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Beach Music (平装)
by Pat Conroy
| Category:
Fiction |
| Market price: ¥ 108.00
MSL price:
¥ 98.00
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| Stock:
Pre-order item, lead time 3-7 weeks upon payment [ COD term does not apply to pre-order items ] |
MSL rating:
 Good for Gifts |
MSL Pointer Review:
Beautiful writing, gripping characters, a book showing why Conroy has been regarded as America’s most beloved storyteller.
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AllReviews |
1 2   | Total 2 pages 12 items |
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Los Angeles Times Book Review (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-05 00:00>
Blockbuster writing at its best. |
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Houston Chronicle (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-05 00:00>
Reading Pat Conroy is like watching Michelangelo paint the Sistine Chapel. |
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The Washington Post Book World (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-05 00:00>
Astonishing… stunning… the range of passions and subjects that brings life to every page is almost endless. |
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Nancy Martin (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-05 00:00>
To read a book by Pat Conroy is to come to the realization that so much of everything else I read, and think is good, is truly just an appetizer getting me ready for the main course - which is what Conroy is. Every sentence you read lures you into the web of Conroy's storytelling. This is a book that will take you from the piazzas in Rome to the low country of South Carolina. You will fall so deeply in love with each setting that you couldn't possibly decide which place you would prefer to live.
Every character is a tortured soul who has a tale to tell - one more heartbreaking than the other. The main story follows Jack McCall, who flees to Rome with his young daughter Leah after his beloved wife Shyla has committed suicide. He leaves behind a bevy of colorful family and friends in an effort to escape his torment and begin a new life in a new land. As a travel writer by trade, Jack is able to pick up and live wherever he chooses. It is a telegram from a family member that will finally bring Jack back to South Carolina to face his demons and learn the stories of all those he loves.
Conroy has the ability of dropping crumbs along the way leading you to each character's hidden story. He touches on times in history involving the Holocaust and the Vietnam War - each decade so real that I don't even want to think about the horrors. But it is these horrors that have come to shape the characters whose cards have been dealt and whose hands must be played. They are all part of a finely interwoven story with South Carolina as the stage for the grand finale.
In reading the book, I can only wonder if the author can write the last twenty pages and not cry himself. I don't usually cry when reading a book but I must admit that this one did me in. Conroy so neatly ties up all the loose ends so that the reader feels no need for a sequel as they are confident that the lives of the characters they have come to love will go on.
While this is a book about tortured souls, it is also a book that holds great promise filled with love and hope and devotion and yes... redemption. We always talk about the books that will stay with us forever. This is one for me...music to my ears... Beach Music that is.
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An American reader (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-05 00:00>
When my teacher told our class that we would have to pick another book to read for an I.S.U, I groaned because most of the books we have to choose from are boring. I chose Beach Music because my friend had read it last year and I figured she could help me with it if I really needed help. Once I got past the first 50 pages I was hooked. I would read till 1 am some nights because I just couldn't put the book down. The author has weaved many character's stories into one main story. I laughed especially hard at the part when crazy John Hardin had the bridge held hostage at gunpoint and refused to give it up until his brothers jumped naked into the river. This book also contained haunting stories of 2 of the characters survival from the Holocaust. This part of the story was gruesome and scary, the most frightening part is that what happened to them in 1940's europe is not made up and actually occured to millions of people. I thouroughly enjoyed this book and it is the second best book I have had to read in highschool. Just in case you were wondering my favourite book was To Kill A Mockingbird. |
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An American reader (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-05 00:00>
This book was recommended to me by a friend, and upon seeing its 800 plus page mass market paperback edition, I thought I was in for some light, forgettable reading. As a frequent reader of heavy, "classic" literature, I was pleasantly surprised at how very wrong my initial insticts about Beach Music were.
