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  <title><![CDATA[On the Occasion of My Last Afternoon: A Novel (P.S.)]]></title>
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  <description><![CDATA[Polly Holliday of TV's <em>Home Improvement</em> won a Tony nomination on Broadway playing Big Mama in <em>Cat on a Hot Tin Roof</em>, and she makes Clarice, the matriarch of Kaye Gibbons' Civil War story <em>On the Occasion of My Last Afternoon</em>, sound very big of voice indeed. Clarice is the slave who really runs things on Virginia's Seven Oaks plantation, no matter what her nasty, brutish owner, Samuel P. Tate, might think. Holliday has a good time voicing Tate's fulminations, too, neatly distinguishing them from the heroine-narrator Emma Tate's rather daintier dulcet tones. Not that Emma can't be wicked in her own way: she describes a snobbish socialite, &quot;aggressively plain in the face ... who effused through the front door and into the arms of everyone simultaneously.&quot; Ms. Holliday puts as much sly violence into that &quot;effused&quot; as she does into Mr. Tate's rages.<p> Everyone who read Charles Frazier's Cold Mountain should consider reading <em>On the Occasion of My Last Afternoon</em>, the poetically charged fictional reminiscences of Emma Garnet Tate Lowell, circa 1842-1900. For one thing, it was Frazier's already-published friend Gibbons who, with Frazier's wife's connivance, pried <em>Cold Mountain</em> from his grip and got it into publishers' hands. <p> But beyond their Civil War setting--a first for Gibbons, who's noted for 20th-century tales--the two books share resonant Southern literary accents, characters with similarly obstinate responses to enormous grief, and a shivery sense of history's stark shadow falling across everyday events. Oprah Winfrey twice recommended Gibbons' fiction (Ellen Foster and A Virtuous Woman), and Walker Percy compared her to Faulkner. Oprah probably liked Gibbons's heroines for their plucky refusal to buckle under oppression--a trait shared by Gibbons herself, who triumphed over the manic-depressive illness that drove her mother to suicide.<p> Our heroine, Emma, shivers under the tyranny of her plantation daddy, Mr. Tate, who slits the throat of a slave who talks back to him and just might do the same to his half-dozen children. There is no enormity of which he is incapable, this bellowing Simon Legree with an autodidact's education and a self-made man's bottomless urge to rise above his raising. He is, as he might have thunderingly put it, &quot;a pluperfect son of Satan.&quot; Only Clarice can fight Samuel Tate to a verbal draw and prevent slave uprisings on the eve of the war. Clarice helps save Emma, as does Emma's impeccable swain Dr. Quincy Lowell, who sweeps in like a cool Boston breeze to dispel the dismal tidewater miasma.<p> The war, alas, brings a tsunami of blood, forcing Dr. Lowell to make Emma a de facto battlefield surgeon, an occasion he recognizes by fashioning a bit of commemorative jewelry for her from a dead man's silver filling and inscribing the date with a finger-amputation tool. One aspect of Gibbons' Frazier-esque orgy of historical research for the book is an authentic feel for the grotesqueries of the period. <p> One craves for Emma's hubby and daddy to swap five percent of each others' respectively perfect and perfectly awful souls--the book is not big on startling character revelations. What makes it work, despite its binary morality, is the grace and rumbling life of the narrator's language. The book, which has its sometimes anachronistically enlightened head in the New South and its feet firmly planted in the past, deserves a place next to Russell Banks' John Brown novel Cloudsplitter. At points, it reads like a smarter, nonracist Gone with the Wind, only less windy.<em>--Tim Appelo</em></p></p></p></p></p>]]></description>
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  <title>
    <![CDATA[On the Occasion of My Last Afternoon]]>
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    <![CDATA[Everyone who read Charles Frazier's <em>Cold Mountain</em> should consider reading Kaye Gibbons's <em>On the Occasion of My Last Afternoon</em>, the poetically charged fictional reminiscences of Emma Garnet Tate Lowell, child of Virginia's Seven Oaks plantation, from 1842-1900. For one thing, it was Frazier's already-published friend Gibbons who, with his wife's connivance, pried <em>Cold Mountain</em> from his grip and got it into publishers' hands. <p>  But beyond their Civil War settings--a first for Gibbons, who's noted for 20th-century tales--the two books share resonant Southern literary accents, characters with similarly obstinate responses to enormous grief, and a shivery sense of history's stark shadow falling across everyday events.  Oprah Winfrey twice recommended Gibbons's fiction (<em>Ellen Foster</em> and <em>A Virtuous Woman</em>), and Walker Percy compared her to Faulkner. Probably Oprah liked Gibbons's heroines for their plucky refusal to buckle under oppression--a trait shared by Gibbons herself, who triumphed over the manic-depression that drove her mother to suicide.<p>  Our heroine, Emma, quakes under the tyranny of her plantation daddy, Samuel P. Tate, who slits the throat of a slave who talks back to him and just might do the same to his half-dozen children. There is no enormity of which he is incapable, this bellowing Simon Legree with an autodidact's education and a self-made man's bottomless urge to rise above his raising. He is, as he might have thunderingly put it, &quot;a pluperfect son of Satan.&quot; Only Clarice, the matriarchal slave and true ruler of the household, can fight Samuel Tate to a verbal draw and prevent slave uprisings on the eve of war. Clarice helps save Emma, as does her impeccable swain Dr. Quincy Lowell, who sweeps in like a cool Boston breeze to dispel the dismal tidewater miasma.<p>  The war, alas, brings a tsunami of blood, forcing Dr. Lowell to make Emma a de facto battlefield surgeon--an occasion he recognizes by fashioning a bit of commemorative jewelry for her from a dead man's silver filling and inscribing the date with a finger-amputation tool. One aspect of Gibbons's Frazieresque orgy of historical research is an authentic feel for the grotesqueries of the period. She can be amusing, too: the &quot;aggressively plain in the face&quot; Miss McKimmon--a fanged Raleigh socialite who's mean to Emma--is said to have arrived at a party and &quot;effused through the front door and into the arms of everyone simultaneously.&quot; On the audiocassette version of <em>On the Occasion of My Last Afternoon</em>, you can hear the proper way to pronounce &quot;effused&quot; for maximum satirical violence. <p>  One craves for Emma's hubby and daddy to swap five percent of each others' respectively perfect and perfectly awful souls--the book is not big on startling character revelations. What makes it work, despite its lack of moral shading and narrative guile, is the grace and rumbling life of the narrator's language. <em>On the Occasion of My Last Afternoon</em>, which has its sometimes anachronistically enlightened head in the New South and its feet firmly planted in the past, deserves a place next to Russell Banks's John Brown novel <em>Cloudsplitter</em>. At points, it reads like a smarter, nonracist <em>Gone with the Wind</em>, only less windy. <em>--Tim Appelo</em></p></p></p></p>]]>
  </description>
  <published>1998</published>
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  <date_added>Mon Jun 18 20:50:55 -0700 2007</date_added>
  <date_updated>Mon Jun 18 20:58:01 -0700 2007</date_updated>
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    <body><![CDATA[This was Gibbon's first historical fiction about the South during the Civil War.  The story, told by a 70-year-old woman looking back at herself when she was a girl of 12, living on a plantation ruled by her bitterly angry father.  It starts out when he &quot;accidently&quot; kills one of his slaves...<a href="http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2101093">more...</a>]]></body>
    
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      <review>
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  <title>
    <![CDATA[On the Occasion of My Last Afternoon: A Novel]]>
  </title>
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  <average_rating>3.63</average_rating>
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    <![CDATA[Polly Holliday of TV's <em>Home Improvement</em> won a Tony nomination on Broadway playing Big Mama in <em>Cat on a Hot Tin Roof</em>, and she makes Clarice, the matriarch of Kaye Gibbons' Civil War story <em>On the Occasion of My Last Afternoon</em>, sound very big of voice indeed. Clarice is the slave who really runs things on Virginia's Seven Oaks plantation, no matter what her nasty, brutish owner, Samuel P. Tate, might think. Holliday has a good time voicing Tate's fulminations, too, neatly distinguishing them from the heroine-narrator Emma Tate's rather daintier dulcet tones. Not that Emma can't be wicked in her own way: she describes a snobbish socialite, &quot;aggressively plain in the face ... who effused through the front door and into the arms of everyone simultaneously.&quot; Ms. Holliday puts as much sly violence into that &quot;effused&quot; as she does into Mr. Tate's rages.<p> Everyone who read Charles Frazier's Cold Mountain should consider reading <em>On the Occasion of My Last Afternoon</em>, the poetically charged fictional reminiscences of Emma Garnet Tate Lowell, circa 1842-1900. For one thing, it was Frazier's already-published friend Gibbons who, with Frazier's wife's connivance, pried <em>Cold Mountain</em> from his grip and got it into publishers' hands. <p> But beyond their Civil War setting--a first for Gibbons, who's noted for 20th-century tales--the two books share resonant Southern literary accents, characters with similarly obstinate responses to enormous grief, and a shivery sense of history's stark shadow falling across everyday events. Oprah Winfrey twice recommended Gibbons' fiction (Ellen Foster and A Virtuous Woman), and Walker Percy compared her to Faulkner. Oprah probably liked Gibbons's heroines for their plucky refusal to buckle under oppression--a trait shared by Gibbons herself, who triumphed over the manic-depressive illness that drove her mother to suicide.<p> Our heroine, Emma, shivers under the tyranny of her plantation daddy, Mr. Tate, who slits the throat of a slave who talks back to him and just might do the same to his half-dozen children. There is no enormity of which he is incapable, this bellowing Simon Legree with an autodidact's education and a self-made man's bottomless urge to rise above his raising. He is, as he might have thunderingly put it, &quot;a pluperfect son of Satan.&quot; Only Clarice can fight Samuel Tate to a verbal draw and prevent slave uprisings on the eve of the war. Clarice helps save Emma, as does Emma's impeccable swain Dr. Quincy Lowell, who sweeps in like a cool Boston breeze to dispel the dismal tidewater miasma.<p> The war, alas, brings a tsunami of blood, forcing Dr. Lowell to make Emma a de facto battlefield surgeon, an occasion he recognizes by fashioning a bit of commemorative jewelry for her from a dead man's silver filling and inscribing the date with a finger-amputation tool. One aspect of Gibbons' Frazier-esque orgy of historical research for the book is an authentic feel for the grotesqueries of the period. <p> One craves for Emma's hubby and daddy to swap five percent of each others' respectively perfect and perfectly awful souls--the book is not big on startling character revelations. What makes it work, despite its binary morality, is the grace and rumbling life of the narrator's language. The book, which has its sometimes anachronistically enlightened head in the New South and its feet firmly planted in the past, deserves a place next to Russell Banks' John Brown novel Cloudsplitter. At points, it reads like a smarter, nonracist Gone with the Wind, only less windy.<em>--Tim Appelo</em></p></p></p></p></p>]]>
  </description>
  <published>1998</published>
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    <rating>2</rating>
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  <read_at>Mon Sep 01 00:00:00 -0700 2008</read_at>
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    <body><![CDATA[We read this one for book club and everyone was excited because they have really liked the author in the past. I found the book to have a very strange style of writing. It was very unclear… sort of a cross between stream of consciousness and flashback. It is about a Southern plantation girl who ma...<a href="http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/44249989">more...</a>]]></body>
    
