Book Description
Crystal Spangler lives in rural Appalachia. She's the apple of her mother's eye -- not yet beautiful, but she will be. She's the most popular girl at Black Rock High. She makes cheerleader, gets good grades, and is elected beauty queen. Crystal discovers God, goes to college, and falls in love. When she comes home, she's disheveled and confused. Crystal becomes a wealthy politician's wife. But there's something calling her, drawing her back to where it all began, in the shadow of Black Mountain . . .
From the Paperback edition.
Customer Reviews:
fiction that doesn't do your thinking for you.......2007-03-10
I had the unique experience of sitting in a hotel lobby reading this book when Lee Smith walked in. I'll bet writers love catching people absorbed in their books. This is a deft narrative that will not deliver a nice neat moral for you, nor polish any of its characters to likeability; it will however let you peer intensely into the characters' lives and make you see them without flinching. The very mysteriousness of the heroine Crystal's lack of self-knowledge--and refusal to know herself--is one of the most chilling aspects, aside from the physical trauma to which she is subjected. You might want to attribute all of Crystal's later behavior to these early, formative experiences, but this author doesn't make things so easy. The book resists distillation--like life--but the characters invite compassion, and however much Crystal may feel distanced from her own story, the reader will find it hard to remain detached, especially when caught up in the clear, beautiful prose.
LEE SMITH SIMPLY DOES NOT WRITE BAD BOOKS ! ~~~~.......2007-01-04
I love Lee Smith's books. She captures life and all the curves it can and does throw at us.
BLACK MOUNTAIN BREAKDOWN deals with Crystal, a young teenage girl living in the Appalachias. She is beautiful, she is popular, she is kind, she is sweet. She is a cheerleader, she dates any boy she wants to, she gets good grades. EVERYONE loves Crystal! She is just a golden girl and not one that you can't stand because she has it all. Crystal is just well loved by everyone in her small Southern town.
But Crystal has her demons, or rather the demons have Crystal. While young teenage Crystal is visiting her two doting aunts who live in another small town, she has a life-altering horrific event happen to her. What I liked about how Lee Smith handled this situation was this - she never mentions what happened to Crystal; however, it is assumed. Then, towards the end of the book, that event is brought to light and explains a lot of why Crystal has a breakdown.
After this event that really mentally/emotionally hurts Crystal and then with the death of her father, she slowly but surely starts to loose her grip on life. She becomes more and more detached about her life and people around her. She dates constantly. She initiates sex with these young boys and they can't get enough of her. However, Crystal is still the most popular girl in town and adored by men/women and boys/girls. No one seems to notice how Crystal is loosing it, or actually having a nervous breakdown.
She goes through boys, having sex with most of them, not caring, not worrying about it, and not truly even "being" there. She breaks the hearts of all of them. She has tons of friends, but has a true and steadfast friend in Agnes who lives right next door to her. Agnes is the opposite of Crystal -- dowdy, serious, righteous, but she loves Crystal and looks after her always. Everyone should be blessed to have a friend such as Agnes.
Crystal's condition worsens as she goes through her life. Events come and go and she just flits through her life, detached and not caring. She leaves her home town for a while, basically loosing contact with friends and family. However, after years, she returns home and seems to get things together for herself mentally by teaching. She turns out to be a great and very caring teacher. You find yourself rooting for Crystal and hoping she can handle life! However, life throws more at Crystal.
In the end, Crystal does just break down as the title suggests. This is not a happy book; however, it is an excellent book. It is a fast, short read and one I will recommend to friends and family. Lee Smith is a great writer and you can tell that she puts her heart and soul into her work.
Thankfully, Lee Smith has a large list of books so you can sit down and enjoy more of her works. I haven't read one of her books yet that I did not like.
Thanks, Ms. Smith. More, please.
