Customer Reviews

The Great Santini

5 star:		(50)
4 star:		(24)
3 star:		(8)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

All of Pat Conroy's books have one foot in his childhood, and none is more autobiographical than The Great Santini. Colonel Bull Meecham is a legendary Marine fighter pilot whose military successes are almost as many as his personal excesses. Lillian Meecham is a Southern gentlewoman with a love of literature. After moving from base to base each year, the Meecham's finally settle down in fictional Ravenel, SC (Beaufort in real life).

The Colonel rules his fighter squadron and his family with an iron first. While this technique is successful in motivating his pilots, it has disastrous effects on his wife and children. His cruelty (both mental and physical) is enough to crush even the strongest soul. While he chides Ben for being a sissy, he suppresses Ben's attempts to act like a man. Yet, the Colonel can do endearing things, like when he gives Ben his original flight jacket on his 18th birthday. No wonder Ben has a love-hate relationship with his old man.

At a new school, Ben quickly establishes himself as a decent scholar and a talented basketball player. Several teachers and his principal see the potential in young Ben, and give him the love and mentoring he could never get from the Colonel. They teach him the importance of standing up for what he believes and to be his own man. When one of Ben's friends is threatened, Ben defies his dad and goes to his aid. In doing so, he becomes more of a man than his father will ever be.

The Great Santini is a fabulous story, and nobody writes with as much passion and beauty as Pat Conroy. Conroy takes us through the emotional gamut from belly laughs to tears and back again. Although some parts of the story are fiction, there is enough truth in that when Conroy's mom filed for divorce from the real Colonel after 33 years of marriage, she handed a copy of The Great Santini to the judge as evidence of the Colonel's violent nature. Conroy is a definitely success story and despite many scars, he was able to overcome his tumultuous upbringing to become the very successful writer he is. But perhaps without that childhood, we would not know the Conroy we know today. Even he admits that "one of the greatest gifts you can get as a writer is to be born into an unhappy family."

This was an excellent book. I found this book personally very interesting, because I grew up in a Marine Family also. Many of Mr. Conroys general descriptions of Marine life were dead on. For example, Mr Conroys description of Col. Meecham loading his family in the car leaving for a new duty station before the sun comes up, reminded me so much of many of the moves we made, incredible but yet so true, it made me laugh. Col Meecham was an extreme character, but many of his phrases and philosophies were familiar to me through some of the people I met growing up Marine. Not only that, his descriptions of Beaufort South Carolina, were also excellent. It put you right back there. You could almost smell the southern sea air and the swamps as you read. The book not only confronted the issues of a family trying to meet the impossibly high standards of thier Marine father, it also confronted the issue of racism in the south. There were many complicated emotional issues in the book. A lot of them do not get resolved, but it was the kind of book that makes you think for a while after you have finished it. I would highly recommend it to anyone.

This was Pat Conroy's first novel and I believe this is his only book written in the third person.

His writing is beautiful, and in my opinion, has grown even more so in the last 25 + years since he wrote this. I respect him because he has not flooded the market with his books like so many other best-selling authors.

This is the story of the Meecham family: Bull, the father, a Marine jet-fighter pilot who refers to himself as "the great Santini"-- as in "The great Santini has spoken"--he is the *law* in the family; Lillian, the mother, a Southern belle who tries to soften her husband's pronouncements and shield her four children from his sometimes-violent wrath; Ben, their son, who is a senior in high school and has a love/hate relationship with Bull; Mary Anne, one year younger than Ben, smart-mouthed and unattractive; and the youngest children, Matt and Karen.

I thought the characters were well-drawn and fully fleshed-out. By the end of this book, I felt that I really *knew* them well. The exploration of the father/son, father/children relationship was masterfully done.

The locale was not as important to this novel as it was in his other books, especially "Beach Music" and "The Prince of Tides". In this respect, the book could have taken place any where...whereas in the aforementioned books, the locales were almost characters in themselves.

All in all, an outstanding book, one that made me sad and happy, made me laugh and cry.

Let me start out by saying that I think Pat Conroy is one of the best authors out there. He can paint a picture so vividly with is words you truly feel like you are there. I first read Beach Music and it rocked my world. Each of the stories told in that book were amazing. So, even though I'd seen the movie Prince of Tides, I decided to read the book. I loved it also. Now having a hunger for more of his amazing writing, I picked up The Great Santini. I must say, I was disappointed. I loved the characters and the general concept of the story. A tough Marine, a true southern belle and two of the four children with depth that you admire throughout the entire story. I just felt that there was no storyline. I get what Conroy was trying to portray by creating the characters, and the relationships between the characters were great, but I just felt as if something was missing from this story. I also didn't feel like a whole lot happened until half way through the book.