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      <review>
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    <name><![CDATA[Jodi]]></name>
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  <title>
    <![CDATA[On the Occasion of My Last Afternoon: A Novel]]>
  </title>
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  <average_rating>3.60</average_rating>
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    <![CDATA[Polly Holliday of TV's <em>Home Improvement</em> won a Tony nomination on Broadway playing Big Mama in <em>Cat on a Hot Tin Roof</em>, and she makes Clarice, the matriarch of Kaye Gibbons' Civil War story <em>On the Occasion of My Last Afternoon</em>, sound very big of voice indeed. Clarice is the slave who really runs things on Virginia's Seven Oaks plantation, no matter what her nasty, brutish owner, Samuel P. Tate, might think. Holliday has a good time voicing Tate's fulminations, too, neatly distinguishing them from the heroine-narrator Emma Tate's rather daintier dulcet tones. Not that Emma can't be wicked in her own way: she describes a snobbish socialite, &quot;aggressively plain in the face ... who effused through the front door and into the arms of everyone simultaneously.&quot; Ms. Holliday puts as much sly violence into that &quot;effused&quot; as she does into Mr. Tate's rages.<p> Everyone who read Charles Frazier's Cold Mountain should consider reading <em>On the Occasion of My Last Afternoon</em>, the poetically charged fictional reminiscences of Emma Garnet Tate Lowell, circa 1842-1900. For one thing, it was Frazier's already-published friend Gibbons who, with Frazier's wife's connivance, pried <em>Cold Mountain</em> from his grip and got it into publishers' hands. <p> But beyond their Civil War setting--a first for Gibbons, who's noted for 20th-century tales--the two books share resonant Southern literary accents, characters with similarly obstinate responses to enormous grief, and a shivery sense of history's stark shadow falling across everyday events. Oprah Winfrey twice recommended Gibbons' fiction (Ellen Foster and A Virtuous Woman), and Walker Percy compared her to Faulkner. Oprah probably liked Gibbons's heroines for their plucky refusal to buckle under oppression--a trait shared by Gibbons herself, who triumphed over the manic-depressive illness that drove her mother to suicide.<p> Our heroine, Emma, shivers under the tyranny of her plantation daddy, Mr. Tate, who slits the throat of a slave who talks back to him and just might do the same to his half-dozen children. There is no enormity of which he is incapable, this bellowing Simon Legree with an autodidact's education and a self-made man's bottomless urge to rise above his raising. He is, as he might have thunderingly put it, &quot;a pluperfect son of Satan.&quot; Only Clarice can fight Samuel Tate to a verbal draw and prevent slave uprisings on the eve of the war. Clarice helps save Emma, as does Emma's impeccable swain Dr. Quincy Lowell, who sweeps in like a cool Boston breeze to dispel the dismal tidewater miasma.<p> The war, alas, brings a tsunami of blood, forcing Dr. Lowell to make Emma a de facto battlefield surgeon, an occasion he recognizes by fashioning a bit of commemorative jewelry for her from a dead man's silver filling and inscribing the date with a finger-amputation tool. One aspect of Gibbons' Frazier-esque orgy of historical research for the book is an authentic feel for the grotesqueries of the period. <p> One craves for Emma's hubby and daddy to swap five percent of each others' respectively perfect and perfectly awful souls--the book is not big on startling character revelations. What makes it work, despite its binary morality, is the grace and rumbling life of the narrator's language. The book, which has its sometimes anachronistically enlightened head in the New South and its feet firmly planted in the past, deserves a place next to Russell Banks' John Brown novel Cloudsplitter. At points, it reads like a smarter, nonracist Gone with the Wind, only less windy.<em>--Tim Appelo</em></p></p></p></p></p>]]>
  </description>
  <published>1998</published>
</book>

    <rating>3</rating>
  <votes>0</votes>
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  <recommended_for><![CDATA[women]]></recommended_for>
  <recommended_by><![CDATA[Carlisle Book Club]]></recommended_by>
  <read_at>Thu Dec 04 00:00:00 -0800 2008</read_at>
  <date_added>Fri Oct 10 18:07:42 -0700 2008</date_added>
  <date_updated>Thu Dec 04 07:37:37 -0800 2008</date_updated>
  <read_count></read_count>
    <body><![CDATA[I had a hard time getting into this book at first because it seemed to jump back in forth in time.  Once I got a handle on the characters and understood more about Emma, I began to like the book more.  I also began to envision her as my elderly mother-in-law or even my great-grandmother telling this...<a href="http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/35016852">more...</a>]]></body>
    
  <url><![CDATA[http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/35016852]]></url>
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    <![CDATA[On the Occasion of My Last Afternoon]]>
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    <![CDATA[Everyone who read Charles Frazier's <em>Cold Mountain</em> should consider reading Kaye Gibbons's <em>On the Occasion of My Last Afternoon</em>, the poetically charged fictional reminiscences of Emma Garnet Tate Lowell, child of Virginia's Seven Oaks plantation, from 1842-1900. For one thing, it was Frazier's already-published friend Gibbons who, with his wife's connivance, pried <em>Cold Mountain</em> from his grip and got it into publishers' hands. <p>  But beyond their Civil War settings--a first for Gibbons, who's noted for 20th-century tales--the two books share resonant Southern literary accents, characters with similarly obstinate responses to enormous grief, and a shivery sense of history's stark shadow falling across everyday events.  Oprah Winfrey twice recommended Gibbons's fiction (<em>Ellen Foster</em> and <em>A Virtuous Woman</em>), and Walker Percy compared her to Faulkner. Probably Oprah liked Gibbons's heroines for their plucky refusal to buckle under oppression--a trait shared by Gibbons herself, who triumphed over the manic-depression that drove her mother to suicide.<p>  Our heroine, Emma, quakes under the tyranny of her plantation daddy, Samuel P. Tate, who slits the throat of a slave who talks back to him and just might do the same to his half-dozen children. There is no enormity of which he is incapable, this bellowing Simon Legree with an autodidact's education and a self-made man's bottomless urge to rise above his raising. He is, as he might have thunderingly put it, &quot;a pluperfect son of Satan.&quot; Only Clarice, the matriarchal slave and true ruler of the household, can fight Samuel Tate to a verbal draw and prevent slave uprisings on the eve of war. Clarice helps save Emma, as does her impeccable swain Dr. Quincy Lowell, who sweeps in like a cool Boston breeze to dispel the dismal tidewater miasma.<p>  The war, alas, brings a tsunami of blood, forcing Dr. Lowell to make Emma a de facto battlefield surgeon--an occasion he recognizes by fashioning a bit of commemorative jewelry for her from a dead man's silver filling and inscribing the date with a finger-amputation tool. One aspect of Gibbons's Frazieresque orgy of historical research is an authentic feel for the grotesqueries of the period. She can be amusing, too: the &quot;aggressively plain in the face&quot; Miss McKimmon--a fanged Raleigh socialite who's mean to Emma--is said to have arrived at a party and &quot;effused through the front door and into the arms of everyone simultaneously.&quot; On the audiocassette version of <em>On the Occasion of My Last Afternoon</em>, you can hear the proper way to pronounce &quot;effused&quot; for maximum satirical violence. <p>  One craves for Emma's hubby and daddy to swap five percent of each others' respectively perfect and perfectly awful souls--the book is not big on startling character revelations. What makes it work, despite its lack of moral shading and narrative guile, is the grace and rumbling life of the narrator's language. <em>On the Occasion of My Last Afternoon</em>, which has its sometimes anachronistically enlightened head in the New South and its feet firmly planted in the past, deserves a place next to Russell Banks's John Brown novel <em>Cloudsplitter</em>. At points, it reads like a smarter, nonracist <em>Gone with the Wind</em>, only less windy. <em>--Tim Appelo</em></p></p></p></p>]]>
  </description>
  <published>1998</published>
</book>

    <rating>1</rating>
  <votes>0</votes>
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  <read_at>Tue Jan 13 00:00:00 -0800 2009</read_at>
  <date_added>Sun Sep 13 20:20:39 -0700 2009</date_added>
  <date_updated>Sun Sep 13 20:36:02 -0700 2009</date_updated>
  <read_count></read_count>
    <body><![CDATA[Uhmmmm, didn't love this book.  It was sad and gave way too much detail about the civil war. Infact it flat out made me depressed.  I did like the time period and liked how the main characters sacrafised their daily lives to host a make shift hospital in their living room. It brought the concept of ...<a href="http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/71128293">more...</a>]]></body>
    
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      <review>
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  <isbn>0060797142</isbn>
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  <title>
    <![CDATA[On the Occasion of My Last Afternoon: A Novel]]>
  </title>
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  <average_rating>3.60</average_rating>
  <ratings_count>524</ratings_count>
  <description>
    <![CDATA[Polly Holliday of TV's <em>Home Improvement</em> won a Tony nomination on Broadway playing Big Mama in <em>Cat on a Hot Tin Roof</em>, and she makes Clarice, the matriarch of Kaye Gibbons' Civil War story <em>On the Occasion of My Last Afternoon</em>, sound very big of voice indeed. Clarice is the slave who really runs things on Virginia's Seven Oaks plantation, no matter what her nasty, brutish owner, Samuel P. Tate, might think. Holliday has a good time voicing Tate's fulminations, too, neatly distinguishing them from the heroine-narrator Emma Tate's rather daintier dulcet tones. Not that Emma can't be wicked in her own way: she describes a snobbish socialite, &quot;aggressively plain in the face ... who effused through the front door and into the arms of everyone simultaneously.&quot; Ms. Holliday puts as much sly violence into that &quot;effused&quot; as she does into Mr. Tate's rages.<p> Everyone who read Charles Frazier's Cold Mountain should consider reading <em>On the Occasion of My Last Afternoon</em>, the poetically charged fictional reminiscences of Emma Garnet Tate Lowell, circa 1842-1900. For one thing, it was Frazier's already-published friend Gibbons who, with Frazier's wife's connivance, pried <em>Cold Mountain</em> from his grip and got it into publishers' hands. <p> But beyond their Civil War setting--a first for Gibbons, who's noted for 20th-century tales--the two books share resonant Southern literary accents, characters with similarly obstinate responses to enormous grief, and a shivery sense of history's stark shadow falling across everyday events. Oprah Winfrey twice recommended Gibbons' fiction (Ellen Foster and A Virtuous Woman), and Walker Percy compared her to Faulkner. Oprah probably liked Gibbons's heroines for their plucky refusal to buckle under oppression--a trait shared by Gibbons herself, who triumphed over the manic-depressive illness that drove her mother to suicide.<p> Our heroine, Emma, shivers under the tyranny of her plantation daddy, Mr. Tate, who slits the throat of a slave who talks back to him and just might do the same to his half-dozen children. There is no enormity of which he is incapable, this bellowing Simon Legree with an autodidact's education and a self-made man's bottomless urge to rise above his raising. He is, as he might have thunderingly put it, &quot;a pluperfect son of Satan.&quot; Only Clarice can fight Samuel Tate to a verbal draw and prevent slave uprisings on the eve of the war. Clarice helps save Emma, as does Emma's impeccable swain Dr. Quincy Lowell, who sweeps in like a cool Boston breeze to dispel the dismal tidewater miasma.<p> The war, alas, brings a tsunami of blood, forcing Dr. Lowell to make Emma a de facto battlefield surgeon, an occasion he recognizes by fashioning a bit of commemorative jewelry for her from a dead man's silver filling and inscribing the date with a finger-amputation tool. One aspect of Gibbons' Frazier-esque orgy of historical research for the book is an authentic feel for the grotesqueries of the period. <p> One craves for Emma's hubby and daddy to swap five percent of each others' respectively perfect and perfectly awful souls--the book is not big on startling character revelations. What makes it work, despite its binary morality, is the grace and rumbling life of the narrator's language. The book, which has its sometimes anachronistically enlightened head in the New South and its feet firmly planted in the past, deserves a place next to Russell Banks' John Brown novel Cloudsplitter. At points, it reads like a smarter, nonracist Gone with the Wind, only less windy.<em>--Tim Appelo</em></p></p></p></p></p>]]>
  </description>
  <published>1998</published>
</book>

