Rainbow The Books

This is the best series I've found for review. Major sections have pretests (diagnostic) and post-tests. Each skill has a brief but clear explanation and example. Worksheets for each section cover basic skills, but there are also worksheets that are completely word problems or that incorporate algebra. So you can select practice sheets for as basic or advanced skills as you need. This book works well with the "Fifth Grade Math Review" (for example) series by Frank Schaffer Publications. They are both excellent but often cover different subsets of skills. (I should say that I actually use the 6th grade version of this book, but am assuming the series is similar throughout.)

This book comes in a binder so its easy to add my own stuff that Ive collected teaching over the last few years. The ideas are excellent for my kids and the activties make it kind of like "chemistry for kids" - but without being too complicated.

If you love poetry, you'll love this wonderful collection by Olivia Mercier. The prose is fresh, gritty, and full of healing. I loved it!

Miranda plays the piano for everyone else until one day she hears a special kind of music she really "needs" to play just for herself. In the end, everybody wins... just the way it should be.

A friend of mine gave me this book when my mom died of cancer. It is a simple story of a mother and daughter and their life together and how their life details continue even after the mom is gone. It is a wonderful small book and a thoughtful gift to someone grieving the loss of their mom.

The now venerable Monarch and Cliff Notes guides have been around for at least 40 years now, I think, and have helped generations of students struggle their way through, let's face it, what they regarded as dull, boring literary classics that seemed to be selected as much for their usefulness as an exercise in student torture as for their supposed literary merits. These guides, ironically enough, simply enabled many students to not even read the book and to at least get a passing grade by just reading the clear, concise and usually insightful and to the point guides. I even used them myself on a couple of occasions--but I was also one of the few who actually read the books. :-)

This is an excellent guide to this difficult book, and presents many of the main issues and topics about GR. Plot, themes, structure, characterization, and others, are covered, and students should find this to be a great help in gaining an understanding of this difficult novel.

Since we're on the subject, I thought I would write a few comments myself to add to what the guide said, since I went to the trouble of coming up with several things that aren't in this booklet.

Before writing this review, I read almost 200 of the other reviews on Amazon about GR, and found that many people didn't like the book because it was too difficult and obscure; others thought it was brilliant. Anyway, although it's a moot point as to whether Amazon needs another review of Gravity's Rainbow, I did come up with a few ideas I didn't see in any of the other reviews, including a couple of comparative observations relating Pynchon to music and art, so I offer them here for what they're worth.

In reading the reviews, I found it curious that this book seems to have polarized people into two equally ardent and vitriolic camps, one who think the book is great, and another who think the book is terrible. Most of the complaints revolved around how difficult the book was. Whatever one may think of GR as a novel, there is no doubt about the richness, range, and depth of Pychon's intellect and his themes and ideas, at least as exemplified in GR. GR is clearly a book that challenges the reader on many levels, and the novel's themes and meanings also work on many levels.

But despite all the criticisms it drew, I personally didn't have any problems with all the various and oft-cited difficulties and complexities of the book. Some of the vast range of scientific and not-so-scientific arcana and esoterica that Pynchon includes in the book I knew, and some of it I didn't, and I didn't worry too much about it. If I learned something in the process, that's fine, and if the novel was a little bit of a stretch at times or a little bit obscure at times because of it, that's okay too. There's nothing wrong with a book that challenges your mind a bit.

To me there are relative degrees of difficulty, and there's a big difference between something that's merely esoteric or recondite, because one doesn't understand the vocabulary, and something that's really intellectually difficult to understand. For example, take Pynchon's large vocabulary and his allusions to various mythic but obscure Qabbalistic, Celtic, and Christian facts and ideas. A good dictionary will fix the first problem, and a good encyclopedia of world myths and religion will fix the second problem, of which I've seen at least a couple on sale at local bookstores in the past. This would have alleviated at least a couple of the complaints by many other reviewers here about how difficult GR was. It might not have alleviated all their problems with the book, but it would have made a big difference. It might mean the difference, for example, between just giving up, which many of them said they did, sometimes after even multiple attempts, and seeing the book through. My point here is that difficulty shouldn't be confused with intellectual laziness.

On the other hand, I think I have a pretty good idea of what real difficulty is. For example, I've been trying to get up to date in modern cosmology, string theory, and quantum mechanics recently. My advanced calculus is now 20 years old and very rusty, and I wasn't that good at math at this level to begin with (I'm really a neurobiologist by education, and who obviously was, at least in mathematics, educated far beyond the level of his intelligence). So although GR is no doubt a very difficult novel, I can tell you that there's no comparison between reading even a novel this rich and complex and the amount of mentally masochistic mind thrashing and head-bashing I'm having to go through with the theoretical physics stuff.

