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Moonglow unfolds as the deathbed confession, made to his grandson, of a man the narrator refers to only as "my grandfather". It is a tale of madness, of war and adventure, of sex and desire and ordinary love, of existential doubt and model rocketry, of the shining aspirations and demonic underpinnings of American technological accomplishment at midcentury, and, above all, of the destructive impact - and the creative power - of the keeping of secrets and the telling of lies.
It's 2011, and Samuel Andresen-Anderson - college professor, stalled writer - has a Nix of his own: his mother, Faye. He hasn't seen her in decades, not since she abandoned the family when he was a boy. Now she's reappeared, having committed an absurd crime that electrifies the nightly news, beguiles the Internet, and inflames a politically divided country. The media paints Faye as a radical hippie with a sordid past, but as far as Samuel knows, his mother was an ordinary girl who married her high school sweetheart.
Anna Kerrigan, nearly 12 years old, accompanies her father to the house of a man who, she gleans, is crucial to the survival of her father and her family. Anna observes the uniformed servants, the lavishing of toys on the children, and some secret pact between her father and Dexter Styles. Years later her father has disappeared, and the country is at war. Anna works at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, where women are allowed to hold jobs that had always belonged to men.
In the late 18th century, Rene Sel, an illiterate woodsman, makes his way from Northern France to New France to seek a living. Bound to a feudal lord, a seigneur, for three years in exchange for land, he suffers extraordinary hardship, always in awe of the forest he is charged with cleaning. Rene marries an Indian healer with children already, and they have more, mixing the blood of two cultures. Proulx tells the stories of the children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren of two lineages, the Sels and the Duquets.
In his final days, beloved and ailing patriarch Miguel Angel de La Cruz, affectionately called Big Angel, has summoned his entire clan for one last legendary birthday party. But as the party approaches, his mother, nearly 100, dies herself, leading to a farewell doubleheader in a single weekend. Among the guests is Big Angel's half-brother, known as Little Angel, who must reckon with the truth that although he shares a father with his siblings, he has not, as a half gringo, shared a life. Across two bittersweet days in their San Diego neighborhood, the revelers mingle.
A Gentleman in Moscow immerses us in an elegantly drawn era with the story of Count Alexander Rostov. When, in 1922, he is deemed an unrepentant aristocrat by a Bolshevik tribunal, the count is sentenced to house arrest in the Metropol, a grand hotel across the street from the Kremlin. Rostov, an indomitable man of erudition and wit, has never worked a day in his life and must now live in an attic room while some of the most tumultuous decades in Russian history are unfolding outside the hotel's doors.
Moonglow unfolds as the deathbed confession, made to his grandson, of a man the narrator refers to only as "my grandfather". It is a tale of madness, of war and adventure, of sex and desire and ordinary love, of existential doubt and model rocketry, of the shining aspirations and demonic underpinnings of American technological accomplishment at midcentury, and, above all, of the destructive impact - and the creative power - of the keeping of secrets and the telling of lies.
It's 2011, and Samuel Andresen-Anderson - college professor, stalled writer - has a Nix of his own: his mother, Faye. He hasn't seen her in decades, not since she abandoned the family when he was a boy. Now she's reappeared, having committed an absurd crime that electrifies the nightly news, beguiles the Internet, and inflames a politically divided country. The media paints Faye as a radical hippie with a sordid past, but as far as Samuel knows, his mother was an ordinary girl who married her high school sweetheart.
Anna Kerrigan, nearly 12 years old, accompanies her father to the house of a man who, she gleans, is crucial to the survival of her father and her family. Anna observes the uniformed servants, the lavishing of toys on the children, and some secret pact between her father and Dexter Styles. Years later her father has disappeared, and the country is at war. Anna works at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, where women are allowed to hold jobs that had always belonged to men.
In the late 18th century, Rene Sel, an illiterate woodsman, makes his way from Northern France to New France to seek a living. Bound to a feudal lord, a seigneur, for three years in exchange for land, he suffers extraordinary hardship, always in awe of the forest he is charged with cleaning. Rene marries an Indian healer with children already, and they have more, mixing the blood of two cultures. Proulx tells the stories of the children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren of two lineages, the Sels and the Duquets.
