Amazon.com
"The Terrain is used as a dump. Smashed lorries. Old boilers. Broken washing machines. Rotary lawn mowers. Refrigerators which don't make cold any more. Wash basins which are cracked. There are also bushes and small trees and tough flowers like pheasant's-eye and viper's-grass."
In John Berger's powerful novel King, the Terrain is also home to a small community of the dispossessed. Here, a stone's throw from a highway somewhere in France, in shelters constructed out of detritus, live Jack and Marcello, old Corinna and Liberto, Joachim and Anna, and Danny and Saul. Here also live Vica and Vico, an elderly couple (and couples are a rarity among the homeless) and their dog, King. It is King who narrates this day-in-the-life narrative, and Berger has endowed him with the ability to understand and be understood: "Lying beside the chestnut brazier, something came to me between the ears: the world is so bad, God has to exist. I asked Vico what he thought. 'Most people,' he said quickly, 'would draw the opposite conclusion.'"
What makes King such a singular creation is that despite his philosophical bent and communicative skills, there is nothing anthropomorphic about him. He thinks, behaves, and reacts like a dog, albeit a dog who ponders the existence of the Almighty. Animals are not sentimental, and neither is Berger. His human characters are irrevocably damaged, their lives verge on the unbearable, and their attempts to create family and community at the edges of society are eventually thwarted. There can be no happy ending to this street story, but Berger is after something bigger than making his readers feel good. Instead he shines a spotlight on a world we would prefer to ignore, using the love that Vica, Vico, and King feel for each other to illuminate a humanity that is all too often overlooked. King is not an easy book to read, but it is impossible to forget. --Alix Wilber
Book Description
With the poetic acuity that renders his work timeless, Booker Prize-winning author John Berger brings us a 24-hour chronicle of homelessness. Beside a highway, in a wasteland furnished with smashed trucks and broken washing machines, lives a vagrant community of once-hopeful individuals, now abandoned by the twentieth century.
King, our narrator, is the guardian of a homeless couple, stealing meat from the butcher and sharing the warmth of his flesh. His canine sensibility affords him both amnesty from human hardship and rare insight into his companions' lives. Through his senses we see--clearly and unsentimentally--the dignity and strength that can survive within chaos and pain.
Customer Reviews:
A urban tragedy.......2001-07-23
KING, by John Berger is a poetic novel written entirely in stacato. It is a urban tragedy that takes place in an imaginary city (Barcelona, Paris, Glasgow, London or the city where I live in Lisbon) somehow like the city of Troy in another one of Berger's novel. It tells the story of one day in the life of a group of homeless carachters, with lots of even more poetic flash backs. All this is told to us, like an ancient greek narrator, that participates, observes and tells the story, by a dog or someone that believes he is a dog because everyone there has to find a way in the middle of the wreck and this is King's way to stand this living hell that is called poverty, a kind of a plague that nowadays is getting to even more people in the world. Nothing happens in the whole novel at least till the last chater, where the tragedy reveals itself... there's a mist of a tragedy in this whole novel that never really takes form of a terrific drama. There is a dense but soft and slow (like the plague that is taking control all over the place) tension.
Why does Berger, that in his last books criticized with such a distant look the urban and capitalist way of life, take this "dog" and lets him sign a book about a couple of homeless that live the rest of their lifes in a city, a "desert of souls"? It may seem like he is living in a city like this for a lot of years and full of watching his life being drained he decided just to release a book that has a critic point of view about it. But if you know Berger's work you will know that this is his most isolated, exhilated, distant and critic book about capitalism, the deception of the urban dream and the globalisation. In fact, Berger has a strong influence of lots of other authors like Giambattista Vico (the name of the main carachter is Vico, the name of the great italian philosopher that, like a prophet, said that every civilisation had to pass through four stages and the last one - il ricorso - is in fact the one we are living in, the AGE OF DOGS), Marx, Pascal and Beckett (a strong influence in most of his works and specially in this one we can find some great similarities).
Resuming, KING is a book to read when a person is feeling good. Like Berger (or King) says: "To read a man needs to love himself, not much but a little."
King is a pearl and like Goethe said: "A well trained dog is worth the respect of the most wise man" and Mr. Berger has trained him well.
I recomend it.
