Missouri Books

This book is a great read. Sodowsky takes us to Africa and shows us the lives of Americans working there and their entanglements with each other and with African culture.

The writing is amazingly descriptive. Indeed, the reader feels him/herself transported to the scene and immediately enjoying the position of "fly on the wall" as the characters seek their way through their unusual situations.

So why not five stars? The writing is extraordinary, and the plots keep the reader going. In my view, the women are stock characters; we've met these ladies many times before!

Still, the book is not only well-written, but is engaging; the reader is left with plenty to think about in terms of personal and global relationships.

THINGS WE LOSE is a frightening look into human nature. These stories will rivet you and surprise you. The stories take place in an Africa where expatriate workers clash with the native culture of the land. In the midst of this unfamiliar world, the reader comes to learn about the dark heart of humanity. If you like good writing, you'll love this book.

Rose Wilder Lane- Laura Ingalls Wilder's daughter- and Helen Dore Boyleston- author of the Sue Barton - were friends and traveled by car from Paris to Albania during the 1920's. This book is basically excerpts from their diaries and provides some wonderful insight into their lives and is great just because it is surprising in the way that people you never imagined were connected are.

I admit to a bias. Helen Dore Boylston was a cousin of my grandfather's and I've been feeling terribly cheated since I read this book because I never met her. The story is remarkable. Two young women decide to drive from Albania to Paris. Their adventures are not, perhaps, quite as colorful as one might hope, but their daring and imagination in deciding upon such an voyage make your realize that Laura Ingalls Wilder really raised one heck of a brave and free daughter. I'd recommend it to anyone who's read the Little House Books or any of Helen Dore Boylston's books about Sue Barton.

I live in New york on the Island. I've always, always had a fascination with the old west, and in particular the state of Kansas.. even though I haven't yet been there. For Christmas this year, my mum gave me among other things, an actual Kansas license plate along with this book. I started reading it right away and it has been entirely engrossing. Very interesting individual tales, some are pretty short, so this is the perfect book to read while on the train. I love it.

Here's one for the history buffs out there. Kids and adults, read about frontier life in Kansas. This is an excellent addition to any library collection. -Native Kansan

While this book is about 20 years old it tells a good story about Tower Grove Park. This park is one of only four in the Unitrd States designated as a national historical park. At the present time the park is being restored and new trees being added. With this,new walks are being established and will be known as the Discovery Forest. The Discovery Forest is being dedicated on 16 April 1999 and Mr.Knittel has been invited to participate.

I've never been to Tower Grove Park in St. Louis, though after reading this book I feel I know it well. Robert Knittel reminds his readers of the joys and rewards of walking for pleasure, stopping to observe and breathe in details, taking detours recommended by a curious canine guide (the author's airdale Herb believes in taking the trails less traveled). In this fast-paced world, we need guides like this, which encourage us not to squeeze all the top sites into one frantic touring afternoon, but to savor and discover our most familiar surroundings through the seasons.

Our sunday school class is really enjoying this book. Once again, James W. Moore hasn't let us down. Very thought provoking.

We are doing this as a small group Bible study. Our ages vary from 43 to 85 and we ALL love it. We have done many different studies over the last 3 years and by far this is our favorite! We are almost through with this one and have already decided to go ahead with another one from James Moore.

A life worth telling is a story worth reading. Rosenberger reveals the life of an only child born of a highborn German immigrant father and a lovely American woman. Living in a working class Kansas City neighborhood during the notorious Pendergast era, a mischievious child, he served as an altar boy in the Roman Catholic Church. Rosenberger continued his service at the Church while growing into a delinquent, nearly criminal youth. Struggling to find his way, he chose the priesthood and did what it took to achieve his goal. He found the Church heirarchy corrupt and dishonest and was sorely disappointed when they set up roadblocks to the enlightened movement set out by Vatican II. Separating himself from the Church, he left the priesthood and struggled to find his way in the world, becoming a husband, father, and successful businessman. In time he became one of those courageous enough to stand up to the Church's practice of hiding the sexual abuse by priests. Essential for individuals who are interested in life in the 1930's, the Pendergast era, regional history, the inside the Catholic Church's practices and beliefs, and the sexual abuse scandals of the Roman Catholic Church, this is a revealing autobiography about a courageous man.

I was very interested in the subject from a priest's point of view. The author saw the abuse and the hypocricy of the church leaders. A fascinating and tragic story that is still shocking even after all the news about it.

This is a good book about Dr. Galahad. It has a medical atmosphere. Tony is a doctor and finds a wife. This is a wonderful book if you like books about doctors.

