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I have been standing on the side of life, watching it float by. I want to swim in the river. I want to feel the current. So writes Mamah Borthwick Cheney in her diary as she struggles to justify her clandestine love affair with Frank Lloyd Wright. Four years earlier, in 1903, Mamah and her husband, Edwin, had commissioned the renowned architect to design a new home for them.
Set in contemporary Northern California, The Harder They Come explores the volatile connections between three damaged people - an aging ex-marine and Vietnam veteran, his psychologically unstable son, and the son's paranoid, much older lover - as they careen toward an explosive confrontation.
For four young immigrant women living in Boston's North End in the early 1900s, escaping tradition doesn't come easy. But at least they have one another and the Saturday Evening Girls Club, a social pottery-making group offering respite from their hectic home lives - and hope for a better future. The friends face family clashes and romantic entanglements, career struggles and cultural prejudice.
Topanga Canyon is home to two couples on a collision course. Los Angeles liberals Delaney and Kyra Mossbacker lead an ordered, sushi-and-recycling existence in a newly gated hilltop community: He is a sensitive nature writer, she an obsessive realtor. Mexican illegals Candido and America Rincon desperately cling to their vision of the American Dream as they fight off starvation in a makeshift camp deep in the ravine.
Likened to the works of Faulkner and Dickens when it was first published 20 years ago, this extraordinarily accomplished debut novel is a brilliantly plotted story of forbidden love and piercing political drama, centered on the tragic decline of an Indian family in the state of Kerala, on the southernmost tip of India. Armed only with the invincible innocence of children, the twins Rahel and Esthappen fashion a childhood for themselves in the shade of the wreck that is their family.
>In the despair of a Japanese POW camp on the Thailand - Burma Death Railway in 1943, Australian surgeon Dorrigo Evans is haunted by his love affair with his uncle's young wife two years earlier. His life is a daily struggle to save the men under his command from starvation, from cholera, from pitiless beatings - until he receives a letter that will change him forever.
I have been standing on the side of life, watching it float by. I want to swim in the river. I want to feel the current. So writes Mamah Borthwick Cheney in her diary as she struggles to justify her clandestine love affair with Frank Lloyd Wright. Four years earlier, in 1903, Mamah and her husband, Edwin, had commissioned the renowned architect to design a new home for them.
Set in contemporary Northern California, The Harder They Come explores the volatile connections between three damaged people - an aging ex-marine and Vietnam veteran, his psychologically unstable son, and the son's paranoid, much older lover - as they careen toward an explosive confrontation.
For four young immigrant women living in Boston's North End in the early 1900s, escaping tradition doesn't come easy. But at least they have one another and the Saturday Evening Girls Club, a social pottery-making group offering respite from their hectic home lives - and hope for a better future. The friends face family clashes and romantic entanglements, career struggles and cultural prejudice.
Topanga Canyon is home to two couples on a collision course. Los Angeles liberals Delaney and Kyra Mossbacker lead an ordered, sushi-and-recycling existence in a newly gated hilltop community: He is a sensitive nature writer, she an obsessive realtor. Mexican illegals Candido and America Rincon desperately cling to their vision of the American Dream as they fight off starvation in a makeshift camp deep in the ravine.
Likened to the works of Faulkner and Dickens when it was first published 20 years ago, this extraordinarily accomplished debut novel is a brilliantly plotted story of forbidden love and piercing political drama, centered on the tragic decline of an Indian family in the state of Kerala, on the southernmost tip of India. Armed only with the invincible innocence of children, the twins Rahel and Esthappen fashion a childhood for themselves in the shade of the wreck that is their family.
>In the despair of a Japanese POW camp on the Thailand - Burma Death Railway in 1943, Australian surgeon Dorrigo Evans is haunted by his love affair with his uncle's young wife two years earlier. His life is a daily struggle to save the men under his command from starvation, from cholera, from pitiless beatings - until he receives a letter that will change him forever.
It is 1994, and in the desert near Tillman, Arizona, 40 miles from Tucson, a grand experiment involving the future of humanity is underway. As climate change threatens the Earth, eight scientists, four men and four women dubbed the Terranauts, have been selected to live under glass in E2, a prototype of a possible off-Earth colony. Their sealed three-acre compound comprises five biomes - rain forest, savanna, desert, ocean, and marsh - and enough wildlife, water, and vegetation to sustain them.
World War II comes to Farleigh Place, the ancestral home of Lord Westerham and his five daughters, when a soldier with a failed parachute falls to his death on the estate. After his uniform and possessions raise suspicions, MI5 operative and family friend Ben Cresswell is covertly tasked with determining if the man is a German spy. The assignment also offers Ben the chance to be near Lord Westerham's middle daughter, Pamela, whom he furtively loves. But Pamela has her own secret.
Summer, 1926. Ernest Hemingway and his wife, Hadley, take refuge from the blazing heat of Paris in a villa in the south of France. They swim and play bridge, and drink gin with abandon. But wherever they go they are accompanied by the glamorous and irrepressible Fife. Fife is Hadley's best friend. She is also Ernest's lover. Hadley is the first Mrs. Hemingway, but neither she nor Fife will be the last. Each Mrs. Hemingway thought their love would last forever; each one was wrong.
