointed parroting from his old mentor uncorks.
This book is subtle and slow-moving, the words culled to bare essentials. The plot progression relies heavily upon psychological deconstruction of its characters, but unlike in Russian literature, it deconstructs characters through the seive of Jian, a fallible tool for such a job, and the reader is left knowing more of Jian from this perspective and less of of the peripheral minor characters shuffling forward to the bubbling finale of The Crazed.
I enjoyed reading Jin's use of the English language, as it is fresh and interesting, unfettered by certain colloquial ruts a native American English speaker tends to use. Whenever possible within the English language rules of word order he seems to place the verb as his core and bends his sentences and extremities around those verbs. The result is a certain fluidity that unlike some (say me, for example) doesn't get hung up on phonemes and fluff.
This book was excellent and masterful, like the stiff, bitter, and neutral taste of vodka. I'll be reading more of Ha Jin, you can be sure of it.
interesting, but..........2007-01-10
...as far as a good read goes, not great. Characters are not interesting, the ending does not work, the storyline is b-movie material.
You're crazed if you read it too.......2006-09-25
I picked up the book for ten dollars HK (that's 1.25 USD) at a charity book sale - I think I bought 17 books there, still have to get another bookshelf for all the extra books I have lying around now.
I've read Ha Jin's first novel, "In the Pond", and it was a quick and interesting read. In 1999 Jin won both the National Book Award and the PEN / Hemingway Award for his second novel "Waiting", which I've yet to read, but that was enough for me to remember the name and snap up "The Crazed" when I saw it for 10 dollars.
I was a bit leery of "The Crazed" - "In the Pond" didn't really have the ending I had hoped for, I felt that the main character settled for a compromise at the end when he had been spending the whole book fighting for justice. And probably two-thirds of the way through "The Crazed", I wasn't enjoying it. But stubbornness, or boredom, or who knows what, kept me going. And I was pleasantly surprised by the final plot twist at the end of the book. Not pleasant enough to recommend that anyone read it, unless they like the idea of slogging through two hundred pages of slow plot revolving around a character who is progressively less and less likable.
See, the plot revolves around the crumbling life of Jian, a PhD candidate. His professor, mentor, and future father-in-law, Mr. Yang, has suffered a debilitating stroke. As Yang's mind unravels on his death bed, his ramblings and despair at a wasted life in academia convince Jian that he should skip the upcoming PhD test and set out on a different career path. (That's basically a summary of the first two hundred pages; like I said, not very exciting.) As Jian begins to make irrevocable decisions, like removing himself from PhD candidacy and dumping his fiancée (Mr Yang's daughter Meimei), it's clear that Ha Jin has titled the book "The Crazed", in the plural, to refer to both Yang and Jian. No one intervenes to keep Jian from throwing his life away, and it's not a very uplifting book to read.
But the redeemable part I found in the novel comes in the twist that Ha Jin adds in the final fifty pages. The story is set in the spring & summer of 1989, during which student protests in Tiananmen Square overshadowed Gorbachev's historic visit to Beijing, culminating in the bloody June 4th Tiananmen Square crackdown. As it's clear to Jian that he has thrown away all his opportunities, in a moment of assumed confidence and bravado he joins a roommate and a group of undergraduate students and travels to Beijing to take part in the student protests. They arrive on June 3, just in time for Jian to witness an army officer walk up to a student leader and blast his brains into the crowd with a pistol. Having survived the long night of carnage, Jian is tipped off by a friend that his name has been put on the list of wanted protestors. He packs his bag with two days' worth of clothes, burns his identity card, pawns off his bicycle, and gets on an overnight train for Guangzhou, hoping to sneak across the border to Hong Kong and safety. Thus ends the novel.
A quote that stuck in my mind:
>>>
This realization made me see how essential personal motives were in political activities. Just as I rushed to Beijing to demonstrate my bravado to Meimei, in the name of revolution people acted on the basis of all kinds of personal interests and reasons. But our history books on the Communist revolution have always left out individuals' motives. I remembered that when talking about why they joined the Red Army or the Communist party, older revolutionaries had often said it was because they had wanted to escape an arranged marriage or to avoid debts or just to have enough food and clothes. It's personal interests that motivate the individual and therefore generate the dynamics of history.
-p 320
<
<<
What remained in my head after I finished the novel was the connection between this passage and the title of the novel, "The Crazed". By developing a character who is self-admittedly losing control of his life, and having that character join the "noble" cause of the Tiananmen Square protests, Jin is making a very thought-provoking connection. Were there many other students like Jian, heading to Tiananmen not to fight for democracy, but simply to escape a crumbling life, with no opportunities and no escape? When the history books write about the Tiananmen Square protests, they will surely say that the evil Communist government massacred hundreds of innocent youth, martyrs for the cause of progress. But what was really going on? Can their protest truly be called noble?
I think Jin is trying to point to a fundamental tension in the discipline of history. The tension between the need to simplify and explain large watershed moments and the need to recognize that history is made up of individual actors with selfish reasons. A tension at the heart of the study of history. A tension that really has no resolution, a tension that makes history a fascinating area of study.
