Book Description
Not since Moby-Dick...No, not since Treasure Island...Actually, not since Jonah and the Whale has there been a sea saga to rival The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists, featuring the greatest sea-faring hero of all time, the immortal Pirate Captain, who, although he lives for months at a time at sea, somehow manages to keep his beard silky and in good condition.
Worried that his pirates are growing bored with a life of winking at pretty native ladies and trying to stick enough jellyfish together to make a bouncy castle, the Pirate Captain decides it's high time to spearhead an adventure.
While searching for some major pirate booty, he mistakenly attacks the young Charles Darwin's Beagle and then leads his ragtag crew from the exotic Galapagos Islands to the fog-filled streets of Victorian London. There they encounter grisly murder, vanishing ladies, radioactive elephants, and the Holy Ghost himself. And that's not even the half of it.
Customer Reviews:
Pirates and Science -- a Dangerous Mix.......2007-05-27
Belay your search for a salty tale and batten on to this slender tome! Creationists may want to avoid this book, as Charles Darwin is a central character. The Pirate Captain takes his descriptively named crew on a rousing adventure around the world and back to London, employing clever disguises and foiling the dastardly plans of the Bishop along the way. Black Bellamy confounds the Pirate Captain yet again, but as usual the dashing Pirate Captain has the word. Written in the best homage to Gilbert & Sullivan's "The Pirates of Penzance", this series continues to delight and titillate the salty senses of the sea-faring soul. Practice reading in an authentic pirate voice, and have some cured ham handy for snacking.
The Pirates!.......2007-03-09
The Pirates! are hilarious in there unexpected adventures! I can't wait for the next one!
Pirates! In an Adventure with Me.......2007-01-15
If you love Monty Python - you'll love the Pirates! series. Get ready to howl with laughter - you won't be disappointed (Though, if this is your first, I'd start with An Adventure with Ahab - still - you'll be entertained either way)
Intellectually humorous.......2006-12-12
This is one of the few books that I finished really fast. It may be because it is a relatively short novel, but it is also because it is never boring and it makes you want to read more. It makes you really hungry for an actual adventure! Well, at least that's how I felt as I was reading. It was easy to understand as it will not require much thinking for other possible meanings of the text, and usually I don't like that (because I like texts that have a lot of metaphors), but here I just have to love the text for providing me with pure entertainment during my free time.
Of course, I have other good reasons for liking The Pirates this much. Not only is it very funny, it is also intellectual. The author provides information on things that readers would probably be interested in, like why our fingers wrinkle every time we stay in the bath too long, and it was really clever of him to do so. The characters of this book have some personality that would make you like them a lot, especially the Pirate Captain. I also like his favorite comrade, the pirate with a scarf. It was also enjoybale to have Charles Darwin, Robert Fitzroy, and the Bishop of Oxford as characters, because in this novel I saw them in another light; the not so serious kind of light... and it was really entertaining because in textbooks all there is to them are their importance to science and religion. At least here, even if it's fiction, you would get to see that maybe after all they had a comedic side.
And of course, it was always easy to picture the scenarios playing in your head. Along with it, you'll smile and laugh for sure!
I would have to praise the author, Mr. Defoe for having a really imaginative mind. I'm sure, if Charles Darwin and Robert Fitzroy were alive now, they would have liked this really nice novel as much as I did.
Super funny stuff........2006-11-23
Surreal and hilarious. I'm a fan of Monty Python and other such UK silliness and this is right up there. Highly recommended!
Book Description
The mathematics of love defies arithmetic . . . The Mathematics of Love is an intimate, poignant story of two people whose lives—amazingly, impossibly—become interwoven in a brilliant tapestry of tragedy, memory, and love. Moving from the modern English countryside to the mountains of nineteenth-century Spain, Emma Darwin's extraordinary narrative beautifully evokes the horrors of war, the pain of loss, the heat of passion, and the timeless power of love.
1819. Stephen Fairhurst, a veteran of Waterloo, is weary of war. Wounded in body and spirit from battles both bloody and heartbreaking, he returns to Kersey Hall from a self-imposed exile in Spain. Amid the verdant beauty and quiet stillness of the countryside he yearns for solitude, but instead meets a most unexpected new acquaintance: the unconventional Lucy Durward.