Dave Eggers scored a worldwide phenomenon with this memoir that topped national best-seller lists and has since become a staple for summer reading and book clubs. A compelling voice for Generation X, Eggers hererecounts his early 20s, caring for his younger brother after their parents’ unexpected deaths and his endeavors in a variety of media.
Greer Kadetsky is a shy college freshman when she meets the woman she hopes will change her life. Faith Frank, dazzlingly persuasive and elegant at 60 and a central pillar of the women's movement for decades, is a figure who inspires others to change the world and make the most of themselves. Upon hearing Faith speak for the first time, Greer - madly in love with her devoted boyfriend, Cory, but still full of longing for an ambition that she can't quite place - is awestruck.
In the midst of what should be an effulgent time of life, with its days bright with music, family, and rowing on the Seine, Jules is confronted headlong and all at once by a series of challenges to his principles, livelihood, and home, forcing him to grapple with his complex past and find a way forward. He risks fraud to save his terminally ill infant grandson, matches wits with a renegade insurance investigator, is drawn into an act of savage violence, and falls deeply, excitingly in love with a young cellist who is a third his age.
The best way to experience this classic of the American South is by joining five-time Academy Award nominee and Best Actress winner Susan Sarandon (Dead Man Walking, Thelma & Louise) as she guides the listener on a journey through the anguish of adolescence and isolation.
Andy Barber has been an assistant district attorney in his suburban Massachusetts county for more than 20 years. He is respected in his community, tenacious in the courtroom, and happy at home with his wife, Laurie, and son, Jacob. But when a shocking crime shatters their New England town, Andy is blindsided by what happens next: his 14-year-old son is charged with the murder of a fellow student.
Spanning 40 years, this is the story of turbulent Tom Wingo, his gifted and troubled twin sister Savannah, and their struggle to triumph over the dark and tragic legacy of the extraordinary family into which they were born.
Italo Calvino imagines a novel capable of endless mutations in this intricately crafted story about writing and readers. If on a Winter's Night a Traveler turns out to be not one novel but 10, each with a different plot, style, ambience, and author, and each interrupted at a moment of suspense. Together they form a labyrinth of literatures, known and unknown, alive and extinct, through which two readers, a male and a female, pursue both the story lines that intrigue them and one another.
In early 1943, Magda Ritter's parents send her to relatives in Bavaria, hoping to keep her safe from the Allied bombs strafing Berlin. Young German women are expected to do their duty - working for the Reich or marrying to produce strong, healthy children. After an interview with the civil service, Magda is assigned to the Berghof, Hitler's mountain retreat. Only after weeks of training does she learn her assignment: she will be one of several young women tasting the Führer's food, offering herself in sacrifice to keep him from being poisoned.
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.
Frank Lloyd Wright's life was one long, howling struggle against the bonds of convention, whether aesthetic, social, moral, or romantic. He never did what was expected, and he never let anything get in the way of his larger-than-life appetites and visions.
Told through the experiences of the four women who loved him, this imaginative account of Wright's raucous life blazes with Boyle's trademark wit and invention. Boyle's protean voice captures these very different women and, in doing so, creates a masterful ode to the creative life in all its complexity and grandeur.
So in a book about an architect (or rather around said architect's muses), I spent more time pondering the architure of the book itself than I might typically -- not because of the profession of the man, but because the structure of the book is questionable, and only after completing it did I realized why Boyle made the choices he did.Yet to have a reader wondering midstream why the author is choosing a weird chronology is akin to wondering why an Architect walks you into a bedroom before the kitchen.
2 quick things - I've never been a huge Boyle fan, I think because I've always felt a bit of authorial disdain when it comes to his character treatment, and less focus on characters than on other elements of his novels. In this novel I appreciated Boyle's care of and for all of his subjects, and the depth in which they are rendered is appreciated.
I'm of a generation that knows who Frank Lloyd Wright is, knows his clean/modern lines but little else about his chaotic life. This isn't the book to educate a reader about his work, but it's a book with enough narrative pull that it creates the desire in someone like me to know more about the work that the character in the novel created, which I also think is a huge compliment to the author.
Because I had no knowledge of Wright's personal life, I was not able to guess in advance why Boyle started with the fourth woman, moved to the third, interjected the first occasionally and closed the book with the fourth until the dramatic, murder-capped denouement. Of course Woman #2's Demise was too dramatic to insert into the middle of the book! But the very fact that I wondered, to me indicates Boyle wasn't quite successful in "arting" around the reordering of the women and the life. Valiant effort though- inserting a distinct narrator (Japanese architecture student) for much of the book helped deflect musings about chronology, but not defeat them.
