Splendored Thing: Love, Roses, and Other Thorny Treasures [Hardcover]

Bia Lowe (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 17, 2002

Bia Lowe’s Splendored Thing is a memoir and a paean to love told in a series of exquisitely written personal essays that follow one woman’s understanding of love, from childhood’s gentle adventures to adulthood’s stormy affairs. Author of the critically acclaimed Wild Ride, Lowe is an award-winning writer who knows that there is more truth in a good metaphor than in a thousand tiny details, and she draws on everything from Sara Lee™ baked goods and fairy tales to maps and stars to limn love in its myriad forms. She writes of her mother, the person from whom she learned loving; the object of her affection, through whom she continues to define and redefine love; and of other kinds of loving: love for a landscape, a house, a snail, a boy. Bia Lowe’s writing calls to mind the best of Joan Didion, Walt Whitman, and Lewis Thomas. But like all great writers, her work is breathtakingly original, and Splendored Thing is a unique book that takes us through the life and loves of a woman who finds joy, sorrow, and, ultimately, wonder in both.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

The author of 1995's acclaimed Wild Ride: Earthquakes, Sneezes and Other Thrills muses here on ordinary objects (mouths, roses, apples), familiar activities (falling, map reading, kissing) and traditional tales (Hansel and Gretel, the Three Bears, Rapunzel), offering commentaries that balloon like cotton candy, at first airy, then becoming dense. In these 15 genre-bending meditations, Lowe takes readers on a random-yet exhilarating-ride, toting along ideas from such thinkers as Thomas Aquinas, James Baldwin, Helen Keller, Barbara McClintock and Roger Williams. Her voice is alternately impious, impish, sensuous, witty, probing and altogether passionate. The central theme is love, admittedly a "troublesome enterprise," but one that permeates many aspects of Lowe's life-she is in love with women, in love with words ("metaphor has more truth than details ever could"), and even in love with love itself. She examines love and conflict via a prism of examples, among them engaging in sexual behavior with a classmate when she was a young girl, pursuing cows gone loose in Ireland, sharing homemade lamb stew with new friends and responding to the 2001 terrorist attacks. Abstract as the essays can be, Lowe's love for "Rose, the pseudonymous woman, object of this valentine" and her measured compassion for her mother are fully concrete. She delightfully shares personal and historical anecdotes, all the while reflecting on the tremendous powers of love and fear.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 237 pages
• Publisher: Seal Press (September 17, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1580050743
• ISBN-13: 978-1580050746
• Product Dimensions: 7.9 x 5.7 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.1 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,512,277 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A delightful read!, December 19, 2002

By A Customer

This review is from: Splendored Thing: Love, Roses, and Other Thorny Treasures (Hardcover)

In her latest book , Bia Lowe goes to the mat with the tougher aspects of being in love -- the scarier stuff, white-knuckle stuff, the stuff most of us want to sidestep in these times of virtual reality and anti-depressants. After all, what could be more difficult, more terrifying than seeing the other? Poetic, but never without grit, "Splendored Thing" speaks to what is most essential to our lives: love of a mate, family, neighbors, and other creatures. There's a lot to reckon with here. Lowe likes to stir a lot of ingredients into her pot... (everything from popular songs to physics)...but the result is sensuous and astonishing.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Sensual Pleasure, November 19, 2002

By A Customer

This review is from: Splendored Thing: Love, Roses, and Other Thorny Treasures (Hardcover)

I loved this book! Bia Lowe's writes with passion and a deft touch. From her renovation of her cottage in Ireland to her travels through Afghanistan, she never loses sight of the most important thing in our lives no matter where we live...love. It's a wonderful collection of essays and stories.

1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars What's all the fuss?, July 3, 2003

By A Customer

This review is from: Splendored Thing: Love, Roses, and Other Thorny Treasures (Hardcover)

This book is lame. It rambles and uses metaphors for EVERYTHING. Bia Lowe has some beautiful descriptions, but there's just nothing REAL about it at all. What a snore.