Вручение 1999 г.
Страна: США
Дата проведения: 1999 г.
Художественная книга
Russell Banks
2.5
The cover of Russell Banks's mountain-sized novel Cloudsplitter features an actual photo of Owen Brown, the son of John Brown -- the hero of "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" whose terrorist band murdered proponents of slavery in Kansas and attacked Harpers Ferry, Virginia, in 1859 on what he considered direct orders from God, helping spark the Civil War.
A deeply researched but fictionalized Owen narrates this remarkably realistic and ambitious novel by the already distinguished author of The Sweet Hereafter. Owen is an atheist, but he is as haunted and dominated by his father, John Brown, as John was haunted by an angry God who demanded human sacrifice to stop the abomination of slavery. Cloudsplitter takes you along on John Brown's journey -- as period-perfect as that of the Civil War deserter in Cold Mountain -- from Brown's cabin facing the great Adirondack mountain (called "the Cloudsplitter" by the Indians) amid an abolitionist settlement the blacks there call "Timbuctoo," to the various perilous stops of the Underground Railroad spiriting slaves out of the South, and finally to the killings in Bloody Kansas and the Harpers Ferry revolt. We meet some great names -- Frederick Douglass, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and a (fictional) lover of Nathaniel Hawthorne -- but the vast book keeps a tight focus on the aged Owen's obsessive recollections of his pa's crusade and the emotional shackles John clamped on his own family.
Banks, a white author, has tackled the topic of race as impressively as Toni Morrison in novels such as Continental Drift. What makes Cloudsplitter a departure for him is its style and scope. He is noted as an exceptionally thorough chronicler of America today in rigorously detailed realist fiction (he championed Snow Falling on Cedars). Banks spent half a decade researching Cloudsplitter, and he renounces the conventional magic of his poetical prose style for a voice steeped in the King James Bible and the stately cadences of 19th-century political rhetoric. The tone is closer to Ken Burns's tragic, elegiac The Civil War than to the recent crazy-quilt modernist novel about John Brown, Raising Holy Hell.
A fan of Banks's more cut-to-the-chase, Hollywood-hot modern style may get impatient, but such readers can turn to, say, Gore Vidal's recently reissued Lincoln, which peeks into the Great Emancipator's head with a modern's cynical wit. Banks's narrator is poetical and witty at times -- Owen notes, "The outrage felt by whites [over slavery] was mostly spent on stoking their own righteousness and warming themselves before its fire." Yet in the main, Banks writes in the "elaborately plainspoken" manner of the Browns, restricting himself to a sober style dictated by the historical subject.
Besides, John Brown's head resembles the stone tablets of Moses. You do not penetrate him, and you can't declare him mad or sane, good or evil. You read, struggling to locate the words emanating from some strange place between history, heaven, and hell.
Barbara Kingsolver
4.5
Фанатичный миссионер Натан Прайс вместе с женой и дочерьми покидает благополучную цивилизованную Америку и отправляется на черный континент, в джунгли Бельгийского Конго, с твердой верой в Бога и с надеждой на то, что Господь поможет ему обратить местных жителей в христианство. Он проповедует яростно и страстно, но местные жители вовсе не жаждут принять благодатные дары. Они трепетно берегут свои святыни, чтут традиции предков и продолжают совершать свои дикие, порой бесчеловечные, обряды.
Но и в собственной семье Натана Прайса назревает бунт: домочадцы оказались не готовы к тяготам быта глухой африканской деревни. Все кажется им чуждым и пугающим – зловещие мрачные джунгли, где на каждом шагу подстерегает смерть; люди, встречающие их угрюмым молчанием, и даже сам Натан Прайс с его фанатичной, не знающей жалости верой…
Биография или автобиография
Лауреат
A. Scott Berg
0.0
Charles Lindbergh is at once one of the century's best-known and most misunderstood figures. In Lindbergh, bestselling author and National Book Award winner A. Scott Berg lifts the veil of myth and mystery that has surrounded the aviator since his moment of triumph on May 21, 1927, when he landed in Paris, the first person to cross the Atlantic alone in an airplane. It's an insightful look at a remarkable life.
Francine du Plessix Gray
0.0
In this account of the scandalous life & violent times of the Marquis de Sade, novelist, essayist & biographer Francine du Plessix Gray resurrects his relationship with his family-- his devoted wife, iron-willed mother-in-law & three children. Gray draws on thousands of pages of letters exchanged by the spouses, few of which have been published in English, to explore in historical & psychological detail what it was like to be the Marquise de Sade, a decorous, upright woman married throughout the decades preceding the French Revolution to one of the most maverick spirits of recent times. Donatien Alphonse Francois, Marquis de Sade (1740-1814), the flamboyant aristocrat whose name has come to connote sexual cruelty, has been called "the freest spirit who ever lived", "the most lucid hero of Western thought" & "a Professor Emeritus of crime". Yet in the vast literature inspired by the marquis' fictional & real-life libertinism, relatively little attention has been given the two women who were closest to him: Renee-Pelagie de Sade, his adoring wife for more than a quarter of a century, & his powerful mother-in-law, Madame de Montreuil. Gray brings to life these two remarkable women & their complex relationship with Sade as they dedicated themselves, each in her own way, to protecting him from the law, curbing his excesses & ultimately confining him.