In his final days, beloved and ailing patriarch Miguel Angel de La Cruz, affectionately called Big Angel, has summoned his entire clan for one last legendary birthday party. But as the party approaches, his mother, nearly 100, dies herself, leading to a farewell doubleheader in a single weekend. Among the guests is Big Angel's half-brother, known as Little Angel, who must reckon with the truth that although he shares a father with his siblings, he has not, as a half gringo, shared a life. Across two bittersweet days in their San Diego neighborhood, the revelers mingle.
A Gentleman in Moscow immerses us in an elegantly drawn era with the story of Count Alexander Rostov. When, in 1922, he is deemed an unrepentant aristocrat by a Bolshevik tribunal, the count is sentenced to house arrest in the Metropol, a grand hotel across the street from the Kremlin. Rostov, an indomitable man of erudition and wit, has never worked a day in his life and must now live in an attic room while some of the most tumultuous decades in Russian history are unfolding outside the hotel's doors.
In the early 1970s, Corey Sifter, the son of working-class parents, becomes a yard boy on the grand estate of the powerful Metarey family. Soon, through the family's generosity, he is a student at a private boarding school and an aide to the great New York senator Henry Bonwiller, who is running for president of the United States.
Told in three distinct and uniquely compelling sections, Asymmetry explores the imbalances that spark and sustain many of our most dramatic human relations: inequities in age, power, talent, wealth, fame, geography, and justice. The first section, "Folly", tells the story of Alice, a young American editor, and her relationship with the famous and much older writer Ezra Blazer. A tender and exquisite account of an unexpected romance that takes place in New York during the early years of the Iraq War.
The Overstory unfolds in concentric rings of interlocking fable that range from antebellum New York to the late 20th-century Timber Wars of the Pacific Northwest and beyond. An air force loadmaster in the Vietnam War is shot out of the sky, then saved by falling into a banyan. An artist inherits 100 years of photographic portraits, all of the same doomed American chestnut. A hard-partying undergraduate in the late 1980s electrocutes herself, dies, and is sent back into life by creatures of air and light. A hearing- and speech-impaired scientist discovers that trees are communicating with one another.
One Sunday afternoon in Southern California, Bert Cousins shows up at Franny Keating's christening party uninvited. Before evening falls, he has kissed Franny's mother, Beverly - thus setting in motion the dissolution of their marriages and the joining of two families.
The long-awaited first novel from the author of Tenth of December: a moving and original father-son story featuring none other than Abraham Lincoln, as well as an unforgettable cast of supporting characters, living and dead, historical and invented. February 1862. The Civil War is less than one year old. The fighting has begun in earnest, and the nation has begun to realize it is in for a long, bloody struggle. Meanwhile, President Lincoln's beloved eleven-year-old son, Willie, lies upstairs in the White House, gravely ill.
Pulitzer Prize, Fiction, 2016. It is April 1975, and Saigon is in chaos. At his villa, a general of the South Vietnamese army is drinking whiskey and, with the help of his trusted captain, drawing up a list of those who will be given passage aboard the last flights out of the country. The general and his compatriots start a new life in Los Angeles, unaware that one among their number, the captain, is secretly observing and reporting on the group to a higher-up in the Viet Cong.
On a foggy summer night, 11 people - 10 privileged, one down-on-his-luck painter - depart Martha's Vineyard on a private jet headed for New York. Sixteen minutes later the unthinkable happens: The plane plunges into the ocean. The only survivors are Scott Burroughs - the painter - and a four-year-old boy who is now the last remaining member of an immensely wealthy and powerful media mogul's family.
Migration, terrorism, the tensions between global capitalism and nationalism, and a communications revolution: These forces shaped Joseph Conrad's destiny at the dawn of the 20th century. In this brilliant new interpretation of one of the great voices in modern literature, Maya Jasanoff reveals Conrad as a prophet of globalization. As an immigrant from Poland to England, and in travels from Malaya to Congo to the Caribbean, Conrad navigated an interconnected world and captured it in a literary oeuvre of extraordinary depth.
From the best-selling author of Atonement, Nutshell is a classic story of murder and deceit, told by a narrator with a perspective and voice unlike any in recent literature. A bravura performance, it is the finest recent work from a true master. To be bound in a nutshell, see the world in two inches of ivory, in a grain of sand. Why not, when all of literature, all of art, of human endeavour is just a speck in the universe of possible things?
In the aftermath of the Civil War, an aging itinerant news reader agrees to transport a young captive of the Kiowa back to her people in this exquisitely rendered, morally complex, multilayered novel of historical fiction from the author of Enemy Women that explores the boundaries of family, responsibility, honor, and trust.
