5 comments about Sights Unseen.

1. SIGHTS UNSEEN, a short novel by Kaye Gibbons, tells the story of a woman named Maggie Barnes with bipolar disorder, told through her daughter, Hattie's, eyes. Hattie, writing from the perspective of the woman she's become, relates the events that happened to her mother, specifically those events that took place during Hattie's twelfth year, in 1963, when Maggie, between bouts of sex-crazed mania and suicidal depression, ran into a woman with a car and was sent to Duke for electroconvulsive shock therapy that was meant "cure" her.
   
   The strength of the novel is in Kaye Gibbons' sensitivity to the severity of manic depression and what it's like for someone who has to live with bouts of extreme joy and severe sadness. However, if you're looking for some kind of insight from Hattie in this novel, you won't find it. Hattie is a completely impersonal narrator; it's easy to forget that she is Maggie's daughter. She seems so disconnected from the story and the events that are happening. The reader gets no insight into Hattie's hopes or fears--we don't know how she feels about growing up without a reliable mother; it's almost as if Gibbons deliberately skirts Hattie's feelings in order to talk more about her mother's antics. There is a brief suggestion that Hattie desperately desires her mother's attention, but it is not fully developed, and is therefore unbelievable.
   
   The novel has potential--but, because of Hattie's failure as a narrator, it falls short of the goal Gibbons probably imagined it would attain.



2. Sights Unseen is the story of a woman with manic depression and her battle back to health, told from the viewpoint of her loving, but baffled young daughter.
   
   Because it is told from the perspective of a young child, we are limited in what manic depression feels like, although there are a few succinct descriptions.
   
   Where it errs is after the mother is well, and her continuing wellness is presented as a "choice." Even with medication and therapy, people with mental illness can relapse, and to present it as such an easy and permanent victory does those who suffer from mental illness a disservice. Manic depression is simply not something one can "decide" to recover from and stay well.



3. This short novel wasn't one of Kaye Gibbon's best. Hattie is the daughter and essentially the narrator of her own life with her mother who suffers from severe bouts of mania and depression. The underlying theme is Hattie is searching for a mother figure she never experiences. My gripe is that Gibbon's never really brings out her emotion of this great loss and it makes the story slightly loose and mediocre. I think that it had the substance of truly being a terrific novel but it doesn't deliver that underneath sense of loss and fright this girl has during her childhood years with her mother.Too bad , I am a fan of most of Kaye Gibbon's fiction but this one felt contrived.



4. I am Bipolar. I bought this book for my son, who is now 34. His comments, as far as the impersonal narration were these. His way of dealing with growing up with my crazy roller coaster ride, in a situation where I was emotionally unavailable to him, although I was right there, was to detach. And become emotionally unavailable himself. Which persists to this day. He admits that he forms no really close attachments to anyone. Our relationship is one of of walking on egg shells and after 20 years of fairly stable behavior, he still doesn't trust me. He says he goes in and out of believing this was something beyond my control. We get some great laughs out of my antics in the days of old but..... Obviously this book inspired some good conversation. We both know that if I made the "choice" to stop my medication that'd be it for him. Maybe this is too much information. Bottom line - we both think this is a great book and some detachment from Hattie may be true to form.



5. This book is the story of Hattie. Her mother has a severe mental illness. Hattie cannot bond with her mother, nor can she feel normal love and affection. I feel that the mother's character was not developed enough in the book, but maybe that was intentional, because the mother's character was suppose to be distant. That's why I gave it 3 stars instead of 4 - because I felt I should have gotten to know the mother a little better.

No comments about Charms For An Easy Life.

5 comments about Charms for the Easy Life.

1. It's a little gem of a book ~~ one I've had in my bookcases for a long time. This past weekend with everyone in my family struggling with the stomach flu ~~ I picked it up to read it as I needed something light and easy to read. It is a lovely insight in a family of three women of three generations. It's mostly about Charlie, the midwife and all-around nurse. Her daughter, Sophia and granddaughter, Margaret were secondary characters but their stories are just as charming.
   
