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Hearts In Atlantis (Paperback)
by Stephen King
Category:
Horror fiction, Bestsellers, Original books |
Market price: ¥ 108.00
MSL price:
¥ 98.00
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Pre-order item, lead time 3-7 weeks upon payment [ COD term does not apply to pre-order items ] |
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Good for Gifts
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MSL Pointer Review:
King's another effort writing about loss of innocence, struggles of conscience, and the Vietnam War. |
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Author: Stephen King
Publisher: Pocket
Pub. in: August, 2000
ISBN: 0671024248
Pages: 688
Measurements: 6.7 x 4.1 x 1.5 inches
Origin of product: USA
Order code: BA00931
Other information: ISBN-13: 9780671024246
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- MSL Picks -
In his final novel of the 1990s, Stephen King has shut the door on his normal assortment of nightmares and created a series of stories that deals with another kind of horror. In Hearts in Atlantis, King writes about loss of innocence, struggles of conscience, and the Vietnam War. It's a collection of five stories about '60s kids.
The first story, Low Men in Yellow Coats, is traditional King. In fact, the story is something of a companion piece to King's popular Dark Tower series. Here the reader is introduced to three kids, Bobby Garfield, Carol Gerber, and John "Sully-John" Sullivan. Although it doesn't deal directly with the Vietnam War, it helps set the backdrop for the stories that follow. In the summer of 1960, eleven year-old Bobby takes first steps out of childhood innocence. He begins to see the evil of which men are truly capable, a parallel to the book Lord of the Flies, given to him by his new neighbor Ted Brautigan. But the old man has another kind of evil chasing him. The "low men" are tracking Ted and want him to return to their world, a place where "All things serve the Crimson King."
Hearts in Atlantis, the second story, changes to a first-person narrative. Pete Riley, a freshman at the University of Maine, and his friends become obsessed with the card game Hearts. Many jeopardize their grades and thus their scholarships as a result, but the real threat is greater than flunking out. In 1966, leaving school means drafted to Vietnam. The story, although told from Pete's point of view, is also about Carol Gerber. She left Connecticut behind her, but has found a new life in protesting the war.
The third story, Blind Willie, deals with Willie Shearman, a minor character in Low Men in Yellow Coats. Now a veteran of the Vietnam War, Willie is doing penance for his misdeeds, those from his childhood and the war. Sully-John attends the funeral of an old army buddy in "Why We're in Vietnam," set in 1999. In reuniting with his lieutenant, they discuss the war and the affects it had on the men who fought there.
It is in this story that the most frightening, most vivid account of the war is relayed. If the other stories were preamble, this is the final climax where the whole book comes together. For Sully-John, haunted by the image of a dead Vietnamese woman, everything after the war has been about trying to "get over." Get over the physical pain, get over the trauma, get over the war.
The fourth story is about Sully. This might be the most consistent of the five stories. It is by far the saddest. It tells the story of Sully, Bobby's childhood friend, who has had devastating after the war scars, due to his time spent in Vietnam. One in particular is an old, dead Vietnamese woman that he saw one of his fellow soldiers savagely murder during the war. Sully sees her everywhere. Of course he is hallucinating, but the hallucinations feel very real. Sully also hallucinates about the world crumbling around him. At times he can be normal, but most of the time the war has left him scarred beyond repair.
The fifth and final story is not really a story but rather a bridge that connects the beginning tale and gives us a feeling of closure. Bobby, now a carpenter, married with three children, returns home to attend the funeral of one of his friends. He hopes to see the girlfriend Carol, who is believed dead, but might still be living. Bobby also tried to make some sense about why he is drawn back home after all this time.
Atlantis becomes a metaphor for America, literally sinking beneath the feet of its people. The dreams and ideals of the 1940s and '50s become lost in the '60s, as the Vietnam War divides the country. Later, the hippies trade in the ideals of the '60s for junk bonds and cocaine. Now, that generation has nothing to show for it. "What have we done since Nam?" one character questions. We've created video games, trash television, and porn on the Internet. All we like to do is watch. "But there was a time... when it was really all in our hands."
And there are moments in these stories when that is literally true. The image of one person physically carrying another is often repeated, showing heroism of the individual under extraordinary circumstances. Bobby Garfield carries Carol up the street when she is injured. Pete and his classmates carry a crippled student out of the icy rain when he falls. Of course, the quintessential moment of heroism comes during the war when Willie carries Sully-John to a waiting chopper in Dong Ha Province.