There were also a couple of highly dramatic scenes(Sammy's girlfriend and Toomer and Red) that had you at the edge of your seat. However, once that chapter was over, no mention of it whatsoever. I would think these things happened for a reason (e.g. character growth, forming a bond between two characters)and would be explored through the eyes of the characters some more. This was a disappointment to me also.

All in all, the book had a lot of good in it, but just didn't measure up to Beach Music and The Prince of Tides. I plan on reading Conroy's other books in hopes to feel the magic of his writing again.

This is a wonderful novel. Published in 1976 when Conroy was 30, The Great Santini marked the debut of a talented writer and born storyteller.

To those who are well acquainted with Conroy, this novel (like all his others) is autobiographical in content. This is the story of Lt. Col. Bull Meecham, United States Marine Corps fighter pilot and his family. Meecham runs his family like a squadron. His word is law and he is the ultimate authority. Any family who dare dissents from Bull's view will suffer his wrath. The novel is, at the core, a family story. Bull, his lovely wife Lillian and their four children, Ben the oldest, Mary Ann, Karen and young Matt. Ben feels all the pressure as the Colonel pushes his son to be the best and will not tolerate any backtalk.

The story moves along at a fine pace and the characters are fully developed whether they are the main characters or supporting ones.

It is interesting to note that it is Conroy's only novel that was written in the third person, and, unlike other first novels, it does not suffer from the standard problems that usually go with debuts.

The one thing that impresses me the most is that Conroy's Marine Corps scenes ring with absolute authority. A difficult achievment for a writer who didn't serve in the Corps. No doubt he had witnessed much Marine Corps activity when going to bases in the company of his father (Col. Don Conroy, USMC Ret. dec.).

Pick this book up if you can. It's a genuine slice of life book that both entertains and enlarges your view of the world.

I began reading this book with trepidation, because I worried that a book about the Marines and basketball might be a little too masculine and juvenile even for someone who tends to enjoy books with that character, but I was pleasantly mistaken. This is a great book--not just good, but great--about a career Marine who has established himself as a hero in war, leader within the Corps and one of the most bombastic, foul mouthed and party-hearty personalities anywhere, but a man who has no idea how to alter his personality at home. His family, which dutifully follows him around the South, admires his professional abilities and follows his orders almost without question also live in terror of the man who rules with an iron fist and absues them emotionally and physically. Bull Meecham is truly one of the great characters and personalities from any fiction I've read.

The other members of the family, however, are also just as valuable and interesting in this book. Bull's son's attempts to be a man, his wife's attempts to rear her children with Southern charm and grace despite their father, the oldest daughter's attempts to be an independent woman despite both of her parents. The Great Santini goes further, however, and explores racism in the mid-century South, the power of sports in youth culture, the troubled existence of military families, etc.

Pat Conroy is a beautiful writer who creates lifelike characters, produces huge laughs and equally large tragedies, and never lets a dull moment slip into this book. This is one of my favorite books I've ever read and will highly recommend it to anyone I meet.

From what Pat Conroy has said in numerous interviews, it is obvious that his novel The Great Santini is a thinly disguised autobiographical account of his own childhood as a Marine brat. High school senior Ben Meecham, Pat Conroy's fictional counterpart, is the son of a volatile Marine fighter pilot 'Bull' Meecham, whose nom de guerre is 'The Great Santini', which, by the way, was also Pat Conroy dad's nom de guerre in real life. Pat Conroy once said that his dad was Zeus and his mom was Hera, and that his first memory was of his dad laughing and hitting his mother in face while she tried to stab him with a knife. Boy, oh boy, if this novel is an accurate representation of what went on in the Conroy household, then he is right about the true identity of his parents! The Great Santini acts, according to his wife Lillian, like a living, breathing Marine recruitment poster. Santini is a man of contradictions, a man who loves his wife and his children more than anything else in the world, but you wouldn't know it from the brutal manner by which he occasionally treats them. By the way, if you saw the wonderful film adaptation of Conroy's novel, you were probably left with the impression that Santini is the only parent in this household that is screwed up. Unlike the movie version, in the novel Santini's wife Lillian, who means well, is in her own way just as screwed up as her husband. Like Santini, Lillian also loves her children more than anything in the world, but she often acts like a demented Scarlett O'Hara. (Indeed, part of the tension between Santini and his wife comes from the fact that she is a Southern Belle who loves her cultural roots, while Santini is a purposely uncouth Yankee from Chicago who despises everything Southern.) Lillian is especially dysfunctional when it comes to teaching gender roles to her daughters. Just as Santini is one extreme with his sons Ben and Matt, wanting them to grow up to be stoic, hard marines who can unmercifully kill America's enemies, Lillian Meecham puts her oldest daughter Mary Anne through hell basically because Mary Anne is a Plain Jane nonconformist who won't conform to her mother's dictum that a woman is like a flower, pretty but silent and modest, while Mary Anne's pretty younger sister Karen does accept her mother's vision of womanhood. Lillian's ideal vision of how a woman should act is ironic because under her soft Southern Belle persona, Santini's wife is woman of steel whose temper is often as fiery and violent as her husband's.