A book I find much more interesting, which illustrates the same tension in history, is "Underground" by Haruki Murakami. The book is simply a collection of interviews with survivors and perpetrators of the 1994 Sarin Gas Attacks in the Tokyo Subway, by the Aum Shinrikyo cult. Whereas Jin created a fictional story to illustrate this tension, Murakami went out and preserved in this book the actual words and motives and emotions that people experienced amidst a catastrophe. It's not an easy book to read as some of the narratives are confusing, but it's authentic. Snd Murakami's concluding essay in the book is focused and spot-on.
<>
<>
<>
Speaking frankly, if I were you, I wouldn't read "The Crazed" unless you're utterly fascinated by every single word I wrote about it. Two stars because Jin is a pretty darn good writer. But hey, I've got high standards. Not many books deserve five stars - Watership Down, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, or Dickens / Twain / Tolkien, authors like that. Maybe "Waiting" will be better. I'm going to stay skeptical. You save your money.
A fascinating commentary on the ills of Chinese society.......2006-05-19
This book is many things, but deep down, it is a commentary on the corruption endemic in Chinese society and how people use their positions of power to gain benefit for themselves and their family members.
Set in the spring of 1989 as China is in the chaos of a student revolution, Jien Wan's professor becomes hospitalized due to a stroke. Despite the fact that Wen is preparing for PhD entrance exams, the department assigns him to watch over his professor and father-in-law to be.
Over the course of his caring for Professor Yang, he witnesses rantings that he tries to piece together over the course of weeks. He thinks he has the rantings pretty much figured out by the time Yang's wife returns and arranges for care.
In the meantime, Wan, who is wrangling over his future, is sent to a far off county in order to secure a reference for a prospective party member. He comes to a harsh realization on his trip, that is how hard life is for the ordinary Chinese. He returns to Shanning with a new mission; to enter the policy department to try to right the wrongs of society.
However, he will find that events are out of his hands and that there is a grand conspiracy involving him, though far different from what he suspects from his interpretations of Professor Yang's rantings. The ultimate figuring this out and a ill conceived trip to Beijing changes his life forever.
The story is slow in developing, in typical Chinese style. The plot thickens with each ranting my Professor Yang, and all of the pieces are put in place with amazing skill and at just the right time. That makes the crushing end all the more difficult to take because one can't help but become extremely sympathetic with Jien. This is a great read that I very nearly gave a five.
Book Description
Ellie is convinced that a ghost is haunting the royal wood. When her pony, Rainbow keeps shying away from the trees, Ellie knows she has to find the ghost or shell never be able to ride in the woods again.
Book Description
When her pony, Sundance, goes missing, Ellie blames a mysterious stranger for the disappearance. Ellie must figure out who the stranger is and rescue Sundance before it is too late.
Customer Reviews:
Good for early readers.......2006-12-09
I purchased this book for my pony-crazed 7-year-old daughter, who reads at a 3rd grade level. This has been a great chapter book for her--challenging without being frustrating. And the fact that it's about a pony-crazed princess has kept her interested, even though she reads me only one chapter each night. She's looking forward to reading about each of the ponies, as they get featured in future books.
Pony Crazed Princess.......2006-11-19
This book is one of my fave books.It is purfect for kids.this book is about friendship,love,and ponys!It is all about a princess who just wants to be a normel kid,but can't.But with the help of her new groom she finds fun and aventure.When her pony goes missing she blames it on a kid you lurking in the shadows.Who is the spy?Where is the pony?But you have to read it to find out what happens.
Customer Reviews:
My daughter loves these books!!.......2007-08-09
My 7 year old daughter found this series while we were in London this June. Naturally they were a hit since horses and princesses are two of her favorite things. It also helps that there is a little mystery thrown in. She reads them from cover to cover in one sitting. And she often re-reads them when she is finished. The stories are appropriate and interesting and the characters are loveable.
Books:
- God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything
- Good News, Bad News: Evangelization, Conversion and the Crisis of Faith
- Good Night, Gorilla
- Good Night, Sleep Tight: The Sleep Lady's Gentle Guide to Helping Your Child Go to Sleep , Stay Asleep, And Wake Up Happy
- Gotham Central Vol. 4: The Quick and the Dead (Batman)
- Grace (Eventually): Thoughts on Faith
- Grace (Eventually): Thoughts on Faith
- Heart-Shaped Box: A Novel
- History: Fiction or Science? (Chronology, No. 1)
- History: Fiction or Science? (Chronology, No. 1)
Books Index
Books Home
Recommended Books
- Servant Leader
- Religious Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know--And Doesn't
- Digest of State Accountancy Laws and State Board Regulations, 2000
- Mensa Guide to Solving Sudoku: Hundreds of Puzzles Plus Techniques to Help You Crack Them All
- History: Fiction or Science
- Sunrise
- Last Lobo, The
- The Essentials of Advanced Accounting II
- Law, Economics and Antitrust: Towards a New Perspective
- A Walk on the Wild Side: A Novel
