[[Book]] Let the Great World Spin ^PDF^
Let the Great World Spin
By : by Colum McCann (Goodreads Author)
ratings : 87,821
ratings reviews : 8,832
reviews
Original Title : Let the Great World Spin
ISBN : 1400063736 (ISBN13: 9781400063734)
Edition Language : English
Series : Philippe Petit
Hardcover, 351 pages
Published June 23rd 2009 by Random House (first published June 16th 2009)
Characters : New York City, New York (United States) Bronx, New York City, New York (United States)
Setting : National Book Award for Fiction (2009), Ambassador Book Award for Fiction (2010), NAIBA Book of the Year for Fiction (2010), Goodreads Choice Award Nominee for Fiction (2009), International Dublin Literary Award (2011)
Description : In the dawning light of a late-summer morning, the people of lower Manhattan stand hushed, staring up in disbelief at the Twin Towers. It is August 1974, and a mysterious tightrope walker is running, dancing, leaping between the towers, suspended a quarter mile above the ground. In the streets below, a slew of ordinary lives become extraordinary in bestselling novelist In the dawning light of a late-summer morning, the people of lower Manhattan stand hushed, staring up in disbelief at the Twin Towers. It is August 1974, and a mysterious tightrope walker is running, dancing, leaping between the towers, suspended a quarter mile above the ground. In the streets below, a slew of ordinary lives become extraordinary in bestselling novelist Colum McCann’s stunningly intricate portrait of a city and its people.Let the Great World Spin is the critically acclaimed author’s most ambitious novel yet: a dazzlingly rich vision of the pain, loveliness, mystery, and promise of New York City in the 1970s.Corrigan, a radical young Irish monk, struggles with his own demons as he lives among the prostitutes in the middle of the burning Bronx. A group of mothers gather in a Park Avenue apartment to mourn their sons who died in Vietnam, only to discover just how much divides them even in grief. A young artist finds herself at the scene of a hit-and-run that sends her own life careening sideways. Tillie, a thirty-eight-year-old grandmother, turns tricks alongside her teenage daughter, determined not only to take care of her family but to prove her own worth.Elegantly weaving together these and other seemingly disparate lives, McCann’s powerful allegory comes alive in the unforgettable voices of the city’s people, unexpectedly drawn together by hope, beauty, and the “artistic crime of the century.” A sweeping and radical social novel, Let the Great World Spin captures the spirit of America in a time of transition, extraordinary promise, and, in hindsight, heartbreaking innocence. Hailed as a “fiercely original talent” (San Francisco Chronicle), award-winning novelist McCann has delivered a triumphantly American masterpiece that awakens in us a sense of what the novel can achieve, confront, and even heal.
Literary Awards : National Book Award for Fiction (2009), Ambassador Book Award for Fiction (2010), NAIBA Book of the Year for Fiction (2010), Goodreads Choice Award Nominee for Fiction (2009), International Dublin Literary Award (2011)
REVIEWS :In my classification system, there are books that are readers’ books (they tell an engaging story); there are books that are writers’ books (they are creative in their prose and technically sound); and then there are GREAT books that tell a good story through solid prose. Let the Great World Spin (the 2009 National Book Award winner) is such a book. The book shares the lives of seemingly random New Yorkers in 1974, and how their lives intertwine. At the surface, they seem connected by what This really may be the first truly profound novel to connect itself with September 11, 2001 and New York City, if only because it does so in such an understated, oblique, and poetically suggestive way. It's also a novel that may take over a hundred pages to truly capture your imagination, but once it does, and once the connective tissue of the disparate group of characters starts to reveal itself, the novel attains a kind of hypnotic and edgy grace for its duration. So richly and deeply are I used to really enjoy short story collections. I used to read scary ones in elementary school, depressing ones in high school, and I even read trippy ones in college (thinking I was cool). But sometime during my post-college years, my interest in them began to wane. I don’t know whether this can be ascribed to getting older, but I do know that I now get frustrated with short stories. The time I invest in the setting and the characters, acclimating to the storytelling style and pacing—well, For a book that's solely supposed to be about characters....I thought all of these characters were amazingly one-dimensional. The self-sacrificing wanna-be priest? The smarter-than-she-looks hooker? The rich lonely Park Ave housewife? Nothing unique or original in there. Reading it didn't suck really hard, because it's an easy enough read, and there are little splotches of nice writing and insight throughout....but