Skip to main content

Mark Twain Redux


A review is linked above. Apparently, the official release date is November 30 -- Twain's 175th birthday -- which may be why the reviews have taken so long on this one (I thought it was maybe because the author was dead).

Comments

  1. I was surprised I got my copy so soon. I remember the official release date being Nov. 30. We almost share the same birthday.

    ReplyDelete
  2. It's available now here as well.

    ReplyDelete
  3. And Huckleberry Finn turns 125:

    http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/la-ca-mark-twain-20101114,0,5921342.story

    ReplyDelete
  4. I would really love to start the new year by reading the Twain book with everyone; can it be deemed history? It certainly is historic.

    ReplyDelete
  5. I think the book is in the spirit of this place and many of us already have it. Might take a year long commitment to read it, though -- it's LONG and this is only volume 1.

    If you do read it, we can always set up a page for your thoughts/comments where others can join in if they decide to also read it.

    ReplyDelete
  6. And ... it's a best seller!

    http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/20/books/20twain.html

    ReplyDelete
  7. Yardley is fast becoming my favorite reviewer:

    Reading the "Autobiography of Mark Twain" too often is like being trapped in a locked room with a garrulous old coot (Twain turned 70 just before these dictations began) who loves the sound of his own voice and hasn't the slightest inclination to turn it off.

    http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/11/19/AR2010111906788.html

    ReplyDelete
  8. Rather sad to see Twain get bumped by Dubya in the Amazon Top 100.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Dylan in America

Whoever it was in 1969 who named the very first Bob Dylan bootleg album “Great White Wonder” may have had a mischievous streak. There are any number of ways you can interpret the title — most boringly, the cover was blank, like the Beatles’ “White Album” — but I like to see a sly allusion to “Moby-Dick.” In the seven years since the release of his first commercial record, Dylan had become the white whale of 20th-century popular song, a wild, unconquerable and often baffling force of musical nature who drove fans and critics Ahab-mad in their efforts to spear him, lash him to the hull and render him merely comprehensible. --- Bruce Handy, NYTimes ____________________________________________ I figured we can start fresh with Bob Dylan.  Couldn't resist this photo of him striking a Woody Guthrie pose.  Looks like only yesterday.  Here is a link to the comments building up to this reading group.

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire

  Welcome to this month's reading group selection.  David Von Drehle mentions The Melting Pot , a play by Israel Zangwill, that premiered on Broadway in 1908.  At that time theater was accessible to a broad section of the public, not the exclusive domain it has become over the decades.  Zangwill carried a hopeful message that America was a place where old hatreds and prejudices were pointless, and that in this new country immigrants would find a more open society.  I suppose the reference was more an ironic one for Von Drehle, as he notes the racial and ethnic hatreds were on display everywhere, and at best Zangwill's play helped persons forget for a moment how deep these divides ran.  Nevertheless, "the melting pot" made its way into the American lexicon, even if New York could best be describing as a boiling cauldron in the early twentieth century. Triangle: The Fire That Changed America takes a broad view of events that led up the notorious fire, noting the gro

Team of Rivals Reading Group

''Team of Rivals" is also an America ''coming-of-age" saga. Lincoln, Seward, Chase et al. are sketched as being part of a ''restless generation," born when Founding Fathers occupied the White House and the Louisiana Purchase netted nearly 530 million new acres to be explored. The Western Expansion motto of this burgeoning generation, in fact, was cleverly captured in two lines of Stephen Vincent Benet's verse: ''The stream uncrossed, the promise still untried / The metal sleeping in the mountainside." None of the protagonists in ''Team of Rivals" hailed from the Deep South or Great Plains. _______________________________ From a review by Douglas Brinkley, 2005