Reviews and Comments

Overall helpful. Alice von Hildebrand's two essays were phenomenal and worth the price of the book. I will be seeking out her work elsewhere. Dietrich was much more analytical, dry, and in my view arbitrary, descending almost to the level of a Sunday School scolding. But there were moments where he shined as well, correcting abuses and tempering with love which is normally found in Catholic ethics.

3.5, I did like the book and I learned a lot from it but you can tell its the author's first novel. The first half of the novel is a classic coming-of-age tale with a practical realism meeting the magical memory of the Kenyan hilllands. It plays out important issues for Africans under colonialism, dealing very directly with the complex issue of female circumcision. But the second half of the book is too burdened by repetitive exposition, and morality play style allusions for it to really shine, although certainly, the potential is there. The book is worth reading and I look forward to reading other of Thiong'o's works.

A lot of latent wisdom here in a Pastor's struggle to remain real and authentic in his approach to God in an American culture that valued the individual and the superfluous above all. Very touching and overall helpful in visualizing the vocation of pastor.

Read this book with my ninth-grade literature class. My students were initially intrigued, often times baffled by the character of Chris McCandless and his story. Jon Krakauer goes into painstaking detail, and the book catalogs the effort to find that painstaking detail. But this is largely where to book goes wrong. It doesn't feel cohesive and it often lost us as readers. McCandless' story can be inspiring but bogged down by pages of minuscule detail, loose conjecture, and stories of different adventurers that don't relate to McCandless' own, the power of witnessing McCandless' short but passionate life is all but snuffed out. You can tell that the book is not Krakauer's preferred form. As one of my students said, "this is why no one reads magazines anymore."

3.5 I love the story, Austen's wit is unparalleled and her vivid characters are eternal. However, I was surprised to find that I enjoyed the film and tv adaptions of the story more than the original novel as Austen's writing style is much too internal without being overly psychologically interesting for my taste. She almost utterly lacks a description of anything other than the thoughts of her characters, or even more blandly, the general listing of opinions of such and such by general people. While her satire and understanding of human nature are pointed and profound, I find her and/or her era's confusion of morals with manners and rank to be utterly annoying. The beginning was largely humorous, the end warm and happy, but the middle like too many a novel felt muddled and dry. I'm curious if any critics have traced her development as a writer and which novels reflect different period of her writing.

In the words of one of my students, "Sometimes I forget that Huck isn't real."