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The daughter of a Swedish minister growing up in Colorado, Thea Kronborg's musical talent sets her apart from her contemporaries. Driven by her determination to satisfy her artistic impulse, she moves to Chicago, where she falls in love with a wealthy married man. Her ability to resolve the tensions between her personal and professional lives and to communicate through her art makes her an unusual and thoroughly modern heroine.
Through Jim Burden's endearing, smitten voice, we revisit the remarkable vicissitudes of immigrant life in the Nebraska heartland, with all its insistent bonds. Guiding the way are some of literature's most beguiling characters: the Russian brothers plagued by memories of a fateful sleigh ride, Antonia's desperately homesick father and self-indulgent mother, and the coy Lena Lingard. Holding the pastoral society's heart, of course, is the bewitching, free-spirited Antonia.
Willa Cather was perhaps most famous for her great novels such as My Antonia and Death Comes to the Archbishop. However, her short stories were enchanting and practical, local and cosmopolitan. Of the great American writers of the early part of the twentieth century she stood alone in her vision. No American writer ever had her breadth of experience and knowledge of people and places, relating to farmers in Nebraska, to barons in New York, and artists in Paris.
In 1956, toward the end of Reverend John Ames's life, he begins a letter to his young son, an account of himself and his forebears. Ames is the son of an Iowan preacher and the grandson of a minister who, as a young man in Maine, saw a vision of Christ bound in chains and came west to Kansas to fight for abolition: He "preached men into the Civil War", then, at age 50, became a chaplain in the Union Army, losing his right eye in battle.
Graham Greene explores corruption and atonement in this penetrating novel set in 1930s Mexico during the era of Communist religious persecutions. As revolutionaries determine to stamp out the evils of the church through violence, the last Roman Catholic priest is on the lam, hunted by a police lieutenant. Despite his own sense of worthlessness—he is a heavy drinker and has fathered an illegitimate child—he is determined to continue to function as a priest until captured.
Claude Wheeler resembles the youngest son of an American fairy tale. His fortune is ready-made for him, but he refuses to settle for it. Alienated from his crass father and pious mother, all but rejected by a wife who reserves her ardor for missionary work, and dissatisfied with farming, Claude is an idealist without an ideal to cling to. It is only when his country enters the First World War that Claude finds what he has been searching for all his life.
The daughter of a Swedish minister growing up in Colorado, Thea Kronborg's musical talent sets her apart from her contemporaries. Driven by her determination to satisfy her artistic impulse, she moves to Chicago, where she falls in love with a wealthy married man. Her ability to resolve the tensions between her personal and professional lives and to communicate through her art makes her an unusual and thoroughly modern heroine.
Through Jim Burden's endearing, smitten voice, we revisit the remarkable vicissitudes of immigrant life in the Nebraska heartland, with all its insistent bonds. Guiding the way are some of literature's most beguiling characters: the Russian brothers plagued by memories of a fateful sleigh ride, Antonia's desperately homesick father and self-indulgent mother, and the coy Lena Lingard. Holding the pastoral society's heart, of course, is the bewitching, free-spirited Antonia.
Willa Cather was perhaps most famous for her great novels such as My Antonia and Death Comes to the Archbishop. However, her short stories were enchanting and practical, local and cosmopolitan. Of the great American writers of the early part of the twentieth century she stood alone in her vision. No American writer ever had her breadth of experience and knowledge of people and places, relating to farmers in Nebraska, to barons in New York, and artists in Paris.
In 1956, toward the end of Reverend John Ames's life, he begins a letter to his young son, an account of himself and his forebears. Ames is the son of an Iowan preacher and the grandson of a minister who, as a young man in Maine, saw a vision of Christ bound in chains and came west to Kansas to fight for abolition: He "preached men into the Civil War", then, at age 50, became a chaplain in the Union Army, losing his right eye in battle.
Graham Greene explores corruption and atonement in this penetrating novel set in 1930s Mexico during the era of Communist religious persecutions. As revolutionaries determine to stamp out the evils of the church through violence, the last Roman Catholic priest is on the lam, hunted by a police lieutenant. Despite his own sense of worthlessness—he is a heavy drinker and has fathered an illegitimate child—he is determined to continue to function as a priest until captured.
