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  by susanmargaret & 5 users

• Current

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Type: fiction

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Status: neutral

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Author: Willa Cather

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Tags: midwest Pioneers

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Description: As far as books about pioneer life go, there are far better books to read than Cather'sAs far as books about pioneer life go, there are far better books to read than Cather's O' Pioneers. I would not recommend this book for reading. If you want a good book about the hardships of Pioneer life, read Ole Rolvaag's Giants in the Earth. The characters in O’ Pioneers are pretty lifeless and unemotional. While reading O' Pioneers, I was reminded of the unemotional tone of the characters in the movie "Fargo".

While reading the first section of the book, I felt like I was receiving the “who and what” but not the “why.” Even the conversations between the characters seem simple and to the point, no unnecessary words are spoken. Many times while reading, I wished I could kick some life into the characters.
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2006-11-06

  by joshsmith

• Current

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Type: poetry

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Status: I recommend

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Author: Ted Kooser

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Tags: poetry plains midwest

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Description: 'There is a sense of quiet amazement at the core of all Kooser's work, but it especially'There is a sense of quiet amazement at the core of all Kooser's work, but it especially seems to animate his new collection of poems, a book of portraits and landscapes, Delights & Shadows. Every delight is shadowed by darkness in this book of small wonders and hard dualisms. The book begins with a poem called "Walking on Tiptoe" and ends with one entitled "A Happy Birthday." It takes an epigraph from Emily Dickinson -- "The Sailor cannot see the North, but knows the Needle can" -- but just as easily could have taken one from Wallace Stevens: "Death is the mother of beauty." Mortality is omnipresent and induces a deep attentiveness. Everyone here -- a young woman in a wheelchair, a skater dressed in black, a group of mourners after a funeral, the poet himself -- seems to be moving lightly over an invisible abyss. "There are days when the fear of death/ is as ubiquitous as light. It illuminates/ everything," he writes in "Surviving." "Were it not for the way you taught me to look/ at the world, to see the life at play in everything," he writes to his mother who has been dead just one month, "I would have to be lonely forever."' - Edward Hirsch, The Washington Post...

2005-10-24