8 of 8 people found this review helpful
While I generally enjoy Boyle's writing and Gardner is a very good reader, this book just doesn't work for me, for several reasons. The book is organized in reverse order, so we start with Wright's last (third) wife Olgivanna, then a section on his second wife Miriam and then a third section about his mistress Mamah, while Wright was married to his first wife Kitty. By the time I finished the section on Olgivanna, I knew as much as I wanted to about Miriam and couldn't finish the second section, so I skipped to section 3. What was the rationale for organizing the book this way? I think it detracts, rather than adds, to the story.
I have an issue with the narrator, who is supposedly one of Wright's apprentices. I realize this is a work of fiction, but Wright and Olgivanna were married in 1927 or 1928 and the apprenticeship program did not begin until 1932. Thus there's some contradiction between actual and fictional events, but I can handle that. What's more problematic is that so many events in the book occurred before the narrator arrived on the scene. His "involvement" in the later sections of the book is minimal, as you might expect, which then begs the question: why use this narrator at all?
If you enjoy listening to Boyle, you'll probably like this -- I really enjoyed the first section of the book. Then it got tedious, and overall, just a little too long for me (even skipping most of section 2).
7 of 7 people found this review helpful
Frank Lloyd Wright is well known for setting new standards in architectural design. This book tells of how he pushed the envelope on social and even moral issues of his time - mistresses, divorces, equality of the sexes and races... The narrative is told by one of his apprentices in a very unique third party tale whose chronology jumps back and forth.
2 of 2 people found this review helpful
I think it is important that this is the ONLY audiobook to which I stopped listening after only an hour and never went back to. It just didn't seem that interesting. I wouldn't want to ruin it for anyone else -- maybe it's because I'm a fiction geek for the most part, and reality just doesn't interest me as much. Maybe I'll try it again later, but I cannot recommend this book.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful
What made the experience of listening to The Women the most enjoyable?
Even though I felt like Frank Lloyd Wright was an opportunist and his outright abuse of the women and people in his life, the story was compelling enough to keep listening to the book.
Would you be willing to try another book from T. C. Boyle? Why or why not?
Yes, I would. He is so descriptive in his story line and he drew you into the story.
What does Grover Gardner bring to the story that you wouldn’t experience if you just read the book?
I think he made the book much easier to follow than if I had been reading it. I can see where reading the book would have been much more difficult to follow. Mr Gardner was an extraordinary narrator in his performance. I would definitely want to listen to other books narrated by him.
Was there a moment in the book that particularly moved you?
When he was in China and his paramour for the moment left him and traveled into the mountains to get away from Frank. Then the letter writing back and forth between the two and then Mr. Wright showing up on her doorstep, and the two spending some time together alone before they went back to Hong Kong. He had an uncanny way of always getting his way.
Any additional comments?
Anyone interested in this book, I would recommend they listen to it rather than read it.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful
The only thing I liked about this book was that I learned a lot about Frank Lloyd Wright and his work. Unfortunately, he comes across as a modern day U.S. Congressman with his "I do what I want" attitude about life and especially women. Frank's women all come across as whiney and manipulative. I also did not like that the book is told from the last wife forward. At times it was difficult to follow. This was complicated by the footnotes being read in the text giving the book as feel of backtracking even more. While this footnote information was generally educational, it disrupted the flow of the book. I could barely finish this listen and wouldn't except that I needed something to entertain me on a really long road trip! Don't bother!
1 of 1 people found this review helpful
It is a testament to Boyle's ability to breathe fictional life into these true-life characters--and that I despised one of them so. Like Diane, from VA, I really struggled through the middle section. Miriam Wright was, without a doubt, a detestable, self-centered, sadistic, mentally unstable, and narcissistic woman. Reading aout her attacks on Wright's last misstress was very difficult.
Boyle brings her to such life that I was pretty much cringing throughout her section. I kept thinking, "How could such a brilliant guy get so manipulated?" Then again, all of Wright's own narcissism and ego is on brilliant display.
Not an easy book to read, but, as with all Boyle's work, an accomplishment. If you like your literature on the soft side, don't brave this one. If you are into well-written prose and intricatly depicted (but unpleasant) characters, then go for this one!
1 of 1 people found this review helpful
Nothing works. The device of the narrator--a fictitious FLW apprentice--falters and seems all but abandoned in the latter third; an inordinate and painful amount of the book is devoted to Miriam, the enraged, drug-addicted, vindictive second wife; all the characters are painted as deluded, selfish and manipulative. The story is told backwards for no discernible reason. I've listened to two other TC Boyle novels that are based on real stories. This is the least satisfying.
3 of 4 people found this review helpful
The problem with this book is that there was really only one interesting thing that happened relative to Wright's love life, and you have to wade through the tedium of the rest of the book to get to it. SO not worth the journey to get there.
2 of 3 people found this review helpful
Would you try another book from T. C. Boyle and/or Grover Gardner?
No
What do you think your next listen will be?
PAtti Smith "M Train"
Would you be willing to try another one of Grover Gardner’s performances?
No
You didn’t love this book... but did it have any redeeming qualities?
The subject Frank Lloyd Wright is a complex, fascinating genius. It would have been good to have a nuanced book about him.
Any additional comments?
I almost always finish books--not this one.I gave up out of annoyance.