@Book@ The Hour I First Believed ^PDF^
The Hour I First Believed
By : by Wally Lamb (Goodreads Author)
ratings : 54,682
ratings reviews : 6,440
reviews
Original Title : The Hour I First Believed
ISBN : 0060393491 (ISBN13: 9780060393496)
Edition Language : English
Series : Denver, Colorado (United States) Connecticut (United States)
Hardcover, 740 pages
Published November 11th 2008 by Harper (first published November 11th 2007)
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Description : Wally Lamb's two previous novels, She's Come Undone and I Know This Much Is True, struck a chord with readers. They responded to the intensely introspective nature of the books, and to their lively narrative styles and biting humor. In The Hour I First Believed, Lamb travels well beyond his earlier work and embodies in his fiction myth, psychology, family history Wally Lamb's two previous novels, She's Come Undone and I Know This Much Is True, struck a chord with readers. They responded to the intensely introspective nature of the books, and to their lively narrative styles and biting humor. In The Hour I First Believed, Lamb travels well beyond his earlier work and embodies in his fiction myth, psychology, family history stretching back many generations, and the questions of faith that lie at the heart of everyday life. The result is an extraordinary tour de force, at once a meditation on the human condition and an unflinching yet compassionate evocation of character.When forty-seven-year-old high school teacher Caelum Quirk and his younger wife, Maureen, a school nurse, move to Littleton, Colorado, they both get jobs at Columbine High School. In April 1999, Caelum returns home to Three Rivers, Connecticut, to be with his aunt who has just had a stroke. But Maureen finds herself in the school library at Columbine, cowering in a cabinet and expecting to be killed, as two vengeful students go on a carefully premeditated, murderous rampage. Miraculously she survives, but at a cost: she is unable to recover from the trauma. Caelum and Maureen flee Colorado and return to an illusion of safety at the Quirk family farm in Three Rivers. But the effects of chaos are not so easily put right, and further tragedy ensues. While Maureen fights to regain her sanity, Caelum discovers a cache of old diaries, letters, and newspaper clippings in an upstairs bedroom of his family's house. The colorful and intriguing story they recount spans five generations of Quirk family ancestors, from the Civil War era to Caelum's own troubled childhood. Piece by piece, Caelum reconstructs the lives of the women and men whose legacy he bears. Unimaginable secrets emerge; long-buried fear, anger, guilt, and grief rise to the surface. As Caelum grapples with unexpected and confounding revelations from the past, he also struggles to fashion a future out of the ashes of tragedy. His personal quest for meaning and faith becomes a mythic journey that is at the same time quintessentially contemporary -- and American.The Hour I First Believed is a profound and heart-rending work of fiction. Wally Lamb proves himself a virtuoso storyteller, assembling a variety of voices and an ensemble of characters rich enough to evoke all of humanity.
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REVIEWS :It truly pains me to give this book only two stars, but after struggling through it, I can't bring myself to give it more. There are definitely redeeming qualities about this novel, and ultimately I ended up getting something out of it. But it was so hard to push through, and it was such a disappointment to me after loving his previous two novels. This book is just SO all over the map, and after awhile it lost me. Bottom line, I just didn't much care about the characters. Everything ends up When an author asks you to go on a 700+ page journey, the trip should be enjoyable and/or the destination should be fulfilling. Unfortunately, I don't feel that "The Hour I First Believed" really offers either a good trip or a satisfying final destination. Rather, it is joyless, self-indulgent, and exposition-heavy. Lamb too often tells rather than shows in this book, and the telling is a little over-done. Also, the dialogue given to the teen characters and an early chapter written from the POV Unbelievably good. I never thought I'd say that about a book that incorporates Columbine, prison, drug addiction, Hurricane Katrina and troubled youth but it's the truth. I had to stop and sit and think after I finished this long book. After thinking for awhile, I realized that I would always think of Caelum Quirk, the main character and narrator, as a good friend even if he doesn't actually exist. This was second time round that I read The Hour I First Believed and is no less a disquieting read for me; first read in 2008 and again nearly six years later. I think that the the blurb is detailed enough so I will forgo an outline of the