I enjoyed this book. It was deep and well-written. I am happy that Ms. Seifert won a $10,000 prize for it. (Probably about the same as $100,000 in today's money.) I know that the book took a lot of skill, concentration, talent, and patience to write, so she did deserve the prize. The book was an in-depth and interesting story of a loyal, dedicated, and extremely good doctor who took his "doctor vows" serious. In this novel, Ms. Seifert, takes us inside the hospital and gives us a vivid view of "hospital and doctor works". I was saddened that Tony did not get to marry Marietta, but married Carolyn instead (but I guess that's one of the things that makes the book so good). This book was soul- and heart-touching. It was powerful on the senses. It felt real, it was tingling, it was moving. It was great. This was a great first novel. It showed that Ms. Seifert has talent. I'm sure it was a great start for her writing career. I enjoyed this ! novel and finished the last page feeling moved and touched. I was glad I read it.

I can't say more on the plot because it's quite obvious what the plot is just from illustrations of the novel. But on the "controversial" aspect of the novel involving the excessive use of the N word, people have to think of the time period that Twain is writing about and when the novel was published.
The novel takes place in Missouri (a slave border state) in the 1830s. We use the term African-American or black now. Before that it was Afro-Americans, coloreds, Negr--s. The list goes on and on. The overall attitude was that as the terms changed the previous one was seen as more offensive than the progressive current one. Yes, that meant there was a time when the word "colored" was used by people who considered themselves progressive in terms of racial attitudes. But in the Antebellum South the use of the N word was thrown around quite easily. And persons added positive as well as negative adjectives to it. It's strange to imagine that. We today only think of it in a totally negative way. But even when Twain published the novel in the 1880s the word was unfortunately not yet out of fashion.
Also consider the way Twain writes of Jim, the runaway slave. While the knee-jerk reaction is that Jim is a total vaudevillian caricature of what the perception was of blacks in the Antebellum South, his relationship with Huck Finn was something to be viewed as progressive. Remember that a decade before the novel came out; Reconstruction was over and left things a mess in terms of race relations. There was a lot of bitterness in the South over the Civil War (probably the most destructive war at the time until WWI), and a whole generation of southern white men took it personally when they were expected to be on the same level in terms of voting rights and other things with men that was formerly human property. For us today "all men are created equal" is a statement of truth provided we all have a level playing field. But for many southern whites at the time this was hard to swallow. In an aristocratic agrarian society, some men are just superior to others. And in the Antebellum South, just below poor whites were blacks. This was the way things were in their society for over two hundred years and the Civil War didn't suddenly end that sentiment among the many. But for Twain to write of a kind of comradeship between a slave and a young white boy was definitely progressive.
Maybe Twain was hoping to reach a young generation raised by their bitter parents and discover that they could have friendships with blacks and not succumb to an entrenching separatist animosity that developed into the Jim Crow Era. Huck and Jim work together in schemes and have fun. This friendship (which is why Huck decides to do what he does on the journey) is what Twain emphasized in the journey down river. This was counter to the way whites were acting with and around blacks at the time (1880s).
I think it's clear based on a certain reading of the novel that Twain believed whites and blacks could and should get along. While today it may not be seen as "progressive", it was when it was first published.

Everyone should read or re-read this classic. Most of us read it in school, probabaly not in its entirety. Schools struggled then and now with the use of the N word, although teenage boys in the 1830's clearly would never have heard a synonym.

These adventures are a classic. The royals were a hoot, how many failed fraudulent enterprises could they invent before the inevitable tar and feathering. Huck and Jim are on the run from an abusive father and the law, respectively, and Twain shows all people have a great deal in common, in spite of theories prevalent in the antebellum era.

I'm not sure why Tom Sawyer needs to show up to conclude this thing. The ending could work without him, maybe Twain not sure that Finn could carry the book or film alone.

This Norton Critical Edition is truly the best version of Huck Finn one could find, with the original Kempel drawings, footnotes that fully explain textual issues without being intrusive, and well-chosen criticism. It is invaluable to me as a graduate student, and would be just as useful to the casual but attentive reader.

Huckleberry Finn is a classic. Simple as that. It provides a look into what life was probably like for a 19th century boy. It was different than the life of children today, because today life centers around education. Back then, it was a regular thing to play hooky, even though they got in trouble for it when they were caught. And when they were punished, usually it was with a beating instead of `You're Grounded!'.

The book shows us how badly slaves were treated. They weren't even considered humans! It was like they didn't have feelings, and didn't see things the same way white people did. They way the slaves actually did think was odd. It was sad to see that they could slap a slave for no reason, and the slave would accept it either because they were used to it or they thought that whites were better than them.

Huck Finn is rather unrealistic in the aspect of adventure. I'm guessing most boys back then didn't run off with an escaped slave to Cairo. The way that Mark Twain wrote the book was different than other first/second person books I've seen. The dialogue was very much like the 19th century southern Mississippi talk. Sometimes it got hard to decipher what a paragraph in slave-speak meant because it was so obscure.