Thank you -- Pam
Sad, tragic..........2006-08-25
Black Mountain Breakdown is Lee Smith's first novel and chronicles the life of Crystal Spangler from teenager-hood through young adult-hood. Crystal is the youngest of her family and the love of her mother's life because she was a late baby and her older brothers had "left" in one sense or another by the time she was in her early teens.
Crystal is beautiful, emotional, and hard to catch. She also reflects back what others give her so that they love her without really knowing why or who she is. Crystal's father Grant is dying at the beginning of the novel--simply sitting in a chair in the front parlor of the house waiting for death to take him. It's a sad existence, but he and Crystal have a connection that foreshadows Crystal's own mental health issues throughout the rest of her life.
After her father's death Crystal turns to anyone to give her life substance and meaning, but only turns to herself once and that is when she is teaching junior high--a vocation she seems to have a knack for.
Her friend Agnes stays with her throughout her life and the two of them mirror one another in life experiences. While Crystal's seems to be living high and happy, Agnes is miserable, but as Crystal begins her decline, Agnes begins her climb to becoming quite the entrepreneur.
BMB is a good book even if it is about a very depressing and tragic life. The mental illness isn't surprising considering the family history and experiences Crystal has, but it is sad nonetheless.
A Book So Haunting I Had to Experience it More than Once........2006-08-24
Smith's character Crystal Spangler is many things, but boring is not one of them. My first reading of this story, I felt a lot like the reviewers here who didn't like the book. The strange thing was that, try as I might, I couldn't forget about it, and went back to it again in the last few days. What is this story about, besides life in the Appalachians and the locals who inhabit it? It's about a circle that's sometimes clear and sometimes fuzzy that is nevertheless complete.
Agnes and Crystal are best friends for life, but we see from the very beginning that big, frumpy Agnes is more well grounded and stronger than her pretty blond, blue-eyed friend who is given to overreacting to her father's dark poetry readings and need to be taken care of by others. Early on, Agnes is a sort of surrogate mother for her. Crystal's father is a heavy smoking alcoholic who has withdrawn into his own space, dependent on both Crystal and his wife Lorena's attention as he slowly chooses to slip away from life. The three Spangler children are effected by him and Lorena's co-dependant enabling in different ways. Jules is bitter, angry, and prefers men to women, ashamed of his family and home. Sykes is flighty and given to following any direction the wind blows in, but he calms down eventually. Crystal is a lot like Sykes, but she isn't as strong because she is raped by an uncle in her junior year of high school, and then, having blocked the entire incident from her mind, goes home to find her father dead.
Crystal will become a floater: months after the blocked out assault and Grant Spangler's death, Crystal will break up with her steady boyfriend Roger Lee, but doesn't know just why. My guess is that she feels he's too closely tied with both the conscious and unconscious incidents. She will begin a somewhat remote and intimately charged relationship with a local bad boy who eventually leaves her for country stardom in Nashville. Constantly needing something to hold onto (like she held onto her daddy's robe upon finding him dead and having a nervous breakdown), she discovers Jesus, then she discovers random male partners. Crystal is empty and just doesn't care. She drifts like a leaf on the wind, always desperate for something to hold onto, constantly anxiety ridden and sometimes lost in a world of hallucinations. She takes up with a hippie radical who ends up hanging himself and has another nervous breakdown.
She returns to the Appalachians and becomes a school teacher, one of the few times she is finally together and admirable, because she genuinely cares about her students. There's just one problem with Crystal; every time things are going half-well, she finds a way to screw it up. A phone call from Jules, her hippie brother boyfriend telling her she's doomed. These things all stick in her mind. We also see Agnes's point of view through this all, sometimes jealous, but mostly knowing all along that Crystal lets other people put ideas in her head that harm her. Crystal is always way too vulnerable despite her strengths.
What goes around comes around full circle. Roger Lee still loves her and dumps his family for her. For a while she is happy with him, but eventually things happen similar to their high school years. Once again, a chain of events makes her overly anxious, and then she recalls the forgotten incidents...