Blessed with an artistic hand, a sharp mind, and an independent spirit, Lucy is a woman unlike any Stephen has ever known. In their newfound correspondence he shields himself from the shadows of the past—and the painful secret he carries.
1976. While her mother spends the summer in Spain with a new lover, sixteen-year-old Anna Ware is packed off to live at Kersey Hall, now a failed girls' school run by her estranged uncle. Hot, bored, desperate for the excitement of London and her girlfriends, Anna looks for a way out, but instead finds a new mentor in Theo.
A charismatic, aging war photographer both worldly and kind, Theo offers an antidote to Anna's loneliness and anger. Yet Theo is not her only solace. Over the course of the summer her curiosity is piqued by a collection of old letters between the former owner of Kersey Hall, Stephen Fairhurst, and a Miss Lucy Durward. As Anna unravels the past letter by letter, she begins to create a heartrending secret of her own—one that will connect her to Stephen in startling and indelible ways.
Hauntingly beautiful and wondrously told, The Mathematics of Love diagrams the mysterious equation that is the human heart. Making flesh and blood the unwavering bond that connects us all, it is a novel that will linger long after the last page is turned.
Amazon.com
Genre-jumping novelist Dan Simmons makes a splash no matter where he leaps. His 1985 horror debut, The Song of Kali, garnered the World Fantasy Award; the vampiric Carrion Comfort took the Bram Stoker Award; Hyperion, the opening volume of his Hyperion saga, snagged the Hugo. In 1999's The Crook Factory, Simmons spun fact, fiction, and Ernest Hemingway into a ripe WWII spy thriller, and with Darwin's Blade, Simmons dives headlong into the suspense pool.
The country's foremost accident investigator, Dr. Darwin Minor, reconstructs automobile accidents for his friends, Lawrence and Trudy Stewart, whose firm specializes in uncovering lucrative, yet unremarkable, insurance fraud. Odd, then, that two Russian hit men in a souped-up Mercedes E 340 attempt to murder Dar in a 160 mph car chase that results in an airborne Mercedes and two dead Russians.
Sydney Olson, the California state's attorney's chief investigator, who's investigating an accomplice-murdering fraud ring, plans to release a story highlighting the Russian mafia's involvement and Dar's name, and then to spend a lot of bodyguard-time with Dar.
Dar returned her challenging gaze. Suddenly she did not look like Stockard Channing to him anymore. "You're staking me out like that goat in the dinosaur movie... Jurassic Park."
"Exactly," said Sydney Olson, smiling openly at Dar now.
Lawrence raised his hand like a schoolboy.
"I just don't want to find my friend Dar's bloody leg on my moon roof someday, okay?"
As the bond between Dar and Sydney grows, so grow the assassination attempts, a gruesome body count, and the realization that a state-wide charitable organization funded by the country's most famous defense attorney is behind the murderous ring.
With its tight plot, memorable and likable cast, and brisk, intelligent narrative, Darwin's Blade has "series" written all over it. Better make room on the Edgar dais now. --Michael Hudson
Book Description
A series of high-speed fatal car wrecks -- accidents that seem. as if they may have been staged -- is leading Darwin Minor down a dangerous road. A reluctantexpert on violent ways to die, he sifts clues from wreckage the way a brilliant coroner extracts damning information from a victim's corpse. But the deeper hedigs, the more enemies he seems to make, and the wider the conspiracy seems to grow. Before long, he'll find himself relying on deadly resources of his own inorder to save his life -- and those of untold others.
Customer Reviews:
Tongue-in-Cheek Romp.......2007-09-02
Either you enjoy the joke of this book, or you don't.
"Darwin's Blade" is a thriller very much in the Michael Crichton mode, very similar in style to "Rising Sun" or "Jurassic Park" (which Simmons mentions). The protagonist is an "accident reconstruction specialist," very similar to an M.E. such as Jonathon Kellerman's Alex Delaware, only Dr. Darwin Minor (Ph.D.) reconstructs accidents based on his knowledge of physics; he doesn't solve murders based on his medical degree. And being a thriller, of course the Bad Guys are after Our Hero for reasons that are only gradually revealed over the course of the novel. And it wouldn't be a thriller/mystery if there wasn't a love interest, some scotch, and a little discreet sex.
