Average customer rating:
- Wonderful trip through a lost world...
- Hollywood's Unfulfilled Dreams
- Hollywood Depicted as It was In 1939 [73][26]
- The literary equivalent of a David Lynch movie.
- Don't waste your time
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The Day of the Locust (Signet Classic)
Nathanael West
Manufacturer: Signet Classics
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Binding: Paperback
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ASIN: 0451523482 |
Customer Reviews:
Wonderful trip through a lost world..........2007-08-18
Carl Melcher Goes to Vietnam
The fact that The Day of the Locust was published in 1939, would, I thought, make it a bit too dated or old-fashioned to enjoy. Happily, I was wrong. Nathanael West's novel is like a well-oiled and maintained Disney ride, guaranteed to educate, amuse and thrill. We climb in the car and enter a tunnel into a world that is, of course, gone forever. Truly an insider's novel, the parasitic Todd lives in the bowels of the many-headed Hollywood beast, but he is not "of it." He comes to Hollywood to work as a studio artist and is too smart to be trapped by all the fascinating things he sees, especially the beautiful Faye. This sets him apart from the drifters, dreamers and pensioners who have been drawn by the allure and glitter. On a smaller scale, Faye IS Hollywood, drawing men close to eventually destroy them much like the lizard hiding in the plant in Homer's house patiently waiting for the next foolish fly to light on the plant's flowers. The only thing in the novel that disappointed me, and only a little, was the dearth of information about Homer Simpson (not that one). I wanted to know more about this polite, quiet and stoic Midwesterner. We know he came west for his health, but why does he invite Faye to live with him? Why does he put up with the abuse? Then I remembered that West was writing before the age of Freud, before the good doctor's psychoanalysis became the normative tool; people were the way they were ... just because. It was `in the blood', or they `took after the father', whatever. Pre-Freud writers gave their characters no breaks for having had a mamma that didn't love them, except perhaps, just a passing mention of the fact.
The secondary characters are fascinating in their brazenness and crudeness; you can almost smell them. They are the kind of folk modern middle class readers don't usually come into contact with, like Earl, for instance, the close-mouthed drugstore cowboy, and Miguel the Mexican with his fighting cocks, which are a metaphor for the men who employ them. The violence between Abe, Earl and Miguel struck me as comic, like the sight of two dogs mating on a Sunday sidewalk in front of a busy church. Perhaps it was because, again, we moderns don't see too many middle class men having fistfights, except in videos.
Young women, uninterested in marriage, sleeping around as they seek to advance their careers, superficiality, frenzied celebrity-worshipping mobs, plain-looking grown men who stupidly lust after beautiful women who are completely uninterested in them, unbridled egotism, desires, dreams, and very little thinking and planning -- the essence of what West worked with here seems to have long ago been mainstreamed down into the great American masses - think of MTV, MySpace, Christina and Britney videos, Survivor and American Idol. But no one, to my knowledge, has illustrated it as vividly and delightfully as West has.
The ending, like the endings of all good novels, drifts slowly away from you, like the beautiful young woman you just held in your arms, fading back into a crowded dance floor. At about 200 pages, a paperback of The Day of the Locust is a must-have addition to your backpack or briefcase, or, perhaps, as an ebook, downloaded into your laptop or cell phone.
The sad fact that this brilliant novel and West's earlier works brought him no significant money or recognition gives this writer succor.
Hollywood's Unfulfilled Dreams.......2007-06-29
Written in the 1930s in the midst of the Depression, "Day of the Locust" portrays the Hollywood glamour scene from the perspective of the oft forgotten supporting characters. This is, those who came to California with high dreams and have become bitter with resentment and disappointment. The novel is told from the perspective of a recent Yale grad, Tod, who is an aspiring artist who takes a job at a movie studio to pay his bills. Throughout the novel, West masterfully portrays a set of characters, whose twisted dreams and aspirations are intertwined into a delicate web of failure.