    <rating>5</rating>
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  <read_at>Sun Jun 01 00:00:00 -0700 1997</read_at>
  <date_added>Mon Jul 06 09:07:39 -0700 2009</date_added>
  <date_updated>Mon Jul 06 09:11:53 -0700 2009</date_updated>
  <read_count></read_count>
    <body><![CDATA[Gibbons grabs you at the first sentence: &quot;I did not mean to kill the nigger!&quot;<br/>Here she tells the tale of the daughter of a plantation owner from the Civil war to early 20th century. <br/><br/>Gibbons captures the reader, who lets go ever so reluctantly at the end of each novel. Her ...<a href="http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/62333283">more...</a>]]></body>
    
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      <review>
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  <title>
    <![CDATA[On the Occasion of My Last Afternoon: A Novel]]>
  </title>
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    <![CDATA[Polly Holliday of TV's <em>Home Improvement</em> won a Tony nomination on Broadway playing Big Mama in <em>Cat on a Hot Tin Roof</em>, and she makes Clarice, the matriarch of Kaye Gibbons' Civil War story <em>On the Occasion of My Last Afternoon</em>, sound very big of voice indeed. Clarice is the slave who really runs things on Virginia's Seven Oaks plantation, no matter what her nasty, brutish owner, Samuel P. Tate, might think. Holliday has a good time voicing Tate's fulminations, too, neatly distinguishing them from the heroine-narrator Emma Tate's rather daintier dulcet tones. Not that Emma can't be wicked in her own way: she describes a snobbish socialite, &quot;aggressively plain in the face ... who effused through the front door and into the arms of everyone simultaneously.&quot; Ms. Holliday puts as much sly violence into that &quot;effused&quot; as she does into Mr. Tate's rages.<p> Everyone who read Charles Frazier's Cold Mountain should consider reading <em>On the Occasion of My Last Afternoon</em>, the poetically charged fictional reminiscences of Emma Garnet Tate Lowell, circa 1842-1900. For one thing, it was Frazier's already-published friend Gibbons who, with Frazier's wife's connivance, pried <em>Cold Mountain</em> from his grip and got it into publishers' hands. <p> But beyond their Civil War setting--a first for Gibbons, who's noted for 20th-century tales--the two books share resonant Southern literary accents, characters with similarly obstinate responses to enormous grief, and a shivery sense of history's stark shadow falling across everyday events. Oprah Winfrey twice recommended Gibbons' fiction (Ellen Foster and A Virtuous Woman), and Walker Percy compared her to Faulkner. Oprah probably liked Gibbons's heroines for their plucky refusal to buckle under oppression--a trait shared by Gibbons herself, who triumphed over the manic-depressive illness that drove her mother to suicide.<p> Our heroine, Emma, shivers under the tyranny of her plantation daddy, Mr. Tate, who slits the throat of a slave who talks back to him and just might do the same to his half-dozen children. There is no enormity of which he is incapable, this bellowing Simon Legree with an autodidact's education and a self-made man's bottomless urge to rise above his raising. He is, as he might have thunderingly put it, &quot;a pluperfect son of Satan.&quot; Only Clarice can fight Samuel Tate to a verbal draw and prevent slave uprisings on the eve of the war. Clarice helps save Emma, as does Emma's impeccable swain Dr. Quincy Lowell, who sweeps in like a cool Boston breeze to dispel the dismal tidewater miasma.<p> The war, alas, brings a tsunami of blood, forcing Dr. Lowell to make Emma a de facto battlefield surgeon, an occasion he recognizes by fashioning a bit of commemorative jewelry for her from a dead man's silver filling and inscribing the date with a finger-amputation tool. One aspect of Gibbons' Frazier-esque orgy of historical research for the book is an authentic feel for the grotesqueries of the period. <p> One craves for Emma's hubby and daddy to swap five percent of each others' respectively perfect and perfectly awful souls--the book is not big on startling character revelations. What makes it work, despite its binary morality, is the grace and rumbling life of the narrator's language. The book, which has its sometimes anachronistically enlightened head in the New South and its feet firmly planted in the past, deserves a place next to Russell Banks' John Brown novel Cloudsplitter. At points, it reads like a smarter, nonracist Gone with the Wind, only less windy.<em>--Tim Appelo</em></p></p></p></p></p>]]>
  </description>
  <published>1998</published>
</book>

    <rating>5</rating>
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  <read_at>Fri Jan 09 00:00:00 -0800 2009</read_at>
  <date_added>Wed Jan 14 18:45:44 -0800 2009</date_added>
  <date_updated>Wed Jan 14 18:47:28 -0800 2009</date_updated>
  <read_count></read_count>
    <body><![CDATA[Another great book from Kaye Gibbons.  I did not read this when it first came out, but added it at a selection for book club to help celebrate the Centennial of Lincoln's Birth with Civil War related books.  This was a great read, excellent character development with rich text.]]></body>
    
  <url><![CDATA[http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/43075729]]></url>
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</review>
      <review>
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  <isbn>0399142991</isbn>
  <isbn13>9780399142994</isbn13>
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  <title>
    <![CDATA[On the Occasion of My Last Afternoon]]>
  </title>
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  <average_rating>3.60</average_rating>
  <ratings_count>524</ratings_count>
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    <![CDATA[Everyone who read Charles Frazier's <em>Cold Mountain</em> should consider reading Kaye Gibbons's <em>On the Occasion of My Last Afternoon</em>, the poetically charged fictional reminiscences of Emma Garnet Tate Lowell, child of Virginia's Seven Oaks plantation, from 1842-1900. For one thing, it was Frazier's already-published friend Gibbons who, with his wife's connivance, pried <em>Cold Mountain</em> from his grip and got it into publishers' hands. <p>  But beyond their Civil War settings--a first for Gibbons, who's noted for 20th-century tales--the two books share resonant Southern literary accents, characters with similarly obstinate responses to enormous grief, and a shivery sense of history's stark shadow falling across everyday events.  Oprah Winfrey twice recommended Gibbons's fiction (<em>Ellen Foster</em> and <em>A Virtuous Woman</em>), and Walker Percy compared her to Faulkner. Probably Oprah liked Gibbons's heroines for their plucky refusal to buckle under oppression--a trait shared by Gibbons herself, who triumphed over the manic-depression that drove her mother to suicide.<p>  Our heroine, Emma, quakes under the tyranny of her plantation daddy, Samuel P. Tate, who slits the throat of a slave who talks back to him and just might do the same to his half-dozen children. There is no enormity of which he is incapable, this bellowing Simon Legree with an autodidact's education and a self-made man's bottomless urge to rise above his raising. He is, as he might have thunderingly put it, &quot;a pluperfect son of Satan.&quot; Only Clarice, the matriarchal slave and true ruler of the household, can fight Samuel Tate to a verbal draw and prevent slave uprisings on the eve of war. Clarice helps save Emma, as does her impeccable swain Dr. Quincy Lowell, who sweeps in like a cool Boston breeze to dispel the dismal tidewater miasma.<p>  The war, alas, brings a tsunami of blood, forcing Dr. Lowell to make Emma a de facto battlefield surgeon--an occasion he recognizes by fashioning a bit of commemorative jewelry for her from a dead man's silver filling and inscribing the date with a finger-amputation tool. One aspect of Gibbons's Frazieresque orgy of historical research is an authentic feel for the grotesqueries of the period. She can be amusing, too: the &quot;aggressively plain in the face&quot; Miss McKimmon--a fanged Raleigh socialite who's mean to Emma--is said to have arrived at a party and &quot;effused through the front door and into the arms of everyone simultaneously.&quot; On the audiocassette version of <em>On the Occasion of My Last Afternoon</em>, you can hear the proper way to pronounce &quot;effused&quot; for maximum satirical violence. <p>  One craves for Emma's hubby and daddy to swap five percent of each others' respectively perfect and perfectly awful souls--the book is not big on startling character revelations. What makes it work, despite its lack of moral shading and narrative guile, is the grace and rumbling life of the narrator's language. <em>On the Occasion of My Last Afternoon</em>, which has its sometimes anachronistically enlightened head in the New South and its feet firmly planted in the past, deserves a place next to Russell Banks's John Brown novel <em>Cloudsplitter</em>. At points, it reads like a smarter, nonracist <em>Gone with the Wind</em>, only less windy. <em>--Tim Appelo</em></p></p></p></p>]]>
  </description>
  <published>1998</published>
</book>

    <rating>2</rating>
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  <read_at>Mon May 18 00:00:00 -0700 2009</read_at>
  <date_added>Fri May 15 10:56:57 -0700 2009</date_added>
  <date_updated>Tue May 19 08:09:24 -0700 2009</date_updated>
  <read_count></read_count>
    <body><![CDATA[At 70 years old, Emma reminisces on her childhood, marriage, and mothering years during the Civil War. Not the happiest story, with an abusive father whose actions destroyed everyone's lives around him. But I enjoy historical fiction and the Civil War is one fascinating time period to read about.]]></body>
    