This novel spans much of the twentieth century, including the Holocaust and the Vietnam protest movement, and handles a wide spectrum of difficult subject matter and vivid emotions with grace and staggering detail. I found myself so absorbed at times that I would literally forget where I was, so drawn was I into the rich imagery Conroy has created. I didn't want this book to end, have reread it four times and often take it along on long trips as a sort of literary security blanket.
This is a rare, beautiful novel, which deserves a place in the canon of great American literature.
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Mary Sibley (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-05 00:00>
To fans telling the story again and overwriting are cause to rejoice. The main character is a widower of one year. He has a young daughter and determines to move to Europe. Jack McCall has been blamed by his wife's family for her death. His sister-in-law seeks him out in Rome. Jack had been in love with his wife's mother when he was a boy. Jack survives in Europe by writing about beautiful cities and great places to eat.
Mike, Capers, Jordan, Ledare, and Jack were students in the same high school group. Mike Hess is doing better than anyone. He has appeared in People magazine. Capers Middleton is running for Governor of South Carolina. Jordan Elliott has joined the Benedictine Order. For all intents and purposes Jordan has vanished. There is a suspense build-up as the reader wonders what it is that Jordan has done to make him hide away in various monasteries.
Jack has four brothers - Tee, Dallas, Dupree and John Hardin. Their father used to be a man of substance. Unfortunately he was the town drunk, too. The father had loved Tolstoy but could not bring himself to love his own family. Jack returns to South Carolina upon learning that his mother is hospitalized. Mike sets up a meeting that includes Ledare and Capers in order to obtain the help of his classmates to create a miniseries. (Actually the author uses a delightful conceit here, that of having a group of high school friends gather together to produce a miniseries.) Capers begs Jack to support his political career. It turns out that Capers took child custody from Ledare through the use of private eyes and other machinations and even arranged to kill her favorite tree.
Jack thinks that if Italy survived the Huns it could survive a visit from his mother. Jack does make peace with his deceased wife's parents and his daughter Leah gets to know her grandparents during a visit to North Carolina after Jack's mother's visit to Rome which ended in a shoot-out at the airport. Jack's mother is a story teller. His father married the shape of a woman and had no particular clue to her nature. Jack's parents inherited a notable house from a woman with ties to South Carolina history who had been a friend of Jack's mother.
Leah, Jack's daughter, finds Waterford, South Carolina comfortable. She wonders why her father took them to Rome, (where he attempted to come to terms with his demons). Leah's maternal grandmother Ruth Fox had come to Waterford as an orphaned teenager. Jack's father had loved drink too much to provide his sons with a happy childhood but his friend Jordan had an even worse time with his Marine officer father. Once in boyhood though Capers, Jack, Jordan, and Mike were lost at sea. Jrodan's survival skills learned from his father ensured their safety. They landed at Cumberland Island, Georgia after fifteen days at sea. It seems that Jack's wife's father served on the Judenrat. In the camp he lived in his head and concentrated on music.
Mike restages their college years for the participants in a mock trial setting. After the shooting at Kent State Jack and his friends were arrested for attempting to destroy the South Carolina draft records. Capers, it is discovered, had been working for the state investigative body all along. They had received a suspended sentence from a generous-spirited judge. The writing is sensuous. The story is very very moving.
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Manola Sommerfeld (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-05 00:00>
This is obviously a novel that stirs passions, some positive, and some negative. One just has to go check out the comments, and see how few three-star scores this book has received, and how many fives and ones. I already know i am going to get lots of negative votes, not because my review is not helpful, but because lots of readers are going to disagree with me. As my Spanish grandpa used to say, "En el Libro de los Justos, Cada Cual Tiene su Gusto" ("In the Book of the Fair, Each One Has His Own Taste"). Well, here we go:
This book was a terrible waste of my time, for the following reasons:
1: There are way too many plots, connected to each other by feeble suspensions of disbelief. The end result looks like a 60's afghan, made with mismatched neon colors. I enjoy the straying away from the main road that many authors have mastered (John Irving comes to mind). At times, the most interesting, colorful, fascinating characters and situations are the secondary ones. In this case, none of that happens. Pat Conroy could have created at least 4 books from this one, rather than compressing all these story lines into an 800-page monstrosity.