Although Tod's psyche may be absent of unrealistic dreams of stardom and he is moderately successful, he lets his infatuation overcome him when he meets a talentless wannabe, Faye Greener. Although she may be living a pipe dream (and sings about getting high, for that matter), her vitality and energy enraptures not just Tod, but a whole set of diverse characters, from a dust-bitten cowboy to a painfully shy Midwesterner. Indeed, her mere presence can begin an undercurrent of sexual tension that manifests itself in a violent fury.
Throughout the novel, Tod uses his imagination to picture the setting for his masterpiece painting, the "Burning of Los Angeles". In his months in Los Angeles, he becomes an acute observer of people, often singling out those who have "come to California to die". This includes not only the wannabe starlets, like Faye, but common laborers from the Midwest and South who came to capture the California dream but have had their dreams relegated to the dustbin.
Overall, West succeeds in showing how the "other half" lived during the heyday of Hollywood, as nary a movie star enters the narrative. This is less a novel about Hollywood and more a novel about unrealistic dreams and their potentially sinister implications if left unfulfilled. Although written more almost seventy years ago, it is still relevant today.
Hollywood Depicted as It was In 1939 [73][26].......2007-05-06
Interestingly, without any intention, I read this novel immediately after finishing Joan Didion's "Play It As It Lays." Each is a burning indictment of Hollywood - this novel was written in 1939 and "Play" was written in 1970.
Like Pynchon's "Crying of Lot 49", the style of this novel is quirky and many of the moments are meant to shock the reader. Some shocks (remember this is a 1939 novel) include a screening of a french pornographic film at one person's house of prostitution, a detailed description of a cock fight at Homer Simpson's (yes that is the character's name) garage, a beautiful actress's (Faye Greener) decision to pay for her father's funeral by employing herself with a silent screen actor's cat house, an incredible depiction of running through a studio's lot where one backdrop falls into another - distanced by centuries and continents from the prior, and an angry dwarf's (Abe Kusich) confrontation with about anyone he meets.
The ending reads heavily. Is it metaphor? Is it purely emblematic? In any event, it is riotous, where the dying mental characters of the novel congregate like frantic sheep and hurt one another in a crowded attempt to "get one glance" at a movie star at the famous movie house where many films are opened - Kahn's Persian Palace Theatre.
The book scoffs Hollywood's allure and sensual delight envisioned by the midwesterners (Homer is from Des Moines, Iowa) and others."Once there, they discover that sunshine isn't enough. They get tired of oranges, even of avocado pears and passion fruit. Nothing happens. They don't know what to do with their time. They haven't the mental equipment for leisure, the money nor the physical equipment for pleasure. . . They watch the waves come in at Venice. There wasn't any ocean where most of them come from, but after you've seen one wave, you've seen them all."
The protagonist, Tod Hackett, cannot escape the ennui - the malaise - with which he lives. Like Walter Percy's "The Moviegoer", the character's life remains in a funk. Unlike Percy's character, Hackett does not escape the ennui, and becomes one of "them." Those whose ". . . boredom becomes more and more terrible. . . They have been cheated and betrayed. They have slaved and saved for nothing." Life (for all of the characters in this book) is miserable under the golden sun of Hollywood.
This is depressing - but not like Didion's "Play." West does not reach into the mind of the protagonist. Instead, West shows us how unique and simultaneously droll Tod's life can be. One can only wonder if this novel is autobiographical.
The literary equivalent of a David Lynch movie........2007-02-19
Nathaniel West's sardonic and dark novel of Hollywood ousiders is as warm and friendly as a dead codfish. A group of oddballs, all living in Hollywood all seem to be slipping towards destruction in this classic of the genre. A studio artist, an aspiring actress and old vaudevillian and others collide with each other in a quest for something intangible, and make glancing blows of emotion during their journey. It's interesting to me that West's novel, though full of tragedy in some sense, is not without humor, and the characters, though gritty, are slightly unreal. It feels to me almost like West has created a sick cartoon of a novel, which is absorbing and full of interesting visual touches, but never quite meant to be taken seriously. It is, however, riveting!