But anyone who takes this book too seriously is doing themselves a serious disservice. A book that begins with a famously-disproved, urban-legend "Darwin Award-winning" accident where the main character is named "Darwin?" A book where the chapters have puns like "G is for Whiz," or silly jokes like "E is for Ticket?" Where every chapter is alphabetical from A-Z, a la Sue Grafton? Where Harlan Ellison is mentioned by name? Where the main character is an obvious over-the-top Heinlein hero?
It's a romp, a pastiche, a blenderized combination of Kellerman, Chandler (the main character drinks scotch, lives in LA, and plays chess, for crying out loud!), Heinlein, Ellison, Crichton, Grafton, and Steven Hunter's "Point of Impact." This book is a gift to Simmons fans, and to fans of urban legends, mysteries, thrillers, and folks who find this kind of thing funny. I loved it, frankly. I thought it was by turns hilarious, suspenseful, and interesting. Other reviewers obviously hated it. I can completely understand that. It's derivative, juvenile, silly, and absurd. But of course, it seems to me that it's *supposed* to be all of those things, and if you go into it ready to enjoy it for what it is, you'll have a good time. If you're expecting the latest Elmore Leonard or the next "Hyperion," you're going to be vastly disappointed.
Third-rate book from a first-rate writer.......2007-08-27
Dan Simmons is an excellent writer, no doubt about it. But this poor effort is so riddled with weak cliché and flat, predictable characters that it's almost painful to get through. (At one point I finally began enjoying it simply for its silliness.
The plots is, well, fine. Nothing special, nothing unique. Bad guys have a plot, good guys are working to uncover it.
But oh, what good guys. Our Hero, Darwin "Dar" Minor, is as close to superman as one can be without having super powers. He's an ex-Marine sniper who's all but perfect with weapons. He's a Vietnam War hero. He's rich, somehow.
He owns a cabin in the woods with all the modern conveniences, including a trap door leading to a secret, bomb-proof storage room that also has its own air supply thanks to a shaft from a nearby gold mine. (No spoilers there; Dar explains that when he gives us a tour.)
He's an expert in literature, the arts, and even liquor. He's an expert pilot, an expert driver, an expert accident reconstructor, and has a Ph.D in physics. He drives the perfect car (which, we learn in the acknowledgements, is what Mr. Simmons drives).
Oh, and he also has a near-photographic memory. At one point, recalling a news story of a murder from several years back, he says, "I remember reading that it was a double tap to the head from a distance of six hundred meters. A newspaper report said that the bullets recovered were 7.62-by-fifty-four-millimeter-rimmed."
Getting beyond the silly protagonist, there's plenty more to be annoyed with. Dar's main job is as an insurance investigator, and the novel is peppered with investigations put there, seemingly, strictly to be funny, as they do little to advance the plot.
Problem: All these investigations are taken straight from a list of cliché urban legends, starting with "man attaches rockets to car and ends up embedded in cliff" (http://www.snopes.com/autos/dream/jato.asp) and including "drunk man shoots self when his phone rings in the middle of the night and he 'answers' his gun."
Simmons didn't even bother to get creative with his insurance-investigator banter. When a few of them are sitting around talking about funny past cases, the ones they claimed to have worked on were taken verbatim from an age-old e-mailed joke list (http://www.snopes.com/humor/lists/insurance.asp).
It's sad that Simmons couldn't even bother (or simply wasn't creative enough) to come up with his own stories and had to lift them from others. But "weak" is par for the course in Darwin's Blade.
Im not too sure any more that Simmons is a very good writer.......2007-02-18
This book started off in an interesting manner. It set the stage and introduced us to Dar (short for Darwin) as he travels around from one accident scene to the next. Darwin is a highly sought after specialist who deals with re-creating accident scenes.
