Amazon.com
In South of the Border, West of the Sun, the arc of an average man's life from childhood to middle age, with its attendant rhythms of success and disappointment, becomes the kind of exquisite literary conundrum that is Haruki Murakami's trademark. The plot is simple: Hajime meets and falls in love with a girl in elementary school, but he loses touch with her when his family moves to another town. He drifts through high school, college, and his 20s, before marrying and settling into a career as a successful bar owner. Then his childhood sweetheart returns, weighed down with secrets:
When I went back into the bar, a glass and ashtray remained where she had been. A couple of lightly crushed cigarette butts were lined up in the ashtray, a faint trace of lipstick on each. I sat down and closed my eyes. Echoes of music faded away, leaving me alone. In that gentle darkness, the rain continued to fall without a sound.
Murakami eschews the fantastic elements that appear in many of his other novels and stories, and readers hoping for a glimpse of the Sheep Man will be disappointed. Yet South of the Border, West of the Sun is as rich and mysterious as anything he has written. It is above all a complex, moving, and honest meditation on the nature of love, distilled into a work with the crystal clarity of a short story. A Nat "King" Cole song, a figure on a crowded street, a face pressed against a car window, a handful of ashes drifting down a river to the sea are woven together into a story that refuses to arrive at a simple conclusion. The classic love triangle may seem like a hackneyed theme for a writer as talented as Murakami, but in his quietly dazzling way, he bends us to his own unique geometry. --Simon Leake
Book Description
In
South of the Border, West of the Sun, the simple arc of a man's life--with its attendant rhythms of success and disappointment--becomes the exquisite literary terrain of Haruki Murakami's most haunting work.
Born in 1951 in an affluent Tokyo suburb, Hajime--beginning in Japanese--has arrived at middle age wanting for almost nothing. The postwar years have brought him a fine marriage, two daughters, and an enviable career as the proprietor of two jazz clubs. Yet a nagging sense of inauthenticity about his success threatens Hajime's happiness. And a boyhood memory of a wise, lonely girl named Shimamoto clouds his heart.
When Shimamoto shows up one rainy night, now a breathtaking beauty with a secret from which she is unable to escape, the fault lines of doubt in Hajime's quotidian existence begin to give way. And the details of stolen moments past and present--a Nat King Cole melody, a face pressed against a window, a handful of ashes drifting downriver to the sea--threaten to undo him completely. Rich, mysterious, quietly dazzling,
South of the Border, West of the Sun is Haruki Murakami's wisest and most compelling fiction.
Customer Reviews:
Living in memories.......2007-09-07
South of the Border, West of the Sun is a good travel read. I liked the title, it seems mysterious. The existence of a yearning in every person, yearning for dreams to come true.. the inexplicable sense of emptiness when you know that there is something more.. but that its left behind or is not in your destiny.. is well elucidated in the book.
But ironically, as in Hajime's life, there is something missing in the book.. I understand the protagonist's feelings in theory, but I dont feel them with him. I can see why he's wistful of the past, but frankly I don't care. Maybe because the language felt so flat. I wonder if its because its a translation. Or maybe I expected some Japanese-ness(?) to the language. A lot of the phrases and words used seem very American, so the characters don't come across as Japanese or of any particular culture. That should probably be a good thing, shouldn't it, to be able to write across borders. But I like to read non-English author's works as it gives a sense of the place, of the people, their culture. I think I had a lot of expectations from the book.
All said, the book is a decent read so I will definitely give a try to one of his more famous books.
For lack of anything more apt to say, this book was just a case of lost in translation for me.
http://ireadokay.blogspot.com
Truth often hurts.......2007-09-01
As always with a Murakami story echoes of the experience reverberate through the mind long after the last word has been read. And the experience is truly mesmerizing. Okay the plot is familiar but Murakami manages to invest it with a timeless quality that illuminates the human condition only too well: we experience the everyday suffering life has to offer when we're full of apparent weakness, hopelessness and despair as well as those transcendent moments that enable us to pull through and ultimately survive. There are no false moments in this short tale that can easily be read in one sitting but however long it takes the time will be well spent since it borders on perfection.
(3.5): A Bittersweet Tale.......2007-08-27
This is an interesting tale, one that certainly does deviate from what we're used to from Murakami. It's much more "Norwegian Wood" than "The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle," in that there lacks a particular fantasy element. But although the strange and absurd is lacking, the same kind of mystery that infuses many of Murakami's books is still present. We are presented with Hajime and follow him from his early childhood through middle-age, watching him go through the growing pains associated with love and friendship. He seems almost mediocre in every way until he marries the right woman and has a string of good luck that results in him living a pretty comfortable life owning and operating two successful bars. Trouble strikes when a girl from his childhood, his first love, comes back and throws his life for a loop.