Don't waste your time.......2007-01-08
This is a depressing book. There is nothing in it but busted dreams, unfulfilled lust, misery and sadness. Don't waste your time reading it. Just listen to the song, "Maneater", by Nelly Furtado and you will have the gist of the story!!
Book Description
"Somehow or other I seem to have slipped in between all the 'schools,' " observed Nathanael West the year before his untimely death in 1940. "My books meet no needs except my own, their circulation is practically private and I'm lucky to be published." Yet today, West is widely recognized as a prophetic writer whose dark and comic vision of
a society obsessed with mass-
produced fantasies foretold much
of what was to come in American life.
Miss Lonelyhearts (1933), which West envisioned as "a novel in the form of a comic strip," tells of an advice-to-the-lovelorn columnist who becomes tragically embroiled in the desperate lives of his readers. The Day of the Locust (1939) is West's great dystopian Hollywood novel based on his experiences at the seedy fringes of the movie industry.
"The work of Nathanael West, savagely, comically, tragically original, has come into its own," said novelist and screenwriter Budd Schulberg. "A new public [has] discovered in the writings of West a brilliant reflection of its own sense of chaos and helplessness in a world running more to madness than to reason."
Customer Reviews:
Reader beware.......2007-05-17
Wow. Much like Paul Bowles, this author takes no prisoners. May I suggest that you be in a stable frame of mind before reading this novel, lest it prove to be one unsettling factor too many for you. I found myself to be none too comfortable to be counted as a member of the human race at the end of this book. Written at about the same time as Raymond Chandler's early novels and set in the same real estate, The Day of the Locust is about five times as sordid. It is totally original and totally unpredictable, except for the scent of doom that pervades it from the opening page. You know that the author was writing about what he saw. Los Angeles and Hollywood were rotten seventy years ago. What must they be like now? West covers so much ground, with such economy, and it's all so readable. This devastating work is a remarkable achievement. What a staggering loss that Nathanael West died so young. And what a surprise to find Homer Simpson hiding out in such a fine novel. Highly recommended.
"Every Man His Own Carver".......2006-12-30
In both of these stunning novellas - one set in New York, the other in Los Angeles - Nathanael West shows us a world without a center, one in which the various characters are therefore free to pursue their own idiosyncratic notions of bliss. Conspicuously absent is any widely accepted code of manners which might have a tonic influence in shaping character and aspiration, or even at lowest ebb in keeping people more recognizably human than grotesque. Thus the considerable element of the distorted which figures strongly in each of these pieces. Shrike in "Miss Lonelyhearts" and Faye Greener in "Day of the Locust" are each self-absorbed to a freakish degree, though West's point in such satiric but painful drawing is to bring contemporary readers to see the frighteningly normal in such freakishness, the unacknowledged bizarreness in modern everyday behavior.
Only because it was assigned.......2006-10-17
I wish there was a rating under one star. I'm supposed to read this for a class, but, in rare fashion, I doubt that I will finish the novel. I realize this is supposed to be surreal, but must I sacrifice plot and character to immerse myself in "literature"?
Maybe I'm a product of the times, but a plot which is at least interesting would be nice, even if I don't care about the characters. Please: Barth, Barthleme, and Pynchon write complex, surrealistic fiction, but also give us characters we can care about and plots which fascinate.
The Torture Of Conciousness.......2005-11-18
Nathanael West was well practiced in the arts of revelation and cruelty that go way beyond what we normally think of as satire. "Miss Lonelyhearts" alone is a dark and disturbing jewel in his very strange crown. It bites the reader softly and injects a moral venom into the reader giving her over to experiences of psychological subtley and derangement that make ordinary psychological novels seem pedestrian - excercises in mere cataloguing. "Miss Lonelyhearts" is a visionary experience.
I wonder if Thomas Harris, the author of "Silence of the Lambs" got any of his inspiration for Hannibal Lector from the character of Shrike. Shrike is very bad. He is a sort of demonic being who cares enough about his victims to give them the very best in a form of torture that interrogates their souls and illuminates every last particle of illusion he finds in them. He doesn't eat their livers with fauva beans and a nice chiante because he doesn't need to. Showing them the nature of their souls in the hellish light of his inquiry is more than enough nourishment for him.
