Crossing to Safety: Wallace Stegner (Penguin Modern Classics)

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The project will be produced by Escape Artists’ Todd Black, Jason Blumenthal, Steve Tisch and Bloomfield. Well, I listened to the audiobook during a long 7h drive today and found it more interesting than Angle and yet not in my upper echelon of American 20th C novels. Honest and straightforward, educated yet unpretentious, cantankerous yet compassionate, Wallace Stegner was an enormous presence in the American literary landscape, a man who wrote and lived with ferocity, energy, and integrity. After all, he’s a famous novelist, and, for 35 years, Larry and his wife Sally have been close friends of the couple. Tracing the lives, loves, and aspirations of two couples who move between Vermont and Wisconsin, it is a work of quiet majesty, deep compassion, and powerful insight into the alchemy of friendship and marriage.

Even her making her husband do something as trivial as the washing up is given menace by our growing understanding of what is wrong. I take it as an omen; and though I remind myself why we are here, I can’t shake the sense of loved familiarity into which I just awoke. I mean, there's nothing in the actual words there that is, sort of, 'great writing', but that's wonderful. Where are speed, noise, ugliness, everything that makes us who we are and makes us recognize ourselves in fiction?I would just like to add at this stage that a plethora of five-star reviews isn't always a reliable indicator of a book's calibre). Stegner’s novel is both a reaction against persistent and formulaic pre-Depression models of American literature and a historicist character study that sifts and winnows away at figures to reveal their underlying motivational and effective blueprints.

Charity, who highly values social capital, clashes with Sid over the likelihood of him securing tenure, which she deems necessary to integrate smoothly into the kind of academic community that she wants to belong to. It’s an academic novel in a sense – both men start out as English professors at the University of Wisconsin in the difficult years of the late 1930s – the end of the Depression, heading into WW II. An early environmentalist, he actively championed the region's preservation and was instrumental-with his now-famous 'Wilderness Letter'-in the passage of the 1964 Wilderness Act. CHARLOTTE WOOD: A beautiful line where he says, 'Everything they had was ours before we had a chance to envy it or ask for it. there are the very solid moments when he can just paint the domestic scene or that scene of him alone.

Seen in geological perspective, we are fossils in the making, to be buried and eventually exposed again for the puzzlement of creatures of later eras. The book itself, published in 1987 by Random House, debuted to critical raves, isstill in print today and boasts a cult following. I assumed, based on the endless 5-star ratings out there for this book, that it was going to be a slam dunk for me. Crossing to Safety ultimately lingers with you awhile as a mournful and melancholy tribute to the passage of time. And I walked the hundred-mile back roads behind the horse named Wizard wondering if there were two stashes of tea in his pack.