To start with, I thought that I could read Simmons happily as he takes his character from one scene to the next and talks about how dumb drivers can be. This is pretty much what you are hit with in the opening pages of the book. The plot doesn't start falling into place until we get around 80 pages into the story. However, that is also when this book starts to fall apart and 'Darwins Blade' becomes excruciatingly poorly written.
I realized that I really didn't want to read a book of Simmons writing accident stories about 200 pages in. By that point you have had Darwin visit a dozen fatal wrecks or ruminate over others and you are sort of sick of him. He is an ultimate nerd with James Bond abilities. After Darwins the target of hit men who go about their work in about as stupid a manner as possible, he is teamed up with a bland two-dimensional female cop named Syd. Syd is pretty much a man poorly crafted into the guise of a female. Watching Simmons trying to turn Syd into a sexy vixen is painful. Syd and Dar dig into who could be responsible for wanting to kill Dar and man, by this point, if you haven't put this book down, you have some blinders on or have a literary hide thicker than mine.
I enjoyed Hyperion a long time ago when it came out. Didn't really enjoy the sequels very much. And this is the first Simmons book I have picked up since then. I don't think I will try this author again for a while at least. You should heed the pretty much universal negative attitude towards this book and skip it.
Action packed........2007-02-08
Prior to obtaining his PhD in physics, Darwin Minor served with distinction as a Marine sniper in Vietnam. Now he makes his living as an accident reconstruction specialist working out of San Diego. Early in the course of Darwin's Blade, Dr. Minor (or Dar as he prefers to be called) becomes the target of a bold asassination attempt.
Darwin's Blade by Dan Simmons is a mystery novel told as a third person narrative. It contains plenty of action-adventure as well as a touch of romance. It's very apparent that a lot of research went into writing Darwin's Blade as the technical descriptions of cars, aircraft, firearms, etc. are detailed to the nth degree. Perhaps more so than necessary or even desirable.
A lengthy book containing a number of bizarre scenarios, many having little or nothing to do with the plot, Darwin's Blade is disturbingly gruesome in places. Despite the lengthiness of the book, the only character developed in any real depth is Dar Minor himself.
Certain parts of Darwin's Blade, like the chapter describing a harrowing battle that took place in Vietnam, do make for compelling reading. But overall, most readers will not derive sufficient reward from this book to justify the expenditure of time and effort needed to complete it.
A very entertaining read.......2007-01-23
This is the best of Simmons books I have read including olympos and the hyperion series for pure entertainment, character development and interest. The story is about an accident investigator who is caught up in an insurance fraud scheme. That gives Simons the backdrop to tell a very entertaining tale in the form of a detective mistery.
The characters here are just deep enough to be interesting without going into deep background that would bog down a story that runs at such a fast clip.
Like all of the Simons books I have read so far, the book just kind of ends with simple resolutions, the guy gets girl, the bad guy dies, and we all go off in the sunset together.
Simons is one of the most accmplished authors we have winning awards in Sci Fi, Horror, and now this first rate detective novel. Overall good show and it makes me want to buy "the Crook Factory" another in this genrea.
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Charles Darwin and Victorian Visual Culture (Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture)
Jonathan Smith
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William Powell Frith: A Painter and His World
ASIN: 0521856906 |
Book Description
Although The Origin of Species contained just a single visual illustration, Charles Darwin's other books, from his monograph on barnacles in the early 1850s to his volume on earthworms in 1881, were copiously illustrated by well-known artists and engravers. Jonathan Smith explains how Darwin managed to illustrate the unillustratable - his theories of natural selection - by manipulating and modifying the visual conventions of natural history, using images to support the claims made in his texts. Moreover, Smith looks outward to analyse the relationships between Darwin's illustrations and Victorian visual culture, especially the late-Victorian debates about aesthetics, and shows how Darwin's evolutionary explanation of beauty, based on his observations of colour and the visual in nature, were a direct challenge to the aesthetics of John Ruskin. The many illustrations reproduced here enhance this fascinating study of a little known aspect of Darwin's lasting influence on literature, art and culture.
