Book Description
The Ordinary Seaman, the second novel from acclaimed writer Francisco Goldman is a lyrical and spellbinding story of hope, despair, and the promise of love. The ordinary seaman is Esteban, a 19-year-old veteran of the war in Nicaragua, who has come to America with 14 other men to form the crew of the Urus. Docked on a desolate Brooklyn pier, the Urus is a wreck, and the men, without the means to return home, become its prisoners. Esteban, haunted by the loss of his first love in the war, gradually works up the courage to escape the ship and start a new life in the city. His story and those of his shipmates come to life, illuminating the conflicts and triumphs of the human heart.
Customer Reviews:
Niche Classic.......2006-05-01
Online reviewers who wrote previously have noted the more-than-incidental Spanish in The Ordinary Seaman as a stumbling block or an artistic flaw. Artistically, Goldman needed to convince us that Capitan Elias can plausibly control the seamen as he does. The seamen's youth and naivete help make the book's premise credible, but what sells it best are the constant reminders in dialogue that these muchachos can't speak or understand the simplest English.
I finished reading The Ordinary Seaman two days ago. Over the last third of the book, my emotional "wants" for specific outcomes built to a very high level. The outcome Goldman provides for Elias did not at all satisfy my "want" for this, the book's most intriguing character. Now, with hindsight, I bow in respectful recognition that my expectations were too banal, and that Goldman in fact fulfills his rendering of Elias with an honesty elevated by high intelligence.
A modern parable.......2004-08-15
Francisco Goldman's (b.1955) second novel, "The Ordinary Seaman" has been described as a modern parable of America's hidden immigrant culture. Son of a Jewish American father and Catholic Guatemalan mother, Goldman populates his fiction with characters who serve as projections of a self that is culturally divided. "TOS" is essentially a story about liminality: that space, like the sea itself, where one's perceptions or situation blends with, or crosses over into, perceptions or situations of others.
The novel centers upon Esteban, a nineteen-year-old Nicaraguan between adolescence and manhood, communism and capitalism, first and second love. An ex-Sandinista guerrilla, he signs on as a sailor without seaman's papers and is transported, with a makeshift crew of fourteen other desperate Centroamericanos from varied backgrounds, to the urban jungle of a remote pier in a desolate Brooklyn shipyard. Abandoned, in political, legal, and personal limbo, they become virtual prisoners on a ship that never sails, the broken-down, rat-infested Urus. A cavernous freighter crippled by fire damage, stripped for parts, and lacking even the most basic provisions for human habitation, this vessel becomes a deathtrap.
A "greenhorn" undergoing a rite of passage, Esteban had been encouraged by a surrogate father-figure to jump ship in a foreign to escape a magalomanic captain with no regard for his ship or crew, beyond their usefulness. Goldman uses the uniquely privileged position of the sea captain to illustrate the corrosive effects of unbridled egoism, not merely skewing the moral compass but jeopardizing life itself.
Highly recommended, very tight and well written.......2002-09-17
This is a very fine novel. The plot is tightly woven; the writing is crisp and even, sprightly, occasionally darkly humorous, and always interesting. Its characters are fascinating portraits drawn on a carefully crafted palette.
Mr. Goldman has done a truly remarkable job and this work should be widely read. His story line, the travails of a desperate group of dirt-poor Nicaraguans, is dispensed in calculated doses. I learned just enough about each helpless participant that I was always felt tuned for more information. Mr. Goldman links the civil war so carefully into his novel that it never intrudes, instead it adds constant, new dimensions. While seemingly effortless, the author's construction is beautifully coordinated.
Masterful blending of each character yields an astonishing, cleaver plot. Although Estaban appears to be the protagonist, he is always balanced and never intrudes on the whole. He acts much like the anchor line of the Urus, the ill-fated boat, which itself appears to be Mr. Goldman allegory of life. Or is this simply too much a stretch, beyond the author's intentions? I think not. Mr. Goldman succeeds where so many others fail; this is a terrific, powerful, carefully crafted, interesting novel.
At first I was distracted by the colloquial Spanish Mr. Goldman includes in dialogue and descriptions. It was a trial for my two years of college training. I soon understood many of the words, much of them if only from the situations described. In time they became actually pleasurable and added to the authenticity. I think this is a remarkable feat and the author deserves to be congratulated on his successful technique.
I do not read books to find faults. However, sometimes they appear as deficiencies that distract from the effects authors set out to achieve. In Mr. Goldman's cases there are none. This book is a fine effort and very interesting, well worth the time spent reading, and it is highly recommended.
