Colum McCann
Hardcover | Pages: 351 pages Rating: 3.95 | 89010 Users | 8907 Reviews
List Books As Let the Great World Spin
| Original Title: | Let the Great World Spin |
| ISBN: | 1400063736 (ISBN13: 9781400063734) |
| Edition Language: | English |
| Characters: | Philippe Petit |
| Setting: | New York City, New York(United States) Bronx, New York City, New York(United States) |
| Literary Awards: | National Book Award for Fiction (2009), Ambassador Book Award for Fiction (2010), NAIBA Book of the Year for Fiction (2010), Goodreads Choice Award Nominee for Fiction (2009), International Dublin Literary Award (2011) |
Narrative Supposing Books Let the Great World Spin
In the dawning light of a late-summer morning, the people of lower Manhattan stand hushed, staring up in disbelief at the Twin Towers. It is August 1974, and a mysterious tightrope walker is running, dancing, leaping between the towers, suspended a quarter mile above the ground. In the streets below, a slew of ordinary lives become extraordinary in bestselling novelist Colum McCann’s stunningly intricate portrait of a city and its people.Let the Great World Spin is the critically acclaimed author’s most ambitious novel yet: a dazzlingly rich vision of the pain, loveliness, mystery, and promise of New York City in the 1970s.
Corrigan, a radical young Irish monk, struggles with his own demons as he lives among the prostitutes in the middle of the burning Bronx. A group of mothers gather in a Park Avenue apartment to mourn their sons who died in Vietnam, only to discover just how much divides them even in grief. A young artist finds herself at the scene of a hit-and-run that sends her own life careening sideways. Tillie, a thirty-eight-year-old grandmother, turns tricks alongside her teenage daughter, determined not only to take care of her family but to prove her own worth.
Elegantly weaving together these and other seemingly disparate lives, McCann’s powerful allegory comes alive in the unforgettable voices of the city’s people, unexpectedly drawn together by hope, beauty, and the “artistic crime of the century.” A sweeping and radical social novel, Let the Great World Spin captures the spirit of America in a time of transition, extraordinary promise, and, in hindsight, heartbreaking innocence. Hailed as a “fiercely original talent” (San Francisco Chronicle), award-winning novelist McCann has delivered a triumphantly American masterpiece that awakens in us a sense of what the novel can achieve, confront, and even heal.
Declare Out Of Books Let the Great World Spin
| Title | : | Let the Great World Spin |
| Author | : | Colum McCann |
| Book Format | : | Hardcover |
| Book Edition | : | Deluxe Edition |
| Pages | : | Pages: 351 pages |
| Published | : | June 23rd 2009 by Random House (first published June 16th 2009) |
| Categories | : | Fiction. Historical. Historical Fiction. New York. Book Club. Contemporary. Novels. Literary Fiction |
Rating Out Of Books Let the Great World Spin
Ratings: 3.95 From 89010 Users | 8907 ReviewsColumn Out Of Books Let the Great World Spin
In my classification system, there are books that are readers books (they tell an engaging story); there are books that are writers books (they are creative in their prose and technically sound); and then there are GREAT books that tell a good story through solid prose. Let the Great World Spin (the 2009 National Book Award winner) is such a book. The book shares the lives of seemingly random New Yorkers in 1974, and how their lives intertwine. At the surface, they seem connected by what happensLet the great world spin. And the great world of New York did indeed spin in this book. How do you view melancholy and heartbreak as something pure and beautiful and riveting and just plain astounding? You read Colum McCann's work, that's how. It was an orchestra of sorts--the many different voices and narratives. McCann writes with so much lyricism, he makes you want to dance with the tightrope walker the book opens with (taken from the true 1974 story of Philippe Petit, by the way). Three word
This is the current read of our Cayo Hueso Literary Salon. I've just read through the reviews of my GR friends, mostly 4* and 5*. From somewhere among those reviews, I have the thought that this book shows that each of us, at some time in our lives, approaches the high wire of life, if we dare, fraught with opportunity and danger. Now to read the book.BTW, if you haven't seen it, I recommend you see MAN ON THE WIRE. Netflix has it.I have read the first chapter, dealing with the two Corrigan
It's hard to describe this National Book Award winning novel without using the phrase 'balancing act.' Phillipe Petit's astonishing 1974 walk between the Twin Towers forms the centrepiece of the story, and in its shadow the lives of several characters intersect in surprising and intricate ways. Corrigan is one of its sprawling cast. A Dublin import, he is a man of God who makes it his mission to serve a congregation of prostitutes working the city's grimy streets. Tillie and her daughter Jazzlyn
A city with so much life in it that just a sliver of a fleeting moment--a man atop a wire suspended between ill-fated twin building--suffices to display the budding emotion of the general populace. And not one emotion but a hundred. & important to these people, for the while, in a very democratic piece of literature. A true valentine to NYC--a jisgaw puzzle of faces that come from different places. They all look up in awe; we look down in equal amazement at the power of this grand American
Life is full of unexpected synchronicities. The kinds of things that occasionally make you feel that you are connected to a greater web of being, a little sign to let you know that you are not in this alone. Two days before I picked up Colum McCann's extraordinary novel "Let The Great World Spin," I watched the equally extraordinary documentary "Man on Wire" for the second time. Philippe Petit, more angel than human, strung a cable across the Twin Towers in 1974 and performed on it for over half
This really may be the first truly profound novel to connect itself with September 11, 2001 and New York City, if only because it does so in such an understated, oblique, and poetically suggestive way. It's also a novel that may take over a hundred pages to truly capture your imagination, but once it does, and once the connective tissue of the disparate group of characters starts to reveal itself, the novel attains a kind of hypnotic and edgy grace for its duration. So richly and deeply are
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