This is a powerful book that immediately draws readers inside the world of French coal miners and their families.
The sense of struggle and hopelessness is palpable throughout as the characters are figuratively and sometimes literally trapped both inside the mines and in their ramshackle homes. The central event in the book is a miners’ strike led by the main character, Étienne Lautier, that becomes violent, divisive, and ultimately tragic.
Zola did an enormous amount of research on mining and miners to carefully recapture both the physical and emotional environment. Readers will learn a great deal about an unfamiliar world that they will not soon forget.
Zola's masterpiece of working life, Germinal (1885), exposes the inhuman conditions of miners in northern France in the 1860s. By Zola's death in 1902 it had come to symbolise the call for freedom from oppression so forcefully that the crowd which gathered at his State funeral chanted 'Germinal! Germinal!'. The central figure, Etienne Lantier, is an outsider who enters the community and eventually leads his fellow-miners in a strike protesting against pay-cuts - a strike which becomes a losing battle against starvation, repression, and sabotage. Yet despite all the violence and disillusion which rock the mining community to its foundations,…
I decided to read this biography of Theodore Dreiser because American Tragedy is one of the finest novels ever written.
Lingeman presents Dreiser’s tumultuous and often sad life warts and all. From his painful family life in Indiana, through his struggles to become a successful writer, through marriage and numerous dalliances, to his flirtation with communism, Dreiser’s deeply flawed character and numerous conflicts in the literary world make for fascinating if often disturbing reading.
Everything from his battles against literary censorship to his on-again off-again friendship with H. L. Mencken fill the biography with drama and poignancy. Readers will watch Dreiser’s life unfold and sometimes wish to turn away but will not be able to do so.
Now an abridged edition of two highly acclaimed volumes Praise for Theodore Dreiser: At the Gates of the City, 18711907 "Dreisers life has never been more vividly told. Lingemans definitive book reveals the tough, uncompromising impulse that led Dreiser, disdaining style, to slug with such knockout power." Studs Terkel "Scrupulously, massivelydevotedlyconstructed; everything is in it. And it is immaculately rendered." Cynthia Ozick The New York Times Book Review "An intimate and revealing portrait a solid, honorable and perceptive book." Jonathan Yardley The Washington Post Book World "A remarkable book packed with vivid reminiscences, personal anecdotes and thorough research that brings…
This is Updike’s last collection of short stories and suitably enough aging is a frequent theme.
Everything from the bittersweet experience of high school class reunions to the nightly routine of an old man are told in Updike’s sharply observant and richly descriptive prose. He brilliantly elevates the ordinary while recapturing both the fascination and sadness of people thinking back on their experiences, from childhood to past relationships.
Set in foreign places as well as Updike’s native Pennsylvania, these are stories to read slowly while taking in the always touching prose and getting to know a cast of at once ordinary and but at the same time fascinating characters.
A sensational collection of stories of the American experience from the Depression to the aftermath of 9/11, by one of the most gifted American writers of the twentieth century and the author of the acclaimed Rabbit series.
John Updike mingles narratives of Pennsylvania with stories of New England suburbia and of foreign travel:“Personal Archaeology” considers life as a sequence of half-buried layers, and “The Full Glass” distills a lifetime’s happiness into one brimming moment of an old man’s bedtime routine. High-school class reunions, in “The Walk with Elizanne” and “The Road Home,” restore their hero to youth’s commonwealth where, as…
Throughout the Civil War, soldiers and civilians on both sides of the conflict saw the hand of God in the terrible events of the day, but the standard narratives of the period pay scant attention to religion. Rable illuminates the broad role of religion during the Civil War, giving attention to often-neglected groups such as Mormons, Catholics, blacks, and people from the Trans-Mississippi region. The book underscores religion's presence in the everyday lives of Americans north and south struggling to understand the meaning of the conflict, from the tragedy of individual death to victory and defeat in battle and even the ultimate outcome of the war. Rable shows that themes of providence, sin, and judgment pervaded both public and private writings about the conflict.