All in all, Mark Twain's writing style is different than the traditional Southern book, but that doesn't detract at all from the story. I liked it!

This book is required reading for my 16 yr old son....the
book arrived quickly & in great shape! Saved me driving all
over town to compete w/ other parents also looking!! Thanks!

The Satanic Verses / 0-312-27082-8

Trapped for days and nights on a hijacked airplane, our heroes suddenly find themselves hurtling towards their certain doom when the hijackers finally decide to detonate the airplane mid-flight. As they plummet towards the ocean which will surely break every bone in their body, they embrace and sing children's nursery rhymes to slow their descent to a gentle, safe tumble. then, the strangeness begins.

The Satanic Verses is a heady carpet ride of a novel, an opium-laced dream. Most readers will probably tire of this quickly - there is certainly much to be said about racism and religious bigotry in this world of ours, but not everyone will appreciate the expression of this via scenes of women fantastically changing into glass statues, nor via images of hapless pilgrims marching into the sea to their death.

For those who will appreciate this unusual and vivid symbolism, The Satanic Verses is a genuine treasure. There is so much to absorb here that something new is found with each reading, some new gem of wisdom or seed of doubt. Rushdie does not claim to have any answers - he only claims to have questions. He does not believe himself to be blasphemous, for he believes that without belief, there can be no blasphemy. (There is some truth in this - no matter what you believe, you are still considered 'blasphemous' to someone, somewhere who dislikes your beliefs, but that doesn't mean that you mean to be blasphemous nor that you take pride or pleasure in it.)

Is this book offensive to Islam? I guess it depends on who you ask. I see this as one man's interpretation of a religion whose divine origin he has doubts on. There are thousands of books that say the same about Islam, Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism, Wicca, and so on. Rushdie does not present his doubts or theories as fact, just as heady dreams in the minds of his own insane characters. I believe teh purpose of The Satanic Verses is simply to ask the readers to examine their beliefs, whatever they may be, religious or otherwise.

Finally got around to reading this and must say it is one of the worst books I have ever encountered.It is dull, rambling, a real case of fishing for some sense in writing that flies and thuds with equal abandon,so that finishing it is more like punishment than pleasure.

I'm having trouble sticking with it. It's a little nebulous and I enjoy more concrete of a style. I'm still not sure what got him into so much trouble but it does speak to the attitude of Islamic people Catholics have been ridiculed and seem to take it better

My wife commented drily as she saw me reading this day after day that it was probably one of the least read bestsellers. Two decades after its controversial release, does this novel merit the considerable attention it demands from any reader taking on over five-hundred pages of often densely Joycean, exuberantly Dickensian, or meditatively magic-realist prose? I think the stories in isolation have many moments that reward careful examination. However, they are dispersed among long sections in which not much happens of any account, so far as the reader's concerned. Rushdie seeks to make a statement about the clash of East and West, the formation of Islam, a surrealistic trek from Pakistan to the Arabian Sea, and London's multicultural ferment. He does manage to explore all these realms, but only with intermittently engrossing scenes.

This novel took me days to finish. My favorite parts probably overlapped those that earned its author greatest hatred among Muslim critics: how the Prophet started Islam under the dictation of Angel Gibreel for me sustained my interest most consistently. The clash of Al-Lat, the female goddess worshipped in Mecca, and Al-Lah, the god who allows no competition, makes for intriguing tension as Hind, the representative of the polytheist old guard, squares off against Mahound the Messenger, who finds himself soon entangled in the dictations and prevarications of Gibreel. "The war between us cannot end in truce." (123) Rushdie contrasts this 7th-century reimagining of how Islam began with contemporary scenes set in London, that intensify other ideological clashes.

In one vignette, Pamela, the lover of Saladin, offers a poignant eulogy for the post-colonial era: "It has been quite a culture, brilliant and foul, cannibal and Christian, the glory of the world. We should celebrate it while we can; until night falls." (190) In exile in London, an Imam's condition spurs this reflection from the omniscient narrator: "In exile no food is ever cooked; the dark-spectacled bodyguards go out for take-away. In exile all attempts to put down roots look like treason: they are admissions of defeat." (190) I found such observations more durable than the fictional post-modern tricks that Rushdie used to keep the stories moving, as these often thwarted easy identification by the reader and wearied me.