  <url><![CDATA[http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/56186871]]></url>
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      <review>
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    <![CDATA[On the Occasion of My Last Afternoon: A Novel]]>
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  <average_rating>3.60</average_rating>
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    <![CDATA[Polly Holliday of TV's <em>Home Improvement</em> won a Tony nomination on Broadway playing Big Mama in <em>Cat on a Hot Tin Roof</em>, and she makes Clarice, the matriarch of Kaye Gibbons' Civil War story <em>On the Occasion of My Last Afternoon</em>, sound very big of voice indeed. Clarice is the slave who really runs things on Virginia's Seven Oaks plantation, no matter what her nasty, brutish owner, Samuel P. Tate, might think. Holliday has a good time voicing Tate's fulminations, too, neatly distinguishing them from the heroine-narrator Emma Tate's rather daintier dulcet tones. Not that Emma can't be wicked in her own way: she describes a snobbish socialite, &quot;aggressively plain in the face ... who effused through the front door and into the arms of everyone simultaneously.&quot; Ms. Holliday puts as much sly violence into that &quot;effused&quot; as she does into Mr. Tate's rages.<p> Everyone who read Charles Frazier's Cold Mountain should consider reading <em>On the Occasion of My Last Afternoon</em>, the poetically charged fictional reminiscences of Emma Garnet Tate Lowell, circa 1842-1900. For one thing, it was Frazier's already-published friend Gibbons who, with Frazier's wife's connivance, pried <em>Cold Mountain</em> from his grip and got it into publishers' hands. <p> But beyond their Civil War setting--a first for Gibbons, who's noted for 20th-century tales--the two books share resonant Southern literary accents, characters with similarly obstinate responses to enormous grief, and a shivery sense of history's stark shadow falling across everyday events. Oprah Winfrey twice recommended Gibbons' fiction (Ellen Foster and A Virtuous Woman), and Walker Percy compared her to Faulkner. Oprah probably liked Gibbons's heroines for their plucky refusal to buckle under oppression--a trait shared by Gibbons herself, who triumphed over the manic-depressive illness that drove her mother to suicide.<p> Our heroine, Emma, shivers under the tyranny of her plantation daddy, Mr. Tate, who slits the throat of a slave who talks back to him and just might do the same to his half-dozen children. There is no enormity of which he is incapable, this bellowing Simon Legree with an autodidact's education and a self-made man's bottomless urge to rise above his raising. He is, as he might have thunderingly put it, &quot;a pluperfect son of Satan.&quot; Only Clarice can fight Samuel Tate to a verbal draw and prevent slave uprisings on the eve of the war. Clarice helps save Emma, as does Emma's impeccable swain Dr. Quincy Lowell, who sweeps in like a cool Boston breeze to dispel the dismal tidewater miasma.<p> The war, alas, brings a tsunami of blood, forcing Dr. Lowell to make Emma a de facto battlefield surgeon, an occasion he recognizes by fashioning a bit of commemorative jewelry for her from a dead man's silver filling and inscribing the date with a finger-amputation tool. One aspect of Gibbons' Frazier-esque orgy of historical research for the book is an authentic feel for the grotesqueries of the period. <p> One craves for Emma's hubby and daddy to swap five percent of each others' respectively perfect and perfectly awful souls--the book is not big on startling character revelations. What makes it work, despite its binary morality, is the grace and rumbling life of the narrator's language. The book, which has its sometimes anachronistically enlightened head in the New South and its feet firmly planted in the past, deserves a place next to Russell Banks' John Brown novel Cloudsplitter. At points, it reads like a smarter, nonracist Gone with the Wind, only less windy.<em>--Tim Appelo</em></p></p></p></p></p>]]>
  </description>
  <published>1998</published>
</book>

    <rating>4</rating>
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  <read_at>Thu Jul 23 00:00:00 -0700 2009</read_at>
  <date_added>Mon Jul 27 05:30:53 -0700 2009</date_added>
  <date_updated>Mon Jul 27 05:34:26 -0700 2009</date_updated>
  <read_count></read_count>
    <body><![CDATA[This book was such a good read somewhat in the manner of &quot;angela's ashes&quot; or other books of overcoming extreme adversity. It is a book strong women will love and I believe all of Kaye Gibbons books should be required reading for girls.  ]]></body>
    
  <url><![CDATA[http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/65106600]]></url>
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</review>
      <review>
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  <isbn>0060797142</isbn>
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  <title>
    <![CDATA[On the Occasion of My Last Afternoon: A Novel]]>
  </title>
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    <![CDATA[Polly Holliday of TV's <em>Home Improvement</em> won a Tony nomination on Broadway playing Big Mama in <em>Cat on a Hot Tin Roof</em>, and she makes Clarice, the matriarch of Kaye Gibbons' Civil War story <em>On the Occasion of My Last Afternoon</em>, sound very big of voice indeed. Clarice is the slave who really runs things on Virginia's Seven Oaks plantation, no matter what her nasty, brutish owner, Samuel P. Tate, might think. Holliday has a good time voicing Tate's fulminations, too, neatly distinguishing them from the heroine-narrator Emma Tate's rather daintier dulcet tones. Not that Emma can't be wicked in her own way: she describes a snobbish socialite, &quot;aggressively plain in the face ... who effused through the front door and into the arms of everyone simultaneously.&quot; Ms. Holliday puts as much sly violence into that &quot;effused&quot; as she does into Mr. Tate's rages.<p> Everyone who read Charles Frazier's Cold Mountain should consider reading <em>On the Occasion of My Last Afternoon</em>, the poetically charged fictional reminiscences of Emma Garnet Tate Lowell, circa 1842-1900. For one thing, it was Frazier's already-published friend Gibbons who, with Frazier's wife's connivance, pried <em>Cold Mountain</em> from his grip and got it into publishers' hands. <p> But beyond their Civil War setting--a first for Gibbons, who's noted for 20th-century tales--the two books share resonant Southern literary accents, characters with similarly obstinate responses to enormous grief, and a shivery sense of history's stark shadow falling across everyday events. Oprah Winfrey twice recommended Gibbons' fiction (Ellen Foster and A Virtuous Woman), and Walker Percy compared her to Faulkner. Oprah probably liked Gibbons's heroines for their plucky refusal to buckle under oppression--a trait shared by Gibbons herself, who triumphed over the manic-depressive illness that drove her mother to suicide.<p> Our heroine, Emma, shivers under the tyranny of her plantation daddy, Mr. Tate, who slits the throat of a slave who talks back to him and just might do the same to his half-dozen children. There is no enormity of which he is incapable, this bellowing Simon Legree with an autodidact's education and a self-made man's bottomless urge to rise above his raising. He is, as he might have thunderingly put it, &quot;a pluperfect son of Satan.&quot; Only Clarice can fight Samuel Tate to a verbal draw and prevent slave uprisings on the eve of the war. Clarice helps save Emma, as does Emma's impeccable swain Dr. Quincy Lowell, who sweeps in like a cool Boston breeze to dispel the dismal tidewater miasma.<p> The war, alas, brings a tsunami of blood, forcing Dr. Lowell to make Emma a de facto battlefield surgeon, an occasion he recognizes by fashioning a bit of commemorative jewelry for her from a dead man's silver filling and inscribing the date with a finger-amputation tool. One aspect of Gibbons' Frazier-esque orgy of historical research for the book is an authentic feel for the grotesqueries of the period. <p> One craves for Emma's hubby and daddy to swap five percent of each others' respectively perfect and perfectly awful souls--the book is not big on startling character revelations. What makes it work, despite its binary morality, is the grace and rumbling life of the narrator's language. The book, which has its sometimes anachronistically enlightened head in the New South and its feet firmly planted in the past, deserves a place next to Russell Banks' John Brown novel Cloudsplitter. At points, it reads like a smarter, nonracist Gone with the Wind, only less windy.<em>--Tim Appelo</em></p></p></p></p></p>]]>
  </description>
  <published>1998</published>
</book>

    <rating>4</rating>
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    <body><![CDATA[Tasha and I both loved this book.  A certain friend of ours who shall remain nameless (whose initials are KP) hated it.  She's wrong.  We're right.<br/>This is historical fiction done well.  Very good read.]]></body>
    
  <url><![CDATA[http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/78546513]]></url>
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  <isbn13>9780380732142</isbn13>
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  <title>
    <![CDATA[On the Occasion of My Last Afternoon]]>
  </title>
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  <average_rating>3.57</average_rating>
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    <![CDATA[Polly Holliday of TV's <em>Home Improvement</em> won a Tony nomination on Broadway playing Big Mama in <em>Cat on a Hot Tin Roof</em>, and she makes Clarice, the matriarch of Kaye Gibbons' Civil War story <em>On the Occasion of My Last Afternoon</em>, sound very big of voice indeed. Clarice is the slave who really runs things on Virginia's Seven Oaks plantation, no matter what her nasty, brutish owner, Samuel P. Tate, might think. Holliday has a good time voicing Tate's fulminations, too, neatly distinguishing them from the heroine-narrator Emma Tate's rather daintier dulcet tones. Not that Emma can't be wicked in her own way: she describes a snobbish socialite, &quot;aggressively plain in the face ... who effused through the front door and into the arms of everyone simultaneously.&quot; Ms. Holliday puts as much sly violence into that &quot;effused&quot; as she does into Mr. Tate's rages.<p> Everyone who read Charles Frazier's Cold Mountain should consider reading <em>On the Occasion of My Last Afternoon</em>, the poetically charged fictional reminiscences of Emma Garnet Tate Lowell, circa 1842-1900. For one thing, it was Frazier's already-published friend Gibbons who, with Frazier's wife's connivance, pried <em>Cold Mountain</em> from his grip and got it into publishers' hands. <p> But beyond their Civil War setting--a first for Gibbons, who's noted for 20th-century tales--the two books share resonant Southern literary accents, characters with similarly obstinate responses to enormous grief, and a shivery sense of history's stark shadow falling across everyday events. Oprah Winfrey twice recommended Gibbons' fiction (Ellen Foster and A Virtuous Woman), and Walker Percy compared her to Faulkner. Oprah probably liked Gibbons's heroines for their plucky refusal to buckle under oppression--a trait shared by Gibbons herself, who triumphed over the manic-depressive illness that drove her mother to suicide.<p> Our heroine, Emma, shivers under the tyranny of her plantation daddy, Mr. Tate, who slits the throat of a slave who talks back to him and just might do the same to his half-dozen children. There is no enormity of which he is incapable, this bellowing Simon Legree with an autodidact's education and a self-made man's bottomless urge to rise above his raising. He is, as he might have thunderingly put it, &quot;a pluperfect son of Satan.&quot; Only Clarice can fight Samuel Tate to a verbal draw and prevent slave uprisings on the eve of the war. Clarice helps save Emma, as does Emma's impeccable swain Dr. Quincy Lowell, who sweeps in like a cool Boston breeze to dispel the dismal tidewater miasma.<p> The war, alas, brings a tsunami of blood, forcing Dr. Lowell to make Emma a de facto battlefield surgeon, an occasion he recognizes by fashioning a bit of commemorative jewelry for her from a dead man's silver filling and inscribing the date with a finger-amputation tool. One aspect of Gibbons' Frazier-esque orgy of historical research for the book is an authentic feel for the grotesqueries of the period. <p> One craves for Emma's hubby and daddy to swap five percent of each others' respectively perfect and perfectly awful souls--the book is not big on startling character revelations. What makes it work, despite its binary morality, is the grace and rumbling life of the narrator's language. The book, which has its sometimes anachronistically enlightened head in the New South and its feet firmly planted in the past, deserves a place next to Russell Banks' John Brown novel Cloudsplitter. At points, it reads like a smarter, nonracist Gone with the Wind, only less windy.<em>--Tim Appelo</em></p></p></p></p></p>]]>
  </description>
  <published>1998</published>
</book>