What impressed me the most about the book is that - and this is more for those who have read a lot of Murakami - you keep thinking that something strange is just around the corner. The mystery is so all-encompassing that only something fantastic would explain everything. Instead, the mystery remains at the end, much as it does in real life.
So why the slightly lower rating? The process of reading the novel was wonderful, but ultimately, I left the book feeling lukewarm or at least unsatisfied. That's merely my opinion. The reading of it was fantastic (4 stars), but the final impression was ok (3 stars).
Read it if you're a fan, try another one of his books if you're new to him.
Murakami channels Danielle Steele.......2007-03-11
There is nothing new about this plot and the writing style is not engaging (? blame the translation?). A quick read, but more suited to the beach in summer, and not literature.
Symbolism is heavy-handed. His life is the desert, and Shimamoto is water. She only appears in his bar when it rains. The author feels the need to point this out to the reader.
When Hajime's wife discovers his infidelity she earnestly proclaims that she only wants him to be happy, and if he wishes, he can take everything, even their children. Right. Even cultural differences do not allow for this over the top male fantasy to be credible.
I don't understand why this book has been so well-reviewed. Maybe it is a romance novel written for men. Guys--there's lots of this stuff out there.
simple story, told wonderfully.......2006-10-28
This is less surreal than some of Murakami's other novels, but just as gripping none the less. Very well written (and translated). It is a simple love story that is hard to forget.
Amazon.com
Australian scholar Keith Windschuttle is one of the fieriest participants in the debate about the practice of history. In The Killing of History he decries the growth of so-called cultural studies in place of the old-fashioned facts-and-chronologies approach. Windschuttle's passion sometimes carries him a bit too far, but he lands many solid punches, such as when he takes on the heavily published French scholar Michel de Certeau, who has called writing a tool of the power elite. "For someone who thinks writing is a form of oppression," Windschuttle twits, "he has done a lot of writing." Elsewhere Windschuttle attacks efforts to explain away such matters as human sacrifice among the Aztecs, saying that to accept such behavior is akin to "accepting the cultures of Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia as equal but different."
Book Description
In The Killing of History, Windschuttle offers a devastating expose of attempts to substitute radically chic theorizing for real knowledge about the past. The result is revolutionary and unprecedented: contemporary historians are increasingly obscuring the facts on which truth about the past is built. Windschuttle offers a devastating expose of these developments. This fascinating narrative leads us into a series of case histories that demonstrate how radical theory has attempted to replace the learning of traditional history with its own political agenda.
Customer Reviews:
The Best critique of the academy written in recent times.......2006-12-27
This is the best critique of the modern academic institution's teaching of history and the humanities to come along in perhaps 20 years or more. In a brilliant way the author confronts what is slowly strangling life out of history, replacing it with all sorts of psuedo-scientific and moral-relativist 'history as theory' and 'history as relative' studies produced since the advent of post-modernism. The idea, which has been presented by some 'historians' like Ilan Pappe, that history is merely propoganda and have then went on to relish dishing out that propoganda without any semblance of accuracy is finally taken to task.
There was a period when history was the record of analls or rathert he record of the deeds of the kings, this is the history roughly found in the Bible and then later in Herodotus, Thucidities and other early pracitioners. Then someone decided that history had neglected the little people, the workers, and that was only a short step to those that claimed history is relative, and therefore there is no 'truth' and thus everything can be fabricated, there must be no judgement.
This book takes all this to task and dares to question why we must accept the idea that history is bunk and that therefore it can be made up and we have to consume it. History today in the acamemy resembles the 'history' produced in Stalin's russia, and yet this is true in free democratic societies. Finally a book that tells us why and challenges all of us to think.
Seth J. Frantzman
Superb work for anyone interested in how history is being rewritten........2006-06-28
Professor Windschuttle exposes the dangers of using structuralism, poststructuralism, postmodernism, cultural relativism and the like as tools for doing history. By quoting extensively from those he takes issue with, taking time to clarify the mumbo-jumbo used by some of these theorists, and explaining his reasoning and conclusions in plain English, the author has made it vastly simpler for the average person to comprehend these radical approaches and why they are so dangerous to truth. One could write more, but it would only be restating much of what has already been said.
Exposing the "emperor's new clothes" of "intellectual" snobs.......2006-04-09
As a student of history, I found mr. Windschuttle's book very useful in understanding how the minds of "intellectual" snobs work, from where they get their bizarre thoughts and why it's important to fight for the maintenance of History as a serious academic discipline. Sure the author may seem too right-wing-orientated for some people as he tends to portray indigenous people as brutal savages and the anglo-saxon culture as inerrant; but mr. Windschuttle's personal thoughts on civilisation is not really the point with this book. Then of course some parts of the book can be difficult to understand as it deals with advanced philosphy and heavy scientific theory, but otherwise it's easy to follow. The emperor has no clothes - the postmodern philosophers writes illogical mumbo-jumbo that even small children can see through...
