AnyBook4Less.com
Find the Best Price on the Web
Order from a Major Online Bookstore
Developed by Fintix
Home  |  Store List  |  FAQ  |  Contact Us  |  
 
Ultimate Book Price Comparison Engine
Save Your Time And Money

Sister Carrie

Please fill out form in order to compare prices
Title: Sister Carrie
by Theodore Dreiser, Richard Lingeman
ISBN: 0-451-52760-7
Publisher: Signet
Pub. Date: 10 April, 2000
Format: Mass Market Paperback
Volumes: 1
List Price(USD): $5.95
Your Country
Currency
Delivery
Include Used Books
Are you a club member of: Barnes and Noble
Books A Million Chapters.Indigo.ca

Average Customer Rating: 4.32 (85 reviews)

Customer Reviews

Rating: 5
Summary: Powerful 1900 novel which will haunt readers in 2000
Comment: This novel hooked me from the first page - who can forget the opening scene where the young Caroline Meeber is "spotted" by the travelling salesman Charles Drouet on the Chicago-bound train? We follow in this novel two seemingly irreversible life flows: Carrie uses her beauty and ambition to rise in life, and Hurstwood falls from his secure position of middle-aged, upper-middle-class success to utter failure, all for the love of a woman half his age. It's the stuff of melodrama to some, but not when handled by Dreiser, who takes the reader into a vividly realized urban world with well-drawn characters whose virtues and vices are equally on display. You leave the book feeling that Carrie and Hurtstwood could very easily have stepped out of the pages of today's newspapers, such is the zone of uncomfortable truth inhabited by the denizens of this brilliant novel.

Rating: 3
Summary: Twist ending on classic formula
Comment: One of the reasons why Sister Carrie is worth reading has to do with the ending. If you've read any of these famous home-wrecking novels, where a young beautiful girl gets involved with an older man, and wondered if suicide always had to be the answer, here's your book. But surprisingly, the ending makes you sort of long for the good old suicide ending. Sister Carrie isn't bad, but a lot of the insights into human nature and society are expressed in the language of a talk-show self-help psychiatrist rather than a great author. There are better versions of this formula (Updike, Tolstoy, Wharton, Austen) but there is still something in Sister Carrie that makes it worth reading. Despite its title, the better character depiction in the book belongs to the lover rather than the heroine of the title. Like Updike, Dreiser makes you feel for the plight of the upper-middle class white man. And I mean that seriously, with no sarcasm.

Rating: 5
Summary: surprisingly engaging and fascinating
Comment: Sister Carrie is a lovely book. It tells a rather profound story--placed specifically in its time, which was of course the 'Modern Day' for the time it was written. As a result a book that was once a critical document of patterns of behavior of some of the author's contemporaries has become, for better or worse, an important historical chronical of the dangers of selfishness and uninhibited personal ambition. Oh, the story is no longer anything unfamiliar, but the grounding and the character studies make this book very affecting and, true to the ideals of its unfortunate literary designation of 'Naturalism' (a meaningless term which limits instead of explains a readers' expectation, much in the way that science-fiction or horror classify something as not necessisarily what it in fact is), this is a very believable and realistic story.

The writing itself, as other readers and critics throughout the past one hundred years or so have repeated when attempting to find fault with Sister Carrie, isn't the most impressive thing about the book. However, in its defense, the cut and dry, occasionally pasted on moments of philosophical conversation and the rugged and perhaps at times inconsistant speech patterns of the various characters somehow, for me, created an even more believable picture, zoning in on those people who attempt to speak both above and beneath their social class and educational backgrounds for either personal gain or in a futile effort to 'fit in'.

A wonderful book, because of its flaws, in fact, that reads like a quick-paced and absorbing tale always on the verge of tragedy. That tension, that what-will-happen-next feeling pervades throughout the book and concludes by providing quite an impact indeed.

Similar Books:

Title: An American Tragedy
by Theodore Dreiser, Richard Lingeman
ISBN: 0451527704
Publisher: Signet
Pub. Date: 08 August, 2000
List Price(USD): $9.95
Title: The House of Mirth
by Edith Wharton, Anna Quindlen
ISBN: 0451527569
Publisher: New American Library
Pub. Date: February, 2000
List Price(USD): $4.95
Title: McTeague: A Story of San Francisco
by Frank Norris, Eric Solomon
ISBN: 0451528913
Publisher: Signet
Pub. Date: 05 August, 2003
List Price(USD): $7.95
Title: The Rise of Silas Lapham (The Penguin American Library)
by William Dean Howells
ISBN: 0140390308
Publisher: Viking Press
Pub. Date: April, 1983
List Price(USD): $12.00
Title: My Antonia
by Willa Cather
ISBN: 039575514X
Publisher: Mariner Books
Pub. Date: 21 September, 1995
List Price(USD): $5.95

Thank you for visiting www.AnyBook4Less.com and enjoy your savings!

Copyright� 2001-2021 Send your comments

Powered by Apache