Customer Reviews:
Great example of Irving Stone's peerless skill.......2007-08-23
A novel-biography in Stone's usual style, I found this a eminently readable and gripping account. It was particularly pleasing to see Charles Darwin's life treated "organically" - too many accounts treat his Beagle years and the following decade or two as merely preparatory for the "Origin of the Species", and events that became important only in 1859 are emphasised at the expense of others (see his Wikipedia article for a prime example - you'd think he made no geological observations in South America at all, yet geology was his main motivation at the time.) But people's lives are lived without hindsight - Darwin is no exception - and Stone recognizes this. The evolution of Charles Darwin from a mildly indolent undergraduate to wide-eyed field geologist to desk-bound author to experimental horticulturalist to world-famous naturalist is done with admirable skill. The portraits of his friends Charles Lyell and Joseph Hooker - extremely famous in their own rights - amongst others, are also very well done.
A criticism levelled on Amazon, that too many speech bubbles read like extracts from letters and writings, is warranted. But that's because they *are* quotes! Novel-biographers get pilloried for making too much dialogue up, so why not quote when they can? If it sounds stilted, just read past it - enjoy the fact that the words are at least genuine!
An excellent lightweight introduction to the life of one of science's luminaries.
Boring and memior-like.......2005-05-19
Granted, I only read 60 pages. Granted, it might get more exciting further into the book. However, I quickly grew tired of the memior-like style of the story, which lacks imagination in recreating Darwin's early 20s. I can tell where Stone is pulling directly from Darwin's writings, letters to and from family members, and musings in his diary. If I wanted that in a book, I'd read a biography; this is a novel. Conversation comes across as stilted and unnatural, with ... thrown in at odd places. I know many of you out there are fans of Stone, but this one doesn't quite make it as a historical/biographical novel. It lacks imagination.
Do the evolution.......2004-10-06
Once again, writer Irving Stone provides his readers with a "biographical novel", like his masterpiece, "The agony and the ecstasy" (about Michelangelo). Stone is a very competent author, and takes time to do his researches, so the information you'll find in his books can be trusted to be true - he also provides a bibliography about his "subject" at the end of the story.
"The origin" is about Charles Darwin, the man who came up with the theory of the evolution of the species by natural selection. In fact, Darwin, living in a static, very religious society, was one of the first scientists to dissociate science from religion, even if at the time it was not his intention, and had many problems because of his theories. Darwin's life was very interesting, from his humble beginning as an observer aboard HMS Beagle to his late and prolific years, when he wrote about varied subjects, becoming one of the first "scientific bestsellers" in the world.
Darwin's life is very well depicted in "The origin", and the reading is not a hard one, even if it's kind of slow. But Stone only presents facts, and makes little effort to present his thoughts about the subject. This is not an insightful kind of biography, more like Darwin's diary written in a more pleasant way. Nevertheless, an excellent book, that provides very useful information about one of the greatest men of all times.
Grade 8.6/10
STILL A GOOD READ AFTER ALL THESE YEARS.......2004-09-20
I first read this one in the early 80s. I picked if off my shelf again, a few days ago, and enjoyed it all over again. Being a student of the life of Charles Darwin, I have read the majority of the major biographies over the past twenty years. While this work is a fictionalized version of Darwin's life, and is certainly overly simplistic at times, there, nevertheless, is no doubt the author did his homework on this one. For a good simple read, and an understanding of the man Darwin (not his work), I highly recommend this one. Mr. Stone is certainly a master of his craft.
Charles Darwin, the Human Being!.......2001-02-16
Irving Stone gives us a beautiful depiction of the character of the real Charles Darwin, and how he came to his breakthrough scientific insights. Charles Darwin, it turns out, was an immensely likeable character, with an adventuresome spirit, immense energy, a genuine humility, and warm sense of humor. Stone's brilliant portrayal shows us how Darwin was always guided by really examining what he saw and experienced, and letting his questions guide him, through a lifetime of earnest questing for knowledge and understanding. Anyone who doubts that such a devoted scientist could also make such a fascinating literary figure, will be delighted by Irving Stone's illuminating storytelling. Now, we can esteem Darwin all the more for his humaneness, which serves to magnify his genius!