Loved it.......2006-03-20
I found this book recently in a secondhand store, and couldn't put it down. This book has been reviewed extensively already so I just want to mention a couple of things.
First of all, it speaks volumes that books criticizing anti-realist approaches and philosophies are so frequently accused of being politically conservative, as this book has by a few reviewers here. (Last time I checked, not everything that every political liberal says is pure fantasy; more to the point, it is perfectly possible to feel inclined toward political liberalism while finding problematic the anti-realist/post-modern influence on historiography). While Windschuttle does speak favourably of the work of a few conservative thinkers, it strikes me as a real stretch to say that Windschuttle is here championing political conservatism. Rather, his book deals with the reality of the past and how we might best seek to apprehend it, and how certain philosophies inhibit that quest.
Two, while I find much to admire in the philosophy of Karl Popper (particularly in his political writings), I thought Windschuttle does well to raise questions about the eventual destination of Popper's epistemology. In short, inspired by David Stove's incisive critique, he argues that Popper, along with Kuhn, Feyerabend, and certain other modern philosophers of science, have done much to lay the groundwork for the kind of lunacy he describes elsewhere in the book. I thought this was particularly interesting and thought-provoking, as well as in many respects irrefutable.
Anyway, a very well-written book, and very enlightening.
Did we read the same book?.......2005-10-20
I was disappointed: there's not a word here for or against the Vietnam War, there's nothing at all about the Crusades or the desirability of civilizing 'primative' people by force, while the 'unchanging goodness of America' sadly goes unremarked (the author is an Australian ex-Marxist). There are a lot of other things that the book isn't about. For an imaginative selection, see the review below.
What we do find here are well-documented case studies of the nonsense produced by half-baked theory (Paul Carter's 'spatial history' of Australia inspired by Derrida is a gem), a painstaking analysis of how this sort of thing came to pass as scholarship, and a plea to preserve empirical history and social sciences generally from pseudo-intellectual claptrap. The fact that an educated reader can dismiss this out of hand as self-evidently outrageous is a reflection of the bankruptcy of 'education' (or possibly 'studies') in at least part of the humanities. And that IS what the book is about.
This isn't a right-wing rant, it isn't all easy reading but it is worth the effort.
Customer Reviews:
Mystery with meat..........2005-06-16
Carol O'Connell's Killing Critics is her third Kathleen Mallory mystery, and they just continue to get better. This book has it all: complex plot, memorable characters and some brilliant detective work.
An artist, Dean Starr, is discovered murdered in the middle of an art gallery exhibition. His death is made to look like performance art. NYPD Special Crimes Unit detectives Mallory and Ricker are called in to investigate. Twelve years previous, there was a brutal double homicide in an art gallery owned by the same man, and the circumstances are very similar. Mallory's late father, Markowitz, was on that case and although he got a confession and a conviction, he never for a minute believed that he had the right man. As Mallory and Riker find out more about this new murder, the more parallels there are to the old one. Yet, the NYPD considers the old case closed, and will not allow them to "officially" investigate. The list of suspects is very long, and there are also a good number of people who would like to see the murders remain unsolved. Those in high ranking office are vulnerable including the police commission and a state senator.
In Killing Critics, O'Connell gives us a crash course on the New York City art world, including artists, works of art, galleries, gallery owners, art shows, art critics, art patrons and art investors. It truly is fascinating. She also opens the door wider into Mallory's troubled childhood, and we better understand why she remains so scarred. All the major characters (Mallory, Riker and Butler) are fleshed out in greater detail.
Two things kept me from giving this book five stars. First, I thought it was a bit slow at the beginning, although it quickly picked up speed and the ending will blow you away. Second, I thought it stretched O'Connell's credibility to have Mallory challenge a former Olympic gold medalist to a fencing duel (she only had one semester of fencing in college). Still, these criticisms aside, this is an awesome story and O'Connell is one of the few writers who gives us mysteries with meat.
Please just keep 'em coming O'Connell.......2004-07-11
This third book in the series is just as great as all the others, maybe even a little more so. All the characters I've come to love are here as well as the introduction of J.L. Quinn (pretty please let him reappear). This was an intensely emotional story that ends with a bang. Art cricits are being killed off and it has something to do with an old crime handled by her late foster father. All hell breaks loose when a determined Mallory reinvestigates. We've gotten to know these characters so well by now that when Riker's past is delved into or Mallory is proven to be as destructible as the next person, the reader is there. The ending left a quite a blow and I couldn't wait to get my hands on the next one in this series (The Stone Angel). I really can't praise this series enough for it's deep character development, unusual as well as strong heroine and well written plots.