The Newest Oprah Book Club 2016 Selection. Cora is a slave on a cotton plantation in Georgia. Life is hell for all the slaves but especially bad for Cora; an outcast even among her fellow Africans, she is coming into womanhood - where even greater pain awaits. When Caesar, a recent arrival from Virginia, tells her about the Underground Railroad, they decide to take a terrifying risk and escape. Matters do not go as planned - Cora kills a young white boy who tries to capture her. Though they manage to find a station and head north, they are being hunted.
Here are two sisters: One trades self-respect for a wealthy husband while the other finds in the pages of a book a kindred spirit who changes her life. The janitor at the local school has his faith tested in an encounter with an isolated man he has come to help; a grown daughter longs for mother love even as she comes to accept her mother's happiness in a foreign country; and the adult Lucy Barton (the heroine of My Name Is Lucy Barton, the author's celebrated New York Times best seller) returns to visit her siblings after 17 years of absence.
Milo Andret is born with an unusual mind. A lonely child growing up in the woods of Northern Michigan in the 1950s, he gives little thought to his own talent. But with his acceptance at UC Berkeley, he realizes the extent - and the risks - of his singular gifts.
California in the '70s is a seduction, opening Milo's eyes to the allure of both ambition and indulgence. The research he begins there will make him a legend; the woman he meets there - and the rival he meets alongside her - will haunt him for the rest of his life. For Milo's brilliance is entwined with a dark need that soon grows to threaten his work, his family, even his existence.
A superb story told in elegant prose, the first half of The Doubter's Almanac is the story of Milo Andret, who grows up in the 1950s in Michigan. He’s a loner and average student, although he always knows exactly where he is on the plane of the earth, an ability that will purportedly serve him well in the field of topology (geometric properties and spatial relations). He is confused by the domain of human relations, and can “neither predict nor understand the behavior of others”, so he concludes that he’s “entirely alone in the world.” This axiom shapes his whole life. After working as a car mechanic, he eventually ends up in grad. school at Berkeley. He meets a girl named Cle, and with her discovers sex, alcohol, and LSD. Milo is old for a mathematician (they allegedly do their best work prior to age 40), and the sex, drugs, and alcohol seem to allay his fears and frustrations. Milo does go on to solve the fictional Malosz conjecture, win the Fields Medal (the Nobel Prize equivalent in mathematics), and become a professor at Princeton University.
There is an interesting incident in Milo's childhood that figures repeatedly in the story. When he is roaming the forests where he can always place himself, he finds a blown-down tree. Working by himself for weeks, he carves the stump into a 25-foot-long continuous, seamless wooden chain. It’s a beautiful thing, described so well by the author that I could easily picture it and want to possess one just like it. Milo does not readily share the chain with others, but it's a project closely linked to his future work and an interesting symbol.
The second part of the book is narrated by Milo’s son Hans, who chronicles exactly how horrible a person Milo really is – a nasty, drunken womanizer who alternately curses and ignores his family and demeans his colleagues, all without shame or apology. He seems to believe that the “curse of his own genius” entitles him to behave this way, but there will be a high price to pay. He has become a nowhere dense set – a set whose closure has empty interior. This second part also describes the ongoing struggle between Milo and his son. Milo insists that Hans has inherited the mathematical gift and seeing what this has done to his father and himself, Hans attempts to flee the curse in his own destructive ways. Hans must also warily watch his own children for signs of what he fears might befall them.
I was impressed with Canin's ability to write about number theory, submanifolds and differential equations, but always in a way that added to the story and was not distracting nor overwhelming to the reader. I loved his use of mathematical terms to describe ordinary things – “a mud-colored polytope of his mass shot glitteringly into the air”, “the twisted white catenary of the phone cord bridging the darkness from his desk”, “The cut edges of the glasses were projecting stellate tessellations across the mahogany.”
I'm not sure that I agree with the conjecture that genius (of any type) is a curse, but not being any sort of genius myself, I do wish I could have just a small taste. Not all people gifted with extraordinary ability repeatedly sabotage themselves as Milo and Hans do. I did wonder why Milo's family withstood his verbal and physical brutality, and then returned for more. I think Milo becomes utterly overwhelmed by the pressure to work, produce, and to achieve, in addition to the ever-present anxiety that whatever special mathematical gift he had been blessed with could just as easily disappear. There is also the more frightening realization that his supposed genius may not even be so. Knowledge can be a binary gift, something that the world needs and celebrates even as it ostracizes from the world those who possess it. This does not have to be mathematics; it can be any legacy, the qualities we inherit and, with any luck and wisdom, we can strive to improve upon.
