I couldn't overlook the strained timeline. I felt that the author had a story he wanted to tell but the plot required that the action begin in high school and that the characters needed to have a suicide and a mental breakdown ten years in the past. Since high school only lasts four years, Conroy...
I really enjoyed this memoir and will probably listen to a few chapters again in the future. It’s part love letter to reading, part deconstruction of the writer as artist and also a rallying cry for the predominance of story. As he writes…'The writers who scoff at the idea of primacy of stories...
I'm a bit scared that I won't be able to describe how much I love this book and that I’ll screw up this review. Every time I have the same problem with Conroy. Every time when I finish reading ''him'' I have this properly deep ache. I get spoiled and I find myself measuring almost everything I’ve...
I wanted to like Pat Conroy’s Beach Music. Really, I did. The opening paragraph (a stunning, lyrical evocation of a young woman’s suicide) drew me into the sprawling, eight hundred page tome. At first glance, the book seemed to have all the elements of a rip-roaring good yarn: betrayal, forgiven...
A few days ago I came to my best friend's flat and while he was giving me joint which I passed, and while he was sorting his decks in Hearthstone, he told me that I was addicted to emotions and that this is the reason why I need turmoil books. I took that roughly and straight to the heart. I lay ...
I could be the only person in the world whose first Pat Conroy book was his sports memoir My Losing Season instead of one of his better known novels like Lords of Discipline, The Great Santini or Beach Music. But Charleston, SC made me do it. I just enjoyed my first trip to this southern stunner,...
SUMMARY: chapter oneNathalie DupreeThe first actual cooking teacher who took both my money and my grief for imparting culinary secrets to me was the inimitable, unclassifiable queen of the Southern kitchen, Nathalie Dupree. Though Nathalie does not know this, she is one of the few people in my li...
Conroy's first book, published after he graduated from The Citadel. Colonel Nugent Corvoisie, better known as "The Boo," was the Lt. Commandant in charge of discipline at the military college. He was both loved and feared by his "lambs." The book is a collection of stories explaining life at The ...
Ellyn StangaroneMs. WheelerHonors English 230 August 2009Book ReviewThe Great SantiniAfter reading this book one feels like they actually grew up in a Marine Family. The book The Great Santini, by Pat Conroy, is one of the best books I have ever read. Pat Conroy is the #1 New York Times best sell...
I can remember falling asleep as my Grandmother Stanny told me about safaris in Tanganyika, belly dancers in Lebanon, and the illegal ivory markets of Hong Kong. My mother, who was no stranger to wildlife, collected poisonous snakes and once told me that a copperhead I caught her for Mother’s Day...
When my grandmother Margaret Nolen Peek deserted her four children and husband in the middle of the Depression and hitchhiked a ride on a mule wagon heading for Atlanta, where she got a job in the notions department at Rich’s department store, then married a Greek salesman of adding machines who ...