PEDRO ALVEs
A Person Could Not.......2001-02-09
Mr. Berger uses man's best friend to describe the human existence of the homeless. The 24 hours of experiences the canine "King" relates, had to be told by an animal other than a human, it could not otherwise work. Man as an animal shares many commonalities with the rest of the animal kingdom. As time passes skills we thought unique to ourselves are becoming fewer, I would offer speech as an example. One only has to read of the care that Elephants treat their dead and dying, the ways they revisit their dead to understand that compassion too is something we have yet to master.
We can claim something that is unique to our group. We kill our own, we torture our own, we systematically exterminate and ethnically cleanse our own. And as King relates to us we lack the compassion for those we would prefer to ignore rather than to help. There is a moment when the act of dousing a sleeping man with gasoline and lighting him afire is described as the death of a heretic. King muses the heretic's crime, could it be he is poor?
This book can be easily dismissed as being nothing new and that perhaps is the point. We have become a group that is nearly impossible to shock, the youngest of our group now kill aimlessly, and older members kill the youngest with no more concern than swatting a insect. Those with power persecute the weak; it has become all but a sport.
Mr. Berger's book is important because it shows behavior that should be contemptible, but has become so common, so cliché, it is rarely even contemplated. He needed to use a dog to bring attention to a human problem because a person is not qualified to comment on how we behave.
An important book by a talented man who has lived a long life, and clearly is less than impressed with what he has seen.
This is a beautiful book.......2000-01-04
Prose that is poetry. A must for any fan of John Berger. And for readers that don't know his work it should be a revelation. An extraordinary, moving, and passionately empathetic book.
King is the word.......1999-11-27
King was published in the UK without John Berger's name on the cover. You only found it on the copyright page and on the endpaper at the back. This is a typically self-effacing move by a writer who is far more interested in telling stories than promoting himself. King takes us further into the zones of the dispossessed than Berger has gone before, even in his stunning trilogy Into Their Labours. A bunch of people live on a patch of urban wasteland; the narrator, King, is a dog who talks, or possibly a man who behaves like (maybe even appears as, maybe even is) a dog. They scrounge what little money and comfort they can get, always keeping an eye out for the authorities. Berger has never ceased to write about the people most writers neither know nor care about; his voice (or rather voices), his authority and his compassion are unique. And it's maybe the best book ever written with a dog as narrator, too.
Another Wonder from Berger.......1999-06-02
John Berger has always been on the cutting edge of language and ideas. He is a sort of exile from all the terminal hipness of literature. He is brave and provocative and he continually questions the order of things. He writes from a deep inner need, in order to say things all over again, as if they have never been told before. This novel, King, is a marvellous movement on from his novel "To the Wedding." It reads as a contemporary myth but I never once doubt the authenticity of voice -- which is strange, since the book is ostensibly narrated by a dog. Berger is in top form. Read this fiercely important book.
Book Description
Is King Solomon really the wisest man in the world? The mighty Queen of Sheba visits the great King to share--and test--his legendary wisdom. Solomon's answers to Sheba's most challenging riddles prove that, to the wise, even small creatures can be great teachers. Inspired by a story from the Old Testament, this dramatic, splendidly illustrated tale is perfect for reading together.
Average customer rating:
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King: A Street Story.
John. Berger
Manufacturer: Pantheon
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
 Contemporary
| General
| Literature & Fiction
| Subjects
| Books
ASIN: 0747542864 |
Book Description
DESCRIPTION: This sequel to the award-winning Dark Matter an-thology features another extraordinary collection of speculative fiction by black writers. Like its groundbreaking predecessor, DARK MATTER: Reading the Bones introduces black speculative fiction writers to readers who may not have realized the depth and breadth of these works. This anthology includes original short fiction and previously published works from Charles Johnson, the National Book Award-winning author of Middle Passage; Tananarive Due; Walter Mosley; W. E. B. Du Bois; Samuel R. Delany; Nalo Hopkinson; Wanda Coleman; and many more. Containing approximately 30 stories, ranging from the early part of the 20th century through the most cutting-edge work of today, this is a powerful collection that will appeal to the culturally diverse audience of science fiction readers.
Download Description
In the tradition of The Norton Anthology of Black Literature, DARK MATTER: READING THE BONES, like its ground-breaking predecessor, will introduce black SF, fantasy, and speculative fiction writers to those who have not yet realized the depth and breadth of their work—or even, in some cases, that it exists. Including original short fiction and nonfiction as well as previously published works and essays, DARK MATTER will contain approximately 30 stories from the early part of the century through the most cutting-edge work of today. Contributors to this new volume include Charles Johnson, National Book Award-winning author of Middle Passage; Tananarive Due; Walter Mosley, W.E.B. Du Bois; Samuel R. Delany; Nalo Hopkinson; and many more.