This book is an eery and painful portrait of a young girl who came from a highly effected, dysfunctional home and, through a series of unfortunate circumstances, can never quite take control of her own life, always needing someone else to take care of her. If you are uncomfortable with this story, perhaps it's because you see elements of yourself in Crystal. All too often, I admit I do. What gets me most is how she always ends up talking like her father, beginning sentences with "Listen...," how she never outgrows the need to have men tell her stories, and how Agnes is the one who ends up taking more care of her in the end than her mother. Full circle, and a sad one at that. More disturbing is how nothing, save for the heat of the moment, ever seems to fulfill her for long. People like this are more real than we want to believe, and Lee Smith has brought this home in a bittersweet and unforgettably prosaic style. If you like books that don't end with a glass slipper and a prince, I urge you to give this one a try. Crystal Spangler is not always likeable, but she definitely isn't forgettable.
Another excellent book by Lee Smith.......2006-05-24
I enjoyed Smith's Black Mountain Breakdown. Smith's story takes us from Crystal's high school years into her early thirties. Along the way we meet interesting characters such as Crystal's friend Anges, the young rebel Mack and her dear Aunt's Nora and Grace. I felt touched by Crystal's emotional rollercoaster.
Customer Reviews:
Anita does it again! .......2007-06-26
Anita Stansfield has been one of my favorite authors since before I can remember. In this book she wonderfully writes her characters and captures their innermost thoughts and feelings. I own all four of these books in the series, and read them over and over. I find something new to love each time!
Bored to tears. .......2006-03-28
I was really looking forward to the 4th book in the series. But could not get through this 3rd book. I was so bored. I quit reading 1/2 way through. It just did not go anywhere! It was just inside personal struggle that did not stop..... it just went on and on and on.
Amazon.com
This is the first in a series of graphic story albums based on the popular motion pictures of the same name, with each volume bringing together a well-known writer and artist. Aliens: Tribes debuted the first major literary work of Stephen R. Bissette, an award-winning comic book artist universally recognized for his artwork on Swamp Thing. Bissette's take on the movie series is to lock us into an orbiting medical facility infested with a horde of aliens. The only way they can be destroyed is to unleash upon them a specially trained military cleanup crew programmed to be even more ruthless than the aliens. Bissette displays an instinctive talent for writing gripping, visceral prose equal to his talents as a horror artist. The volume is further complemented by the magnificent full-color paintings of another award-winning artist, David Dorman. A truly terrifying ride, it should come as no surprise that this book later won a Bram Stoker Award from the Horror Writers Association. --Stanley Wiater
Book Description
This exquisitely produced, Smythe-sewn, embossed hardcover volume features an Aliens tale written by today's master of horror comics, Steve Bissette, accompanied by 24 full-color paintings by the most sought-after painter in the field, Dave Dorman. An Alien has been detected on board a space station orbiting Earth, and a crack extermination team sets out to destroy it. The success of their mission depends on one man's sinister secret. The story is presented in the traditional text format accompanied by full-page color paintings by Dorman. This book also features a dust jacket illustrated by Dorman.
Customer Reviews:
Preety to Mean with a Gloss Coated Sheen .......2007-07-17
An facility floating amidst the far reaches of space is filled to the brim with Aliens that are, by and far, not happy to give it up. Since the station is important there is an unwillingness to abandon it, leaving only one option - you have to find someone that things like the Aliens to bring the Aliens down. This leads to problems, of course, because what really happens when you start to employ something worse than the things you begun calling "the most deadly species in the universe?"
You end up with tragedy, a little travesty, and then some.
In Tribes we find ourselves with the question of "who is really the most monstrous" again in another Alien forum, repeating a story that we saw in Berserker but without the Perry touches. That's somewhat sad, too, because I really like the way Perry puts the touches on the Alien books and I found myself liking this book. I even grew partial to the set-up of this book as I looked at the 60 + illustrations that graced page in and page again, but I wasn't really happy with the way I didn't get a complete Alien story. When you added up the interior pages, taking out the introduction and the blank areas, you had something more akin to Alien comic than one of the Alien novels.