He is happy. He finds it no sin to labor in his vocation.
Miss Lonelyhearts himself is an abusive Christ figure who dies for no one's sins other than his own. He is a directionless victim full of lust and a malice disguised as compassion. He was born for ruin and his death is the exact opposite of anything we would ever call an apotheosis. No one's sins are redeemed. They are confirmed.
Nathanael West apparently was a self-hating jew but his moral rigor is so savage and extreme methinks he might be best thought of as a literary satanist come to torment and educate us all through demonic revelries that move in slow motion. I can't remember if there are very many colors described in this little poisonous novel because the whole effect on my inner eye is a dark wastescape composed of tones in black, false-white, and endlessly arranged shades of gray.
Surely "Miss Lonelyhearts" was one of the best novels of the twentieth century but hardly anybody has heard of it. I recommend it strongly to those who prefer their humor as black as the pit of hell, but hidden behind a sunlight that tortures the ground until spikes of grass grow up.
Surreal and Scathing.......2005-10-21
West always reminds me of Fitzy. Extremely cynical views on love and the America dream.
Amazon.com
In 1940, when an automobile accident prematurely claimed Nathanael West's life, he was a relatively obscure writer, the author of only four short novels. West's reputation has grown considerably since then and he is now considered one of the 20th century's major authors. This superb volume, edited by Sacvan Bercovitch, compiles all of West's novels and a great number of other documents, including stories, plays, and letters. Novels and Other Writings is the most complete West now available in a single volume. Film buffs will be particularly fascinated by Miss Lonelyhearts, which served as the basis for two intriguing movies and The Day of the Locust, West's final novel, which many consider to be the most withering attack on Hollywood ever written. Among the papers included in this collection are a never-filmed screenplay, Before the Fact, and a screen treatment of West's novel A Cool Million.
Customer Reviews:
The man who burned Los Angeles.......2005-04-30
The quartet of piquant short novels Nathanael West had published by the time he died in a car accident at the age of thirty-seven occupy a unique niche in American literature. A Hollywood screenwriter who migrated from studio to studio in search of sustenance, West was a humorist with a warped conscience, a young man who had fraudulently gained admission to Brown University and probably belonged there anyway, an intellectual misfit trying to make a living and a name for himself in a glitzy industry. Like Kafka with a comic-strip aesthetic, West saw the world and the people around him as the tortured products of an insane creator, cartoons to be stretched, punched, and mutilated.
"Few things are sadder than the truly monstrous," West observes in "The Day of the Locust," the last of his novels, which made an indelible impression upon me when I first read it a few years ago. Ironically, sadness is definitely not the note he strikes in his portrayal of a congregation of hilarious cretins who populate the fringes of 1930s Hollywood; it is a very brash and "loud" novel, but incredibly it is more refined and less outrageous than its three predecessors. The surrealistic narrative of "The Dream Life of Balso Snell," by contrast, is not to be read with a queasy stomach. The unassuming Mr. Snell happens upon a giant wooden horse--apparently the same the ancient Greeks used to infiltrate Troy--and, entering through the posterior, finds the intestines inhabited by unhinged writers in search of an audience.
In "Miss Lonelyhearts," the title character (who is a man) is an advice columnist for a newspaper, unable to muster anything better than empty platitudes in response to tearful letters from barely literate and improbably pathetic losers who are mostly beyond help. He is not, however, doing this just as a hoax; he approaches his role soberly because the trust his correspondents place in him forces him to "examine the values by which he lives." If "Miss Lonelyhearts" seems farcical, consider how accurately it prophesies the Jerry Springer era of televised dirty laundry and voluntary public embarrassment.
"A Cool Million" is a relentlessly cruel Horatio Alger parody that follows the misadventures of Lemuel Pitkin, a Vermont boy who goes to New York to try to make a fortune in order to save his mother's house from foreclosure but is foiled continually as he encounters an endless procession of human sleaze: corrupt businessmen, brutish cops, brothel operators and their clientele, rapists, thieves, and con men. (The screen story West wrote for "A Cool Million"--a project never filmed--is understandably so much cleaner and more optimistic that it hardly resembles the original novel.)
