East of Eden

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East of Eden
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East of Eden
John Steinbeck
Manufacturer: Penguin (Non-Classics)
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0142004235

Just as Norman Maclean writes at the end of "A River Runs through It" that he is "haunted by waters," so have readers been haunted by his novella. A retired English professor who began writing fiction at the age of 70, Maclean produced what is now recognized as one of the classic American stories of the twentieth century. Originally published in 1976, A River Runs through It and Other Stories now celebrates its twenty-fifth anniversary, marked by this new edition that includes a foreword by Annie Proulx.

Maclean grew up in the western Rocky Mountains in the first decades of the twentieth century. As a young man he worked many summers in logging camps and for the United States Forest Service. The two novellas and short story in this collection are based on his own experiencesthe experiences of a young man who found that life was only a step from art in its structures and beauty. The beauty he found was in reality, and so he leaves a careful record of what it was like to work in the woods when it was still a world of horse and hand and foot, without power saws, "cats," or four-wheel drives. Populated with drunks, loggers, card sharks, and whores, and set in the small towns and surrounding trout streams and mountains of western Montana, the stories concern themselves with the complexities of fly fishing, logging, fighting forest fires, playing cribbage, and being a husband, a son, and a father.

By turns raunchy, poignant, caustic, and elegiac, these are superb tales which express, in Maclean's own words, "a little of the love I have for the earth as it goes by." A first offering from a 70-year-old writer, the basis of a top-grossing movie, and the first original fiction published by the University of Chicago Press, A River Runs through It and Other Stories has sold more than a million copies. As Proulx writes in her foreword to this new edition, "In 1990 Norman Maclean died in body, but for hundreds of thousands of readers he will live as long as fish swim and books are made."

"Altogether beautiful in the power of its feeling. . . . As beautiful as anything in Thoreau or Hemingway."—Alfred Kazin, Chicago Tribune Book World

"It is an enchanted tale. . . . I have read the story three times now, and each time it seems fuller."— Roger Sale, New York Review of Books

"Maclean's book—acerbic, laconic, deadpan—rings out of a rich American tradition that includes Mark Twain, Kin Hubbard, Richard Bissell, Jean Shepherd, and Nelson Algren. I love its sound."—James R. Frakes, New York Times Book Review

"The title novella is the prize. . . . Something unique and marvelous: a story that is at once an evocation of nature's miracles and realities and a probing of human mysteries. Wise, witty, wonderful, Maclean spins his tales, casts his flies, fishes the rivers and the woods for what he remembers from his youth in the Rockies."—Publishers Weekly

"Ostensibly a 'fishing story,' 'A River Runs through It' is really an autobiographical elegy that captivates readers who have never held a fly rod in their hand. In it the art of casting a fly becomes a ritual of grace, a metaphor for man's attempt to move into nature."—Andrew Rosenheim, The Independent

Norman Maclean (1902-1990) was the William Rainey Harper Professor of English at the University of Chicago. His book on Montana's Mann Gulch forest fire of 1949, Young Men and Fire, is also available from the University of Chicago Press.

In this new series of hardcover biblical novellas from beloved author Francine Rivers, each novella tells the story of one of five biblical men who stood behind the great heroes of the faith: Aaron the priest, Caleb the warrior, Jonathan the prince, Amos the prophet, and Silas the scribe. In the vein of the Lineage of Grace series, these books will entertain, challenge, and inspire, directing readers back to the Bible as the ultimate source of truth and hope.