And that isn't to down the Alien comics because many of them - especially Labyrinth and some of the Batman pieces - were really done well.
I just thought this was a novel because it was shelled with a hardcover and I wanted my Alien fix and I found myself instead facing down the barrel of a gun with only 40 pages.
Hmmm.
Still, for what it costs now and how good some of the art looked, I really can't complain and neither can anyone who picks it up. The Alien takes good pictures, and anyone that has talents like those displayed in this really deserves praise for what they've done. There are some really cryptic pictures of the Alien that give it a realistic quality that make me think "alive" - and by alive I mean that sexy "I can inhabit any world I wanna" kinda sheen.
If you miss the Alien and need a good fix then this is a place to see plaenty of portraits of it saying "hello."
it's a book.......2007-05-12
From the moment i opened the cover, i was sucked into a story that gripped me and kept me on the edge of my seat. the story retains the sorrowful human detachment in the face of over-mechanized society the movies Alien3 and Resurrection had, with the commando grunt feel of Aliens. if you like simplistic writing of a comic-like set up that requires pictures to tell most of the story, don't pick this up. but if you enjoy a good, dark book with awe inspiring illustrations, pick this up.
Too short and uninvolving.......2000-07-16
This book racks in at 72 pages, but it starts on page 6, and 25 of the remaining 66 pages are illustrations. That turns this book into a 40 page book. The art is excellent, up to Dorman's standards, creepy, photorealistic, and lots of fun to look at. But the writing leaves a lot to be desired. Overlong senteces and too many big words obscure some really neat scenes. The story's pretty good, though, and it introduces the idea of a "berserker" unit that will be brought back later in Perry's novel. This book is a neat addition to the Aliens series, it just costs too much for too little content.
Excellent writing with even better art work........1997-10-09
The writing on this graphic novel/book is very good, and the artwork is some of the best I have ever seen.
Book Description
The Master of Speech deciphers the ancient mythology of the Dogon, an isolated African tribe who live along a 200-kilometre stretch of escarpment called the Cliffs of Bandiagara near Timbuktu. The French anthropologist Griaule recorded the Dogon mythology in 1947 in his book, Conversations with Ogotemmêli.
The Dogon had knowledge of the triple star Sirius system that was told to Griaule long before modern astronomers discovered the third star in the system in 1995. The Dogon told Griaule they had obtained their knowledge from amphibious beings who came to Earth from the Sirius star system. After extensive analysis of this mythology, Dorey reveals that these alien beings called Nummo were responsible for human creation through genetic engineering. She further proves that their contact with the Earth resulted in the evolution of most of the world's major religions. The Master of Speech focuses on the connections between paganism, Christianity, and the Greek and Egyptian mythologies. It reveals the connection of the Zodiac to this mythology and refers to the destruction of the Earth as told in Plato's Timeas relating to Atlantis. It talks about the human unconscious and our relationship to time and immortality.
The information presented in this book will be disturbing for some individuals. The facts however speak for themselves. This is a must read for anyone wanting to come to terms with the truth about the beginning of human existence.
Book Description
Tells the story of Iran's shaping and transmitting of the world's religions, starting with the Iranian merchants and missionaries who brought, not only Islam but also Christianity, Judaism, and Buddhism to China.
Customer Reviews:
Persia: a cradle of religions.......2007-02-02
Spirituality in the Land of the Noble by Richard C. Foltz (Oneworld Publications, Oxford; 2004) surveys the ways in which religions have emerged and have been shaped during the course of history in the region we now call Iran. The author notes that "throughout the country's long history its peoples and cultures have played an unexcelled role in influencing, transforming, and propagating all the world's universal traditions." Chapters cover origins of Iranian religion, Zoroastrianism, Judaism, Buddhism, Christianity, so-called Gnostic traditions including the syncretistic Manichean religion, Islam, the "Babi Movement and the Baha'i Faith," and the current state of affairs in the country. The chapter on Zoroastrianism, the review of the long history of Judaism in Iran, and the section on the successional conflicts following the death of Mohammed are particularly informative.