Pretty good.......2002-02-25
Not as good as Goldman's first novel but if you're looking for an enjoyable piece of literary fiction, you could do worse.
ordinary seaman.......2001-07-29
It would have beeeen a lot better if I could understand the words All the greek(?) words that are not understood detract mightly from the story if you are going to write a book in english, use english!
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No Ordinary Seaman
Richard Gough
Manufacturer: Adlibbed Ltd
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
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ASIN: 1905166656 |
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Ordinary Seaman
Manufacturer: RECORDED BOOKS, INC.
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Audio Cassette
ASIN: 0788725211 |
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- Required Reading
- Short gems from master storyteller!
- ...
- Somewhat of a disappointment...
- Great Mix of Stories
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Get Off the Unicorn
Anne Mccaffrey
Manufacturer: Del Rey
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Mass Market Paperback
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ASIN: 0345349350
Release Date: 1987-05-12 |
Book Description
Open these pages and discover 14 remarkable stories of fantasy by a grand master of the genre. A wonderful writer, as well as successful and beloved by fans across the world, Anne McCaffrey has created an exciting collection of telepaths, secret gifts, dangerous missions, dragonriders, and more.
Download Description
Open these pages and discover fourteen remarkable stories of fantasy by a grand master of the genre.
A wonderful writer, as well as successful and beloved by fans across the world, Anne McCaffrey has created an exciting collection of telepaths, secret gifts, dangerous missions, dragonriders, and more.
Cover Art by Paul Alexander
Customer Reviews:
Required Reading.......2004-08-23
In 6th Grade English, one of the printed stories we had to analize was "The Littlest Dragonrider" At that time I had no Ideathat Pern was a larger word that that short story, When I found out years later, I serched everywhere to find a copy of that english book just so Icould have that story, then I found out she reprinted it in "Get off the Unicorn" and I was estatic, I also loved all of the other stories that came with it :)
Short gems from master storyteller!.......2002-08-31
Ms. McCaffrey's collection of short stories, Get Off the Unicorn, is a treasure trove of great little stories. Some of them, like Daughter, Dull Drums, and Finder's Keeper are great example of McCaffrey's skill at creating characters you love in just a handful of pages. One story that really hit home for me was called A Proper Santa Claus. It is about a very creative young boy who is very gently crushed by the adults about him into what they believe is a proper use of his talent. The end always makes me cry. I think all teachers and parents should be made to read this story!
But the coolest part of this excellent collection of short stories is that it is the source for several of her best series:
Apple -- The Talent Series
Thorns of Barevi -- The Freedom Series
Lady in the Tower -- The Rowan
A Meeting of Minds -- Damia
And there is even a Pern story, The Littlest Dragonboy and a Brainship story called Honeymoon about Helva and Niall Parollan. A great collection!
..........2001-09-21
Yes, it's a collection of short stories...but it's the beginning of so many books by Anne McCaffrey that it's a fascinating look at how one short story can bloom into a series. This book includes short stories that she later developed into the "Rowan", "Pegasus", and "Freedom" series. It also includes stories about Halva (The Ship Who Sang), Keevan (The Dragonriders of Pern-he later becomes a Weyrleader), and many other characters that you normally wouldn't pay much attention to. All in all, an engaging read that shows you the beginning of a writing empire!
Somewhat of a disappointment..........2001-07-26
I bought this book, hoping for dragons. Not neccessarily Pern, but something fantastic, like unicorns (as the title SUGGESTS) or goblins or even horses, like Ms. McCaffrey normally does. Something fun ^_^ Unfortunately, no such luck. While I highly admire Ms. McCaffrey's work, I will be blunt and say that perhaps it would be best if these short stories remained short stories. Forever. The main reason, however, that I gave the book three stars? For the only Pernese short story of the book, "The Littlest Dragon Boy", which I thought was the gem in the rough. It was sweet :)
Great Mix of Stories.......2001-06-11
I really enjoyed this book. I found a majority of the stories interesting and engrossing, and I have read it over and over again many times. One of the things I enjoy most about this book are the introductions before each new group of stories, explaining why McCaffrey wrote each story and what she was thinking while she did so. Some of my favorite stories included "Lady in the Tower," and "A Meeting of Minds," stories that are the original ideas for the books in the "Rowan" series. My absolute favorites in this collection were "Daughter" and "Dull Drums," stories about the Fenn family, especially the daughter Nora, who, although they live in the future, deal with family problems that are relevant today. I am a young reader which may be why I especially liked these stories, since they are about young people. Another one that I really enjoyed was "The Littlest Dragonboy," about how even though one may be smaller than the others, size doesn't matter- it's what's inside that counts. A frequently used sentiment, I know, but one that is illustrated very nicely in this story. However, I could have done without "A Proper Santa Claus," which had a really depressing, cut-off ending. But overall, I thought this was a really satisfying collection of stories that had samples from all of the different genres that Anne McCaffrey writes in, and I really recommend it.
