0 items in cart
|
Ragtimeby Doctorow, E.L
Bookseller Information
Bibliographic Details
Book DescriptionRandom House. Hardcover. 0394469011 First Edition, First Printing Hardcover with dust jacket in Very Good condition. Some wear. No writing. Wear and tear to dust jacket. Some spots of discoloration. . Very Good. Book summaryDoctorow's novel takes place in turn-of-the-century New York, and mingles real-life and fictional characters. The plot involves the Evelyn Nesbit-Stanford White intrigue, but also includes a black musician and his girlfriend, a Jewish peddler on the Lower East Side, and a coterie of wealthy Anglo-Saxons in pursuit of wealth. Time magazine called RAGTIME one of the 10 best books of the 1970s, and it was made into a successful musical.Media Reviews"'Ragtime' is a unique and beautiful work of art about American destiny, built of fact and logical fantasy, governed by music heard and sensed, responsive to cinema both as method and historical datum, shaken by a continental pulse....Its central excellence is its central vision, the idea of the book, which is generative without being obsessive, original without being clever." -- Stanley Kauffmann, Saturday Review "'Ragtime' is as exhilarating as a deep breath of pure oxygen....At times, the swift, short sentences suggest the pristine flicker of silent films; at others, the sharp angles and sardonic deployment of detail in 'Citizen Kane'....The grace and surface vivacity of 'Ragtime' make it enormous fun to read. But beneath its peppy, bracing rhythms sound the neat, sad waltz of 'Gatsby' and the tunes of betrayed promise. History resonates with special clarity here. Doctorow has found a fresh way to orchestrate the themes of American innocence, energy, and inchoate ambition." -- Newsweek "'Ragtime' succeeds entirely...[It] incorporates the fictions and realities of the era of ragtime while it rags our fictions about it. It is an anti-nostalgic novel that incorporates our nostalgia about its subject. It is cool, hard, controlled, utterly unsentimental, an art of sharp outlines and clipped phrases. Yet it implies all we could ask for in the way of texture, mood, character and despair." -- George Stade, New York Times Book Review "...'Ragtime' is a model of a novel: compact because it is perfectly controlled, spare, because a loose end would have detracted from the shape it has, completely absorbing because once in, there is no possible way out except through the last page." -- Doris Grumbach, New Republic "...a brilliant and graceful, a finely wrought and historically provocative, a funny and bizarre story about America at the beginning of the century...Doctorow turns history into myth and myth into history. Along the way he revitalizes the novel as a mythmaking device..." -- Raymond Sokolov, Washington Post Book World First LineIn 1902 father built a house at the crest of the Broadview Avenue hill in New Rochelle, New York. Publisher NotesRelates the interrelated early twentieth-century lives of the families of a New Rochelle manufacturer, an immigrant socialist, and a Harlem musician and their involvements with Evelyn Nesbit, Henry Ford, Houdini, Morgan, Dreiser, Freud, Zapata, and otherperiod notables. Other Recommended Books
|
|
(US)