    <rating>3</rating>
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  <read_at>Sat Nov 28 00:00:00 -0800 2009</read_at>
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  <date_updated>Sat Nov 28 18:04:00 -0800 2009</date_updated>
  <read_count></read_count>
    <body><![CDATA[Emma Garnet Lowell reflects on her life under her Southern father's tyrannical rule, her marriage to a Union sympathizing doctor and their sacrifices during the Civil War.  I liked the pacing of the story and Emma's ruminations about her past, which she could look on with new clarity afforded to her...<a href="http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/76517672">more...</a>]]></body>
    
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      <review>
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  <title>
    <![CDATA[On the Occasion of My Last Afternoon]]>
  </title>
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    <![CDATA[Everyone who read Charles Frazier's <em>Cold Mountain</em> should consider reading Kaye Gibbons's <em>On the Occasion of My Last Afternoon</em>, the poetically charged fictional reminiscences of Emma Garnet Tate Lowell, child of Virginia's Seven Oaks plantation, from 1842-1900. For one thing, it was Frazier's already-published friend Gibbons who, with his wife's connivance, pried <em>Cold Mountain</em> from his grip and got it into publishers' hands. <p>  But beyond their Civil War settings--a first for Gibbons, who's noted for 20th-century tales--the two books share resonant Southern literary accents, characters with similarly obstinate responses to enormous grief, and a shivery sense of history's stark shadow falling across everyday events.  Oprah Winfrey twice recommended Gibbons's fiction (<em>Ellen Foster</em> and <em>A Virtuous Woman</em>), and Walker Percy compared her to Faulkner. Probably Oprah liked Gibbons's heroines for their plucky refusal to buckle under oppression--a trait shared by Gibbons herself, who triumphed over the manic-depression that drove her mother to suicide.<p>  Our heroine, Emma, quakes under the tyranny of her plantation daddy, Samuel P. Tate, who slits the throat of a slave who talks back to him and just might do the same to his half-dozen children. There is no enormity of which he is incapable, this bellowing Simon Legree with an autodidact's education and a self-made man's bottomless urge to rise above his raising. He is, as he might have thunderingly put it, &quot;a pluperfect son of Satan.&quot; Only Clarice, the matriarchal slave and true ruler of the household, can fight Samuel Tate to a verbal draw and prevent slave uprisings on the eve of war. Clarice helps save Emma, as does her impeccable swain Dr. Quincy Lowell, who sweeps in like a cool Boston breeze to dispel the dismal tidewater miasma.<p>  The war, alas, brings a tsunami of blood, forcing Dr. Lowell to make Emma a de facto battlefield surgeon--an occasion he recognizes by fashioning a bit of commemorative jewelry for her from a dead man's silver filling and inscribing the date with a finger-amputation tool. One aspect of Gibbons's Frazieresque orgy of historical research is an authentic feel for the grotesqueries of the period. She can be amusing, too: the &quot;aggressively plain in the face&quot; Miss McKimmon--a fanged Raleigh socialite who's mean to Emma--is said to have arrived at a party and &quot;effused through the front door and into the arms of everyone simultaneously.&quot; On the audiocassette version of <em>On the Occasion of My Last Afternoon</em>, you can hear the proper way to pronounce &quot;effused&quot; for maximum satirical violence. <p>  One craves for Emma's hubby and daddy to swap five percent of each others' respectively perfect and perfectly awful souls--the book is not big on startling character revelations. What makes it work, despite its lack of moral shading and narrative guile, is the grace and rumbling life of the narrator's language. <em>On the Occasion of My Last Afternoon</em>, which has its sometimes anachronistically enlightened head in the New South and its feet firmly planted in the past, deserves a place next to Russell Banks's John Brown novel <em>Cloudsplitter</em>. At points, it reads like a smarter, nonracist <em>Gone with the Wind</em>, only less windy. <em>--Tim Appelo</em></p></p></p></p>]]>
  </description>
  <published>1998</published>
</book>

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  <date_added>Thu Nov 12 04:48:28 -0800 2009</date_added>
  <date_updated>Thu Nov 12 04:51:01 -0800 2009</date_updated>
  <read_count></read_count>
    <body><![CDATA[This author threw every impressive word she could find from her dictionary and thesaurus into this book.  I've tried to read it twice and gave up both times.  ]]></body>
    
  <url><![CDATA[http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/77529435]]></url>
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      <review>
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  <isbn>0060797142</isbn>
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  <title>
    <![CDATA[On the Occasion of My Last Afternoon: A Novel]]>
  </title>
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  <average_rating>3.60</average_rating>
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    <![CDATA[Polly Holliday of TV's <em>Home Improvement</em> won a Tony nomination on Broadway playing Big Mama in <em>Cat on a Hot Tin Roof</em>, and she makes Clarice, the matriarch of Kaye Gibbons' Civil War story <em>On the Occasion of My Last Afternoon</em>, sound very big of voice indeed. Clarice is the slave who really runs things on Virginia's Seven Oaks plantation, no matter what her nasty, brutish owner, Samuel P. Tate, might think. Holliday has a good time voicing Tate's fulminations, too, neatly distinguishing them from the heroine-narrator Emma Tate's rather daintier dulcet tones. Not that Emma can't be wicked in her own way: she describes a snobbish socialite, &quot;aggressively plain in the face ... who effused through the front door and into the arms of everyone simultaneously.&quot; Ms. Holliday puts as much sly violence into that &quot;effused&quot; as she does into Mr. Tate's rages.<p> Everyone who read Charles Frazier's Cold Mountain should consider reading <em>On the Occasion of My Last Afternoon</em>, the poetically charged fictional reminiscences of Emma Garnet Tate Lowell, circa 1842-1900. For one thing, it was Frazier's already-published friend Gibbons who, with Frazier's wife's connivance, pried <em>Cold Mountain</em> from his grip and got it into publishers' hands. <p> But beyond their Civil War setting--a first for Gibbons, who's noted for 20th-century tales--the two books share resonant Southern literary accents, characters with similarly obstinate responses to enormous grief, and a shivery sense of history's stark shadow falling across everyday events. Oprah Winfrey twice recommended Gibbons' fiction (Ellen Foster and A Virtuous Woman), and Walker Percy compared her to Faulkner. Oprah probably liked Gibbons's heroines for their plucky refusal to buckle under oppression--a trait shared by Gibbons herself, who triumphed over the manic-depressive illness that drove her mother to suicide.<p> Our heroine, Emma, shivers under the tyranny of her plantation daddy, Mr. Tate, who slits the throat of a slave who talks back to him and just might do the same to his half-dozen children. There is no enormity of which he is incapable, this bellowing Simon Legree with an autodidact's education and a self-made man's bottomless urge to rise above his raising. He is, as he might have thunderingly put it, &quot;a pluperfect son of Satan.&quot; Only Clarice can fight Samuel Tate to a verbal draw and prevent slave uprisings on the eve of the war. Clarice helps save Emma, as does Emma's impeccable swain Dr. Quincy Lowell, who sweeps in like a cool Boston breeze to dispel the dismal tidewater miasma.<p> The war, alas, brings a tsunami of blood, forcing Dr. Lowell to make Emma a de facto battlefield surgeon, an occasion he recognizes by fashioning a bit of commemorative jewelry for her from a dead man's silver filling and inscribing the date with a finger-amputation tool. One aspect of Gibbons' Frazier-esque orgy of historical research for the book is an authentic feel for the grotesqueries of the period. <p> One craves for Emma's hubby and daddy to swap five percent of each others' respectively perfect and perfectly awful souls--the book is not big on startling character revelations. What makes it work, despite its binary morality, is the grace and rumbling life of the narrator's language. The book, which has its sometimes anachronistically enlightened head in the New South and its feet firmly planted in the past, deserves a place next to Russell Banks' John Brown novel Cloudsplitter. At points, it reads like a smarter, nonracist Gone with the Wind, only less windy.<em>--Tim Appelo</em></p></p></p></p></p>]]>
  </description>
  <published>1998</published>
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    <rating>4</rating>
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    <body><![CDATA[This is one of my favorite authors telling a story set during the Civil War.  It is NOT an idealistic setting or view of the era.  An excellent read.]]></body>
    
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  <title>
    <![CDATA[On the Occasion of My Last Afternoon: A Novel]]>
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    <![CDATA[Polly Holliday of TV's <em>Home Improvement</em> won a Tony nomination on Broadway playing Big Mama in <em>Cat on a Hot Tin Roof</em>, and she makes Clarice, the matriarch of Kaye Gibbons' Civil War story <em>On the Occasion of My Last Afternoon</em>, sound very big of voice indeed. Clarice is the slave who really runs things on Virginia's Seven Oaks plantation, no matter what her nasty, brutish owner, Samuel P. Tate, might think. Holliday has a good time voicing Tate's fulminations, too, neatly distinguishing them from the heroine-narrator Emma Tate's rather daintier dulcet tones. Not that Emma can't be wicked in her own way: she describes a snobbish socialite, &quot;aggressively plain in the face ... who effused through the front door and into the arms of everyone simultaneously.&quot; Ms. Holliday puts as much sly violence into that &quot;effused&quot; as she does into Mr. Tate's rages.<p> Everyone who read Charles Frazier's Cold Mountain should consider reading <em>On the Occasion of My Last Afternoon</em>, the poetically charged fictional reminiscences of Emma Garnet Tate Lowell, circa 1842-1900. For one thing, it was Frazier's already-published friend Gibbons who, with Frazier's wife's connivance, pried <em>Cold Mountain</em> from his grip and got it into publishers' hands. <p> But beyond their Civil War setting--a first for Gibbons, who's noted for 20th-century tales--the two books share resonant Southern literary accents, characters with similarly obstinate responses to enormous grief, and a shivery sense of history's stark shadow falling across everyday events. Oprah Winfrey twice recommended Gibbons' fiction (Ellen Foster and A Virtuous Woman), and Walker Percy compared her to Faulkner. Oprah probably liked Gibbons's heroines for their plucky refusal to buckle under oppression--a trait shared by Gibbons herself, who triumphed over the manic-depressive illness that drove her mother to suicide.<p> Our heroine, Emma, shivers under the tyranny of her plantation daddy, Mr. Tate, who slits the throat of a slave who talks back to him and just might do the same to his half-dozen children. There is no enormity of which he is incapable, this bellowing Simon Legree with an autodidact's education and a self-made man's bottomless urge to rise above his raising. He is, as he might have thunderingly put it, &quot;a pluperfect son of Satan.&quot; Only Clarice can fight Samuel Tate to a verbal draw and prevent slave uprisings on the eve of the war. Clarice helps save Emma, as does Emma's impeccable swain Dr. Quincy Lowell, who sweeps in like a cool Boston breeze to dispel the dismal tidewater miasma.<p> The war, alas, brings a tsunami of blood, forcing Dr. Lowell to make Emma a de facto battlefield surgeon, an occasion he recognizes by fashioning a bit of commemorative jewelry for her from a dead man's silver filling and inscribing the date with a finger-amputation tool. One aspect of Gibbons' Frazier-esque orgy of historical research for the book is an authentic feel for the grotesqueries of the period. <p> One craves for Emma's hubby and daddy to swap five percent of each others' respectively perfect and perfectly awful souls--the book is not big on startling character revelations. What makes it work, despite its binary morality, is the grace and rumbling life of the narrator's language. The book, which has its sometimes anachronistically enlightened head in the New South and its feet firmly planted in the past, deserves a place next to Russell Banks' John Brown novel Cloudsplitter. At points, it reads like a smarter, nonracist Gone with the Wind, only less windy.<em>--Tim Appelo</em></p></p></p></p></p>]]>
  </description>
  <published>1998</published>
</book>