   Charlie grew up poor. She married the river ferryman. After their daughter, Sophia was born, they moved inland. Charlie kept her midwife practice going and soon, her husband abandoned her to work on the Ohio River. It was just Charlie and Sophia, till Sophia married a man who made a mockery of their wedding by wearing yellow shoes. While Sophia's daughter Margaret was still young, Sophia became a widow. Then Charlie moved in with them and this is the basis of their story. They lived through life with stories of people and ailments, love and friendship through the years.
   
   It really is a charming little book. If you love stories on mother/daughter relationships, this book is for you. If you like stories about people living in rural areas where community is very important, this one is for you. It's my first Gibbons book in a long time and reading it is just as sweet as stealing an afternoon to read it!
   
   4-16-07



2. Gibbons' book is amount three strong women who possess the determination to succeed and do so with their hearts intact. You'll fall in love with these characters as the author cleverly displays their motives, desires, thoughts, and feelings. I thought this book was a little slow in the beginning, but soon I could not put it down. The characters began to evolve, and then Charms for the Easy Life became ever so intriguiging. Author, With Great Mercy.



3. I enjoyed this book, but kind of started to wonder if there was an actual plot. The plot doesn't really become apparent until well into the second half of the book. I didn't mind though, because the author does an excellent job of creating characters that really jump off the page. But don't plan to get blown away by a plot.



4. As I read this book I kept waiting for some catastrophic event to occur, but it never does. The author gives you great characters that live an unconventional life for that time period, yet nothing happens to them. They go about their lives doing good deeds and you the reader are just peering into there goody goody routines. The characters are very well developed and funny even at times a bit corny for me. The best part of this book was that it was short.



5. I enjoyed Kaye Gibbons' Charms for the Easy Life immensely. I thought it was a well-crafted, character-focused novel that explored the deep familial relationships of three Southern women.
   
   The book details the lives of Charlie Kate, a smart, stubborn, self-taught healer; her daughter, Sophia, a beautiful woman searching for companionship; and her granddaughter, Margaret, a shy girl growing up in the WWII era. The book follows each woman as she finds love, manages family relationships, and blazes an unconventional path towards her own happiness. Through it all, the women demonstrate an insatiable and admirable thirst for knowledge.
   
   The story is told from granddaughter Margaret's point of view. The writing is evocative and engaging. In addition, the character of the grandmother is one for the ages. Uncompromising, set in her ways, and sure of her talents, she is not a woman you will forget easily.
   
   The novel is largely about how family cares for one another, about how Charlie Kate, Sophia, and Margaret are each one another's "charms," making life easier, happier, and more livable. You will thoroughly enjoy keeping their company for a while.

No comments about On the Occassion of My Last Afternoon.

No comments about THE LIFE ALL AROUND ME BY ELLEN FOSTER.

No comments about On the Occasion of My Last Afternoon.

5 comments about On the Occasion of My Last Afternoon.

1. Even though I finished reading this book months and months ago, I'm still thinking about it. Told from the point of view of Emma Garnet Tate-Lowell, it traces the woman's life from her youth right up to her death during the 1800's. A gracefully told Civil War story, as well as a story of how a strong woman endures her bullying father, death of loved ones, and nursing wounded soldiers alongside her husband during the war, it is one of those novels that will stick with you for a long time. Anybody who read Ellen Foster and enjoyed that (or Gone with the Wind) will enjoy this marvelous tale told by a very gifted, talented writer.



2. Emma Garnet's wealthy, sheltered childhood with an abusive, domineering father and a loving and refined mother was top notch -- insightful and at times heartbreaking. Gibbons was writing what she knew about and it felt like she lived some of those scenes
   
   But after Emma's marriage, it was a different book. To quote Mr. Tate, everything was "pluperfect". Perfect husband, perfect children, perfect family life -- except for one unlikely incident at a dinner party when Emma is asked about her unfortunate brother and which felt manufactured to put some distress in Emma's perfect life.
   