Chilling blend of horror and heartache.......2003-04-26
This was the first Carol O'Connell book I read and still one of my favorites. It's the only book that ever scared the hell out of me while making me cry for so many characters who were irreversibly devastated by their loss. Carol O'Connell has a wonderful way of creating characters who are rarely likable or sympathetic but who are almost always interesting.
An Intense Read!.......2002-10-31
This is my third venture into Kathy Mallory's world. Descriptions of crime scenes are gory. Neverending tension! Thank heaven for the men around her to balance her out. She's intense and seemingly invulnerable. I could not put the book down! What a ride! On to the next!
An Intense Read!.......2002-10-31
This is my third venture into Kathy Mallory's world. Descriptions of crime scenes are gory. Neverending tension! Thank heaven for the men around her to balance her out. She's intense and seemingly invulnerable. I could not put the book down! What a ride! On to the next!
Average customer rating:
|
Killing Critics
Manufacturer: Scorpion Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
ASIN: 1873567251 |
Book Description
This digital document is an article from The Futurist, published by Thomson Gale on May 1, 2006. The length of the article is 920 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.
Citation Details
Title: The killer economy--and what to do about it: social critic Paul Stiles says you can't buy happiness, but you can buy misery.(Is the American Dream Killing You?: How "The Market" Rules Our Lives)(Book review)
Author: Patrick Tucker
Publication:
The Futurist (Magazine/Journal)
Date: May 1, 2006
Publisher: Thomson Gale
Volume: 40
Issue: 3
Page: 61(2)
Article Type: Book review
Distributed by Thomson Gale
Book Description
Pai doesn't look a day over sixteen; of course, she's 300 years old and the last of an ancient mystical race. Yakumo doesn't look any different than your average Tokyo teen; however, he's been resurrected from the dead as Pai's immortal slave and defender. They're both on a quest to return Pai to her hidden homeland and ultimately to return Yakumo to his mortal form. They've been through hell and high water to find a lost Tibetan shrine that holds the keys to the Sacred Land of Kunlun. But with the mission accomplished, the return to Kunlun turns out not to be the heartfelt reunion Pai had hoped for, but could instead reveal her incredible journey to be only a ruse that could well release the evil Kaiyan Wang from imprisonment in the Sacred Land!
Book Description
A sought-after sports nutritionist offers recreational and competitive athletes alike the secrets to improved performance in any sport through specialized nutrition. From explaining how to tweak the protein, fats, and carbs in your diet to enhance performance to taking readers through pre- and post-game planning, this book offers the complete, inside track on sports nutrition.
Customer Reviews:
GREAT BOOK.......2004-02-08
I AM AN ATHLETE AND I WHEN I READ THIS BOOK IT PUT ME IN THE MOOD TO CHANGE MY LIFE. I WAS ALWAYS USED TO EATING "HEALTHY" BUT THIS BOOK PUT MY HEALTHY TO THE RIGHT HEALHTY!! GREAT BOOK!
This Book Is Awesome.......2004-02-08
When I saw this book I thought this was just another nutrtion book but boy was I wrong. I am an athletic director at a local college and I have recommened that all my athletes go out and get this book. It teaches you how to stay active and healthy at the same time. I reccomend this book not only for athletes, coaches and other athletic directors but to the average person!!!
The Greatest Book on Sports Nurition.......2004-02-07
When I first got this book I couldn't put it down. I loved all the ideas that it had in it. I hope that they come out with another book on the same lines as this one.
Books:
- Spencerville
- The Black Angel: A Thriller (Charlie Parker Mysteries)
- The Boys and the Bees
- The Candlestone (Dragons in Our Midst, Vol. 2) (Dragons in Our Midst)
- The Dew Breaker
- The Drowning Tree: A Novel
- The Gilded Chamber: A Novel of Queen Esther
- The Hot Kid: A Novel
- The House of Thunder
- The Hundred Secret Senses
Books Index
Books Home
Recommended Books
- Textbook of Pediatric Emergency Procedures
- History: Fiction or Science
- A Thousand Years of Good Prayers: Stories
- Battle For Zimbabwe: The Final Countdown
- Building Professional Services: The Sirens' Song
- History: Fiction or Science
- Franco-Prussian War: The German Invasion of France 1870-1871, Revised Edition
- Figure Drawing Without a Model
- Break the One-Armed Bandits!
- Messages Of The Governors Of Michigan: Baldwin, Bagley, Croswell, Jerome, Begole, Alger, Luce, Winan
Contemporary
| General
| Literature & Fiction
| Subjects
| Books
Sputnik Sweetheart
Norwegian Wood
A Wild Sheep Chase: A Novel
Dance Dance Dance
Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World: A Novel (Vintage International)