Book Description
In Verity's world, nanotech plagues decimated the population after an initial renaissance of utopian nanotech cities. Growing up on an isolated farm, her happy life changes course when Blaze, the only young man in the community and Verity's best friend, is shot. With Blaze's body wrapped in a nanotech cocoon, Verity sets off on a quest to the Enlivened City of Cincinnati. It is a place of legend, where huge bio-engineered bees carry information through the streets and enormous nanotech flowers burst from the tops of strange buildings. It is the place where Blaze might be brought back from the brink of death. But Cincinnati is a city of dreams turned into nightmares, endlessly reliving the fantasies of its creator, a city that Verity must rule-or die. Queen City Jazz was a New York Times Notable Book of 1994.
Customer Reviews:
Super Reader.......2007-08-27
Bee an art lover.
One serious problem with this book, it reads like a padded chunk of a series, and apparently this is a series. It is very, very slow.
Runaway type technology has changed a lot of things, and the protagonist of the piece lives in a paranoid type of religious community trying to stay uninvolved.
Needless to say, she has to get out of there, and heads for Cincinnati for a painstakingly dragged out revelation or two. Cincinnati presumably is nicknamed the Queen City.
Not interesting enough to want to read several more books.
What the ???.......2006-12-20
The beginning was great, the new Quakers, the society they built, the alluded to technological improvements that man had somehow lost control of, the fear of reproduction, the inexplicably menacing Bees and the way those with the "plague" (some sort of human conversion through automated DNA manipulation) were driven to make the journey to New Orleans - it was just what a great sci-fi, post-apocalypse book should be like ...
Then Verity (main character) goes to Cincinnati or "the City" and everything becomes an incomprehensible mess. There is no suspense, no meaningful characters or plot and you cease caring about Verity completely (who gets totally lost in literally a hundred pages of random technologies and dream sequences narrated in meaningless techno-jargon babble). Goonan's occasional attempts to bring the story back to its roots are far too few and weak.
This is one of maybe 3 books in my entire life I was unable to finish - at about half way through it began to feel more like a chore than a pleasure to read. Too bad, cause I am always looking for good sci-fi by women or about women ... unfortunately this isn't it.
Very Confused.......2005-09-08
This story line was so confused, I doubt even the author knew what was really going on. I suspect that the plotline changed in the author's head several times during the writing process. By the end of the book I just no longer cared what happened to anyone in the story. I just wanted it to be over. My suggestion to the author - write an outline BEFORE you write the book.
Organic intelligence.......2004-04-19
Some things really do change. The ecology movement of the seventies expressed itself in commercials, school filmstrips and short science films that portrayed the killing effect of uncontrolled technology. Mountains scooped out by loud, diesel smoke-spewing machines; rivers covered in detergent foam and rotted fish; urban deserts of trash, rusting car chassis and bed springs; streets slimed with oil spots; beaches covered with tar and dead, blackened birds.
Much of this hell has been redeemed. Cities have cleaner air. Rivers and lakes have been saved from death. The Clark Fork River here in Missoula shows few signs of the car metal and trash that lined its banks only two decades ago. Nevertheless, the large-scale trend continues. American lakes and rivers may be recovering, and its cities' air more breathable, but worldwide the effects of uncontrolled technology are worse than ever. The deterioration of the ozone layer, and the accumulation of greenhouse gases goes on - global phenomena that national borders do not constrain.
Science fiction has functioned like the ecology movement, but instead of showing us what is, it shows us what might be if we continue on the way we are going. Reading "Queen City Jazz" by Kathleen Ann Goonan, ten years after its publication, I say to myself, "Well, things have changed, and this nightmare of nano-technology seems just that - a nightmare, an unreality that we have woken from, in part due to the book itself, and all efforts and communications like it that have steered us from the disasters depicted in their messages." The overarching tendency unfortunately remains. We don't hear much alarm regarding nano-technology currently, but genetic engineering and its "dreams" of cloning and tissue- and organ-production wiggle and waver on the edges of our sleeping, and stand front and center in our waking.
Kathleen Ann Goonan blends together experiences bequeathed to us by the ecology movement - a land much cleansed of the plagues of industrial technology - with the fevered dreams and unbalanced waking of a biologically and genetically based technological sickness.
The Ohio River and its tributaries with their earthen banks figure beautifully in the story. In the first chapter Goonan presents the land strong and good, and the central human character, Verity, the same.
