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Title: So Big (Perennial Classics) by Edna Ferber ISBN: 0-06-095669-0 Publisher: Perennial Pub. Date: 01 September, 2000 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.7 (10 reviews)
Rating: 4
Summary: Single motherhood at the turn of the last century
Comment: An interesting story of a woman's life and her struggle to raise her only son and teach him what is valuable in life. The Story is set in the late 1800 and early 1900's in rural and urban Chicago. The author called it "a book about cabbages..." but really, it's a story about Selina DeJong, orphaned as a young, wealthy child, who struggles to make a life for herself and her only child Dirk whom she has nicknamed "sobig". She marries a dolt for a husband and begins to work on a farm. Her husband is a small man with a small brain and is afraid of his own shadow which limits and frustrates Selina and keeps her from accomplishing anything for many years. Fortunately, her husband suffers an accidental death and she is fianlly able to make some necessary improvements which allow her son (who otherwise would have been a cabbage farmer his whole life) to attend college in the city. He succeeds in college, but when he gets out he sacrifices his dream profession(architecture) to make a lot of money doing something boring in finance, and in doing so, he misses the point his mother tried to teach him about success. (i.e. that money doesn't equal it.) This is a really good book with a wonderful and inspiring ending. If the whole book had been as good as the last couple chapters, I would have given it five stars easily. Although "So Big" isn't a famous book, Edna Ferber made it big with most of her others... You may have heard of a couple of them... "Giant" from which the Rock Hudson, James Dean film was made, and "Showboat", which was made into a sprawling musical. (My head aches just to think about it).
Rating: 4
Summary: Pulitzer Prize Winner
Comment: Without a doubt, _So Big_ is the best of all Edna Ferber's novels, and it was awarded the 1924 Pulitzer prize. It contains a strong portrayal of early 20th century midwestern agricultural life, which Ferber borrowed from her observations as a young women in Appleton, Wisconsin.
_So Big_ is the story of Dirk DeJong, and his mother Selina. After a colorful and tragic girlhood, she arrived as a schoolteacher in a Dutch farming community south of Chicago. She didn't quite fit in with the narrow-minded farmers and their overworked wives, yet she married a handsome farmer with notoriously unproductive land.
After his early death, she spends the next decades finding a market and coaxing a crop to grow in soggy land. By the time Dirk grows up, the "DeJong asparagus" is a success, and it enables his banking career. Yet he loses a sense of empathy and beauty, which Selina retains, despite her difficult path in life.
Ferber is the author who wrote _Show Boat_ and _Giant_. She could grind out popular dramatic fiction with loads of stock characters in a sentimentalized historic setting. But her later work loses the art found in _So Big_, which is peopled with multi-dimensional characters and a story which touches the reader's heart.
I highly recommend this book.
Rating: 5
Summary: One of the best books I've read.
Comment: I throughly enjoyed ths book. It was the second Ferber novel I had read, and truly, I don't think there are many that top this one. I laughed, I cried. I would highly recommend it to anyone interested in meeting an incredible woman who takes what she gets in life and makes the best that she can. A truly compelling novel.
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Title: Giant (Perennial Classics) by Edna Ferber ISBN: 0060956704 Publisher: Perennial Pub. Date: 01 September, 2000 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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Title: Alice Adams (Library of Indiana Classics) by Booth Tarkington, Arthur William Brown, Donald Gray ISBN: 0253215935 Publisher: Indiana University Press Pub. Date: 01 May, 2003 List Price(USD): $14.95 |
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Title: Where River Turns to Sky by Gregg Kleiner ISBN: 0380805596 Publisher: Perennial Pub. Date: 01 April, 1999 List Price(USD): $13.95 |
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Title: One of Ours (Vintage Classics) by Willa Cather ISBN: 0679737448 Publisher: Vintage Books USA Pub. Date: 01 November, 1991 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
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Title: Scarlet Sister Mary (Brown Thrasher Books) by Julia Peterkin, A. J. Verdelle ISBN: 0820323772 Publisher: University of Georgia Press Pub. Date: 01 October, 1998 List Price(USD): $17.95 |
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