Jonathan Raban0.0 A New York Times Editors' Choice for Book of the Year
Winner of the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Award
Winner of the PEN West Creative Nonfiction Award
"No one has evoked with greater power the marriage of land and sky that gives this country both its beauty and its terror. "
--Washington Post Book World
In 1909 maps still identified eastern Montana as the Great American Desert. But in that year Congress, lobbied heavily by railroad companies, offered 320-acre tracts of land to anyone bold or foolish enough to stake a claim to them. Drawn by shamelessly inventive brochures, countless homesteaders--many of them immigrants--went west to make their fortunes. Most failed. In Bad Land, Jonathan Raban travels through the unforgiving country that was the scene of their dreams and undoing, and makes their story come miraculously alive.
In towns named Terry, Calypso, and Ismay (which changed its name to Joe, Montana, in an effort to attract football fans), and in the landscape in between, Raban unearths a vanished episode of American history, with its own ruins, its own heroes and heroines, its own hopeful myths and bitter memories. Startlingly observed, beautifully written, this book is a contemporary classic of the American West.
Джон Кракауэр4.2 В апреле 1992 года молодой человек из обеспеченной семьи добирается автостопом до Аляски, где в полном одиночестве, добывая пропитание охотой и собирательством, живет в заброшенном автобусе - в совершенно диких условиях.. Реальная история Криса Маккэндлесса стала известной на весь мир благодаря мастерству известного писателя Джона Кракауэра и блестящей экранизации Шона Пенна. Знаменитый актер и режиссер прочитал книгу за одну ночь и затем в течение 10 лет добивался от родственников Криса разрешения на съемку фильма, который впоследствии получил множество наград и по праву считается культовым. Заброшенный автобус посреди Аляски стал настоящей меккой для путешественников, а сам Крис - кумиром у молодых противников серой офисной жизни и материальных ценностей.
Кевин Канти0.0 Building on the success of A Stranger in This World, the widely praised collection of stories that was one of the most exciting literary debuts of recent years, Kevin Canty has written a blistering, unforgettable first novel. Set in the sprawl of suburbia, with its shattered families and hollow lives, Into the Great Wide Open is the story of two young people fleeing their families' emotional abandonment to find refuge in each other.
Smart but scarred, Kenny Kolodny yearns to awake from the nightmare of his smashed-up family: his mother is in an institution and forever away; his father is an abusive alcoholic; his brother lives abroad. Seventeen and alone, he hangs on the periphery of his world, until he makes a passionate connection with the troubled, beautiful, fiercely independent Junie Williamson. Kenny discovers in their highly charged, intensely erotic relationship a reality--and a capacity for caring--he has not known before.
In prose startling for its diamond-hard edges and bravura lyricism, Kevin Canty revives the heady carnival of adolescence, evoking its confusing emotional landscape and its heightened sensuality, too soon lost. Into the Great Wide Open is a haunting, mesmerizing novel by a writer of deep sensitivity and undeniable talent.
Ким Барнс0.0 Poet Kim Barnes grew up in Northern Idaho, in the isolated camps where her father worked as a logger and her mother made a home for her husband and two children. Their lives were short on material wealth, but long on the riches of family and friendship, and the great sheltering power of the wilderness. But in the mid-1960s, as automation and a declining economy drove more and more loggers out of the wilderness and into despair, Kim's father dug in, determined to stay. It was then the family turned fervently toward Pentecostalism. It was then things changed. In the Wilderness is the story of this poet's journey toward adulthood, set against an interior landscape every bit as awesome, as wondrous, and as fraught with hidden peril as the great Idaho forest itself. It is an examination of how both geography and faith can shape the heart and soul, and of the uncharted territory we must all enter to face our own demons. It is the clear-eyed and deeply moving story of a young woman's coming to terms with her family, her homeland, her spirituality, and herself.
Чак Паланик4.2 Это - самая потрясающая и самая скандальная книга 1990-х.
- Книга, в которой устами Чака Паланика заговорило не просто "Поколение Икс", но - "Поколение Икс" уже озлобленное, уже растерявшее свои последние иллюзии.