all in all, I didn't get it.I also didn't get the whole "NYC in the '70s" thing This won the national book awardWhich didn’t stop me from becoming boredInstead of this you could try aDocumentary called Man on a WireIt’s also about Philippe Petit’s act(Against which the cards were surely stacked)To walk in the air between the two towersFor approximately 0.75 hoursOn 7th August 1974.By doing so he broke the lawBut the DA for once did the right thingAnd he wasn’t sent to Rikers or Sing SingWhere PP’s feat was one of funambulismColum McCann’s is more like somnambulismSmack-head Reviews, in my opinion, aren't the right place for book reports, nor for nosegays of fanboy gush. I'm supposed to let the reader know why he or she should, could, or would want to read a title.You should, could, AND would want to read this National Book Award-winning novel of grief, sadness, and loss because it's so damned easy to love and cherish these characters. The Catholic monk whose vocation is to bring a whisper of compassion, in its ancient and literal meaning of "shared pain", to the Have you ever heard Gershwin's 'Rhapsody in Blue'? That first low note of the clarinet that increasingly vibrates on the ground before it jumps high, high to land with a soft boom of drums and a smooth backdrop of horns, a building for the clarinet to continue on with trills and soars, till finally the zenith is reached and the horn sounds its own quavering, the robust tone completing that architecture first sounded by the leaping thrills of the lone clarinet.I am hardly the first to see this A tightrope walker about to pull off one of the biggest stunts ever performed. A committed priest too busy looking out for the downtrodden to take care of himself. A pair of prostitutes who are also mother and daughter. A rich woman crippled by grief and her stoic judge husband. A couple of artists who fled the New York night life. Computer hackers. A brutal car wreck. Slums. Penthouses. Robbery. Charity. It’s either another day in New York, or it’s the shittiest circus ever.In 1974, a French Oh god, don’t make me look up! I was only looking at words in a book, but the image gives me instant vertigo! And I’m NOT kidding! There’s a crazy guy doing gymnastics on a tightrope between the Twin Towers, a million feet up in the air. All the other people can look up (and are obsessed with looking up, in fact, which is totally beyond my comprehension since I have to stare intently at my feet), so what’s with me? I’m afraid of heights, so I just can’t look. I just can’t. But how can just A city with so much life in it that just a sliver of a fleeting moment--a man atop a wire suspended between ill-fated twin building--suffices to display the budding emotion of the general populace. And not one emotion but a hundred. & important to these people, for the while, in a very democratic piece of literature. A true valentine to NYC--a jisgaw puzzle of faces that come from different places. They all look up in awe; we look down in equal amazement at the power of this grand American "Being on the tightrope is living; everything else is waiting."-- Karl Wallenda, of the Flying Wallendas. The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 are almost ten years old, and yet, the wound is still very raw (for those not directly involved, I mean; for those that were there, the wound is forever). Books and films that have dared touch the subject have done so in one of two ways: with near-stultifying decorum and gravity, which makes art into some kind of vague, patriotic duty; or with I despise this book on so many levels. Primarily because it touches upon all the necessary/obvious hot points of recent American history: racism, Vietnam, 9/11, even hammering the latter home by ludicrously having a security guard tell someone they can't use their phone in a fricking airport terminal while waiting for luggage. Also: poverty, religion, class warfare, etc. It's as if some foreign writer came in to write about America and wanted to come away with all its dark secrets by scanning Life is full of unexpected synchronicities. The kinds of things that occasionally make you feel that you are connected to a greater web of being, a little sign to let you know that you are not in this alone. Two days before I picked up Colum McCann's extraordinary novel "Let The Great World Spin," I watched the equally extraordinary documentary "Man on Wire" for the second time. Philippe Petit, more angel than human, strung a cable across the Twin Towers in 1974 and performed on it for over half I had a difficult time getting into this book but in the end I am glad I persevered. It is really a story about New York City in 1974 centered around Phillippe Petit's historic tight rope walk between the two towers of the World Trade Center. But the story itself trancends all that and takes us into the lives of some of the people whose days are coloured by this incredible feat and what unfolds is a powerful,complex tale of life, love, loss and redemption. I don't think I realized just how.
Posting Komentar