story. Lamb does what I most love in a novel; he takes real people and events and fashions a fictional story alongside these very real moments in time. The catalyst of the story is the Columbine shooting massacre of April 1999 but it also covers marriage The Hour I First Believed? By Wally Lamb? Yeah, I read it. Hey, I didn't say it was great or anything. In fact, it seems like Mr. Lamb was really inspired by that show. Law and Order? Yeah, you know the one where they use crappy dialog to push forward bizarre plot points and explain complex technical stuff so the audience doesn't feel dumb cause they're not lawyers? Even though real people probably wouldn't talk like that in real life? Yeah, it's kinda like that in some ways. (You know, I felt post-trau·mat·ic stress dis·or·der (n.) : a condition of persistent mental and emotional stress occurring as a result of injury or severe psychological shock, typically involving disturbance of sleep and constant vivid recall of the experience, with dulled responses to others and to the outside world.This book made my mind spin round and round; I’m still trying to connect all the dots days after finishing it. Caelum Quirk and his wife Maureen suffer damaging effects after the Columbine In the afterword to The Hour I First Believed, Wally Lamb says his long career in teaching influenced his decision to center his new book on the 1999 Columbine High School shooting, in which Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold killed 12 students and one teacher before taking their own lives. “(H)aving spent half of my life in high school – four years as a student and 25 as a teacher – I could and did transport myself, psychically if not physically, to Littleton, Colorado. Could I have acted as *SPOILERS*This book is absolutely terrible, but well crafted. It's like a well lit, professionally taken picture of a headless puppy. Don't read it, unless you consider gratuitous constant tragedy to be the definition of depth. Believe me, this is the worst example of the McDeep conceptual space that is so tedious in today's writing and general media.In it, the main character witnesses (I kid you not):ColumbinePTSD in a loved oneVicarious suffering over KatrinaLoss of limb in IraqViolent Say what you will about this book; in my opinion it's a tour de force. The author covers a wide range of topics starting with the Civil War, abolitionism, the Columbine horrors, 9/11, lost souls, death, alcoholism, the power of love, and so much more that it's difficult to quantify. I'm sure this will become an Oprah book and all that jazz, but still, reading a book like this one wonders how an author can do it. The main character is a sort of sad sack who always feels something askew in his For those in my book club, you will hear this in person eventually so just ignore.Here goes ...Why is it that in an era of 'Green' being the new Black, of ADD being the new normal, and 'fast and snippy' the new 'slow and steady,' do otherwise talented authors suddenly feel the need to knock down innocent trees and waste our time in a most achronistic fashion? With Lamb's new book, he successfully joins the ranks of Russo and Sittenfeld (and I am sure others) who follow up perfectly wonderful and This was not an easy book to read. For all the effort I put into it, Wally Lamb should have been standing on the last page offering me a sash, a trophy, and large sums of money. It kind of turned into a joke as every night I would tell my husband what the new plotline was. Some of the subjects were: Adultery, Columbine, PTSD, Drug Addiction, Murder, Womens prisons (In great detail), buried corpses (in greater detail) and a paper about civil war times (in RIDICULOUS detail). Not my favorite. What? I never wrote a review? Maybe I read it before a Goodreads addict.... haha...But this story is page turning.It’s $1.99 Kindle special if you missed it. I picked up this book with some trepidation: first, I wasn't sure how much I wanted to read about the Columbine shootings, especially since I remember being extremely distraught upon hearing about the whole tragedy and was afraid to revisit that. Secondly, I've read Lamb's two other novels and liked one but hated the other. Well, I got about 60 pages in and decided to drop this book because long ago I'd given up my neurotic need to finish a book once I've started. Lamb's narrator, Caelum Quirk, While I can understand why the reviews of this novel range from hot to cold, I loved it. I can not think of the last time I read a novel that contained so many current events and issues, all under the same cover.I thought Lamb took a huge risk by weaving fictional characters in with the Columbine tragedy, but it worked. Not many authors could combine the two with such sensitivity. I thought his character development absolutely perfect.I do admit that some of the thesis was a bit long and.
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