In " Hearts in Atlantis" Stephen King is taking us to the heart of some of the problems of to days American life, drugs, school shootings, street Gang fights, drive away shootings. These are nothing but killing a sow.
Target readers:
General readers
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Stephen Edwin King was born in Portland, Maine in 1947. After his parents separated when Stephen was a toddler, he and his older brother, David, were raised by his mother. Parts of his childhood were spent in Fort Wayne, Indiana, where his father's family was at the time, and in Stratford, Connecticut. When Stephen was eleven, his mother brought her children back to Durham, Maine, for good. Her parents, Guy and Nellie Pillsbury, had become incapacitated with old age, and Ruth King was persuaded by her sisters to take over the physical care of the elderly couple. Other family members provided a small house in Durham and financial support. After Stephen's grandparents passed away, Mrs. King found work in the kitchens of Pineland, a nearby residential facility for the mentally challenged.
Stephen attended the grammar school in Durham and then Lisbon Falls High School, graduating in 1966. From his sophomore year at the University of Maine at Orono, he wrote a weekly column for the school newspaper, The Maine Campus. He was also active in student politics, serving as a member of the Student Senate. He came to support the anti-war movement on the Orono campus, arriving at his stance from a conservative view that the war in Vietnam was unconstitutional. He graduated from the University of Maine at Orono in 1970, with a B.A. in English and qualified to teach on the high school level. A draft board examination immediately post-graduation found him 4-F on grounds of high blood pressure, limited vision, flat feet, and punctured eardrums.
Stephen made his first professional short story sale ("The Glass Floor") to Startling Mystery Stories in 1967. Throughout the early years of his marriage, he continued to sell stories to men's magazines. Many of these were later gathered into the Night Shift collection or appeared in other anthologies.
In the fall of 1971, Stephen began teaching high school English classes at Hampden Academy, the public high school in Hampden, Maine. Writing in the evenings and on the weekends, he continued to produce short stories and to work on novels.
In the spring of 1973, Doubleday & Co. accepted the novel Carrie for publication. On Mother's Day of that year, Stephen learned from his new editor at Doubleday, Bill Thompson, that a major paperback sale would provide him with the means to leave teaching and write full-time.
At the end of the summer of 1973, the Kings moved their growing family to southern Maine because of Stephen's mother's failing health. Renting a summer home on Sebago Lake in North Windham for the winter, Stephen wrote his next-published novel, originally titled Second Coming and then Jerusalem's Lot, before it became 'Salem's Lot, in a small room in the garage. During this period, Stephen's mother died of cancer, at the age of 59.
Carrie was published in the spring of 1974. That same fall, the Kings left Maine for Boulder, Colorado. They lived there for a little less than a year, during which Stephen wrote The Shining, set in Colorado. Returning to Maine in the summer of 1975, the Kings purchased a home in the Lakes Region of western Maine. At that house, Stephen finished writing The Stand, much of which also is set in Boulder. The Dead Zone was also written in Bridgton.
In 1977, the Kings spent three months of a projected year- long stay in England, cut the sojourn short and returned home in mid-December, purchasing a new home in Center Lovell, Maine. After living there one summer, the Kings moved north to Orrington, near Bangor, so that Stephen could teach creative writing at the University of Maine at Orono. The Kings returned to Center Lovell in the spring of 1979. In 1980, the Kings purchased a second home in Bangor, retaining the Center Lovell house as a summer home.
Because their children have become adults, Stephen and Tabitha now spend winters in Florida and the remainder of the year at their Bangor and Center Lovell homes.
He has put some of his college dramatic society experience to use doing cameos in several of the film adaptations of his works as well as a bit part in a George Romero picture, Knightriders. Joe Hill King also appeared in Creepshow, which was released in 1982. Stephen made his directorial debut, as well as writing the screenplay, for the movie Maximum Overdrive (an adaptation of his short story "Trucks") in 1985.
Stephen is the 2003 recipient of The National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters.
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Stephen King, whose first novel, Carrie, was published in 1974, the year before the last U.S. troops withdrew from Vietnam, is the first hugely popular writer of the TV generation. Images from that war - and the protests against it - had flooded America's living rooms for a decade. Hearts in Atlantis, King's newest fiction, is composed of five interconnected, sequential narratives, set in the years from 1960 to 1999. Each story is deeply rooted in the sixties, and each is haunted by the Vietnam War.
In Part One, Low Men in Yellow Coats, eleven-year-old Bobby Garfield discovers a world of predatory malice in his own neighborhood. He also discovers that adults are sometimes not rescuers but at the heart of the terror.