Book Description
Gillian Beer's landmark book demonstrates how Darwin overturned fundamental cultural assumptions in his narratives, how George Eliot, Thomas Hardy and other writers pursued and resisted their contradictory implications, and how the stories he produced about natural selection and the struggle for life now underpin our culture. This second edition incorporates a new preface by the author and a foreword by the distinguished American scholar George Levine.
Average customer rating:
- Difficult (2.5 stars)
- Beautiful
- Conflicted and Lyrical
- A MUST-HAVE BOOK; BUY IT
- Truth through Words
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Cane (Norton Critical Editions)
Jean Toomer
Manufacturer: W. W. Norton
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Passing (Penguin Classics)
ASIN: 0393956008 |
Customer Reviews:
Difficult (2.5 stars).......2007-03-11
I write this review with the realization that it is likely to be unpopular, nevertheless, I found the book to be very trying. While I can appreciate the modernist approach which was employed years before its time, the experimental nature of the writing had my head spinning. The text itself is a mixed bag that includes not only prose, but poetry and drama as well. Toomer insisted on these pieces being put together to form a novel, but I cannot help but feel many of the inclusions would have faired better standing alone. In my particular reading experience, I found that many of the pieces do not interlock or even coincide, which produces a sort of start-and-stop reading ordeal. There is simply no fluidity in the text.
Toomer was of mixed heritage, so the book is rife with ambivalence and a proverbial tug-of-war between "light and dark." It has been pointed out that Toomer was very much influenced by Picasso's cubism and worked to recreate this in his literature. As far as I know, Toomer and Gertrude Stein are the only two to have done this, and the effect is arrantly vertiginous in both cases.
In literary circles, this book is considered a must-read in African-American literature, and for that reason, it should be read and contemplated. However, if you are looking for leisure reading, I would suggest something else. The book is only 112 pages long, but I found that it somehow seemed rather "Victorian" in length. It is by no means fast.
In defense of the book, I think my problem with it is a result of preferring prose over poetry and drama. If you are a reader that likes all genres equally, you may find this considerably more enjoyable.
Suggested Af/Am Lit: Wright's Black Boy, Morrison's Song of Solomon, Ellison's Invisible Man, Chesnutt's The Marrow of Tradition, and Moody's Coming of Age in Mississippi.
Beautiful.......2006-01-15
the first few chapters alone is worth having this book in your library. It reads like smooth passionate music, writing prose like poetry, capturing moments in history, in the past of our country, that many do not often think about. this book is amazing.
Conflicted and Lyrical.......2004-09-11
There appear to be several tangled threads in CANE that join the three parts of the book together. The first thread unifying the collection of poetry and prose is the way it was put together. In book one you have the narrator observing rural negroes in the south. In book two you have the narrator express-ing the discontent of urban negroes. Then, in book three, you have old Kabnis, a northern negro, trying to escape his pain by returning to his roots in rural Georgia. Coming full-circle. And yet not. Part Two should come first, with its discontented youth, then "Kabnis", then Part One. Why does Toomer choose to progress from spiritual unity to disunity? Is it because the book truly represents a cycle which has no beginning and no end? A clue to this is in two poems, "Reapers" and "Harvest Song". Both are written on related topics, and yet "Reapers" is the first poem of the book, and "Harvest Song" the last. In "Reapers" a rat is injured by a scythe, and yet "the blade, blooded-stained, continues cutting weeds and shade" oblivious to or uncaring of the rat's injuries and pain. In "Harvest Song" the narrator is a reaper who, at the end of the day, with his work still unfinshed, fears his own hunger so much that he distracts himself with pain, "...My pain is sweet...It will not bring me knowledge of my hunger." What, exactly, is it that Toomer's characters hunger for?
Another thread appears to me to be the striving for unity. This desire for unity is expressed in the ways in which the men and women in CANE strive toward unity in their relation-ships. Admittedly, they fail miserably. The women in the book are terribly one-sided--sex objects that are either passive, as with Karintha and Fern and Avey, or active, as with Carma and Louisa and Bona. However, for all their being available physically, the females Toomer portrays in his cameos are untouchable or out of reach spiritually. The men are also one-sided--rational and yet passionate, often overcome by lust and rage. These probably function to demonstrate Toomer's personal views on what men and women are, and how their desires for unity in healthy relation-ships produces a significant amount of pain as a result of their oppositeness.
