Fai clic su di un'immagine per andare a Google Ricerca Libri.
|
Sto caricando le informazioni... A Skeptic's Guide to Writers' Housesdi Anne Trubek
   Nessuno Sto caricando le informazioni...
 Iscriviti per consentire a LibraryThing di scoprire se ti piacerà questo libro. Attualmente non vi sono conversazioni su questo libro.  Adrianne_p | Oct 16, 2012 |    ) lucybrown | Jul 29, 2011 |
 It doesn't take long to realize that Trubek is more a fellow traveler than guide, one ready to prove herself wrong. And indeed there is nothing foolish about her quest. On the contrary, it is a blazingly intelligent romp, full of humor and hard-won wisdom. Part literary history, part travelogue and part personal essay, "A Skeptic's Guide to Writers' Houses" crisscrosses the country in search of epiphanies on the doorsteps of some of our more important writers. hy do people visit writer's homes? What are they looking for and what do they hope to take away that isn't sold in the gift shop? This memoir-travelogue takes you from Thoreau's Concord to Hemingway's Key West, exploring the tracks authors and their fans have laid down over the years. Trubek is a sharp-eyed observer, and you'll wish you could have been her travel companion. a slim, clever bit of literary criticism masquerading as smart travel writing. In a succession of well-reported chapters, Ms. Trubek takes the reader to all these places, as well as to the Walt Whitman House in Camden, N.J. (where the poet lived for the last eight years of his life) and to more obscure destinations, such as the former home of the African-American poet Paul Laurence Dunbar in Dayton, Ohio. Along the way, she notes the vagaries of the real-estate market and the caprice of the literary canon. On occasion, Ms. Trubek even slides toward memoir. Upon visiting the Sonoma Valley ruins of Jack London's so-called Wolf House, which burned down the day he was to move in, she links the event to her own recent separation from her husband. Reflecting on London's ambitions for the place—he hired a fancy architect and used supposedly fire- and earthquake-resistant materials—Ms. Trubek remarks: "All that longing, all that work and then—poof!"
There are many ways to show our devotion to an author besides reading his or her works. Graves make for popular pilgrimage sites, but far more popular are writers' house museums. What is it we hope to accomplish by trekking to the home of a dead author? We may go in search of the point of inspiration, eager to stand on the very spot where our favorite literary characters first came to life-and find ourselves instead in the house where the author himself was conceived, or where she drew her last breath. Perhaps it is a place through which our writer passed only briefly, or maybe it really was a longtime home-now thoroughly remade as a decorator's show-house.In A Skeptic's Guide to Writers' Houses Anne Trubek takes a vexed, often funny, and always thoughtful tour of a goodly number of house museums across the nation. In Key West she visits the shamelessly ersatz shrine to a hard-living Ernest Hemingway, while meditating on his lost Cuban farm and the sterile Idaho house in which he committed suicide. In Hannibal, Missouri, she walks the fuzzy line between fact and fiction, as she visits the home of the young Samuel Clemens-and the purported haunts of Tom Sawyer, Becky Thatcher, and Injun' Joe. She hits literary pay-dirt in Concord, Massachusetts, the nineteenth-century mecca that gave home to Hawthorne, Emerson, and Thoreau-and yet could not accommodate a surprisingly complex Louisa May Alcott. She takes us along the trail of residences that Edgar Allan Poe left behind in the wake of his many failures and to the burned-out shell of a California house with which Jack London staked his claim on posterity. In Dayton, Ohio, a charismatic guide brings Paul Laurence Dunbar to compelling life for those few visitors willing to listen; in Cleveland, Trubek finds a moving remembrance of Charles Chesnutt in a house that no longer stands.Why is it that we visit writers' houses? Although admittedly skeptical about the stories these buildings tell us about their former inhabitants, Anne Trubek carries us along as she falls at least a little bit in love with each stop on her itinerary and finds in each some truth about literature, history, and contemporary America. Non sono state trovate descrizioni di biblioteche |
Autore LibraryThingAnne Trubek è un Autore di LibraryThing, un autore che cataloga la sua biblioteca personale su LibraryThing. pagina del profilo | pagina dell'autore è anche l'autore Anne Trubek. Discussioni correntiNessunoCopertine popolari  
 Google Books — Sto caricando le informazioni...GeneriSistema Decimale Melvil (DDC)810.9Literature English (North America) American literature History and criticism of American literatureClassificazione LCVotoMedia: (3.31)
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
1
From the 1st chapter, we are told that this author is against "Writers' Houses" -- houses that "writers" apparently lived in -- and explains why. *Every* *Single* *Chapter* afterwards (that I have read, which is 4 so far) reiterates that. We are told nothing further in any chapter. Every. Single. Chapter reiterates the 1st – the continued condescension from the author about Writers' Houses and the people that visit them.
And the chapters are not even consistent! The chapters appear to be broken up by Writers' Houses -- so, like, the 2nd chapter is supposed to be about Whitman's house. In large part it is. Then, the next chapter, is supposed to be about Mark Twain's houses, but it is so not! It's about the condescension of these houses, and in this case, the city that houses those houses ... it's a very, very long chapter of the author's ranting against these places. The 4th chapter opens with continued ranting about Mark Twain's previous houses!
I have yet to come across her appearing to be at all open to these memorials that people have established for their favorite authors. It's just one continuous long rant. Kind of like this review.
If you like this review, you'll love the book. If you think I've gone on long enough, don't bother with this book.
Adrianne (