But getting back to GR, Pynchon's writing style is either the victim or benefactor of this richness, however one sees it, and I did find his style somewhat ponderous occasionally, and his long sentences and long-winded descriptions of things to be a bit labored, hyperbolied, and hyperborean at times. Someone once said the reason why no-one reads John Milton except English majors and professors is because no-one has the patience for Miltonian periods anymore. Since both authors often write sentences that go on for a more like a paragraph or even a bigger portion of a page, the same could be said of Pynchon. You can find sentences with exclamation points in the middle, sentences with multiple dashes and ellipses, and multiple sentence fragments that refer to other sentence fragments. One could almost say that his style is more about punctuation and syntax than semantics. But I'll say in his defense that from a linguistic standpoint, his ratio of modifiers to non-modifiers, of adverbs and adjectives to nouns and verbs, is probably higher than most writers, and there is a certain technical and perhaps linguistic validity and aesthetic charm in that.

In addition to the obvious oddities of his punctuation and syntax, there is Pynchon's love affair or perhaps obsession with English and with what I call his "language games," although perhaps not in the sense in which the modern philosopher Wittgenstein meant, but I'll have more to say on that shortly. Pynchon delights in the use of the English language, with all its expressive capabilities, its rhythms, harmonies, dissonances and many opportunities for word-play, esoteric vocabulary, arcane references and allusions, and imaginative and even bizarre figures of speech. And he likes bringing in foreign phrases and languages too, although I can't vouch for their correctness, but a friend of mine says that he has it on good authority from another friend who does speak good German that this isn't one of Pynchon's strong points.

Pynchon is particularly adept at the creative use of metaphor, a characteristic which many analytical rhetoricians and English grammarians regard as a sign of an especially accomplished and intelligent writer. As Lois Shawver, a philosopher at the University of Calgary, Canada, points out about Wittgenstein's theory of word games, "Words seem to be passed from primary or primitive uses of language into this more metaphorical or parasitic use of language with little awareness on our part. These hidden metaphors lead us into language games that we have learned in other contexts without our awareness by a process that the postmoderns call "metaphorical structuring." " She goes on to say, "The enormity of this observation is only striking when one's attention is awakened to the wealth of implicit metaphors that fill our ordinary speech." All this is just by way of saying that metaphor is perhaps the ultimate trope or figure of speech of the linguistic universe, and that Pynchon himself seems to be intuitively or explicitly aware of that fact, since he is a master of it.

Many comparisons have been made with Joyce's Ulysses, and even Burroughs' Naked Lunch. If one is searching for classical and historical comparisons, another one that occurs to me is that Pynchon's juxtaposition of both high-brow and low-brow themes reminds me more of Rabelais's Gargantua and Pantagruel than either Ulysses or Naked Lunch. In fact, I think Pynchon should write a sequel to GR, entitled Ulysses and Gargantua's Naked Lunch at Tiffany's, starring Audrey Hepburn and George Peppard. Well, they're probably too old now, so perhaps it could be Madonna and Brad Pitt.

I do think he goes a little too far with all the cutesy and weird names, and I don't think this really adds much to the novel. Also, appropos of Pynchon's long-winded descriptions and obsession with observing the most minute details, one thing that separates a great author from a lesser one is the ability to pick and choose the most salient and most telling details without having to inundate the reader with extraneous trivia. This is an important part of writing craftsmanship, and craftsmanship is something a friend of mine who reads many more novels than I do often emphasizes, although I don't seem to have much of a sense for it myself. Theodore Dreiser comes to mind in this regard, and as a result, it can be said of Dreiser that he is a great author but a lesser writer. The same may apply to Pynchon. If I may paraphrase something the great art historian, G.C. Argan, observed about van Eyck's oil paintings but that I think applies equally well to Pynchon, even nature is not so capillary, meticulous, and absurd as Pynchon's prodigious eye sees it.

Since the novel is a storytelling art and medium, I think the language should promote the telling of the story and therefore be mostly perspicuous and transparent rather than opaque in terms of facilitating such telling. Pynchon's language tends more toward the opaque and overtly self-conscious end of the spectrum, but I didn't even mind that, since I can get into word games and philological recondities or crudites as much as anyone. But Pynchon seems more concerned with providing an intellectual smorgasbord for the reader rather than a real story in the traditional sense.