   I believed in Emma the child but Emma as an adult lost me and lost my sympathy. The child's sensibilities -- treating slaves like people, and not calling them "slaves" but "servants" -- this didn't transfer to adulthood. Why else would Emma not tell her servants that they were free? Emma should have realized how patronizing that was, not to mention simply cruel.
   
   Much is made (by Emma) of her love for her beleaguered mother, yet she kept Clarice with her -- her mother's only bulwark against the father. Emma had wealth and status and protection and she didn't fear her father, yet in twelve years she couldn't visit her mother? The child Emma would have brought mom home for a visit and kept her.
   
   After her mother dies, she worries for her sister Maureen and writes to her father, "You monster, send Maureen to me now." Then nothing. She could have rescued her sister, but she did nothing.
   
   What happened to the strong, resourceful, fearless child we met in the first part of the book? Someone swapped her for Melanie Wilkes.
   
   The only scenes that felt real in the second half of the book were Emma and her doctor husband caring for wounded soldiers, and the privation they suffered. Everything else felt like a fairy tale, with a bit of an apologist slant.



3. While one can absolutely be provoked to feel the same sense of dread and loathing for Emma Tate's cruel and abusive father Samuel, pitying the rest of the family, and having great respect for Clarice, this book never lets up on loads and loads of misery.
   
   Gibbons's Emma is drawn more to being like her kindly mother who is constantly tortured in some way by Samuel until he makes her so sick from her headaches that she dies. He destroys the lives of his children if they allow him to, and has killed a slave with a knife for talking back to him. There is very little light in this tale of misery for the reader to catch a second wind. One of the few bright spots is when Emma marries Dr. Lowell and has three daughters with him, but that too is terminated by the Civil War and Samuel being driven from his home to theirs with sister Maureen, where he attempts a reign of terror there too that is strongly resisted.
   
   Powerful and emotional, with a history timeframe I am grateful we are not living in, one comes away wondering how anyone can use a phrase like "the good old days." Where and when have those ever occurred, and in what 15 minute span of time? This novel was indeed good, but I recommend Charms for the Easy Life to all you new Gibbons readers first. It is a truly impressive and beautiful portrayal of three generations of women in coexistence, their similarities, differences, and what makes their relationship work.



4. I should have been suspicious of the pages and pages of literary raves at the beginning of this book - including the one that says "Better than Gone with the Wind" Give me a break. This story seems to be a sanitized version of the civil war south. The sainted main character and her even more perfect husband seem to have an unlimited supply of money, energy and tolerance for every needy character they minister to during the war and never seem to lose their virtuous patience On the other hand, the character of Emma's father is purely bad, a foil to all that goodness I suppose. All in all you get no subtlety, no complexity and you as a reader gain very little believable insight into why these characters behave the way they do. On the other hand, you do get plenty of overt preaching about the evils of war and racism - Duh!



5. On the Occasion of My Last Afternoon tells the story of Emma Garnet, a young girl growing up in the years before the Civil War. Emma chafes under the imposing hand of a tyrannical father, who is newly rich but yearns for the respectability of old money. His war-mongering political opinions, restrictive ideas of a lady's place, and violent nature drive even his family away. Emma is lucky enough to escape to a happy marriage, and the novel follows her throughout raising a family, mourning the loss of those she loves, and weathering the storms of the Civil War.
   
   I thought this was a good novel, and I enjoyed Emma Garnet as a character. However, much was made of her own battles with her father, and of secrets of her father's past that had been kept from her. When these secrets were finally revealed, they were not substantial enough to satisfy the curiousity that Gibbons had stoked in them throughout the book. I was left wanting to know more about him to justify his role in the story. How did he come by his fortune? How did he espy Emma Garnet's mother and mark her for his own? Simply, the secrets (or "secret," as it turned out to be only one) did not live up to more than 225 pages of anticipation.
   