After years of indulging a variety of sexual aberrations, experiences he used in novels such as "Justine, Philosophy in the Boudoir" & "The 120 Days of Sodom", Sade was imprisoned on the basis of an arrest warrant issued by Louis XVI at his mother-in-law's instigation. Throughout his 13 years in jail, Madame de Sade was his principal solace & his only lifeline to reality. Few spouses seemed more ill-matched than the profligate nobleman & his homespun wife, but the two enjoyed bonds of affection & conspiracy. Madame de Sade remained passionately in love with her husband throughout the first 26 years of their marriage; she accepted his many liaisons with actresses, courtesans & whores of all varieties; hid her husband's traces from the police & may even have participated in his orgies. It was only upon the onset of the French Revolution, when Sade was finally freed, that Pelagie made a sudden about-face from her decades of devotion.
In the course of telling this remarkable story, Gray vividly recreates the extravagant hedonism of late 18th-century France; the ensuing terror of the French Revolution, when her protagonists lived in fear of imminent destruction; & the oppression of the Napoleonic regime under which Sade spent his last decade. The 74-year span of Sade's life, the entire panorama of his milieu & of his times, are brought to life in these pages.
Нехудожественная литература
Лауреат
Джон МакФи
0.0
The Pulitzer Prize-winning view of the continent, across the fortieth parallel and down through 4.6 billion years
Twenty years ago, when John McPhee began his journeys back and forth across the United States, he planned to describe a cross section of North America at about the fortieth parallel and, in the process, come to an understanding not only of the science but of the style of the geologists he traveled with. The structure of the book never changed, but its breadth caused him to complete it in stages, under the overall title Annals of the Former World.
Like the terrain it covers, Annals of the Former World tells a multilayered tale, and the reader may choose one of many paths through it. As clearly and succinctly written as it is profoundly informed, this is our finest popular survey of geology and a masterpiece of modern nonfiction.
Annals of the Former World is the winner of the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for Nonfiction.
Эллиотт Карри
0.0
There are five times as many Americans behind bars today as in 1970, yet we remain the most violent industrial society on earth. This hard-hitting and accessible book dissects the myths that have given us both the industrial world's most swollen prison population and its highest rate of violent crime.
Джудит Рич Харрис
3.0
How much credit do parents deserve when their children turn out well? How much blame when they turn out badly? This electrifying book explodes some of our deepest beliefs about children and parents and gives us something radically new to put in their place. With eloquence and wit, Judith Harris explains why parents have little power to determine the sort of people their children become. It is what children experience outside the home, in the company of their peers, that matters most. Parents don't socialize children: children socialize children. Yet we cling to the "nurture assumption", our unquestioned belief that, aside from their genes, what makes children turn out the way they do is the way their parents bring them up. This assumption is so deeply embedded in our culture that it underlies everything we are taught about rearing children and everything we believe about the emotional hangups of adults. But that doesn't make it true. Harris looks with a fresh eye at the real lives of real children and shows that the nurture assumption is nothing more than a cultural myth. Why do the children of immigrant parents end up speaking in the language and accent of their peers, not of their parents? Why are twins reared together no more alike than twins raised apart? Why does a boy who spends his first eight years with a nanny and his next ten years in boarding school nevertheless turn out just like his father? The nurture assumption cannot provide an answer to these questions. Judith Harris can.
Using examples from folklore and literature as well as from scientific research, Harris shows us the world of childhood in all its richness and complexity. Relationships with parents and siblings are always important, but they vary from culture to culture. One aspect of childhood, however, is universal: the children's peer group. With a range that extends from the Yanomamo of the Brazilian rainforest to deaf Nicaraguan children learning to communicate for the very first time, Harris demonstrates the power peer groups have in shaping the lives of children. Along the way, we see that many cherished notions-- such as the idea that early mother-child attachments set the pattern for later relationships-- fail to explain what happens to real children, or to a girl named Cinderella, whose miserable home life did not keep her from being a great success in the world outside her cottage.
Harris has a message that will change parents' lives: they have been sold a bill of goods. Parenting does not match its widely publicized job description. It is a job in which sincerity and hard work do not guarantee success. Through no fault of their own, good parents sometimes have bad kids. Harris offers parents wise counsel on what they can and cannot do, and relief from guilt for those whose best efforts have somehow failed to produce a happy, well-behaved, self-confident child.
"The Nurture Assumption" is a profound work that brings together insights from psychology, sociology, anthropology, primatology, and evolutionary biology to offer a startling new view of who we are and how we got that way.
The Hours, by Michael Cunningham