Customer Reviews

Toward What Bright Glory

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My grandfather loaned me this book during my senior year of high school. It struck me then as being both a summation of my experiences that year and a preview of things to come. The novel follows the adventures of a group of seniors at Stanford University in the year leading up to World War II. They make up a cross-section of society as current now as it was then, and the book explores their reactions to everything from Big Game to the death of one of their own.

Highly recommended and an especially great gift for the high school senior in your life.

I read "Toward What Bright Glory?" my junior year of high school, after reading Drury's superb "Advise and Consent." The experience of reading my second Drury book was...underwhelming, to say the least.

"Toward What Bright Glory?" has one very good quality, and two very bad qualities. Just like "Advise and Consent," Drury simply has a genius for characterization. The students in "Toward What Bright Glory?" come alive, and subsequently their school comes alive, and their goals, dreams, and desires come alive. It's hard to write a truly horrible book if you can write people like Drury can, and he never truly did. If you're interested in "student fiction" - that is, fiction written about students or young people and their entrance into the real world, pick this book up.

However, "Toward What Bright Glory?" doesn't really have much of a plot. It's characters are connected by a few loose actions and desires, but, unlike "Advise and Consent," they're not held together by any main events of the novel, no one great cause that they all battle for throughout the book. Furthermore, other than a cheesy sentimentalism and a nostalgia for youth, the novel doesn't seem to have much of a message. What does Drury argue for or against? "Gee, our college kids sure were cool around the time of the Second World War" seems to be the only theme. Or perhaps, "Racism and Nazis are bad."

If you're interested in characterization, and specifically, characterization of students, "Toward What Bright Glory?" is a great book. However, taken as a whole, it is no more than average. Too bad. It could have been much more.