false 259255 1 0 462142 0618756434 9780618756438 38 http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1174960504m/462142.jpg http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1174960504s/462142.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/462142.The_Visible_World 3.54 123 259255 3.56 203 56 2007 950966 0375402160 9780375402166 3 http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1179746730m/950966.jpg http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1179746730s/950966.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/950966.God_s_Fool 4.19 21 God’s Fool is the ease and compassion with which he draws the story of one human being from this ghastly predicament. Looking beyond the twins’ physical connection, he imagines one man’s life of ordinary grace and suffering, longing and resistance, and the ties of love, as well as of blood, that bind and redeem us all.

By any standard, theirs is a history of epic variety and drama. Their birth, to an illiterate fishmonger, sent midwives screaming from the room. Condemned to death, they survived to be brought, at the age of thirteen, to the Royal Palace in Bangkok for an audience with King Rama III. At seventeen, laboring as merchants on the Meklong River, they saw their world erased by a typhoon. Consigned for three hundred pounds to an opium trader by their mother, who was desperate to ensure their survival, they sailed for Europe. There they entertained kings and counselors in salons and drawing rooms from Brussels to Rome, and, in Paris, met the woman who would divide them as no surgeon ever could.

When the culture that had lifted them up inevitably cast them down, they landed in the flophouses of London, where, penniless and starving, they were discovered by Phineas T. Barnum, who packed them off to America along with an assortment of bearded ladies and two-headed calves, albino beauties and dog boys, German midgets and twelve-fingered flute players. Leaving Barnum at the height of their fame to take a last stab at normal life, they settled in North Carolina, where, despite the tensions growing between them, they found, for a time, tranquillity as farmers and slave owners, marrying a pair of sisters and fathering, between them, twenty children. Their peace, however, would prove to be short-lived. As the Civil War drew closer, and their world began to tilt, they would first turn against each other and then, faced with a trial unlike any they
had ever known, draw together once more. No longer young, they set off to find the war, and to save what could be saved. It would be there, on that very real battlefield, that Chang would enact his final, terrifying battle with fate.

Sweeping and intimate, vibrant and austere, God’s Fool is a novel of soaring ambition and accomplishment from a fiercely gifted storyteller.]]> 259255 3.56 203 56 2002 950968 0375702083 9780375702082 2 http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1179746731m/950968.jpg http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1179746731s/950968.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/950968.Lost_Lake_Stories 3.69 13 It's an extraordinary image, and one that aptly sums up the project of this dazzling debut collection. Throughout Lost Lake, Slouka invests everyday events with an almost numinous glow. Catching fish; cleaning them; practicing knots; telling stories: these actions are windows opening onto unimaginable darkness--soldiers hanged along an avenue of cherry trees, decapitated snapping turtles crawling past their own heads, a dead baby wrapped in "the warm cave" of a coat. Ostensibly, these stories take place among a small Czech community settled on the shores of New York's Lost Lake, but they ripple outward to encompass the world. No exalted feat of nature, Lost Lake is a landscape both humble and utterly human, as we discover in "Creation," in which a dreamy farmer looks out over a cow pasture and pictures the fishing hole he will make. Nonetheless, it's still privy to the most elemental of dramas, from death ("Equinox") to adulterous love ("The Exile"). The short story is a miniaturist's art, and its success depends on a writer's ability to compress everything most essential about life--memory, guilt, sorrow, love, fishing--to fit within its brief pages. Slouka is a master. Reading Lost Lake elicits the same wonder as holding water up to a microscope for the first time: there it is, life, teeming, abundant, and true. --Mary Park

]]> 259255 3.56 203 56 1998 1031987 0465004865 9780465004867 1 http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1180372189m/1031987.jpg http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1180372189s/1031987.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1031987.War_of_the_Worlds_Cyberspace_and_the_High_Tech_Assault_on_Reality 3.20 5 Wired editor Kevin Kelly to Nazi propaganda filmmaker Leni Rienfenstahl. War of the Worlds is well worth reading, though, because it's important to critically review the critics, especially those who argue their point this well.]]> 259255 3.56 203 56 1995 6956906 0641609450 9780641609459 0 http://www.goodreads.com/images/nocover-111x148.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/images/nocover-60x80.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6956906-god-s-fool 0.0 0 259255 3.56 203 56 2002 1031999 3896672215 9783896672216 0 http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1180372210m/1031999.jpg http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1180372210s/1031999.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1031999.Die_Wiese_in_der_ich_schwimmen_lernte 0.0 0 259255 3.56 203 56 2005 1031993 3896672207 9783896672209 0 http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1180372207m/1031993.jpg http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1180372207s/1031993.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1031993.Eine_Laune_Gottes_ 0.0 0 259255 3.56 203 56 2003 950969 0465020828 9780465020829 0 http://www.goodreads.com/images/nocover-111x148.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/images/nocover-60x80.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/950969.Essentialism 0.0 0 259255 3.56 203 56 1999