The four novels combined constitute only half of the Library of America volume, the rest of which includes miscellaneous fragments, plays, and letters. Among the detritus are the unsuccessful play "Good Hunting," a relatively conventional satire of war and war correspondence, an unfilmed screenplay based on Francis Iles's novel "Before the Fact" (a different screenplay by another author was used by the studio instead, and was filmed by Alfred Hitchcock as "Suspicion"), and a college essay praising Euripides to the stars. This juxtaposition effectively illuminates the two dichotomous worlds of West--the true artist and the commercial hack, the grotesque emerging from the mundane.
Artless?.......2003-05-28
It's beyond me how anyone could describe the prose of Lonelyhearts and Locust as "artless" (as one reviewer did). I can understand how some might find the bitterness and despair of these two works not to their liking. But artless? Years after reading these two novels, I can recall entire passages by heart and picture the scenes vividly. Such effects are not achieved by artless amateur writers, only by those with considerable literary talent.
That said, I must agree with the other reviewers here: The remaining stuff collected by LOA is distinctly second-rate, the product of West on a bad day or before he reached his stride. Only if you are a scholar researching twentieth-century American novelists should you buy this volume. Get the inexpensive paperback book published by New Directions, containing the two imperishable works Lonelyhearts and Locust.
Is LOA Running Out of Good American Authors?.......2002-10-18
As a long-standing and avid reader of the fiction volumes produced by the Library of America, I eagerly awaited this book and now I can't understand why they printed it. I stopped reading after about 400 pages and haven't been able to garner the energy and patience for more. 'Miss Lonelyhearts' was slightly interesting, but a very slight novel written in an artless manner. As for the rest of what I read, I consider it time not at all well spent. Dreiser, another author featured by the Library of America, created artless prose also...but he did so in the context of engaging stories that offered intellectual stimulation. I'll give this book away rather than have it consume valuable shelf space.
Of Greater Academic than Casual Interest.......2002-06-15
Little known during his lifetime, Nathanael West is today considered one of the 20th Century's most influential authors, a writer whose pitch-black satires focus on the emptiness of an American society choking on its own regurgitated mythology. His reputation rests squarely upon two works: MISS LONELYHEARTS, the tale of a newspaper advice columnist who is overwhelmed by the tragedies of those who write to him for advice, and THE DAY OF THE LOCUST, a savage vision of American society turning upon the illusions fosted upon them by a Hollywood mentality.
Both MISS LONELYHEARTS and LOCUST are powerful works, every bit as vital and unnerving today as when they were first published in the 1930s; I recommend both very strongly. But the remainder of West's cannon is extremely problematic. Like the little girl with the curl, when West was good he was very, very good, and when he was bad he was horrid. And with its inclusion of his lesser writings, this Library of America anthology gives us a detailed tour of the latter.
THE DREAM LIFE OF BALSO SNELL, West's first novel, was an experimental tale that parodies intellectual pretentions through religious, mythological, and aesthetic motifs--but while it has a number of fascinating ideas and conceits, it is at best an interesting failure. A COOL MILLION, West's third novel, is a satire on the Horatio Alger myth; it is considerably more readable than SNELL, but it lags far behind both LONELYHEARTS and LOCUST.
The rest of the anthology consists of a failed Broadway play, an unfilmed screenplay, unpublished stories and fragments, juvenalia, and personal letters. Both the play and screenplay--GOOD HUNTING and BEFORE THE FACT respectively--are written very much against the grain; it is not difficult to see why the play failed and director Hitchcock (who filmed BEFORE THE FACT as SUSPICION) ordered a completely new script. The remaining items are mediocre at best, dire at worst, and although West's letters are interesting from a historical standpoint they have no literary merit per se.