Such narrative leaps are acknowledged, as Mimi notes: "I have read 'Finnegans Wake' and am conversant with postomodern critiques of the West, e.g, that we have here a society capable only of pastiche: a 'flattened' world." (270) "Salman the Persian," an early witness to Mahound's claims of being a chosen mediator between Al-Lah and the people of Mecca, suspicious of how the Prophet in seemingly contemporary fashion appears to be angling the revelations supposedly received from Gibreel as a divine messenger to suit his own mortal situation, observes: "This was when he had the idea that destroyed his faith, because he recalled of course that Mahound himself had been a businessman, and a damned successful one at that, a person to whom organization and rules came naturally, so how excessively convenient it was that he should have come up with such a very businesslike archangel, who handed down the management decisions of this highly corporate, if non-corporeal, God." (376)

This astute judgment makes it hard to take the Qur'an at face value anymore. Salman begins to insert what are called the "satanic verses" into the oral revelation, at first as a little joke, then as a way to bring down the pride of the Messenger whose fame and power increase as he is judged the recipient of the divine Revelation of Submission, the new faith that ousts Hind and the goddess-worshippers and the prostitutes-- an episode that numbers among the best in this tale. Mahound is determined to avenge himself in the name of Allah upon Salman and Hind and their kind: "Writers and whores, I see no difference here." (405) This contention between those who understand human desire and cater to mortal weakness against those who dominate the temptings of the flesh with the demands of the spirit-- all the while making exceptions for their own positions of power-- make for thoughtful pages here.

Finally, as with a nod to Nabokov, who'd I'd been thinking about when trudging on through Rushdie's increasingly complicated storylines, Saladin as Chamcha explodes in frustration at this knotted Arabian concatenation of one episode after another: "I give up, anyway. How are you supposed to read a man who writes in a made-up lingo of his own?" (456) This applies to portions here as much as "Pale Fire." The later section on the pilgrimage to the sea by Mishal and her contingent, as they plod on to the Arabian Sea, suffers by comparison with the more evocative scenes from the labyrinthine brothel or even the set-piece of a miniature London at a party on the sets of Shepperton studios. Rushdie has too many balls to juggle in the air, and it's still eighty pages to go. Still, it's probably rewarding enough for the patient.

The glimpses may be worth it, of Alleluia Cone's Himalayan portage, of Chamcha's polyphonic chaos caused at the expense of his rival and one-time pal Farishta, and of their exchanges on the relative distinctions of life lived in Bombay vs. London. No reader will fail to be moved by such chapters, but there's lots of languor intervening that challenges the casual visitor to this audacious and multi-levelled novel. It's all summed up to the moment, 90% through, on pg. 472 of the paperback in case you're totally at sea, however. Gibreel's dreams multiply as he faces the final apocalyptic (of course) showdown with rival Saladin.

Very strange book, but then I like strange. I fear that much of his artistry is lost in the translation. To really enjoy this book you must read from a different cultural viewpoint.

This is very dark fantasy with some good twists and turns.

I found this to be a real feel good book. I stumbled on Fannie Flaggs' book 'Welcome to the World Baby Girl' and was so taken by it that I looked for more of her books. I think she has written three books that take place in Elmwood Springs and I've enjoyed them all - just simple stories about people.

I've just read Standing in the Rainbow for the second time and it was as entertaining as the first time! Fannie Flagg again takes ordinary people and places and tells their story in an engaging way to draw in readers' hearts. Set in Middle America, the story revolves around a group of residents of Elmwood Springs and their normal but intriguing lives that weave the town's tapestry together.

Fannie Flagg has filled this story with authentic people from a small town; people we would like to meet for a cup of coffee. They're believable and likable and you wouldn't mind having them for a neighbor.

The story begins in the 1940s. Fannie Flagg lets the reader relive or learn for the first time about five decades of American history--the good, bad and sometimes awful when we've gone to war. All in all it's an uplifting story and one that keeps you turning pages because you're so connected with her characters and can't wait to find out what happens next to all of them. A delightful read. I highly recommend the book.

This is one of my favorite novels by Flagg. A must-read for anyone who loves witty humor and lovable characters. Flagg is a wonderful southern author and knows how to tell a story.

This was a funny, heart warming, lovely book. I'm trying not to read this too fast because I don't want to leave the characters in the small town of Elmwood. This book will have you laughing out loud. Highly recommend it. I wish my mom was still living.....she would have really enjoyed this book. It brings back memories of childhood events for me in the 60's.

Standing in the Rainbow (Ballantine Reader's Circle) I was introduced to this book and this author through the book club I attend. This novel was a great find! I thoroughly enjoyed entering the world of Elmwood Springs, Missouri in circa 1940. Neighbor Dorothy and her friends have become cherished acquaintances. I loved this book so much that when I found a follow-up "Can't Wait to Get to Heaven" in my local library I grabbed that up and read it as well. Enjoyed it every bit as much as the first one. I highly recommend this book to anyone who would enjoy a feel good read and don't be surprised if you find yourself smiling or even laughing out loud frequently as you read about the folks of Elmwood Springs.