That, too, is fine, except one needs to exercise some measure of control and discipline over the process. And I'm not referring to the problem of the intellectual odyssey becoming nothing more than a vain and self-serving display of erudition, a complaint which a number of reviewers here have levied against Pynchon. I'm not even worried about that. I'm not the most intellectually modest person myself, so I can't fault Pynchon for that, either. I'm referring, rather, to the need to maintain some kind of structure and minimal architectonic basis lest the novel partly or completely disintegrate because of the chaotic intellectual and literary adventurism of its author.

To cite an interesting parallel from music, take Dvorak's 9th Symphony ("The New World"), for example. This is a justly famous Romantic-period symphony, and Dvorak was certainly a brilliant composer. On the other hand, it's also an example of where he got more than a little bit too inventive with all the melodies and themes in the composition, to the point where the symphony almost explodes because of Dvorak's over-ingenuity and his near failure to keep everything integrated and tied together. Well, the symphonic four-movement, sonata-allegro form is a more structured and disciplined art form than the novel, perhaps, but the same principles still apply. It takes a brilliant or at least very inventive composer or author like Dvorak or Pynchon to get into this situation in the first place as well as to get out of it, and I leave it to the reader to decide whether Gravity's Rainbow, like Dvorak's 9th, almost comes to, or falls over, the brink of disaster as a result.

That having been said, as Allen Ruch points out in his structural analysis of Pynchon, "Contrary to the opinion of some frustrated readers and a few cranky critics, Gravity's Rainbow is not an unstructured work that sprawls chaotically across 800 pages. Like its literary grandparents Moby Dick and Ulysses, if the light of intelligent analysis is directed upon its pages, a structure emerges from the dense thickets: there is a method in its madness. On the most basic level, it is organized into four parts, each given a name and prefaced by a quotation. These parts are then divided into smaller sections generally called "episodes," which vary in length from a single page to fifty or more." I refer the reader to Ruch's excellent article for more information, which, if you do a Google search on "Gravity's Rainbow: an analysis," can be found on his website.

Whether it hangs together structurally or textually, however, is a different question from whether it hangs together aesthetically, i.e., as a unified, powerful, dynamic, and dramatic work of art. Note that these adjectives represent aesthetic qualities that apply not only to music and art, but to literary works as well. But whether or not GR succeeds at this level or not, this is a much more difficult and complex question to consider, and one which I'm not sure I know yet how to answer completely anyway, except that I believe GR posseses all of these important qualities in abundance.

Overall, I found Pynchon's imaginative and eclectic mix, or perhaps alchemical witches brew, of historical, paranoid, erotic, scientific, philological, philosophical, and fantastic themes entertaining and imaginative, and at the very least, educational. So I'll go on record by saying that despite the several issues I discuss above, I thought this was a unique if not brilliant book. If I can indulge in a somewhat Pynchonesque and risque metaphor myself, I would describe Pynchon's at times cerebral, at times low-brow, and at other times, pornographic magnum opus, as basically the intellectual foreskin on the flaccid penis of the present literary universe.

My kids have the entire 2-5 yr old set of Me Too! books and we are now beginning our collection of the older age books. These are very well written Bible story books that my children choose to read again and again... and I really like the values my kids are learning. "More Than Beautiful" is the story of Queen Esther, from the time she came to Persia until the Jews are saved from genocide. The great thing about this book is it doesn't just tell the story, it asks, "what would you do?" And it emphasizes that Esther's faith, wisdom and courage made her truly beautiful.

This book is a beautifully written story of how a man grieves the loss of his wife. Nice to read something about grieving from the person who experienced it rather then a Dr. The man's perspective of grieve and loss is also enlightening.

Hanif Kureishi is one of a new generation of British writers whose experience of the United Kingdom is refracted, socially and culturally, through his Pakistani heritage.

My Beautiful Laundrette brings together the script of Hanif Kureishi's recent award-winning film with a long autobiographical on the nature of the Pakistani experience, The Rainbow Sign.
--- from book's back cover

This book offers powerful wisdom, written in an easily understandable style. Mr. Perkins has worked healing wonders on my college-aged son, both physically and spiritually - so I have proof that he knows whereof he speaks. I personally have experienced marked improvements to my physical and spiritual health just by following the techniques detailed in this book. Thank you, Mark Perkins, and I eagerly await the next episode in your tale!