   While a good read, it was not as good as A Virtuous Woman (or Charms for the Easy Life, for that matter).

5 comments about The Best American Essays of the Century (The Best American Series (TM)).

1. I don't think I'm alone in viewing essays as members of a somewhat lower caste than novels and non-fiction books. Maybe it's because I associate the essay with newspapers, and people like George Will who pretend to know more than their readers. I think the editors of this essay collection understood that popular conception, and tried very hard to fight it. In line with that fight, one of the organizing themes of this book seems to be ``Essays About Individual Experiences." True, many of the essays take individual experiences and move into a more general realm, but they're always grounded in the author's experiences. Contrast this with George Will - Trinity College undergrad, Princeton grad school in political science - writing essays about poverty and policy. There's more legitimacy - in my mind, anyway - in Richard Wright writing an essay about ``The Ethics of Living Jim Crow."

   Many of the essays in this book, like Wright's, are on the subject of race in America. We have Zora Neale Hurston's ``How It Feels To Be Colored Me" (``Sometimes, I feel discriminated against, but it does not make me angry. It merely astonishes me. How *can* any deny themselves the pleasure of my company! It's beyond me."); Alice Walker's ``Looking For Zora," on her attempts to find Hurston's lonely, abandoned, unkempt gravestone in Florida; Maya Angelou's ``I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings" (later part of a book of the same name); Martin Luther King's ``Letter From Birmingham Jail"; and so forth. As the editors suggest, race has been one of the longest-running struggles in the United States; it shouldn't surprise us that it has produced works of such power. The autobiographical format of these essays particularly fits with their subject matter. That format works a lot better than, say, a collection of statistics (however truthful those statistics might be).

   _Best American Essays_ is far more than a book about race, however. It contains some hilarious essays, like S.J. Perelman's ``Insert Flap `A' and Throw Away" (on his attempts to put together toys for his kids); an essay on bullfighting (Hemingway's ``Pamplona in July"); essays about suicide (``The Crack-Up" by F. Scott Fitzgerald, William H. Gass's ``The Doomed In Their Sinking", Edward Hoagland's ``Heaven and Nature"); Stephen Jay Gould on why humans seem to need to divide a complex continuum into a discrete beginning and end (``The Creation Myths of Cooperstown"); and on and on. All of them are almost crystalline in their density of information. All of them left me, after 10 or 12 pages, reeling as though I'd just set down a novel.

   I'm particularly fond of William Manchester's essay memorializing the battle of Okinawa (``Okinawa: The Bloodiest Battle Of All"). I normally enter essays about war with a large dose of skepticism and revulsion, and this one was no different. ``Great," I thought, ``Manchester was a vet, so this will be another essay about the glory of armed combat." It is nothing at all like that. To use a nice vogue term, it is a deconstruction of what war really is, and what war has become over the centuries. It turned from 15-minute battles around the time of Agincourt to 10-month-long subwars of attrition during World War I. But let's look at those minutes-long battles, says Manchester:

   ``The dead were bludgeoned or stabbed to death, and we
   have a pretty good idea of how this was done. ... Kabar
   fighting knives, with seven-inch blades honed to such
   precision that you could shave with them, were issued to
   Marines ... You drove the point of your blade into a
   man's lower belly and ripped upward. In the process, you
   yourself became soaked in the other man's gore. After that
   charges at Camlann, Arthur must have been half drowned in
   blood."

   The essay reveals war's pointlessness and the revulsion that mankind must feel in its presence. Coming from someone who fought on Okinawa, it carries more weight than all the world's pundits could ever bestow. The entire volume holds this authority. Since its contributors are also some of the most talented authors that the U.S. has ever known, there's no reason not to buy this astonishing work.