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  <date_added>Sun Feb 22 13:46:48 -0800 2009</date_added>
  <date_updated>Sun Feb 22 13:48:05 -0800 2009</date_updated>
  <read_count></read_count>
    <body><![CDATA[Painful to get through the first fifty pages, but I enjoyed it in the end. It is the account of one woman's life living through the Civil War.]]></body>
    
  <url><![CDATA[http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/47174651]]></url>
  <link><![CDATA[http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/47174651]]></link>
</review>
      <review>
  <id>45540452</id>
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    <name><![CDATA[Donna]]></name>
    <location><![CDATA[Vincentown, NJ]]></location>
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  <id type="integer">873308</id>
  <isbn>0380732149</isbn>
  <isbn13>9780380732142</isbn13>
  <text_reviews_count type="integer">3</text_reviews_count>
  <title>
    <![CDATA[On the Occasion of My Last Afternoon]]>
  </title>
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  <average_rating>3.60</average_rating>
  <ratings_count>524</ratings_count>
  <description>
    <![CDATA[Polly Holliday of TV's <em>Home Improvement</em> won a Tony nomination on Broadway playing Big Mama in <em>Cat on a Hot Tin Roof</em>, and she makes Clarice, the matriarch of Kaye Gibbons' Civil War story <em>On the Occasion of My Last Afternoon</em>, sound very big of voice indeed. Clarice is the slave who really runs things on Virginia's Seven Oaks plantation, no matter what her nasty, brutish owner, Samuel P. Tate, might think. Holliday has a good time voicing Tate's fulminations, too, neatly distinguishing them from the heroine-narrator Emma Tate's rather daintier dulcet tones. Not that Emma can't be wicked in her own way: she describes a snobbish socialite, &quot;aggressively plain in the face ... who effused through the front door and into the arms of everyone simultaneously.&quot; Ms. Holliday puts as much sly violence into that &quot;effused&quot; as she does into Mr. Tate's rages.<p> Everyone who read Charles Frazier's Cold Mountain should consider reading <em>On the Occasion of My Last Afternoon</em>, the poetically charged fictional reminiscences of Emma Garnet Tate Lowell, circa 1842-1900. For one thing, it was Frazier's already-published friend Gibbons who, with Frazier's wife's connivance, pried <em>Cold Mountain</em> from his grip and got it into publishers' hands. <p> But beyond their Civil War setting--a first for Gibbons, who's noted for 20th-century tales--the two books share resonant Southern literary accents, characters with similarly obstinate responses to enormous grief, and a shivery sense of history's stark shadow falling across everyday events. Oprah Winfrey twice recommended Gibbons' fiction (Ellen Foster and A Virtuous Woman), and Walker Percy compared her to Faulkner. Oprah probably liked Gibbons's heroines for their plucky refusal to buckle under oppression--a trait shared by Gibbons herself, who triumphed over the manic-depressive illness that drove her mother to suicide.<p> Our heroine, Emma, shivers under the tyranny of her plantation daddy, Mr. Tate, who slits the throat of a slave who talks back to him and just might do the same to his half-dozen children. There is no enormity of which he is incapable, this bellowing Simon Legree with an autodidact's education and a self-made man's bottomless urge to rise above his raising. He is, as he might have thunderingly put it, &quot;a pluperfect son of Satan.&quot; Only Clarice can fight Samuel Tate to a verbal draw and prevent slave uprisings on the eve of the war. Clarice helps save Emma, as does Emma's impeccable swain Dr. Quincy Lowell, who sweeps in like a cool Boston breeze to dispel the dismal tidewater miasma.<p> The war, alas, brings a tsunami of blood, forcing Dr. Lowell to make Emma a de facto battlefield surgeon, an occasion he recognizes by fashioning a bit of commemorative jewelry for her from a dead man's silver filling and inscribing the date with a finger-amputation tool. One aspect of Gibbons' Frazier-esque orgy of historical research for the book is an authentic feel for the grotesqueries of the period. <p> One craves for Emma's hubby and daddy to swap five percent of each others' respectively perfect and perfectly awful souls--the book is not big on startling character revelations. What makes it work, despite its binary morality, is the grace and rumbling life of the narrator's language. The book, which has its sometimes anachronistically enlightened head in the New South and its feet firmly planted in the past, deserves a place next to Russell Banks' John Brown novel Cloudsplitter. At points, it reads like a smarter, nonracist Gone with the Wind, only less windy.<em>--Tim Appelo</em></p></p></p></p></p>]]>
  </description>
  <published>1998</published>
</book>

    <rating>5</rating>
  <votes>0</votes>
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        <shelf name="read" />
          </shelves>
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  <recommended_by><![CDATA[]]></recommended_by>
  <read_at>Fri Dec 05 00:00:00 -0800 2008</read_at>
  <date_added>Fri Feb 06 04:35:58 -0800 2009</date_added>
  <date_updated>Fri Feb 06 04:40:36 -0800 2009</date_updated>
  <read_count></read_count>
    <body><![CDATA[Mitchell came close to depicting women surviving during the Civil War era, but not nearly as close as Gibbons' portrayal. This a must read. ]]></body>
    
  <url><![CDATA[http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/45540452]]></url>
  <link><![CDATA[http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/45540452]]></link>
</review>
      <review>
  <id>67340422</id>
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    <name><![CDATA[Kimberlyn]]></name>
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  <isbn>0060797142</isbn>
  <isbn13>9780060797140</isbn13>
  <text_reviews_count type="integer">42</text_reviews_count>
  <title>
    <![CDATA[On the Occasion of My Last Afternoon: A Novel]]>
  </title>
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  <average_rating>3.60</average_rating>
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  <description>
    <![CDATA[Polly Holliday of TV's <em>Home Improvement</em> won a Tony nomination on Broadway playing Big Mama in <em>Cat on a Hot Tin Roof</em>, and she makes Clarice, the matriarch of Kaye Gibbons' Civil War story <em>On the Occasion of My Last Afternoon</em>, sound very big of voice indeed. Clarice is the slave who really runs things on Virginia's Seven Oaks plantation, no matter what her nasty, brutish owner, Samuel P. Tate, might think. Holliday has a good time voicing Tate's fulminations, too, neatly distinguishing them from the heroine-narrator Emma Tate's rather daintier dulcet tones. Not that Emma can't be wicked in her own way: she describes a snobbish socialite, &quot;aggressively plain in the face ... who effused through the front door and into the arms of everyone simultaneously.&quot; Ms. Holliday puts as much sly violence into that &quot;effused&quot; as she does into Mr. Tate's rages.<p> Everyone who read Charles Frazier's Cold Mountain should consider reading <em>On the Occasion of My Last Afternoon</em>, the poetically charged fictional reminiscences of Emma Garnet Tate Lowell, circa 1842-1900. For one thing, it was Frazier's already-published friend Gibbons who, with Frazier's wife's connivance, pried <em>Cold Mountain</em> from his grip and got it into publishers' hands. <p> But beyond their Civil War setting--a first for Gibbons, who's noted for 20th-century tales--the two books share resonant Southern literary accents, characters with similarly obstinate responses to enormous grief, and a shivery sense of history's stark shadow falling across everyday events. Oprah Winfrey twice recommended Gibbons' fiction (Ellen Foster and A Virtuous Woman), and Walker Percy compared her to Faulkner. Oprah probably liked Gibbons's heroines for their plucky refusal to buckle under oppression--a trait shared by Gibbons herself, who triumphed over the manic-depressive illness that drove her mother to suicide.<p> Our heroine, Emma, shivers under the tyranny of her plantation daddy, Mr. Tate, who slits the throat of a slave who talks back to him and just might do the same to his half-dozen children. There is no enormity of which he is incapable, this bellowing Simon Legree with an autodidact's education and a self-made man's bottomless urge to rise above his raising. He is, as he might have thunderingly put it, &quot;a pluperfect son of Satan.&quot; Only Clarice can fight Samuel Tate to a verbal draw and prevent slave uprisings on the eve of the war. Clarice helps save Emma, as does Emma's impeccable swain Dr. Quincy Lowell, who sweeps in like a cool Boston breeze to dispel the dismal tidewater miasma.<p> The war, alas, brings a tsunami of blood, forcing Dr. Lowell to make Emma a de facto battlefield surgeon, an occasion he recognizes by fashioning a bit of commemorative jewelry for her from a dead man's silver filling and inscribing the date with a finger-amputation tool. One aspect of Gibbons' Frazier-esque orgy of historical research for the book is an authentic feel for the grotesqueries of the period. <p> One craves for Emma's hubby and daddy to swap five percent of each others' respectively perfect and perfectly awful souls--the book is not big on startling character revelations. What makes it work, despite its binary morality, is the grace and rumbling life of the narrator's language. The book, which has its sometimes anachronistically enlightened head in the New South and its feet firmly planted in the past, deserves a place next to Russell Banks' John Brown novel Cloudsplitter. At points, it reads like a smarter, nonracist Gone with the Wind, only less windy.<em>--Tim Appelo</em></p></p></p></p></p>]]>
  </description>
  <published>1998</published>
</book>

    <rating>4</rating>
  <votes>0</votes>
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  <recommended_for><![CDATA[]]></recommended_for>
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  <read_at>Sun Dec 24 00:00:00 -0800 2000</read_at>
  <date_added>Thu Aug 13 22:29:00 -0700 2009</date_added>
  <date_updated>Thu Aug 13 22:30:16 -0700 2009</date_updated>
  <read_count></read_count>
    <body><![CDATA[a story told as an old woman looks at her life before and during the Civil War in Virginia. Very good]]></body>
    