8 of 8 people found this review helpful
I'm conflicted about the book, which is a good thing because it means I'll be thinking about it even having finished it.
It's a brave author who leads with a character who is so unlikeable. Milo has his doubts & character flaws, but the first portion of the book is a warts and all view that makes sympathy for Milo difficult. The interplay of genius, the compulsion to pursue the path of one's gift and the personality that resulted are an intense look at the effects of such an intellectual gift. The second part of the book is a let down, partially because it's unclear why anyone would feel the devotion to Milo that at least three characters have. Additionally, the positing that mathematical genius is hereditary (and pretty much a curse) isn't based on any reality, and plays into a kind of "you get math or you don't" way of thinking that research disproves since the children all have their math skills while being almost actively discouraged from following them.
Still, the examination of Milo's life (and mathematical gift) and how that plays out is fascinating. Also, great writing and kudos to any author who would make mathematics a base of a novel (and make it accessible).
3 of 3 people found this review helpful
Excellent narrator. If you liked All the Light We Cannot See - or The Innovators - you may find this very engaging.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful
“A Doubter’s Almanac” is a 21st century novel destined to be a classic. Though some may argue otherwise, Ethan Canin writes about a universal truth; i.e. “women are the sun; men are the moon”. Canin catalyzes one’s doubt and ambivalence about life’s meaning in a story about moral transgression, addiction, guilt, and redemption.
The story begins with details of a person with a superior intellect, and an amoral life. He is Milo Andret, a mathematician blessed with the ability to understand complex spatial relationships, even as they change shape. Milo is never lost in a physical wilderness but is trapped in a space reserved only for himself. In some ways, Milo reminds one of Ivan Karamazov (Dostoyevsky’s protagonist in “Brothers Karamazov”), a rationalist that denies God because of the irrationality of faith and the cruelty of life.
Milo, like Ivan, treats others as superficial human beings who only have relevance in respect to what they can do for him. Milo is a self-absorbed genius who begins as a naïve young boy looking for recognition from others for a superiority that he only vaguely sees in himself. Milo is a boy narcissist who matures into a misogynistic adult and dies as a repentant grandfather. Canin reveals the nature of geniuses who exploit their intellectual superiority. They alienate others. Some will lie to win praise. They are awarded for “presumed” new discoveries that are beyond the reasoning ability of their peers.
Canin has written a good story; expertly narrated by David Baker. It is a tribute to the seekers of proof about the nature of existence. The nature of existence seems beyond the grasp of the human mind. Through Milo and his family, Canin implies neither men nor women should ever give up. What Canin’s hero confirms is that women are the sun and men are the moon. Nature and nurture make us who we are but the principal source of power is in the sun.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful
What could have made this a 4 or 5-star listening experience for you?
First part of book, describing the active portion of a mathematician's career was well-written and interesting. Unfortunately the later part, in which this alcoholic character is in his dying days, drags on FOREVER and is very boring.
Has A Doubter's Almanac turned you off from other books in this genre?
yes, done with Ethan Canin.
I liked some of his short stories years ago, but this one will make it impossible for me to read anything more of his.
How did the narrator detract from the book?
Falsetto for female characters sounds like a drag queen.
What reaction did this book spark in you? Anger, sadness, disappointment?
Disappointment that Canin is unable to carry an interesting story and keep up the interest level. There was just this endless bloody boring phase where everyone is grappling with this old dying alcoholic's legacy, and it just feels like, why the hell are you dragging me the reader through this crapola.
Any additional comments?
If you like alcoholics with liver failure and people sorting out their own emotions endlessly, this is the book for you. Otherwise find another book.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful
Work is very very well with however despite a strong start with an interesting set up the characters become less interesting as the book progresses and the overall subject matter is quite dull.
3 of 4 people found this review helpful
So many angles in which to view this novel; as a son, a father, a friend, a lover, a brother. A story that reveals layers of understanding in us all, and some things many can never comprehend.
3 of 4 people found this review helpful
I absolutely loved the intricately woven tale of unique, intelligent characters! Enjoy the unpredictable adventure!
1 of 1 people found this review helpful
It is good in the beginning but the second half brings it all together. Great listen.
good story but missed opportunities to reveal a great truth. Great descriptions of complex concepts