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Title: This Side of Brightness: A Novel by Colum McCann ISBN: 0-312-42197-4 Publisher: Picador USA Pub. Date: 01 January, 2003 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.24 (29 reviews)
Rating: 1
Summary: Worse than Gigli
Comment: This isn't writing, it's pus. To add insult to injury, it has a manufactured, writing-school bred sense of inauthenticity about it. It's a catalog of human degradation with a tiny amount of story thrown in. As an ex-NY'r, I hate to see a man sloppily in love with the trash he's been psychologically conditioned to find glamourous.
The incidents in this book, such as a young boy watching his mother inject heroin into her private parts exceed the widely dilated standards of late 20th century decency. Killing off said mother in a car accident when what little narrative there is runs of a steam like a tricycle pushed uphill is exploitation of the most obvious type. The book also includes a rather unromantic use of a sink. The narrative is structured around images, as if it were the rough draft of a screen play. Let us hope that no trendy director turns this into a cinematic account of the excursion into the armpit of one of the homeless men in the book. We're given exceptionally smelly sex between subway tunnel dwellers, a horrific, graphic beating, the depths of drug addiction and we don't want any of them.
There is a tiny passage concerning the experiences of an iron worker on high steel that is worth reading, but you don't need to buy the book for that.
This book couldn't exist without book company publicity. The cover says its an international best seller. That could include the sale of two copies in an Amsterdam restroom.
For example, if McCann the author were ever to admit he wrote it in a stupor, and that he traded his real name for the name of a chain of cheap NY bars where he did his scribbling, his publicist would address this admission by insisting that a stupor is really a type of eastern european sub-compact car wherin the author pecked out the tale on a back seat typewriter.
This book is a blemish on the consciousness of the human race. Not as big as the unfaceable degradation of true poverty, which I really couldn't handle, but a mess nonetheless.
Rating: 5
Summary: An original and rewarding novel
Comment: Set both during the turn of the century and in the present day, The Side Of Brightness by Colum McCann is an original and rewarding novel of workers who undertook one of the most dangerous jobs in existence - that of the sandhog, someone who digs under the bowels of the riverbed to create the tunnel that will carry trains from Brooklyn to Manhattan. The counterpoint of a homeless person living beneath the streets today complements this saga of those who risked (and often lost) their lives to advance transportation and technology in this complex and involving story of the building of New York City. Also very highly recommended are Colum McCann's previous works: (Everything In The Country Must (0312273185, ...) and Songdogs (0312147414, ...).
Rating: 5
Summary: I have NEVER read another book like this one!
Comment: Somehow, coldly descriptive and vividly warm at the same read. These characters and this story has remained with me for months after reading "The Side of Brightness" and I am grateful to the friend who recommended it....
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Title: Dancer: A Novel by Colum McCann ISBN: 0805067922 Publisher: Metropolitan Books Pub. Date: 06 January, 2003 List Price(USD): $26.00 |
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Title: Everything in This Country Must : A Novella and Two Stories by Colum McCann ISBN: 0312273185 Publisher: Picador USA Pub. Date: 07 March, 2001 List Price(USD): $12.00 |
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Title: Songdogs : A Novel by Colum McCann ISBN: 0312147414 Publisher: Picador USA Pub. Date: 15 October, 1996 List Price(USD): $12.00 |
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Title: The Butcher Boy by Patrick McCabe ISBN: 0385312377 Publisher: Dell Pub. Date: 01 August, 1994 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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Title: The Woman Who Walked into Doors by Roddy Doyle ISBN: 0140255125 Publisher: Penguin USA (Paper) Pub. Date: January, 1997 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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