West's life was cut short by an automobile accident just as he seemed to be finding his true voice, and it is interesting to speculate on how his writing might have developed if he had lived to write more. This is an important collection--but it's importance is largely of an academic nature rather than a literary one, of more interest to the serious student of American literature than to a casual reader. If you fall into the latter catagory, I strongly recommend that you read MISS LONELYHEARTS and DAY OF THE LOCUST (both of which are available in inexpensive editions) rather than purchase this particular volume--and only after, if you like so many others among us find yourself fascinated by West's work, contemplate purchase of this anthology.
hard work by Harvard grad students.......2000-04-30
Thanks to the efforts of a bunch of Harvard grad students, this is the only book you need to become a cocktail party expert on Nathanael West (born Nathan Weinstein, 1903; died in Hollywood in 1940). My favorite part of the book is the capsule biography in the back. He drops out of high school (like me!) and alters his transcript to get into Tufts. He flunks out of Tufts but gets hold of a transcript for another Nathan Weinstein, who was apparently a pretty good student. He uses this to get into Brown and becomes an Ivy League graduate in 1924.
Oh yes, the writing... West's prose could easily pass for a New Yorker story circa 1985. Furthermore, his characters behave a lot like our contemporaries. None of this struck me as remarkable but I think it accounts for why he was so widely admired by good writers of his day and so roundly ignored by readers during the 1930s (perhaps 6,000 copies of his books were sold during his lifetime). Even if his writing style hadn't been so modern, releasing the bleak Miss Lonelyhearts in 1933 cannot have been an inspired marketing idea (the publisher went bankrupt just as the book was released).
If you want to read just one West novel, my personal choice would be Day of the Locust (1939), his last work. It is about the people destroyed by their dreams of California and Hollywood, seen through the eyes of a journeyman studio artist. He's obsessed with an aspiring actress, Faye Greener: "Her invitation wasn't to pleasure, but to struggle, hard and sharp, closer to murder than to love. If you threw yourself on her, it would be like throwing yourself from the parapet of a skyscraper. You would do it with a scream. You couldn't expect to rise again. Your teeth would be driven into your skull like nails into a pine board and your back would be broken. You wouldn't even have time to sweat or close your eyes."
The strangest novel in the collection is A Cool Million, wherein a Candide-like young man, Lemuel Pitkin, goes out to make his fortune in what a variety of Panglosses keep telling him is the Land of Opportunity. As in a Horatio Alger story, Pitkin meets a lot of rich and powerful men who are in a position to help him. West departs from Alger in that Pitkin is cheated and mutilated by all of his encounters with the rest of humanity.
Average customer rating:
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The Day of the Locust
Manufacturer: Bantam Books
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Mass Market Paperback
ASIN: B000I4TK6S |
Customer Reviews:
Excellent characterization!.......2006-08-29
I love books that are set in the Carolina Low Country (ie: Dorothea Benton Frank and Anne Rivers Siddons)becuae it seems like such a gloriously stylish place to live!!!
This was an interesting story about a high-power career woman suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, who returns home to heal. When the safety net she intended to fall back on doesn't come through for her, she finds a truer path towards healing, which includes a passionate relationship that's as strong as the passion she once held for her work.
I particularly admired the therapist in this story, and how the psychotherapy sessions were really very helpful and healing. I also found the vivid details of Cord and Bobby's work, restoring antebellum homes and historical landmarks to their original splendour, added significant color and depth to the storyline.
This is the first novel of the Charleston Trilogy.......2006-01-03
`Backup Plan' by Sherryl Woods is fun southern romance novel. Dinah Davis returns home after working in Afghanistan. She decides to take a break and look up her old boyfriend Bobby - her official backup plan. Instead of Bobby, she finds Cord the older and annoying brother to Bobby. This novel deals with posttraumatic stress disorder, a marriage on the rocks and car bombing. I read the Trilogy out of order and they can stand alone. The second novel is `Flirting with Disaster' December 2005 and the final novel `Waking up in Charleston' May 2006.
Charming character driven story.......2005-08-02
War correspondent Dinah Davis is devastated after watching her cameraman/lover murdered in a car bombing ambush while on assignment in Afghanistan. Her editor knows that she is hanging on by a thread, and recommends returning home for some R&R. She decides to quit, return to South Carolina, and look up the guy that said he would wait for her forever. Marrying Bobby would be her backup plan and a way to escape her guilt over losing Peter.