  <url><![CDATA[http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/67340422]]></url>
  <link><![CDATA[http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/67340422]]></link>
</review>
      <review>
  <id>49206847</id>
    <user>
    <id>2126040</id>
    <name><![CDATA[Jude]]></name>
    <location><![CDATA[Mount Rainier, MD]]></location>
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  <isbn>0060797142</isbn>
  <isbn13>9780060797140</isbn13>
  <text_reviews_count type="integer">42</text_reviews_count>
  <title>
    <![CDATA[On the Occasion of My Last Afternoon: A Novel]]>
  </title>
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  <average_rating>3.60</average_rating>
  <ratings_count>524</ratings_count>
  <description>
    <![CDATA[Polly Holliday of TV's <em>Home Improvement</em> won a Tony nomination on Broadway playing Big Mama in <em>Cat on a Hot Tin Roof</em>, and she makes Clarice, the matriarch of Kaye Gibbons' Civil War story <em>On the Occasion of My Last Afternoon</em>, sound very big of voice indeed. Clarice is the slave who really runs things on Virginia's Seven Oaks plantation, no matter what her nasty, brutish owner, Samuel P. Tate, might think. Holliday has a good time voicing Tate's fulminations, too, neatly distinguishing them from the heroine-narrator Emma Tate's rather daintier dulcet tones. Not that Emma can't be wicked in her own way: she describes a snobbish socialite, &quot;aggressively plain in the face ... who effused through the front door and into the arms of everyone simultaneously.&quot; Ms. Holliday puts as much sly violence into that &quot;effused&quot; as she does into Mr. Tate's rages.<p> Everyone who read Charles Frazier's Cold Mountain should consider reading <em>On the Occasion of My Last Afternoon</em>, the poetically charged fictional reminiscences of Emma Garnet Tate Lowell, circa 1842-1900. For one thing, it was Frazier's already-published friend Gibbons who, with Frazier's wife's connivance, pried <em>Cold Mountain</em> from his grip and got it into publishers' hands. <p> But beyond their Civil War setting--a first for Gibbons, who's noted for 20th-century tales--the two books share resonant Southern literary accents, characters with similarly obstinate responses to enormous grief, and a shivery sense of history's stark shadow falling across everyday events. Oprah Winfrey twice recommended Gibbons' fiction (Ellen Foster and A Virtuous Woman), and Walker Percy compared her to Faulkner. Oprah probably liked Gibbons's heroines for their plucky refusal to buckle under oppression--a trait shared by Gibbons herself, who triumphed over the manic-depressive illness that drove her mother to suicide.<p> Our heroine, Emma, shivers under the tyranny of her plantation daddy, Mr. Tate, who slits the throat of a slave who talks back to him and just might do the same to his half-dozen children. There is no enormity of which he is incapable, this bellowing Simon Legree with an autodidact's education and a self-made man's bottomless urge to rise above his raising. He is, as he might have thunderingly put it, &quot;a pluperfect son of Satan.&quot; Only Clarice can fight Samuel Tate to a verbal draw and prevent slave uprisings on the eve of the war. Clarice helps save Emma, as does Emma's impeccable swain Dr. Quincy Lowell, who sweeps in like a cool Boston breeze to dispel the dismal tidewater miasma.<p> The war, alas, brings a tsunami of blood, forcing Dr. Lowell to make Emma a de facto battlefield surgeon, an occasion he recognizes by fashioning a bit of commemorative jewelry for her from a dead man's silver filling and inscribing the date with a finger-amputation tool. One aspect of Gibbons' Frazier-esque orgy of historical research for the book is an authentic feel for the grotesqueries of the period. <p> One craves for Emma's hubby and daddy to swap five percent of each others' respectively perfect and perfectly awful souls--the book is not big on startling character revelations. What makes it work, despite its binary morality, is the grace and rumbling life of the narrator's language. The book, which has its sometimes anachronistically enlightened head in the New South and its feet firmly planted in the past, deserves a place next to Russell Banks' John Brown novel Cloudsplitter. At points, it reads like a smarter, nonracist Gone with the Wind, only less windy.<em>--Tim Appelo</em></p></p></p></p></p>]]>
  </description>
  <published>1998</published>
</book>

    <rating>5</rating>
  <votes>0</votes>
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  <read_at>Sat Jan 01 00:00:00 -0800 2005</read_at>
  <date_added>Fri Mar 13 19:31:40 -0700 2009</date_added>
  <date_updated>Fri Mar 13 19:32:24 -0700 2009</date_updated>
  <read_count></read_count>
    <body><![CDATA[Hard stuff during the Civil War, but such good story telling &amp; a fabulous woman.]]></body>
    
  <url><![CDATA[http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/49206847]]></url>
  <link><![CDATA[http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/49206847]]></link>
</review>
      <review>
  <id>41584634</id>
    <user>
    <id>236092</id>
    <name><![CDATA[Pamela]]></name>
    <location><![CDATA[Frederick, MD]]></location>
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  <isbn>0060797142</isbn>
  <isbn13>9780060797140</isbn13>
  <text_reviews_count type="integer">42</text_reviews_count>
  <title>
    <![CDATA[On the Occasion of My Last Afternoon: A Novel]]>
  </title>
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  <average_rating>3.60</average_rating>
  <ratings_count>524</ratings_count>
  <description>
    <![CDATA[Polly Holliday of TV's <em>Home Improvement</em> won a Tony nomination on Broadway playing Big Mama in <em>Cat on a Hot Tin Roof</em>, and she makes Clarice, the matriarch of Kaye Gibbons' Civil War story <em>On the Occasion of My Last Afternoon</em>, sound very big of voice indeed. Clarice is the slave who really runs things on Virginia's Seven Oaks plantation, no matter what her nasty, brutish owner, Samuel P. Tate, might think. Holliday has a good time voicing Tate's fulminations, too, neatly distinguishing them from the heroine-narrator Emma Tate's rather daintier dulcet tones. Not that Emma can't be wicked in her own way: she describes a snobbish socialite, &quot;aggressively plain in the face ... who effused through the front door and into the arms of everyone simultaneously.&quot; Ms. Holliday puts as much sly violence into that &quot;effused&quot; as she does into Mr. Tate's rages.<p> Everyone who read Charles Frazier's Cold Mountain should consider reading <em>On the Occasion of My Last Afternoon</em>, the poetically charged fictional reminiscences of Emma Garnet Tate Lowell, circa 1842-1900. For one thing, it was Frazier's already-published friend Gibbons who, with Frazier's wife's connivance, pried <em>Cold Mountain</em> from his grip and got it into publishers' hands. <p> But beyond their Civil War setting--a first for Gibbons, who's noted for 20th-century tales--the two books share resonant Southern literary accents, characters with similarly obstinate responses to enormous grief, and a shivery sense of history's stark shadow falling across everyday events. Oprah Winfrey twice recommended Gibbons' fiction (Ellen Foster and A Virtuous Woman), and Walker Percy compared her to Faulkner. Oprah probably liked Gibbons's heroines for their plucky refusal to buckle under oppression--a trait shared by Gibbons herself, who triumphed over the manic-depressive illness that drove her mother to suicide.<p> Our heroine, Emma, shivers under the tyranny of her plantation daddy, Mr. Tate, who slits the throat of a slave who talks back to him and just might do the same to his half-dozen children. There is no enormity of which he is incapable, this bellowing Simon Legree with an autodidact's education and a self-made man's bottomless urge to rise above his raising. He is, as he might have thunderingly put it, &quot;a pluperfect son of Satan.&quot; Only Clarice can fight Samuel Tate to a verbal draw and prevent slave uprisings on the eve of the war. Clarice helps save Emma, as does Emma's impeccable swain Dr. Quincy Lowell, who sweeps in like a cool Boston breeze to dispel the dismal tidewater miasma.<p> The war, alas, brings a tsunami of blood, forcing Dr. Lowell to make Emma a de facto battlefield surgeon, an occasion he recognizes by fashioning a bit of commemorative jewelry for her from a dead man's silver filling and inscribing the date with a finger-amputation tool. One aspect of Gibbons' Frazier-esque orgy of historical research for the book is an authentic feel for the grotesqueries of the period. <p> One craves for Emma's hubby and daddy to swap five percent of each others' respectively perfect and perfectly awful souls--the book is not big on startling character revelations. What makes it work, despite its binary morality, is the grace and rumbling life of the narrator's language. The book, which has its sometimes anachronistically enlightened head in the New South and its feet firmly planted in the past, deserves a place next to Russell Banks' John Brown novel Cloudsplitter. At points, it reads like a smarter, nonracist Gone with the Wind, only less windy.<em>--Tim Appelo</em></p></p></p></p></p>]]>
  </description>
  <published>1998</published>
</book>

    <rating>3</rating>
  <votes>0</votes>
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        <shelf name="read" />
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  <read_at>Thu Jun 20 00:00:00 -0700 2002</read_at>
  <date_added>Fri Jan 02 06:11:10 -0800 2009</date_added>
  <date_updated>Fri Jan 02 06:11:47 -0800 2009</date_updated>
  <read_count></read_count>
    <body><![CDATA[I really like the way that Kay Gibbons creates a story.  One of my favorite authors.]]></body>
    
