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Title: The Big Rock Candy Mountain (Contemporary American Fiction) by Wallace Earle Stegner ISBN: 0-14-013939-7 Publisher: Penguin USA (Paper) Pub. Date: February, 1995 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.73 (15 reviews)
Rating: 4
Summary: Tough and relentless story
Comment: When I read that BRCM is 'roughly autobiographical,' I was stunned that a writer of Stegner's magnitude could come from such a pitiless, brutal background. The transient, rootless, poverty-stricken upbringing of the children in the Mason family is rife with tension, resentment, and a level of bleakness that's hard to comprehend. Bo Mason is the most powerful character, by far, a bootlegger always chasing the dream of fast money and instant wealth. It's hard to know exactly how Stegner feels about the character of Bo's wife, a long-suffering, self-sacrificing woman who remains loyal and always seems to be making excuses for him to their children. It's tough reading a story of such an abusive family situation, but it sure reads 'real' in its portrayal of a search for roots, for home, for love, for connection.
Rating: 5
Summary: The Universal in the West
Comment: 'Big Rock Candy Mountain' is the story of ambition and security, of restlessness and comfort, of expansion and insularity. In Bo Mason, the book presents te expansive here who cannot be tied down. It presents the restless dreamer whose only motive is to find the pace that is better. It presented him as the daring rogue that men envy and women find irresistible. It also presents him as the husband of Elsa and the father of Chester and Bruce. It presents him as the husband who deeply loves his wife and sons but whose instinctive drives forces him to hurt them deeply. The book presents Elsa, Bo's wife, whose dream is the security of a loving family but who is ineluctably attracted to the daring bo who can free her from a life of restriction and drudgery.
In short this is a book about the conflict within the human soul that pits the need for independence and adventure against the desire for security and safety. It is set in the Canadian and American west at the time of the westward expansion. It is a book about real people that delve deeply into the generic human condition. Its characters are real and finely detailed yet it is more than just an account of a particular family in a particular time. It explores grand themes an yet it true to the motivations of its characters. It is a book that finds the universal in the particular and the instant in eternity. It is a book that will be remembered.
Rating: 4
Summary: An American treasure
Comment: Wallace Stegner is an American treasure and one of the great writers of the American west. If you have never treated yourself to one of his books, why wait any longer? If you've read, say, "Angle of Repose" and wonder if his other works measure up, don't worry... they do. In this one, he tells the story of the itinerant Mason family over the course of 30 years, from just after the turn of the century until the early 1930s. You'll follow them from the Dakotas to Saskatchewan to Montana, Nevada, and Utah, as Bo Mason, intent on making it big, involves his family in a variety of get rich quick schemes, (some legal, some not) that emotionally wrench the family from one city to the next. They are always on the brink of either great wealth or abject poverty, of high society or a prison term. Stegner can weave a tale like few other writers. Very highly recommended.
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Title: Angle of Repose by Wallace Earle Stegner ISBN: 014016930X Publisher: Penguin USA (Paper) Pub. Date: May, 1992 List Price(USD): $13.95 |
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Title: Recapitulation by Wallace Earle Stegner ISBN: 0140266739 Publisher: Penguin USA (Paper) Pub. Date: November, 1997 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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Title: All the Little Live Things (Contemporary American Fiction) by Wallace Earle Stegner ISBN: 0140154418 Publisher: Penguin USA (Paper) Pub. Date: January, 1993 List Price(USD): $13.95 |
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Title: Crossing to Safety by Wallace Earle Stegner ISBN: 037575931X Publisher: Modern Library Pub. Date: 09 April, 2002 List Price(USD): $13.95 |
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Title: Remembering Laughter by Wallace Earle Stegner ISBN: 0140252401 Publisher: Penguin USA (Paper) Pub. Date: November, 1996 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
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