-She trod water for a minute...feeling the cool, pure pull of the depths of the river, wondering what it would be like to dive deep and never come up, but flow along the bottom in long, powerful surges and never take air again, but breathe only lovely, cool green water.-
In the last chapter, the land and river live and abide:
-Looking west, Verity could see where the rivers wove back into one...Everything looked so hazy, so wonderful. The Territory, pristine and bright, lay ahead of them, beckoning.-
In this story, Verity brings the substance, the reality and life, spontaneity and plain obstinate earthiness, to a city diseased but not dying - a city caught in a torturous cycle that uses the natural seasons only as a trigger for its own numbingly predictable cycle of nano-technologically engineered processes. The city is Cincinnati, "enlivened" a few decades previous. "Enlivening" is a controlled process authorized and directed by city governments using the new technology of nano-engineering. This technology involves the "building" of materials and end products from "within", rather than from "without". Instead of taking natural resources and shaping and forming something by external processes and tools - shaping sand and rock into bricks and steel into buildings using blueprints, moulds, hammers, rulers - nano-technology involves manipulating cellular- and molecular-level processes that carry out new instructions for growth. We humans can plant a seed that grows into a building; regenerate limbs or grow new and different ones; and biologically transfer information.
At the start of the separate sections of the story, Goonan quotes Eric Drexler from his book "Engines of Creation," the primer and manifesto of nano-technology.
-The technology underlying cell repair systems will allow people to change their bodies in ways that range from the trivial to the amazing to the bizarre. Such changes have few obvious limits. Some people may shed human form as a caterpillar transforms itself to take to the air; others may bring plain humanity to a new perfection. Some people will simply cure their warts, ignore the new butterflies, and go fishing. -
If Drexler sees that nano-technology has "few obvious limits," though, Goonan gives us glasses to treat our pathological myopia. What she sees in our blind spot is fantastic, bizarre, hellish. One wonders how Drexler could be so blind as to equate possibility with limitlessness. The foresight that sees limits in every choice we make is a function of imagination, not intellect. Nature, according to any philosophy, is at some level an image, and imagination and nature are deeply akin. So in "Queen City Jazz," Goonan shows how the river and the light of the sun on the clouds, the cold of a winter snowstorm, the "lovely, cool green water" washes away the mud from our eyes, and we can see again.
Goonan's writing is superb, her story credible, if at times complicated and confusing. She gets into the minds of those who think that possibility is the same as freedom, who think that if we can do something, we should try doing it, instead of realizing that if thinking can take us as far as formulating the possibility, it should be required to take us beyond to formulating the consequences. If the land - the deep flowing rivers and the wind and trees - can hold out against human-induced plague, though, the land will have a much greater chance if humans make choices to constrain themselves. Goonan takes us through the winding recesses of both the land and the human intellect and imagination, showing us the beauty in it all, but also the malleability of both, for better or worse.
A Slog.......2002-06-13
This book [is bad]. Tedious, and nothing happens.
Product Description
This impressive first novel by an experienced story writer combines hallucinogenic visions, historical personae and an original futuristic dystopia. Young Verity has been raised by a reconstructionist Shaker group that bases its religion on the American cult that banned sex and believed in "simple" virtues. The adolescent has strange powers and mysterious compulsions that cause her to seek out and learn things from technologies that her adoptive community has forsaken. After tragedy strikes her "family," Verity packs up several precious burdens and repairs to the technologically superior but dangerously insane "enlivened" city of Cincinnati. There she meets the passionate jazz musician Sphere and becomes embroiled in mutating versions of a nanotech plague and overlapping views of the historical facts that led to the destruction of rational civilization. In Cincinnati she learns her true identity and how to affect the city's destiny. Highlights of the book include a scene in which Ernest Hemingway gets kicked off a baseball team because he's not a "team player" and a mini-lesson in the communication techniques of bees. Also a pleasure is watching the intelligent heroine grapple with responsibility, passion and artistic creation. While overly dense in detail, Goonan's work is powerful and richly textured.
Customer Reviews:
An excellent explanation of the Shorter Catechism.......1999-11-19
This is a very helpful explanation of the Westminster Shorter Catechism. The author uses a question and answer format as he carefully explains the catechism. I found it very helpful while teaching the Shorter Catechism to a junior high Sunday school class.
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- The Tale of Cupid and Psyche: An Illustrated History
- The Three-Arched Bridge
- The Virtual Kibbutz: Stories from a Changing Society
- The Watchful Gods And Other Stories (Western Literature Series)
- To Kill a Mockingbird
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