Claude Wheeler resembles the youngest son of an American fairy tale. His fortune is ready-made for him, but he refuses to settle for it. Alienated from his crass father and pious mother, all but rejected by a wife who reserves her ardor for missionary work, and dissatisfied with farming, Claude is an idealist without an ideal to cling to. It is only when his country enters the First World War that Claude finds what he has been searching for all his life.
This now classic book revealed Flannery O’Connor as one of the most original and provocative writers to emerge from the South. Her apocalyptic vision of life is expressed through grotesque, often comic situations in which the principal character faces a problem of salvation: the grandmother, in the title story, confronting the murderous Misfit; a neglected four-year-old boy looking for the Kingdom of Christ in the fast-flowing waters of the river; General Sash, about to meet the final enemy.
In 1697, Quebec is an island of French civilization perched on a bare gray rock amid a wilderness of trackless forests. For many of its settlers, Quebec is a place of exile, so remote that an entire winter passes without a word from home. But to 12-year-old Cécile Auclair, the rock is home, where even the formidable Governor Frontenac entertains children in his palace and beavers lie beside the lambs in a Christmas créche.
Ethan Frome is a 1911 novel by Edith Wharton, set in turn-of-the-century New England, in the fictitious town of Starkfield, Massachusetts. It is the story of a poor farmer, lonely and downtrodden, his wife Zeena, and their pretty and vivacious cousin, Mattie Silver. This is a short but powerful and engrossing drama, and although it is the least characteristic of the author's novels, it has become her most celebrated book.
In 1905 New York City, Lily Bart is a young, witty and beautiful socialite. Through a series of unfortunate events, she learns of the bitter consequences for a single woman without wealth, living in an uncaring society.
The one thing you can depend on in Cold Sassy, Georgia, is that word gets around fast. If the preacher's wife's petticoat shows, the ladies will make the talk last a week. But on July 5, 1906, things take a scandalous turn. That is the day E. Rucker Blakeslee, proprietor of the general store and barely three weeks a widower, elopes with Miss Love Simpson, a woman half his age and, worse yet, a Yankee!
A portrait of a woman who reflects the conventions of her age even as she defies them and whose transformations embody the decline and coarsening of the American frontier.
A study in emotional dislocation and renewal. Professor Godfrey St. Peter, a man in his 50s, has achieved what would seem to be remarkable success. When called on to move to a more comfortable home, something in him rebels.
Stephen Crane's classic novel gives us a glimpse into the mind of a young soldier as he passes through the experience he will never be able to forget, and possibly awaken him from his slumber in a sweat and panic for years to come.
Life on The Divide was a struggle for the pioneering Bergson family. Alexandra, all at once tough as nails and tender as a budding blossom, faces and conquers the harsh realities of early settlers in Nebraska. The struggle for life, love, and meaning permeate this timeless classic. Willa Cather captures the imagination with her vivid portrayals of landscape and the enduring desire to achieve a dream.
Wharton’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel set in upper class New York City. Newland Archer, gentleman lawyer and heir to one of New York City's best families, is happily anticipating a highly desirable marriage to the sheltered and beautiful May Welland. Yet he finds reason to doubt his choice of bride after the appearance of Countess Ellen Olenska, May's exotic, beautiful 30-year-old cousin, who has been living in Europe. This novel won the first ever Pulitzer awarded to a woman.
Uncle Tom's Cabin was the best-selling novel of the 19th century and the second best-selling book of that century, following the Bible. It is credited with helping fuel the abolitionist cause in the 1850s. In 1855, three years after it was published, it was called "the most popular novel of our day." A thrilling and important piece of American literature!
Theodore Dreiser's first and perhaps greatest novel appeared in 1900. The story is about a young country girl who moves to the big city, where she starts realizing her own American Dream by embarking on a life of sin rather than by hard work and perseverance. On publication, it met with outraged disapproval and was immediately withdrawn as "too shocking and sordid for polite readers".