Pain is yet another thread that unifies the poetry, sketches, stories and drama of CANE. After all is experienced, the pain is what is left, the only significant fruit of their struggles. In Part One, the pain everyone suffers seems to be symbolized by the ever-present cane. The cane, which can cut the skin, must be ground, the juice boiled and cooled, in order to obtain it sweetness. Is the pain which the characters savor the sweetness in their lives? And if so, wouldn't the cane also represent the sweetness (pain) in their lives? In Part Two, which takes place in the urban North, the Negroes live repressed, frustrated, and sadly warped lives. The pain is intellectualized, yet it is still there, doubly so. Is this a result of being separated from the soil--that which is perceived to be source of their spirituality--as well as their failure to form meaningful relationships? The pain in "Kabnis" is more incoherent, the pain of an urban negro who has returned to his roots only to find that he cannot accept them, is alienated by them.
It is impossible to discuss all of the tangled threads that weave CANE into the powerfully moving and unorthodox novel of Toomer's voyage of self-discovery. It is often incoherent, filled with evocative recurrent images, and powerful character sketches that leave the reader unfulfilled, confused, and hungry for more. Perhaps it is Toomer's own hunger, expressed in his writing, that the reader picks up. If there was more to the novel, perhaps one could pin down the more elusive points. Then again, perhaps not.
A MUST-HAVE BOOK; BUY IT.......2004-06-10
One of the best books I have read. Just don't try to categorize it. Perhaps it is the freedom from a "format" that makes it so creative. He tells little stories about people with such power and reflections on the sexual the spiritual the racial the natural world. It is prose poetry. I have not even finished reading it yet! I urge you to by this edition which includes critical essays on CANE. Not that they can ever truly dissect it -- that's what makes it so great. So, he didn't consider himself black -- probably neither does Michael Jackson -- and he's still a genious. The WORK is what is important.
Truth through Words.......2004-04-17
Women play a dramatic role throughout Jean Toomer's eyebrow raising novel, Cane. In Cane, Toomer depicts the lives of many women who are misunderstood by the world around them. Through each dramatic story we are introduced to different characters that all tell a story, a story that spells out the racism and virtual element of sadness that has overcome Georgia and everything in it's path. Cane is not only a novel, but also a learning lesson of the changing times and real true to life struggles that innocent victims had to endure. After experiencing cane, we are introduced to another world that we have never known, forever changing our mindset of the world around us. Not only was Cane a dramatic learning tool, but also an irreplaceable piece of literature that will forever remain in our thoughts and our minds generation after generation touching each reader that is lucky enough to have inhaled it's beauty. One of Cane's greatest acheivements is in the way you have to find the beauty within each character through understanding Georgia's mindset. Toomer truly challenges our minds to relate to each and every character, be it man or woman, and understand and appreciate each and every struggle and hardship, and once we can feel their pain we too have a little purple in our hearts.
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Darwin: A Novel
S. A. Prio
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The Beak of the Finch: A Story of Evolution in Our Time
ASIN: 1591137993 |
Book Description
Charles Darwin, a young man in search of direction, sails for South America from England in 1831 aboard the HMS Beagle. As ship's naturalist his job is to collect plant and animal specimens. On returning home he expects to marry a third cousin and become a country parson. Instead he has an affair with Lucy Douglas, a woman of color who is a secret agent for Lord Palmerston and would be anathema to his family, and develops a theory of evolution that contradicts the Bible he intended to preach.
This fictionalization of Darwin's journey reveals a human story of adventure through which a young man finds direction in life. His adventures lead from one exotic place to the next -- fleeing French spies in Buenos Aires, fighting fierce Indians in Patagonia, and battling icy storms off Tierra del Fuego. In the process, rather than through some sort of stroke of genius, he develops a theory that would forever change him and the world.