2: The vast majority of the characters are, in my opinion, too melo- dramatic, way off line, and as a result, totally unbelievable. The most offensive of all is the schizophrenic brother. What a horrible disservice is Conroy doing to schizophrenics of this world and their families by portraying the disease the way he does. He ends up looking like an eccentric uncle. If Conroy had described other diseases in the book the same way he treats schizophrenia, the mother would have dealt with her cancer with Tylenol and plenty of napping.
3: More on characters: i have never read a book where everyone was so gorgeous. Maybe if the novel had taken place in Southern California....
4: Conroy's writing is incredibly uneven. There are times when his descriptions work, and he does a fine job explaining and elaborating on a story. Other times, his writing is a collection of regurgitated clich s. It looks like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde co-authoring a novel.
5: More on (un)willing suspensions of disbelief: killing yourself because parental grief is too much of a burden. The wife killed herself because she could not deal with HERSELF. She had problems no matter what had happened to her parents, no matter what her heritage was. Why make it look like she could not handle her parents' history? This was an artificial move on Conroy's part, which totally disgraces the novel (and happens too early on to forgive).
I understand that Pat Conroy has produced some other fine books, and certainly many people think Beach Music is terrific. I cannot recommend this book to anyone looking for a serious read. I hope my comments have been helpful, and i am sorry i cannot agree with Conroy's fans on this one. |
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Anita (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-05 00:00>
The book goes through many subplots that made me felt like I was reading a different book each time I came back to the original thread of the plot. Also, although the book would've been sufficient and a good read in its own right, it leads you through the sub-characters lives, giving the impression of a first-hand interview or an emotional documentary. If I hadn't read this book, I'm not sure stories of backwoods America, or the Jewish ghetto and holucaust would've ever have come onto my bookshelf. The only part I would ask to be changed is how Conroy handled the adult character of Mike. While all the others stayed true to their original personalities, Mike, the least likly to change in my opinion, took on the Hollywood cliche of an egotistical producer, possilbly just to have to means to get everyone together for the ultimate "climax" to make a movie. But that's it. It's a good read without all the profanity and such. |
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An American reader (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-05 00:00>
I've heard people have been tinkering with the idea of making a movie of this, starring Brad Pitt. I almost hope they don't try, as it would be very difficult to capture this story in even a three hour movie without blowing the balance of characters in this story somehow. The cutting of any character's story would probably ruin it.
This is one whopping good tale that somehow connects the Holocaust with South Carolina from the 50's to the 80's. It is the story of a group of friends, mostly four young men and two women, who grow up together, share the pain and/or abuse of their parents, drift irrevocably apart (or do they?), and come together to try and put the pieces of the whole story together.
It is not giving anything that is not on the dust jacket to say that one of the six committed suicide. One is a fugitive. One is in self-imposed exile. One is a politician trying to use the former assocations for political gain. And another just happens to be a movie producer who thinks the public would love to see on the screen what we are treated to in the book.
The story takes the reader back and forth in time for the six main characters. But almost as important are the parents of several of them. While The Big Six all have their problems and flaws, it is the story of some of these parents that really grabs you. I've mentioned the Holocaust, and it's no surprise that this breaks your heart, albeit in ways, believe it or not, other than the usual atrocities we hear about. But once you think the lowest depths of human behavior have been reached, the story of another of the parents appears, and you see that it was not the case.
It is these supporting stories that, in my eyes, make the story really great. For just about all of The Big Six are big achievers to some extent. We get several head cheerleaders, an aspiring governor, a famous writer, and a movie producer. I would have preferred if these people weren't all so important, and that's why I love the stories of the parents. For these were ordinary people who both did bad things, and had extremely bad things done to them, mostly not through their fault. This is a long book, but the story also zooms by as you can't wait to see what happens next. |
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1 2 | Total 2 pages 12 items |
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