Life was hard on the Nebraska prairie, but for Alexandra Bergson, daughter of a Swedish immigrant family, her love of the land gave her courage and strength. When Alexandra's father dies, she takes over the care of her family and management of the farm, so that the Bergsons can stay in the place they've chosen for their home. O Pioneers! tells the story of a remarkable heroine, and draws on Cather's own experience growing up on the lonely and wild American prairies.
"A direct, human tale of love and struggle and attainment, a tale that is American in the best sense of the word." (The New York Times)
"Barbara McCulloh's voice and quiet tone match the flow of this American classic." (Omnibus)
I love Willa Cather's soothing love of the land, of people, and nature. Her prose ripples and rolls like fields ready to harvest. Cather is elegant in her prose, but she doesn't hold back in her stories. O Pioneers! is a simple and passionate tale of life, struggles, tragedy and love. It is epic and simple both.
It is clear that Cather loved those immigrants who came from Europe (whether Swedes, Bohemians, or French) to carve their piece out of the American West. Her writing is full of the economical (yet hard) memory of the land, the circadian rhythms of nature and life, and the soft beauty and brutal tragedy of love.
She is one of those writers you either get and love, or just never quite connect to. For me, her prose is like a quickening. It makes me slow down, but also become more aware, more tolerant, more accepting of my own fragile place in this world.
19 of 21 people found this review helpful
Overall, the reading of the book is good - the narrator has a nice voice. However, the highest format the book is available in is Format 2, and it shows - the sound quality of the recording sounds muffled, and not as sharp as books you can get in Format 2. I recommend, if you want to get this book on Audible, find a version recorded in Format 4.
3 of 3 people found this review helpful
I've enjoyed listening to other Willa Cather novels (My Antonia and The Song of the Lark) but found this too slow-moving to keep my interest and gave up after an hour. If you enjoy long descriptive passages, you may like this more than I did.
6 of 7 people found this review helpful
I admire Willa Catha's writing but why is this book listed in the Gay and Lesbian Category? There are no gay or lesbian characters.
Hope other Gays and Lesbians complain too.
5 of 8 people found this review helpful
It was okay. It was not really what I coincide a pioneer book. It was just a sad book really
Limited in scope, a "feel-good" story written in simple prose, with nothing of substance to support it. Rather stock characters, though some more interesting than others. Religious "lessons" in the actions/punishments of wayward people. Basically a Christian look at a hard life, about forgiveness, tolerance, and learning to be satisfied with what one has.
If this was meant to contain any "feminist" threads, they were slim. Strong female protag who is successful in most of her endeavors, but waits till forever to marry. A few conflicts which could have proved interesting but didn't
Narrator fine; story -- good for 10-12 year olds; older kids would find it dull and unrealistic.
Lots of scenery, love of the land, etc. etc.
Read The Yearling if you like books about making it in the rough, about rising to overcome adversity and about growing up to be a "good" human being.
2.5 - 3*, because it is the first of a fairly good trilogy. My Antonia (the 3rd) is far better than this one; with more grit and real emotion, perhaps because by then Cather had matured as a writer.
I enjoyed the text of this book, but the reader all but kept me from getting through it. She speaks so slowly and deliberately that I found myself anticipating the dialog for her. Even when she emphasizes words to emote feeling, it's so little that one has to decide oneself whether the characters are, themselves, boring monotones or in fact come to life at all. I'd recommend getting a hard copy of this one or find a version with a different narrator.
The sound quality was not very good and reader used expression and rhythm as if she were reading a fairy tale to preschoolers. Can't recommend it.
Awesome book! Really gives a good, in-depth picture of life on the frontier in vivid, beautiful, penetrating and challenging language.
BUT, the recording was terrible. It was a recording from a tape (the "turn over tape" instructions were left on at one point in the download). I had to turn my ipod up nearly all the way in order to hear the reading.
I hope that audible or someone can procure a better reading.
I love this site! Thanks for offering good books!
Doug
Unfortunately the sound quality for this recording is bad, it sounds like you are listening to an old wind-up phonograph. The story itself is good but not quite as engaging as My Antonia by the same author.