In the title story, a bunch of college kids get hooked on a card game, discover the possibility of protest... and confront their own collective heart of darkness, where laughter may be no more than the thinly disguised cry of the beast.
In Blind Willie and Why We're in Vietnam, two men who grew up with Bobby in suburban Connecticut try to fill the emptiness of the post-Vietnam era in an America which sometimes seems as hollow - and as haunted - as their own lives.
And in Heavenly Shades of Night Are Falling, this remarkable book's denouement, Bobby returns to his hometown where one final secret, the hope of redemption, and his heart's desire may await him.
Full of danger, full of suspense, most of all full of heart, Stephen King's new book will take some readers to a place they have never been... and others to a place they have never been able to completely leave.
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View all 15 comments |
Maritza Volmar (MSL quote), Distrito Nacional Dominican Republic
<2007-02-02 00:00>
With a novel as rich, delightful, and fascinating-in one word unputdownable-as this, no matter how hard you try to write a thorough review about it, it's very likely that you will leave something out.
The story begins while the main characters, Bobby Garfield, Carol Gerber and John Sullivan, childhood friends growing up together in a small American town, are eagerly expecting the coming summer vacations, unaware that before the summer is over their lives are going to be changed forever. Spanning four decades, the novel shows us how, though the eyes of a wide group of characters, directly and indirectly related to Bobby, Carol and John (Sully) and through their own eyes, their lives unfold.
Stephen King's narrative all through the book is at his best. He incorporates supernatural elements using his mastery of the craft and creates characters so humanly natural that they feel to the reader like old college friends. The experiences of the main characers are so well balanced between the quotidian and the extraordiary, that I almost felt this was a true story about real people. The supporting characters are so interesting that one cannot help wanting to meet them face to face and know more about how their lives unfold. The places are so richly and vividly described, and the time periods so pictorially represented through fashions, ideologies, settings, and even music, that you actually feel the richness and evolution of American culture as you read, even if you didn't live through those times.
Of everything this novel has to offer, what I liked the most, without a doubt, is its spectacular, believable, satisfying and sweet ending.
This novel is charming, entertaining, surprising and fun, for both fans and non-fans of Stephen King, and for everyone who enjoys the twists and turns of life and the hidden connections between the lives of strangers. A must read. --Reviewed by Maritza Volmar
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A reader (MSL quote), USA
<2007-02-02 00:00>
I really enjoyed this book especially Low Men in Yellow Coats Which has something to do with the Dark Tower and Blind Willie a story of a Vietnam vet who walks around acting like he's blind to get money. The only story I wouldn't give 5 stars to is the title story Hearts in Atlantis which i thought was kind of boring. Why We're in Vietnam is a good story about Bobby's friend John who is haunted by a woman killed in Vietnam. The last story Heavenly Shades of Night Are Falling was a good story were we find out what happens to Bobby and Carol when they attend John's funeral. In this story King has put believable characters in an unbelievable situation. Great book.
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Eoghain O'Keeffe (MSL quote), Ireland
<2007-02-02 00:00>
Whenever I recommend this book to somebody and they ask me what it's like, I always reply, 'Remember how you felt when you read 'Catcher in the Rye'?' I have only encountered a few books in my life that filled me with so much intense emotion. (A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving is the only other example I can think of right now). King's evocation of childhood friendship and long-ago summers and innocence lost is so rich and deep and real that when I finished this book the only thing I wanted to do was go back to the start and read it all through again. I have read all of Kings books and I think he has succeeded on this level a number of other times... It, The Body, Apt Pupil, etc... but never to this extent. This book is epic in depth and scope and range of characters yet he never loses track of those bittersweet moments that make your spine tingle and push you to the brink of tears. While the first story is undoubtably the best, I don't agree with other reviewers who consider the rest of the book to be 'mediocre'. It's true that older characters can't bring about the same emotions as the eleven year old characters, but they are fascinating nonetheless. This is not only one of my favourite Stephen King books, it's one of my favourite books of all time.
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Richard Kessler (MSL quote), France
<2007-02-02 00:00>
Hearts in Atlantis epitomizes for me that comfortable King writing style that I have loved for years. For King fans like myself, Hearts shows the author's ability of tying together three new stories using reappearing characters and plot lines, and intertwining the story line of another King series - The Dark Tower. The creativity and language - as always - made me feel like I was with an old friend.
Once I started reading Hearts in Atlantis, my usual King problem began. That is, how can I stop everything else in my life so that I don't have to put down the book!
For those of you who love Stephen King, this book can only reinforce your hope that Mr. King's health (physical & mental) return to the before-car-accident state.
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