2. Some good essays here, but a number of boring ones as well, if they had 100 years of essays to choose from, I'm suprised this was the best they could come up with.



3. Joyce Carol Oates is not simply a prolific writer, she is also a tremendously 'prolific' reader. In this selection of the best American essays of the century, she and her co- editor series editor Robert Atwan choose many of the most important American essays of the century. If I just think of those I know beforehand there is William James famous ' The Moral Equivalent of War' which talks about the place of sport in American life. There is perhaps the most well- known literary essay of the century T.S. Eliot's 'Tradition and the Individual Talent' in which he argues that each new literary work of significance redefines the whole Tradition, makes us see it all in a new way. There is F. Scott Fitzgerald's tremendously moving personal essay on his own breakdown,'The Crack-up' in which he tells us ' in the dark night of the soul it is always three o'clock in the morning. There is James Baldwin's searing essay, 'Notes of a Native Son' and Mark Twain telling us in 'Corn-pone' that where the person gets his core- pone is where his opinions is. It is a typical humorous and brilliant Twain attack on the common-sense conventional mind, and a call for the kind of independent thinking he in his work so exemplified.
   There are a considerable number of essays on race, on the condition of the blacks in America. Richard Wright, Zola Hurston, Baldwin, Maya Angelou. There are outstanding essays on science by Lewis Thomas, Stephen J. Gould, Oliver Sachs. There are literary explorations and explorations of the American lanscape and mind.
   Among the other writers included are Eudora Welty, Susan Sontag, Tom Wofe, Donald Hall, Cynthia Ozick ,William Manchester, John Updike, Saul Bellow, James Agee, John Jay Chapman, John Muir, Nabovkov, Edwin Hoagland, Willam Gass, Hemingway, Elizabeth Hardwick, S.J. Perelman, Gertrude Stein, Thurber, E.B. White , Oates herself and many others.
   It may not contain all the best, and it may not all be good, but much of it is the best, and a good share very good indeed.



4. I loved this book because it illustrated to me how much our society has and hasn't changed over the years. The writing was exquisite which was a pleasant respite from today's 24/7 verbal and informational assaults which are produced so quickley and usually without much pondering or maturing of themes and ideas. I see the essay as a slowly dying art form and I am just an average American who loves to read and think and write, I'm definitely not an academic predicting the end of civilization because of the pace of life and thinking brought about by technology.



5. This is a fantastic sampling of American memoir and reflections on race, gender, nature, literature, and other topics of broad interest. It features the century's greatest, starting with Twain, ending with Bellow. The volume is beautifully introduced by Atwan and Oates, both of whom help chip away at the manifold mystery of what makes a good essay. If memoir is of particular interest to you, you will appreciate the poetic sensibilities of the writers. The position essays are equally lucid. I will be teaching a course shortly on developing narrative style and feel fortunate to have stumbled upon this collection. For readers who are looking for varied and pleasant readings, the works in this book will provide that with a challenging edge.

5 comments about Ellen Foster.

1. With a narrative the style similar to Harper Lee's "To Kill A Mockingbird," Ellen Foster embraces everything gorgeous and tragic about growing up among damaged people. Told from the voice of a confused child, Kaye Gibbons perfectly captures your heart in her opening pages. She wastes not a word as she so perfectly sculpts a portrait of a child's quest to belong, to be loved, to be happy.



2. This book is just strange. It's a diary of a young girl that is hard to figure out. There is no conclusion to this story, it just kind of stops like half the book is missing. You can read it in one sitting if that's what you are looking for, buy it.



3. I found this book to be absolutely stunning, primarily because of the point of view! Ellen is the narrator, and we so clearly see the world, people, and events around her through her ten-year-old eyes--and they are very special eyes! The child has a way of interpreting events that helps her survive a childhood that may have defeated many more ordinary girls.
   She is unforgettable.