Depressed and spending the majority of her days watching soaps or sitting by the pool, Dinah is unsuccessful at hooking up with Bobby, who never seems to be in town (and is now engaged). She does not count on falling for his roguish bad-boy brother, Cordell. Cord has been in love with Dinah since they were kids; he even made up a little white lie to keep Dinah and Bobby apart, only to have it backfire on him. Dinah just thinks he is a trouble maker. While Cord claims to not be the marrying kind, he certainly does not want Dinah and Bobby to reconcile, so he schemes to keep Bobby on assignment in Atlanta.
The more time Cord and Dinah spend together, the harder they fall for each other, until he finally realizes that the only way to show his love for Dinah is to let her resolve the conflict that brought her home and has caused so much post traumatic stress. Dinah makes progress on her own with the help of a caring psychologist.
The Backup Plan is an entertaining romantic comedy with a hint of despair - parts of the book might make you cry, particularly her flashbacks to Afghanistan. The only thing standing in the way of a 5 star rating is the lack of depth into the character of Bobby. He was never developed, and really on appears on a handful of pages. This was an emotional and engaging story - guaranteed to keep you glued for nearly 400 pages.
deep character study.......2005-02-27
War correspondent Dinah Davis has covered many of the recent hot spots. Currently she is reporting on Afghanistan, but has lost her edge since she witnessed the death of a friend and was nearly killed too. Physically Dinah has healed, but her boss tells her she is not the same and should return to the States to marry and have babies. Initially refusing to listen, Dinah realizes that her career is over and wonders if her boyfriend Bobby Beaufort still waits for as he promised a decade ago when she chose journalism over marriage.
Back home in South Carolina, Dinah's mom worries that her daughter has not recovered from her last overseas assignment. Meanwhile Bobby's older brother Cord, who thought his sibling was a fool to agree to Dinah's backup plan, quickly wants to revise the arrangement by inserting himself as the groom. As Dinah suffers the malaise of post traumatic syndrome, she turns to Cord not her family or Bobby for comfort while he worries whether he will prove enough in the long run.
Though the actual backup plan of Bobby waiting for a decade seems strange, fans will appreciate this deep look into the traumas and tragedies civilians in combat areas can suffer. The story line is character driven once Dinah returns home moping and depressed. Adding to her depression is that she realizes her plan is a failure as she finds the sibling more attractive than the chosen one, but does not want to hurt the loyal Bobby. This is a strong tale that showcases the aftermath of horrific situations on survivors.
Harriet Klausner
Average customer rating:
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The Backup Plan
Kathryn Keller
Manufacturer: PublishAmerica
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
General | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books | Classics | Comic | Contemporary | Literary
Suspense | Thrillers | Mystery & Thrillers | Subjects | Books
General | Mystery & Thrillers | Subjects | Books
ASIN: 1413794300
Release Date: 2006-07-17 |
Book Description
After the tragic death of her husband, Arden Iverson moves to Minneapolis to build a new life, but things don't go as she hopes. Hearing strange noises in an adjoining apartment and fearing her teenage neighbor needs help, Arden discovers Nikki Lockwood lying on the floor, dead. Alone and armed with nothing except courage and tenacity, Arden is caught between the police, who consider her their number one suspect, and the perpetrator who fears the victim identified him before she died. Arden is warned by the police not to leave town and told by the killer to go back where she came from and keep her mouth shut. Unable to convince the police of her innocence or the killer she knows nothing, Arden fearfully awaits her fate. Who will be first, the police or the perpetrator? What if they are one and the same?
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Backup Generator Plan Raises Questions.(Brief Article): An article from: San Diego Business Journal
Lee Zion
Manufacturer: CBJ, L.P.
