Hello Goodbye Hello: A Circle Of 101 Remarkable Meetings (2012) - Plot & Excerpts
I found this book to be a completely baffling reading experience. While I enjoyed it, I often forgot I was reading it and went for week-long stretches without paying any attention to it. (I usually read fiction and non-fiction at the same time, so I wasn't just lolling about reading nothing!) Then, I would go back to it and become really interested in one of the people mentioned, which sent me on a quest for more information that often left me hopelessly caught in a Wikipedia loop. Many of the people in the book are not household names in the US (as I suspect they are in Britain), and the overall concept of the book is a bit gimmicky. However, despite these things, and even though it took me a really long time to finish, I found it very enjoyable. Any time I'm learning while I'm entertained, I'm a happy reader. I was really glad to be able to borrow this book from a friend because I had heard a very favorable review and discussion about it on NPR and I was intrigued by the concept of an entertaining and gossipy book devoted to the chance meetings, intense rivalries, and long standing friendships among well-known people. And after reading the book, I have to admit that my belief in the theory of six degrees of separation has been strengthened. There were some interesting meetings and relationships profiled--Harpo Marx meeting George Bernard Shaw, Salvadore Dali and Sigmund Freud, Mark Twain and Helen Keller, H.G. Wells and Stalin, Isadora Duncan and Auguste Rodin, and Groucho Marx and T.S. Eliot. However, I was a little put off by the gimmick of the book in which 101 meetings were profiled and each chapter was exactly 1,001 words making the entire book exactly 101,101 words long. Really? An interesting book to pick up, read a few of the chapters, put down, and come back to later.
What do You think about Hello Goodbye Hello: A Circle Of 101 Remarkable Meetings (2012)?
Amusing, but at the end, you had to be British to know some of the people.
—surfking
Original, charming, startling in places - just a fun read!
—jennifer