Customer Reviews:
Another good anthology.......2005-07-17
Just like the first anthology, this book introduces one to Black authors who you might not have known before and also you might read new stories from authors you do know.
Caution for the ebook edition.......2004-12-20
Here I am, a computer analyst and it took me two days to "get" my copy of this book! The documentation should mention that you must have the latest version of Adobe Reader for your desktop, even if you plan to transfer the book to your Palm. I run Win98 at home, so I can't download the latest version of Adobe desktop there. I can run the latest version of the Palm version, but you can't transfer the book to the Palm without the desktop version. I ended up having to download the book at work; and I don't like putting personal files on my work machine. As yet, I haven't discovered if I will be able to move the downloaded pdf file to my home machine. The documentation makes it sound like I can only use it on 1 machine.
Better than the first Dark Matters book!.......2004-11-30
I am a big fan of the first Dark Matter anthology and was anxious to see how this volume would compare. Much to my surprise I found this second installment more enjoyable than the first.
Anthologies are ususally pretty hit-or-miss but I found myself enjoying many of the stories included here. My favorites being Nalo Hopkinson's "The Glass Bottle Trick," Kiini Ibura Salaam's "Desire," Nnedi Okorafor-Mbachu's comical "The Magical Negro," Tanarive Due's werewolf tale "Aftermoon," Wanda Coleman's "Buying Primo Time," and Douglas Kearney's hilarious "Anansi Meets Peter Parker at Taco Bell."
There were a few dogs in the bunch, the three stories that appear last in the anthology: "Maggies," "Mindscape," and "Trance" varied from too dull to too convoluted causing the collection to lose steam towards the end.
I skipped the three essays included at the end of this anthology. Perhaps it would have been more fitting to include them at the beginning along with the editor's introduction. Tacking it onto the end seemed pretty anti-climatic after reading all these intriguing stories.
Speculative fiction..........2004-01-17
Sheree R. Thomas' first compilation, Dark Matter: A Century of Speculative Fiction From the African American Diaspora, received critical acclaim for its quality and historical value. Her second collection is due similar accolades.
DARK MATTER: READING THE BONES is speculative fiction from multiple vantage points. With contributors ranging from W.E.B. DuBois to Charles Johnson to Nalo Hopkinson, this collection brings forth an opportunity for many different stories to be told and many voices to be heard. DARK MATTER: READING THE BONES is a mystical journey that is somewhat sequential in its presentation; the stories of the Middle Passage are placed at the beginning, and the tales of future worlds are placed near the end. The result is a time travel experience sort of like that depicted in the final story, "Trance" by Kalamu ya Salaam, where the reader only has to flip back a few pages to recount history or flip forward to get a glimpse of the future.
There honestly was not one story in the entire compilation that I could say I disliked, but there are some favorites that I feel I must mention by name. Pam Noles' "The Whipping Boy" was heartwrenching. Walter Mosley's "Whispers in the Dark" was thoughtful and amazing. John Cooley's "The Binary" was adventurous and exciting. Charles R. Saunders' "Yahimba's Choice" was heartbreaking and poignant. I could go on and on. This is a book I would suggest every science fiction, fantasy, or horror lover read as soon as they can.
Reviewed by CandaceK
of The RAWSISTAZ Reviewers
Some very thrilling prose.......2004-01-13
Ok...so some of the essays lean to the lame side; but the fiction is generally taut and riveting. General readers will find some interesting new world views while African-American readers will find many familiar themes. Among the best:
Pam Noles' "Whipping boy"
Dubois' "Jesus Christ in Texas"
Walter Moseley's "Whispers in the Dark"
Tananarive Due's "Afternoon" and
Samuel R. Delaney's "Corona"
Book Description
Nikolai Sholokhov has arrived in Moscow for what is euphemistically called "Privilege," after spending eighteen months on the Moon calibrating an array for the Star Whisper Project - an ultra-secret program that has detected radio signals around a distant star in the constellation Hercules. Earth's population has been decimated by a gender-sensitive virus that raged across the globe over a century ago: Fevreblau. Sheltered by the State, women who survived the Blue Fever are considered Exotics, used to prevent populations from dissolving in a shattered world. Before his scheduled appointment, Nikolai meets an adroit thief, Yuri Tur, who in turn introduces him to Moscow's premier underground leader, Mintz. Mintz is interested in the signals detected by the radio-telescope. Nikolai also befriends a frightened young woman, Galina Toumanova, fleeing one of the larger Union Houses during a citywide riot. Together, they make a daring escape south to Star City (Baikonur Cosmodrome) and into the Archipelago - orbiting habitats in cislunar space. Once there, Nikolai discovers he alone is at the epicenter of a sweeping revolution that will not only change the basic social dynamics of Humanity, but the culture of an entire world.