Prince Jonathan: A Witness of Loyalty to David and Love for His GOD!!.......2007-01-25

In the winter of his 11th year, two schoolyard bullies break into the Lands' house, and Rube's big brother Davy guns them down with a Winchester. Shortly after his arrest, Davy breaks out of jail and goes on the lam. Swede is Rube's younger sister, a precocious writer who crafts rhymed epics of romantic Western outlawry. Shortly after Davy's escape, Rube, Swede, and their father, a widowed school custodian, hit the road too, swerving this way and that across Minnesota and North Dakota, determined to find their lost outlaw Davy. In the end it's not Rube who haunts the reader's imagination, it's his father, torn between love for his outlaw son and the duty to do the right, honest thing. Enger finds something quietly heroic in the bred-in-the-bone Minnesota decency of America's heartland. Peace Like a River opens up a new chapter in Midwestern literature. --Claire Dederer

Leif Enger's rhapsodic novel about a father raising his three children in 1960s Minnesota is a breathtaking celebration of family, faith, and America's pioneering spirit. Through the voice of eleven-year-old Reuben, an asthmatic boy obsessed with cowboy stories, Peace Like a River tells of the Land family's cross-country search for Reuben's outlaw older brother, who has been controversially charged with murder. Sprinkled with playful and warmhearted nods to biblical tales, classic American novels such as Huckleberry Finn, the adventure stories of Robert Louis Stevenson, and the Westerns of Zane Grey, Peace Like a River brilliantly incorporates the best elements of all these genres and ultimately earns its own prominent and enduring place on the shelf among them. Reuben Land was born with no air in his lungs, and it was only when his father, Jeremiah, picked him up and commanded him to breathe that his lungs filled. Reuben struggles with debilitating asthma thenceforth, but he is a boy who knows firsthand that life is a gift, and also one who suspects that his father can overturn the laws of nature. When Reuben's older brother, Davy, kills two marauders who have come to harm the family, the town is divided between those who see him as a hero and those who see him as a cold-blooded murderer. On the morning of the trial, Davy escapes from his cell, and when his family finds out they decide to go forth into the unknown in search of him. With Jeremiah -- whose faith is the stuff of legend -- at the helm, the family covers territory far more glorious than even the Badlands, where they search for Davy from their Airstream trailer. By the time the journey is over, they will have traversed boundaries of a different nature entirely. Marked by a soul-expanding sense of place and a love of storytelling, Peace Like a River is at once a heroic quest, a tragedy, a romance, and a heartfelt meditation on the possibility of magic in the everyday world.

"Killing Mr Watson" told the story of Edgar Watson's life in Southern Florida and his eventual death at the hands of a posse of his neighbours. "Lost Man's River" tells the story of Watson's son Lucius, a historian with both an academic and an emotional interest in finding out the truth about his father's life. (Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that, while Lucius's academic interest lies in finding out the truth about his father's life, his emotional interest lies in confirming his own preconceived ideas about his father's life). By the time of the events narrated in the book (around 1960) Lucius is an elderly man. The book follows his journeys around Florida and his meetings with the surviving few people who remember Edgar Watson, including his reunion with his long-lost brother Rob.

The sentimental journeyings of a septuagenarian historian do not make for an enthralling plot; indeed, the book has a loose, episodic structure and very little in the way of coherent plot at all. In "Killing Mister Watson" the characters were vividly drawn, especially the dominating figure of Watson himself. In "Lost Man's River" there is much less in the way of characterisation. Although Watson is an ever-present thought in Lucius's mind, he obviously cannot be introduced as a character in his own right as he has been dead for fifty years. Lucius is merely a bore, and the other characters are stiff and lifeless. The old people's reminiscences of the past are tedious and confusing, and tend to get bogged down in an excess of genealogical detail. In an attempt to add to the interest of the plot, Matthiessen provides a brief love-interest for Lucius in the form of a much younger woman, but this episode struck me as very unconvincing.

Not everything about the book is bad. There are some vivid descriptions of the natural beauty of the Everglades. There is also some sharp commentary about the way in which that natural beauty has been despoiled by the modern world, and about Southern racism. Unlike most of what has preceded it, the ending is genuinely gripping, as old feuds end in violence and Lucius makes an unwelcome discovery which forces him to reassess his view of the past. Unfortunately, to get to the ending one has to wade through some very tedious passages; like some of the characters, I often felt that I was bogged down in an impenetrable swamp.