Join Amazon Prime and ship Two-Day for free and Overnight for $3.99. Already a member? Sign in.
|
Frequently Bought Together
Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought
by Marc Estrin
|
by Naomi Ragen
|
Rashi's Daughters, Book I: Joheved: A Novel of Love and the Talmud in Medieval France by Maggie Anton |
Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
Alan Krieger, a Jewish ER nurse and self-styled "golem of the Grand Concourse," is the antihero of Estrin's third novel, impressive for Alan's verbal pyrotechnics but finally overwhelmed by his motivating pathology. Alan's repulsiveness begins with his grotesquely obese, unhygienic and flatulent body (which is unaccountably appealing to women), but his many minor sins and shortcomings are dwarfed by his outrageous racism. Alan's musings grow increasingly ugly as his interactions with black people—in the hospital, on the subway, in the Bronx where he lives, and in Harlem where "they" live—both feed and reflect his poisonous obsession. While Estrin foregrounds various prejudices on all sides, it is suffocating to accompany Alan in his accelerating madness, as he sheds the outer skins that make his life at all tenable—his family; his girlfriends, a German psychiatrist and a Jewish social worker; his job —and hurtles into his fate over the six-month course of the novel. Like Alan, the book's 1999 veers unsteadily between millennial homeboys, Taxi Driver, Bernard Goetz and post-Holocaust Jewish anger, and Alan's ugliness can't hold it all together. (Nov.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Booklist
In his edgy and satirical novels, Estrin hijacks historical figures and impudently improvises on the works of his literary superiors. In Insect Dreams: The Half Life of Gregor Samsa (2002), Estrin riffs on Kafka; here he commandeers John Kennedy O'Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces. Estrin's latest vitriolic tale is set in New York in 1999 and stars a fat, angry, and gross Jewish registered nurse named Alan Kreiger. Aggressively pedantic and manipulative, Alan lives in filth with a boa constrictor and juggles two girlfriends (what they see in him is beyond comprehension), one a German psychiatrist, the other a Jewish social worker. Confronted by violence, madness, and hate in the emergency room and anti-Semitism on the street, Alan is driven over the edge. Estrin's abrasive antihero's commitment to battling false messiahs is morbidly compelling, and his logorrhea is occasionally dazzling. As Estrin raises a host of tough moral questions, drags philosopher Martha Nussbaum into the unsavory proceedings, and tinkers with the story of the golem, his mind-bending humor is at once intellectual and ribald. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
See all Editorial Reviews
Alan Krieger, a Jewish ER nurse and self-styled "golem of the Grand Concourse," is the antihero of Estrin's third novel, impressive for Alan's verbal pyrotechnics but finally overwhelmed by his motivating pathology. Alan's repulsiveness begins with his grotesquely obese, unhygienic and flatulent body (which is unaccountably appealing to women), but his many minor sins and shortcomings are dwarfed by his outrageous racism. Alan's musings grow increasingly ugly as his interactions with black people—in the hospital, on the subway, in the Bronx where he lives, and in Harlem where "they" live—both feed and reflect his poisonous obsession. While Estrin foregrounds various prejudices on all sides, it is suffocating to accompany Alan in his accelerating madness, as he sheds the outer skins that make his life at all tenable—his family; his girlfriends, a German psychiatrist and a Jewish social worker; his job —and hurtles into his fate over the six-month course of the novel. Like Alan, the book's 1999 veers unsteadily between millennial homeboys, Taxi Driver, Bernard Goetz and post-Holocaust Jewish anger, and Alan's ugliness can't hold it all together. (Nov.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Booklist
In his edgy and satirical novels, Estrin hijacks historical figures and impudently improvises on the works of his literary superiors. In Insect Dreams: The Half Life of Gregor Samsa (2002), Estrin riffs on Kafka; here he commandeers John Kennedy O'Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces. Estrin's latest vitriolic tale is set in New York in 1999 and stars a fat, angry, and gross Jewish registered nurse named Alan Kreiger. Aggressively pedantic and manipulative, Alan lives in filth with a boa constrictor and juggles two girlfriends (what they see in him is beyond comprehension), one a German psychiatrist, the other a Jewish social worker. Confronted by violence, madness, and hate in the emergency room and anti-Semitism on the street, Alan is driven over the edge. Estrin's abrasive antihero's commitment to battling false messiahs is morbidly compelling, and his logorrhea is occasionally dazzling. As Estrin raises a host of tough moral questions, drags philosopher Martha Nussbaum into the unsavory proceedings, and tinkers with the story of the golem, his mind-bending humor is at once intellectual and ribald. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
See all Editorial Reviews
Product Details
Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
|
Inside This Book
(learn more)
Tag this product(What's this?)Think of a tag as a keyword or label you consider is strongly related to this product.
Tags will help all customers organize and find favorite items. |
Help others find this product — tag it for Amazon search
No one has tagged this product for Amazon search yet. Why not be the first to suggest a search for which it should appear?
Sell a Digital Version of This Book in the Kindle Store
If you are a publisher or author and hold the digital rights to a book, you can sell a digital version of it in our Kindle Store.
Learn more
Customer Reviews
There are no customer reviews yet. Create your own review
| |||
Video reviews
|
|
Customer Discussions
Beta (What's this?)
New! See all customer communities, and bookmark your communities to keep track of them.
Product Information from the Amapedia Community
Beta (What's this?)Be the first person to add an article about this item at Amapedia.com.
› See featured Amapedia.com articles
Listmania!
Look for Similar Items by Category
Cook with the Best Ingredients |
Best Books of 2008 |
Buy Three Books, Get a Fourth Free |
Smoke Signals |
|||||||
|
Your Recent History
(What's this?)|
You have no recently viewed items or searches.
After viewing product detail pages or search results, look here to find an easy way to navigate back to pages you are interested in. Look to the right column to find helpful suggestions for your shopping session. |
Continue shopping: Top Sellers
| ||||
| ||
| ||
| ||
| ||
| ||