  <url><![CDATA[http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/41584634]]></url>
  <link><![CDATA[http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/41584634]]></link>
</review>
      <review>
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  <title>
    <![CDATA[On the Occasion of My Last Afternoon: A Novel]]>
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    <![CDATA[Polly Holliday of TV's <em>Home Improvement</em> won a Tony nomination on Broadway playing Big Mama in <em>Cat on a Hot Tin Roof</em>, and she makes Clarice, the matriarch of Kaye Gibbons' Civil War story <em>On the Occasion of My Last Afternoon</em>, sound very big of voice indeed. Clarice is the slave who really runs things on Virginia's Seven Oaks plantation, no matter what her nasty, brutish owner, Samuel P. Tate, might think. Holliday has a good time voicing Tate's fulminations, too, neatly distinguishing them from the heroine-narrator Emma Tate's rather daintier dulcet tones. Not that Emma can't be wicked in her own way: she describes a snobbish socialite, &quot;aggressively plain in the face ... who effused through the front door and into the arms of everyone simultaneously.&quot; Ms. Holliday puts as much sly violence into that &quot;effused&quot; as she does into Mr. Tate's rages.<p> Everyone who read Charles Frazier's Cold Mountain should consider reading <em>On the Occasion of My Last Afternoon</em>, the poetically charged fictional reminiscences of Emma Garnet Tate Lowell, circa 1842-1900. For one thing, it was Frazier's already-published friend Gibbons who, with Frazier's wife's connivance, pried <em>Cold Mountain</em> from his grip and got it into publishers' hands. <p> But beyond their Civil War setting--a first for Gibbons, who's noted for 20th-century tales--the two books share resonant Southern literary accents, characters with similarly obstinate responses to enormous grief, and a shivery sense of history's stark shadow falling across everyday events. Oprah Winfrey twice recommended Gibbons' fiction (Ellen Foster and A Virtuous Woman), and Walker Percy compared her to Faulkner. Oprah probably liked Gibbons's heroines for their plucky refusal to buckle under oppression--a trait shared by Gibbons herself, who triumphed over the manic-depressive illness that drove her mother to suicide.<p> Our heroine, Emma, shivers under the tyranny of her plantation daddy, Mr. Tate, who slits the throat of a slave who talks back to him and just might do the same to his half-dozen children. There is no enormity of which he is incapable, this bellowing Simon Legree with an autodidact's education and a self-made man's bottomless urge to rise above his raising. He is, as he might have thunderingly put it, &quot;a pluperfect son of Satan.&quot; Only Clarice can fight Samuel Tate to a verbal draw and prevent slave uprisings on the eve of the war. Clarice helps save Emma, as does Emma's impeccable swain Dr. Quincy Lowell, who sweeps in like a cool Boston breeze to dispel the dismal tidewater miasma.<p> The war, alas, brings a tsunami of blood, forcing Dr. Lowell to make Emma a de facto battlefield surgeon, an occasion he recognizes by fashioning a bit of commemorative jewelry for her from a dead man's silver filling and inscribing the date with a finger-amputation tool. One aspect of Gibbons' Frazier-esque orgy of historical research for the book is an authentic feel for the grotesqueries of the period. <p> One craves for Emma's hubby and daddy to swap five percent of each others' respectively perfect and perfectly awful souls--the book is not big on startling character revelations. What makes it work, despite its binary morality, is the grace and rumbling life of the narrator's language. The book, which has its sometimes anachronistically enlightened head in the New South and its feet firmly planted in the past, deserves a place next to Russell Banks' John Brown novel Cloudsplitter. At points, it reads like a smarter, nonracist Gone with the Wind, only less windy.<em>--Tim Appelo</em></p></p></p></p></p>]]>
  </description>
  <published>1998</published>
</book>

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  <date_added>Sun Oct 19 18:23:54 -0700 2008</date_added>
  <date_updated>Sun Oct 19 18:30:09 -0700 2008</date_updated>
  <read_count></read_count>
    <body><![CDATA[Kaye Gibbons, the author of Ellen Foster, creates not one, but two heroines, in this poignant Civil War story...Emma, the pampered plantation daughter with a cruel father, and Clarice, the slave who actually makes things happen there.  Together, they tell the tale of a South that is flawed, majestic...<a href="http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/35723034">more...</a>]]></body>
    
  <url><![CDATA[http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/35723034]]></url>
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  <isbn>0060797142</isbn>
  <isbn13>9780060797140</isbn13>
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  <title>
    <![CDATA[On the Occasion of My Last Afternoon: A Novel]]>
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  <description>
    <![CDATA[Polly Holliday of TV's <em>Home Improvement</em> won a Tony nomination on Broadway playing Big Mama in <em>Cat on a Hot Tin Roof</em>, and she makes Clarice, the matriarch of Kaye Gibbons' Civil War story <em>On the Occasion of My Last Afternoon</em>, sound very big of voice indeed. Clarice is the slave who really runs things on Virginia's Seven Oaks plantation, no matter what her nasty, brutish owner, Samuel P. Tate, might think. Holliday has a good time voicing Tate's fulminations, too, neatly distinguishing them from the heroine-narrator Emma Tate's rather daintier dulcet tones. Not that Emma can't be wicked in her own way: she describes a snobbish socialite, &quot;aggressively plain in the face ... who effused through the front door and into the arms of everyone simultaneously.&quot; Ms. Holliday puts as much sly violence into that &quot;effused&quot; as she does into Mr. Tate's rages.<p> Everyone who read Charles Frazier's Cold Mountain should consider reading <em>On the Occasion of My Last Afternoon</em>, the poetically charged fictional reminiscences of Emma Garnet Tate Lowell, circa 1842-1900. For one thing, it was Frazier's already-published friend Gibbons who, with Frazier's wife's connivance, pried <em>Cold Mountain</em> from his grip and got it into publishers' hands. <p> But beyond their Civil War setting--a first for Gibbons, who's noted for 20th-century tales--the two books share resonant Southern literary accents, characters with similarly obstinate responses to enormous grief, and a shivery sense of history's stark shadow falling across everyday events. Oprah Winfrey twice recommended Gibbons' fiction (Ellen Foster and A Virtuous Woman), and Walker Percy compared her to Faulkner. Oprah probably liked Gibbons's heroines for their plucky refusal to buckle under oppression--a trait shared by Gibbons herself, who triumphed over the manic-depressive illness that drove her mother to suicide.<p> Our heroine, Emma, shivers under the tyranny of her plantation daddy, Mr. Tate, who slits the throat of a slave who talks back to him and just might do the same to his half-dozen children. There is no enormity of which he is incapable, this bellowing Simon Legree with an autodidact's education and a self-made man's bottomless urge to rise above his raising. He is, as he might have thunderingly put it, &quot;a pluperfect son of Satan.&quot; Only Clarice can fight Samuel Tate to a verbal draw and prevent slave uprisings on the eve of the war. Clarice helps save Emma, as does Emma's impeccable swain Dr. Quincy Lowell, who sweeps in like a cool Boston breeze to dispel the dismal tidewater miasma.<p> The war, alas, brings a tsunami of blood, forcing Dr. Lowell to make Emma a de facto battlefield surgeon, an occasion he recognizes by fashioning a bit of commemorative jewelry for her from a dead man's silver filling and inscribing the date with a finger-amputation tool. One aspect of Gibbons' Frazier-esque orgy of historical research for the book is an authentic feel for the grotesqueries of the period. <p> One craves for Emma's hubby and daddy to swap five percent of each others' respectively perfect and perfectly awful souls--the book is not big on startling character revelations. What makes it work, despite its binary morality, is the grace and rumbling life of the narrator's language. The book, which has its sometimes anachronistically enlightened head in the New South and its feet firmly planted in the past, deserves a place next to Russell Banks' John Brown novel Cloudsplitter. At points, it reads like a smarter, nonracist Gone with the Wind, only less windy.<em>--Tim Appelo</em></p></p></p></p></p>]]>
  </description>
  <published>1998</published>
</book>

    <rating>4</rating>
  <votes>0</votes>
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  <date_added>Sun Sep 27 22:13:49 -0700 2009</date_added>
  <date_updated>Sun Sep 27 22:14:25 -0700 2009</date_updated>
  <read_count></read_count>
    <body><![CDATA[This was not my favorite novel of Gibbons', but it is still definitely worth reading. ]]></body>
    
  <url><![CDATA[http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/72734310]]></url>
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      <review>
  <id>41968124</id>
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    <name><![CDATA[LuAnn]]></name>
    <location><![CDATA[Othello, WA]]></location>
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  <isbn>0060797142</isbn>
  <isbn13>9780060797140</isbn13>
  <text_reviews_count type="integer">42</text_reviews_count>
  <title>
    <![CDATA[On the Occasion of My Last Afternoon: A Novel]]>
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  <average_rating>3.60</average_rating>
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    <![CDATA[Polly Holliday of TV's <em>Home Improvement</em> won a Tony nomination on Broadway playing Big Mama in <em>Cat on a Hot Tin Roof</em>, and she makes Clarice, the matriarch of Kaye Gibbons' Civil War story <em>On the Occasion of My Last Afternoon</em>, sound very big of voice indeed. Clarice is the slave who really runs things on Virginia's Seven Oaks plantation, no matter what her nasty, brutish owner, Samuel P. Tate, might think. Holliday has a good time voicing Tate's fulminations, too, neatly distinguishing them from the heroine-narrator Emma Tate's rather daintier dulcet tones. Not that Emma can't be wicked in her own way: she describes a snobbish socialite, &quot;aggressively plain in the face ... who effused through the front door and into the arms of everyone simultaneously.&quot; Ms. Holliday puts as much sly violence into that &quot;effused&quot; as she does into Mr. Tate's rages.<p> Everyone who read Charles Frazier's Cold Mountain should consider reading <em>On the Occasion of My Last Afternoon</em>, the poetically charged fictional reminiscences of Emma Garnet Tate Lowell, circa 1842-1900. For one thing, it was Frazier's already-published friend Gibbons who, with Frazier's wife's connivance, pried <em>Cold Mountain</em> from his grip and got it into publishers' hands. <p> But beyond their Civil War setting--a first for Gibbons, who's noted for 20th-century tales--the two books share resonant Southern literary accents, characters with similarly obstinate responses to enormous grief, and a shivery sense of history's stark shadow falling across everyday events. Oprah Winfrey twice recommended Gibbons' fiction (Ellen Foster and A Virtuous Woman), and Walker Percy compared her to Faulkner. Oprah probably liked Gibbons's heroines for their plucky refusal to buckle under oppression--a trait shared by Gibbons herself, who triumphed over the manic-depressive illness that drove her mother to suicide.<p> Our heroine, Emma, shivers under the tyranny of her plantation daddy, Mr. Tate, who slits the throat of a slave who talks back to him and just might do the same to his half-dozen children. There is no enormity of which he is incapable, this bellowing Simon Legree with an autodidact's education and a self-made man's bottomless urge to rise above his raising. He is, as he might have thunderingly put it, &quot;a pluperfect son of Satan.&quot; Only Clarice can fight Samuel Tate to a verbal draw and prevent slave uprisings on the eve of the war. Clarice helps save Emma, as does Emma's impeccable swain Dr. Quincy Lowell, who sweeps in like a cool Boston breeze to dispel the dismal tidewater miasma.<p> The war, alas, brings a tsunami of blood, forcing Dr. Lowell to make Emma a de facto battlefield surgeon, an occasion he recognizes by fashioning a bit of commemorative jewelry for her from a dead man's silver filling and inscribing the date with a finger-amputation tool. One aspect of Gibbons' Frazier-esque orgy of historical research for the book is an authentic feel for the grotesqueries of the period. <p> One craves for Emma's hubby and daddy to swap five percent of each others' respectively perfect and perfectly awful souls--the book is not big on startling character revelations. What makes it work, despite its binary morality, is the grace and rumbling life of the narrator's language. The book, which has its sometimes anachronistically enlightened head in the New South and its feet firmly planted in the past, deserves a place next to Russell Banks' John Brown novel Cloudsplitter. At points, it reads like a smarter, nonracist Gone with the Wind, only less windy.<em>--Tim Appelo</em></p></p></p></p></p>]]>
  </description>
  <published>1998</published>
</book>

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  <date_added>Mon Jan 05 10:08:09 -0800 2009</date_added>
  <date_updated>Mon Jan 05 10:08:42 -0800 2009</date_updated>
  <read_count></read_count>
    <body><![CDATA[A decent read, but I didn’t enjoy it as much as others by this author.]]></body>
    
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