4. You will fall in love with the title character of Kaye Gibbons's Ellen Foster. Throughout the novel, Ellen's most dominant character trait is self-preservation. From the first page to the last, she reveals and demonstrates the backbone and resilience necessary for a child thrown into challenging circumstances.
   
   Gibbons structures the novella around a series of temporal shifts between the present situation of the narrator (the now of the story) and the past situation of the character (the then of the story). The story, in effect, becomes a gradual diminishing of the distance between these two temporal settings.
   
   As the story of Ellen Foster's difficult childhood and her remarkable resilience is parceled out to the reader through fifteen chapters, another story--a story about a child's understanding of race and decency--is told as well.
   
   Like J.D. Salinger's Catcher in the Rye, Ellen Foster is a story for people of all ages.



5. Ellen Foster is a slim volume, Gibbon's first novel. It's told from the searingly honest perspective of eleven-year-old Ellen, whose mother passes away. After her mother's death, Ellen manages to escape her abusive, alcoholic father. She moves in with a controlling, vindictive grandmother. After the grandmother, too, dies (by which time her father is also deceased), Ellen stays for a short time with her aunt (also a difficult situation) before joining a foster family that finally provides her with a real home.
   
   Ellen is a fascinating character. Her voice is simple, but clearly intelligent and bent on self-preservation. Her eventual epiphany and acceptance of her "colored friend" Starletta is also a strong theme. The book reads quickly, and though Ellen endures considerable hardship, she does not wallow in self-pity. I recommend this novel.

5 comments about A Virtuous Woman a Cs.

1. If the theme and heart-felt stories of Souhern souls resonate within your own soul, this is a wonderful read for you. It dares to probe the inner worlds of people in ways you will never forget. Another excellent read from a Southern voice about love, faith and the struggle to become whole can be found in Walking the Trail, One Man's Journey Along the Cherokee Trail of Tears by Cherokee and Alabama author Jerry Ellis. The book was nominated for a Pulitzer and was featured in Readers Digest.



2. The story was fine and it was a quick read with some interesting moments but overall I would not recommend this book unless you just need something to read on a quick flight. I really don't understand what all the fuss is about. I believe if you go into this book thinking it's some amazing novel you will be disappointed. But if you are looking for something light to read without becoming engrossed you will be fine. I certainly wouldn't call this a page turner and have a whole list of books I would recommend before this one.



3. So, let's see. A virtuous woman is one who'll marry anyone who asks her to, one who'll leave considerate parents without a backward wave because a man with an attractive face suggests doing so, one who decides to take up a distasteful habit to prove she's capable of vice. Each of the characters in this one-dimensional book is either exclusively good or exclusively bad. That choice of character template is lazy and insulting to readers who're aware that humanity can't be sorted so effortlessly. This review is based on the first ten chapters of the book. I wish I'd had the good sense to quit reading beyond chapter one. This is the last book I'll select based on its inclusion in Oprah's "list."



4. This was a quick and fabulous read! I felt as if I knew each of the characters.



5. The writing in this book is so good that I've read it twice. (Something I NEVER do. Nev. Er.) A Virtuous Woman tells the story of a married couple, Ruby and Jack, who meet each other, fall in love, and marry. Ruby later contracts lung cancer. Facing her death, she ruminates on her adventures and tries her best to prepare Jack to live without her. Jack savors the memories of the two of them, even as he knows he must move beyond them to continue his life. Chapters of the novel are alternately narrated by each of the two primary characters, a style which is effective because it lets us see the inner thoughts of both.
   
   I enjoyed how this novel dealt with the definition of love. It is a subject worth considering, and one that can easily become maudlin. However, Gibbons' characters look at it with a steady, nearly objective eye. The characters know who they are and what they need from a mate. And when they find one another, there is a quiet cherishing that they do of one another. The love Gibbons writes of is a wise love, not young and foolish, not headstrong and impassioned, but matter-of-fact and solid as bedrock. I can appreciate such a story.