The relatively short, stand alone chapter on the Baha'i Faith is respectful and provides a useful summary, albeit with few superlatives. Foltz attempts to capture the Babi drama with a largely historical review and casts it as millenarian and messianic. He highlights the universalistic nature of the Baha'i teachings, summarizes them with accurate sourcing to Baha'i writings, and remarks on gender equality in particular as a radical notion at the time. In his preface, the author notes: "Finally there is the Baha'i faith, a distinctly modern religious tradition whose universalizing approach exceeds, and indeed attempts to subsume, all of its predecessors. Nothing evokes the Iranian origins of this now global religion more vividly than a visit to the beautiful Persian gardens surrounding Baha'i shines of Acre and Haifa in Israel." With regard to persecution, Foltz observes that "The rabid hostility of the official view makes it essentially impossible within Iran today to obtain anything approaching an accurate understanding of the Baha'i religion."
In this book, Dr. Foltz (on the faculty of religious studies at the University of Florida) extends material he developed in an earlier publication (St. Martin's Griffin, 2000), Religions of the Silk Road: Overland Trade and Cultural Exchange from Antiquity to the Fifteenth Century. Dr. Foltz notes that with just the faintest of investigating it ought to become clear that Iran could just as easily be labeled a "cradle of religions" as the regions immediately to its west and east. Baha'is would very likely agree. This book is a good read, a good reference, and well worth the modest price.
Superb Overview.......2007-01-06
This is a great place and a starting point for understanding distinctly Iranian influences on world religions. It's is expansive in the number of topics covered however it is easy to digest as it is not overly academic.
Recommended to all interested in the roots of religion.
Not worth the time reading.......2006-03-21
This book is more about the authors political views than a study of religions in Iran. I found comparison of present murderous Islamic state of Iran with US democracy unacceptable and nauseating, however, very typical far-left relativism rational. I did not enjoy or learn anything I would like to remember reading this book and found myself skipping paragraphs at a time. If there was a 0 star rating I would select 0 but there is not so 1 it is.
a great book.......2005-10-17
I think it is a great book. I found it well-structured and fair. The arguments are well-documented. Richard Foltz describes the influence of Persian culture on a wide range of different world religions from Zoroasterism, Manichaeism and Mazdakism (which are pure Iranian religion) to Christianity, Jewism, Islam and even Buddhism.
I have been interested on this subject for years but never found any thing so comprehensive. I was particularly impressed by the knowledge of author in Persian language. It probably has helped the author to investigate the Persian culture as it is, rather than as an outside viewer with a Greek-style bias.
I strongly recommend this book for any one interested in religion, culture, history and even politics.
All world 's ideologies began in Persia ! just read this book and challenge it if u can !.......2005-09-26
This book is the BEST book ever written on the history of Persia/Iran. Any reader with any right mind can see the plagirisim of the Greeks and the Arabs as all that PERSIA gave to the whole world's philosophy, spirituality and religions. Persia indeed shaped the whole world's ideology but got NONE in return, not even an acknowlegment! What a pity!
Book Description
This digital document is an article from One Country, published by Baha'i International Community on April 1, 2004. The length of the article is 1328 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: Religious history through the lens of Iran.(Spirituality in the Land of the Noble: How Iran Shaped the World's Religions)(Book Review)
Publication:
One Country (Magazine/Journal)
Date: April 1, 2004
Publisher: Baha'i International Community
Volume: 16
Issue: 1
Page: 16(2)
Article Type: Book Review
Distributed by Thomson Gale
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