Kenneth Mark Hoover was born in New Iberia, Louisiana, in 1959. He currently lives in Mississippi with his wife and three children.
Customer Reviews:
Great Book!.......2006-03-12
Fevreblau is a great book! I thoroughly enjoyed reading it. Once I began I had to keep reading to the excellent ending. The story is fascinating and puts a very unique spin on the future. The characterization is first rate and you really love the main character, Nikolai.
Sci-fi fans will enjoy this book very much. It's a quick read and the payoff is great. I can't wait for more books by Kenneth Mark Hoover. Bravo!
exciting futuristic thriller .......2005-12-31
The earth of the future is a dark and bleak place; mankind is almost extinct thanks to Feverblau, a virus that killed women. Only a small percentage of females survived and they are regarded as valuable possessions put in Union Houses where men pay for the privilege of having sex with them. They don't bear children because their uteruses are taken from them to mix with sperm in an artificial environment to protect males that will eventually fight in the continual wars that plague the planet.
Nikolai Sholokhov is on two week leave from Luna and the top secret Star Whisper project that he has been working on for eighteen months. He is looking forward to his first "privilege" at the Union House but before that happens he meets the top Mafioso who is interested in the alien signals picked up by the radio telescope on Luna. After that encounter, he is asked by a person out after curfew if Nikolai will share his quarters with her. Nikolai agrees to this to only find out that the young man is really a woman Galina who is being transported to a Union House. She escapes during a city riot and both know if Nikolai is caught with her, he will be killed. Yuri Tur who befriended Nikolai has connections powerful enough to get them out of Moscow and Nikolai wants to try to escape to one of the habitats orbiting earth with Galina because they love one another in a world where such a thing is forbidden.
Most of the action takes place in Moscow as an innocent Nikolai gets involved with the Russian underground, the resistance movement and the totalitarian government that wants to see him dead. He loses his innocence very fast but his love for Galina gives him strength of purpose that makes him a very appealing hero. There is a lot of action and political intrigue in the exciting futuristic thriller and the characters who populate this book make the storyline realistic and believable.
Harriet Klausner
Customer Reviews:
Matthew's Gospel, The Catholic Biblical Quarterly 1987.......2003-03-28
'The Plot of Matthew's Gospel," The Catholic Biblical Quarterly, Vol. 49, No. 2/April 1987, pp. 233-253.
In this article Matera, a Professor of New Testament at the Catholic University, shows that the Gospel of Matthew has a plot. His arguments for this conclusion are 1) a plot consists of events placed in a timely and orderly fashion, 2) the events in Jesus' life are placed in a timely and orderly way in Matthew. By the term 'plot' Matera means "the arrangement of incidents." (p. 235). Having defined 'plot', Matera is ready to uncover the arrangement of events in the gospel of Matthew. First he makes a distinction concerning two kinds of arrangements. Second he identifies the kernels in Jesus' life. Third he applies both kinds of arrangements to Matthew. As a result, this scholarly study of a plot in Matthew is expertly investigated and convincing. Matera writes that the plot according to time shows that it is possible that Israel will reject Jesus as the Messiah. By the middle (11:2-16:12), it is probable that Israel will reject Jesus as the Messiah. By the end, it becomes necessary that Israel rejects Jesus as the Messiah (21:1-28:15) (p. 239).
Book Description
The first volume in a series on interpreting genres of New Testament literature. McKnight critiques methods and suggests how students with some knowledge of Greek can benefit from different analyses.
Books:
- Knight's Gambit
- L'\Education Sentimentale
- La hija del embajador
- La Tour Dreams of the Wolf Girl: A Novel
- Landor's Tower: Or Imaginary Conversations
- Leaving Paradise: My Expat Adventures and Other Stories
- Leon El Africano / Leon the African (2013)
- Lost Lake: Stories
- Meditations from a Movable Chair
- Melal: A Novel of the Pacific
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