A lot happens action wise in this novel, some of it horrifying, some of it hilarious, but The Great Santini doesn't have an overly obvious narrative drive per se. Instead, the questions that drive the plot of this amazing novel are more subtle: Will Santini be successful in his first command at the Marine base in Ravenel? Will Ben and Mary Anne be successful in their bid to fit in at their new high school? (Like Conroy's "The Lords of Discipline", the action of TGS takes place within the space of a school year.) Now that the Great Santini has come home from his year living overseas without his family, will the Meecham family have a better year together this time, or will their family situation become abusive again like in the past? I guess you could argue that The Great Santini is more character-driven than plot-driven, although it's not necessarily easy to make a distinction between the two since action often reveals character. The Great Santini is a fascinating portrayal of how even an extremely dysfunctional family can still love each other, and how a child can love a parent who occasionally causes them great pain. Five stars.

This novel by Pat Conroy is an amazing contemporary novel that leads you through the life of a military family in the late 1950's. This book hits home having several family members, two being pilots and one a marine, that have served in the military, and it was a difficult book to put down. In many ways, the "Great Santini" reminded me of my father; a man that at times is both loved and hated by his family. Colonel Bull Meecham is a marine fighter pilot that demands respect as the "Great Santini" by both his family and his flight squadron. His oldest son Ben, a senior in high school, struggles with the relationship that he has with his father, who he hates very much but loves and respects. If not for Lillian Meecham, wife of the "Great Santini" and peacekeeper of the household, the harsh and sometimes abusive father would release his wrath without a second thought. From the witty remarks of Mary Anne to the competitiveness between Ben and his father, The Great Santini creates a family persona that many can relate. The Great Santini takes you through the difficulties of a year in the life of a southern marine family after the Korean War. I highly recommend entering the past and becoming a member of the Meecham family by reading The Great Santini. This non-stop novel reaches heights of laughter and tears and is well worth reading.

Nobody has wrung more novels from a dysfunctional family than Pat Conroy. In The Great Santinti he opens a window which may give a new and unexpected view to many Americans, into the family life of a career military man. For those who have never lived within the military, this book may seem bizarre and contrived. For those of us who did, it hits a nerve - even for those of us whose father was not an abusive borderline alcoholic fighter pilot.

The sense of rootlessness, of being disconnected from the rest of society is here. Military families live in a strange semisubmerged culture invisible to the mainstream, and with the ending of the draft we have a generation of Americans who have never served and thus the gap has widened. The only friendships we form are with other military people, for civilians, even in the towns outside the main gate, are partially alien and can never be part of the community. Conroy captures this, and superimposes upon it the additional strains imposed by the father's domineering, macho, iron willed personality. Face it, he's not Gerald McRaney from Major Dad. No trying to understand the fears and dreams of his family, we do it by the book, my way or no way, sir, yes sir!!! There is stress between Colonel Santini and his neurotic southern belle wife, who wants to ensure her children grow up with a gentle appreciation for life, with his son who wants desperately to please his father but to do it by following his own path, and with his intelligent but socially awkward daughter who being a mere girl is not qualified for the warrior life and thus doesn't count. The military life is hard enough, throwing in these problems on top of it makes you wonder at the limits we accept in everyday life.

Hard edged, disorienting, sometimes ugly, this book is for all veterans of the Cold War, active duty or dependents, who lived with the possibility that the head of the family might be called upon to go off and die in someplace most of us couldn't locate on a globe (as an aside I find that former military brats are much better at geography than most others - for one thing we got letters from all those exotic locales)... Admiral Hyman Rickover once said military officers should be like a caste of warrior priests... this novel is about that caste and the acolytes who also served. Pat Conroy once wrote elsewhere to the effect that his father's job was to be a fighter pilot, and his family's job was to provide that fighter pilot whenever the govenrment called for him.

I have practically lived Conroy's books, being a child of the military (in my case the United States Navy)and professional nomad while still having deep roots in the Old South. This book in particular, spoke to my soul. It is about the unconditional love we have for our parents, who are themselves fallible human beings. Reading this book lead me to see my father as a human being for the first time, and in a large part was responsible for my deciding to forgive him for the scars of my childhood. in response to my reaching out as an adult to get to know him, he was finally able to become the friend and advisor he longed to be to me when I was growing up. Only through forgiveness and understanding are we capable of breaking the cycle of emotional and physical abuse so prevalent in the children of abusers.