Customer Reviews

101 Best Scenes Ever Written: A Romp Through Literature for Writers and Readers

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3 star:		(1)
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Writers and readers alike will find much to love in 101 BEST SCENES EVER WRITTEN: A ROMP THROUGH LITERATURE FOR WRITERS AND READERS. Here works by Hemingway, Jack London, Steinbeck, Twain and other notables are surveyed with an eye to providing examples of some of the most memorable writing approaches in modern history. Playwrights, in particular, will want this survey of what influences transform an ordinary scene to a great one.

Diane C. Donovan
California Bookwatch

Mr. Conrad has a fascinating idea here, but his execution is crazy. As noted elsewhere, many of his excerpts are absurdly short, and he talks in between every example. He should have trusted his idea and let the scenes do the talking.

And it's beyond absurd that he includes a long excerpt from his own work.

If not the "101 Best Scenes Ever Written"-still darn close. One of most pleasurable books I have ever read-still re-reading. Also led me to see some of the old movies these scences came from-which I had never seen. Barnaby Conrad is not a great story teller, yet always, an entertaining character worth reading.(and bullfighting afficionado-segundo a nadien)
Dave Richards
www.charlesspurgeon.net

This book is good but in a one-note fashion.

First, there aren't really 101 scenes. There are about 50 scenes that are given completely enough to recognize them as scenes. The remainder are presented as brief paragraphs. The discussion betweeen scenes is not particularly useful.

The scenes are divided into the categories: beginning, visual, action, adventure, war, romance, humor, horror, juveniles, and ending. The selection of scenes are acceptable, but the range of those fully presented is limited. There are classics (Twain, Stevenson, Defoe, Faulkner, Flaubert) and genre. The genre is from high volume writers of a couple of decades ago (Ludlum, Greene, Forsyth). What is notable is what is missing: scenes written by anyone other than a white male. There is one scene from Mitchell's Gone With The Wind and the rest of the scenes by women are in the Horror chapter. Tiresome! Where is Richard Wright, Anne Tyler,Sherman Alexie, Willa Cather? There are too many excellent writers whose drop-dead brillant scenes did not make this book.

If you love literature and enjoy unusual information about various books, this is one you should check out for yourself.