Fergus, Weaver of Autistic Webs > Recent Status Updates

Hard-hitting page-turner as this is, it reveals an innate understanding of how the rough male ego reacts when stressed to the max in the grim theatre of war.

A Hugely Convicting book on the moral imperative of contemporary Social Action.

I needed a change. An air of been-there, done-that polite sophistication was becoming my literary meat and potatoes. I was famished for fresh air, and found it here. Lane’s style is terse and direct and hard hitting, like the pulp fiction a neighbour in the fifties loved. He held a doctorate in biology but he loved hunting and fishing. And make no bones, he was a man’s man. Thanks Mr. Lane, I needed this!

Edmund Wilson, the subject of this book, in the 1920´s, was the Cool Dude Incarnate to so many flappers. But when I read his book The Twenties 20 years ago, I thought he was anything but. I thought he was a mere uncouth ANIMAL.

So I recently gave that book away. NOW, however, I see my judgment judged ME much more than Wilson. You see, I was a mere Sheep in Wolf’s clothing (and never trust a sheep with WOLF FUR)!

An OUTSTANDINGLY Fine Book!.An ordinary man flashes back upon the events of his life in this world - Before and AFTER his own death...

What TREASURES are unearthed when we clean out our basements!

My thoughtful younger bro sent this book to us for Christmas in 1989. What a beautiful, humongous-sized book! AND it is filled with incredible photos throughout.

This is my required reading this afternoon, upstairs, when my better half is roasting our Turkey for our Canadian Thanksgiving!

A very human, realistic and superlatively POSITIVE book about the desolation wreaked by chronic pain - by a Catholic deacon humble enough to admit to his own chronic suffering - all the while sharing the Way through and above it that he has taken. I can dig it. A chronic bipolar veteran myself, I too have learned that Union with my own Cross is the CURE - not of the illness - but of the Pain that goes with it.

Stone's writing crackles with sheer Electricity!

Waymarsh and Strether bicker over bringing young Chad back into The Family Fold. Strether remains sunny and positive, while Waymarsh - as his name suggests, with his head plunged into a Slough along the Way - remains choleric and negative!

Anthony is one very, VERY funny, and wise, young writer. Any wonder? He's a regular New Yorker staffer!

Part III begins. The deed is done, by Strether alone. What horrid critique will then issue from Waymarsh’s conservative lips? Not a temperate one, we think - if Strether has erred with young Chad. Time will tell!

I was a Larry. Born about the same time. And I went thru EXACTLY the same changing moods of those decades. The seventies. The eighties. The nineties!

Then, in 1999, as the Millenium beckoned, I started to anxiously HUNT FOR MY ORIGINAL SELF.

We are all playthings of our Zeitgeist. So...

Great Canadian Novel, here I am!

Heavily enlaced with the most cutting of aristocratic ironies, to elicit chuckles GALORE from the Pit...

This is so cool! I'm just letting my old, late lamented - and yikes, bipolar like me - friend McElway guide my weary burnt out brain to the Great Age of the New Yorker, just like his old - and joyfully sane - comrade in arms, Roger Angell (still publishing, after ninety, books like This Old Man). Who says there's no joy left in life? Just read McElway accusing Admiral Nimitz of TREASON! Give this guy his meds....

I've just learned from a very good GR friend that Lambert Strether's "awakening" is as short-lived as mine has (on purpose) proven. Thank heaven, Henry (James)! Discretion is by far the HAPPIEST form of valour.

Tough but necessary.

Incisively penetrating, from a psychological point of view. I am seeing Henry James through Entirely new eyes!

Just HAD to get this, and I LOVE it. It's what a burnt-out old guy like me NEEDS, to get his daily catharsis. It's like the pivotal character in Henry James' best (for me personally) book, The Ambassadors, says, it's just all too awful. But it's all OK for her, because she's totally worn out, like me!

I first started this seminal Victorian novel when I was eighteen. I loved it - but never knew why. The answer, of course, as I peruse it now more than 50 years later, is because it was for the same reason as I loved Monty Python's Flying Circus back then. You see, both books are side-splittingly funny sendups of the Brit Ruling Class!

SUPER Book!

For me, the BEST NOVEL I have read this year. No question.

Absolutely WONDERFUL.

A long-overdue reread. It's been almost 50:years - since the dull, listless beginning of my pensionable career - and Atwood was ANYTHING but dull!

Isn’t it GREAT being a New Yorker? These essays are Superb.

The epochal New Yorker columnist directs his watchful eyes and ears, and his witty and urbane mind, toward the people and events who have shaped the vibrant inner life of Manhattan over the past century. A real crowd-pleaser! I am not in the least disappointed with my choice of this audiobook.

The audiobook is Beautiful, and I will get a print version for my ailing old high school friend Don, as he recovers from heart surgery!

Audiobook.

These stories are Models of Integrity, Discretion and Understatement. I’m gonna give them the Full Five Stars.