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Digital
General | Business & Investing | Subjects | Books
Management | Management & Leadership | Business & Investing | Subjects | Books
General | Business & Investing | Subjects | e-Docs | Formats | Books
Management | Business & Investing | Subjects | e-Docs | Formats | Books
General | Business & Investing | HTML | Formats | e-Docs | Formats | Books
Management | Business & Investing | HTML | Formats | e-Docs | Formats | Books
ASIN: B0008I199A
Release Date: 2005-07-28 |
Book Description
This digital document is an article from San Diego Business Journal, published by CBJ, L.P. on June 4, 2001. The length of the article is 978 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.
Citation Details
Title: Backup Generator Plan Raises Questions.(Brief Article)
Author: Lee Zion
Publication:
San Diego Business Journal (Magazine/Journal)
Date: June 4, 2001
Publisher: CBJ, L.P.
Volume: 22
Issue: 23
Page: 1
Article Type: Brief Article
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Book Description
This digital document is an article from National Underwriter Property & Casualty-Risk & Benefits Management, published by The National Underwriter Company on July 10, 2000. The length of the article is 1309 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.
Citation Details
Title: Backup Plans Can Avert Data Disaster.
Author: Ara C. Trembly
Publication:
National Underwriter Property & Casualty-Risk & Benefits Management (Magazine/Journal)
Date: July 10, 2000
Publisher: The National Underwriter Company
Volume: 104
Issue: 28
Page: 15
Article Type: Interview
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Backup plans: a step-by-step guide to protect your data.(Technology): An article from: Detroiter
Tony Scicluna
Manufacturer: Detroit Regional Chamber
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Digital
General | Business & Investing | Subjects | Books
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ASIN: B0008DYC8A
Release Date: 2005-07-31 |
Book Description
This digital document is an article from Detroiter, published by Detroit Regional Chamber on November 1, 2002. The length of the article is 1130 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.
Citation Details
Title: Backup plans: a step-by-step guide to protect your data.(Technology)
Author: Tony Scicluna
Publication:
Detroiter (Magazine/Journal)
Date: November 1, 2002
Publisher: Detroit Regional Chamber
Volume: 24
Issue: 11
Page: 16(2)
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Backup plans: security is nothing new for data centers.: An article from: ColoradoBiz
Susan J. Marks
Manufacturer: Wiesner Publications, Inc.
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Digital
Nonfiction | Subjects | Books | Automotive | Books on CD | Books on Cassette | Crime & Criminals | Current Events | Economics | Education | Foreign Language Nonfiction | Government | Holidays | Law | Philosophy | Politics | Social Sciences | Transportation | True Accounts | Urban Planning & Development | Women's Studies
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ASIN: B0008FBCOA
Release Date: 2005-07-30 |
Book Description
This digital document is an article from ColoradoBiz, published by Wiesner Publications, Inc. on May 1, 2002. The length of the article is 1204 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.
Citation Details
Title: Backup plans: security is nothing new for data centers.
Author: Susan J. Marks
Publication:
ColoradoBiz (Magazine/Journal)
Date: May 1, 2002
Publisher: Wiesner Publications, Inc.
Volume: 29
Issue: 5
Page: 44(2)
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Claiming a refund for erroneous backup withholding from exempt retirement plan trusts.: An article from: The Tax Adviser
Brendan Logan
Manufacturer: American Institute of CPA's
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Digital
Nonfiction | Subjects | Books | Automotive | Books on CD | Books on Cassette | Crime & Criminals | Current Events | Economics | Education | Foreign Language Nonfiction | Government | Holidays | Law | Philosophy | Politics | Social Sciences | Transportation | True Accounts | Urban Planning & Development | Women's Studies
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ASIN: B000995VEC
Release Date: 2005-07-28 |
Book Description
This digital document is an article from The Tax Adviser, published by American Institute of CPA's on October 1, 1999. The length of the article is 573 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.
Citation Details
Title: Claiming a refund for erroneous backup withholding from exempt retirement plan trusts.
Author: Brendan Logan
Publication:
The Tax Adviser (Magazine/Journal)
Date: October 1, 1999
Publisher: American Institute of CPA's
Volume: 30
Issue: 10
Page: 708
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