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Title: Rising Up and Rising Down by William T. Vollmann ISBN: 1-932416-02-1 Publisher: McSweeney's Books Pub. Date: November, 2003 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $120.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 5 (2 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Don't Believe the Hype . . .
Comment: . . . because it's even better than you'd imagine.
I threw a party for the future of literature and I invited Vollmann as the guest speaker.
Rating: 5
Summary: ok, it's important. But will I read it?
Comment: Something that I haven't seen in any of the reviews of Vollmann's book is this: "Am I going to want to read it?" After all, if you're spendng $120 or so on the thing, and you're interested in more that just looking at it on your bookshelf, it should be considered. Sure, Vollmann has written an important book by all accounts, but that doesn't mean I'm going to read it. Or even a quarter of it.
Well, good news: Rising Up Rising Down is very readable; moreso I think that his recent novel Argall, on which I remain stuck on around page 350. The book does get heavy of course in its theories and efforts to explore the connections it needs to make. But the chapters themselves are usually very short, and few examples in it last so long that you lose interest. A few more pages and he'll be talking about something else in a different country and different time. I raced through the first volume, and half of the second. At that point I got sidetracked with some other things, but I can't wait to get back into it.
In many cases you actually get nice short versions of difficult to understand historical events. For example, one hundred pages on what happened in the early Soviet Union when farms were turned into state owned collectives and the famine that resulted is actually much easir to read than a 500 page book on the topic, Frankly that's enough for me, and if I want to know more about it beyond that, Vollmann gives me a list of plenty of other books to check out on the topic as well.
I'll leave it to others to go into the strengths and shortcomings of this book. What I wanted to do here is just encourage people who are on the fence about buying this thing to not be discouraged by its length or topic or bewildering talk of Vollmann's "moral calculus." It is in fact a very interesting read, and the fact that you learn a lot at the same time hasn't hurt me a bit.
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Title: Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes, Edith Grossman, Harold Bloom ISBN: 0060188707 Publisher: Ecco Pub. Date: 21 October, 2003 List Price(USD): $29.95 |
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Title: Everything and More: A Compact History of Infinity (Great Discoveries) by David Foster Wallace ISBN: 0393003388 Publisher: W.W. Norton & Company Pub. Date: October, 2003 List Price(USD): $23.95 |
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Title:American Splendor ASIN: B0000U0X20 Publisher: HBO Video Pub. Date: 03 February, 2004 List Price(USD): $27.95 Comparison N/A, buy it from Amazon for $19.57 |
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Title: Living to Tell the Tale by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Edith Grossman ISBN: 1400041341 Publisher: Knopf Pub. Date: 04 November, 2003 List Price(USD): $26.95 |
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Title: The Paris Review Book: of Heartbreak, Madness, Sex, Love, Betrayal, Outsiders, Intoxication, War, Whimsy, Horrors, God, Death, Dinner, Baseball, Travels, the Art of Writing, and Everything Else in the World Since 1953 by George Plimpton, The Paris Review, The Paris Review ISBN: 0312422385 Publisher: Picador USA Pub. Date: 03 May, 2003 List Price(USD): $30.00 |
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