Book Description
Levine shows how Darwin's ideas affected nineteenth-century novelists—from Dickens and Trollope to Conrad. "Levine stands in our day as the premier critic and commentator on Victorian prose."—Frank M. Turner, Nineteenth-Century Literature. "Magnificently written, with a care and delicacy worthy of its subject."—Nina Auerbach, University of Pennsylvania
Customer Reviews:
Even unread theories permeate fiction........2003-06-27
The book functions as both a wonderful review of Victorian period novels and a review of Darwinism for the general reader. Science is part of cultural formation. Even unread theories permeate fiction because others in the milieu talk about the theories and talk about issues forming the foundation for scientific theories. This is a collection of essays extending the reach of the new historicism critical school. It is necessary in using critical method to resist using a kind of metaphorical reductionsim. Jane Austen, Walter Scott, Dickens, Trollope, Conrad, and Hardy are covered.
The scientific view Darwin displaced may be called "natural theology." Darwin learned the language and many of the adaptations from natural theology. The idea of adaptation also implies the idea of interdependence. Darwin may well be taken as the father of ecology. Jane Austen's works reflect the world of pre-Darwinian science. MANSFIELD PARK is a world of disciplined control. It is essentially a closed system. Jane Austen is dedicated to calling things by their right names. By way of contrast, Darwin needed to break the traditional hold of classification. He denies Aristotelian essentialism. Chance and the random become the great creative forces in Darwin's theory. Natural selection is a metaphor for mindless temporal processes.
Dickens had a preoccupation with irrepressible multiplicity. The difference between Darwin and Dickens is that Darwin's laws have no moral significance. In LITTLE DORRIT Dickens's images are of a world irredeemably secular in which both Darwinian theory and thermodynamics would find a place. Darwin and Trollope were alike in taking self-deprecating stances in their autobiographies and being keen observers. Thomas Hardy was preoccupied with close observation and his works encompass the character of the observer and the consequences of the act of observation which may constitute a sort of invasion of privacy. Conrad emphasized the disruptiveness of Darwin's vision. Through his characters Conrad moves from Darwinian distancing and dehumanization to the edge of self-annihilation.
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The Flirt's Tragedy: Desire Without End in Victorian and Edwardian Fiction
Richard A. Kaye
Manufacturer: University of Virginia Press
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Binding: Hardcover
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ASIN: 0813921007 |
Book Description
In the flirtation plots of novels by Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, and W. M. Thackeray, heroines learn sociability through competition with naughty coquette-doubles. In the writing of George Eliot and Thomas Hardy, flirting harbors potentially tragic consequences, a perilous game then adapted by male flirts in the novels of Oscar Wilde and Henry James. In revising Gustave Flaubert's Sentimental Education in The Age of Innocence, Edith Wharton critiques the nineteenth-century European novel as morbidly obsessed with deferred desires. Finally, in works by D. H. Lawrence and E. M. Forster, flirtation comes to reshape the modernist representation of homoerotic relations.
In The Flirt's Tragedy: Desire without End in Victorian and Edwardian Fiction, Richard Kaye makes a case for flirtation as a unique, neglected species of eros that finds its deepest, most elaborately sustained fulfillment in the nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century novel. The author examines flirtation in major British, French, and American texts to demonstrate how the changing aesthetic of such fiction fastened on flirtatious desire as a paramount subject for distinctly novelistic inquiry. The novel, he argues, accentuated questions of ambiguity and ambivalence on which an erotics of deliberate imprecision thrived. But the impact of flirtation was not only formal. Kaye views coquetry as an arena of freedom built on a dialectic of simultaneous consent and refusal, as well as an expression of “managed desire,” a risky display of female power, and a cagey avenue for the expression of dissident sexualities. Through coquetry, novelists offered their response to important scientific and social changes and to the rise of the metropolis as a realm of increasingly transient amorous relations.
Challenging current trends in gender, post-gender, and queer-theory criticism, and considering texts as diverse as Darwin's The Descent of Man and Gilbert and Sullivan's The Mikado, Kaye insists that critical appraisals of Victorian and Edwardian fiction must move beyond existing paradigms defining considerations of flirtation in the novel. The Flirt's Tragedy offers a lively, revisionary, often startling assessment of nineteenth-century fiction that will alter our understanding of the history of the novel.
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