Customer Reviews

Who the Hell Is Pansy O'Hara?: The Fascinating Stories Behind 50 of the World's Best-LovedBooks

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There are many books about books. "Why Not Catch-21?" by Gary Dexter is one of them. Harold Bloom's "Novelists and Novels" is another. "Who the Hell is Pansy O'Hara?" is one of the most recent book about books. It is different from the others not only in style, but also in content. Some will find it fascinating to have stories like Rowling's "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone" discussed in the same book that discusses Jane Austen ("Pride and Prejudice") and Emily Bronte ("Jane Eyre"). The authors include the Russian heavyweights, Leo Tolstoy ("War and Peace") and Fyodor Dostoevsky ("Crime and Punishment") - they tell us that Dostoevsky's book was accepted by the publisher only because Tolstoy grew fat on his previous success and had not written anything that year, and coincidentally, Turgenev, their contemporary rival, also had nothing to publish at the time. The unconventional mix of stories - I should now add, Jacqueline Susanne's "Valley of the Dolls", Dan Brown's "Da Vinci Code, and A A Milne's "Winnie the Pooh" - may discourage others. Austen, Tolstoy & Shelley ("Frankenstein") have readers; Rowling, Brown, & Susanne have fans. They might not like to catch each other reading the same book.

Secondly, this book stands out because it combines a discussion of the story and the writer in the context of its history, the writer's biography, and the reviews of the work. It is a literary "making of" book of books. Every work is a chapter and the book is divided into two main parts, "fiction" and "non-fiction". That is the third intriguing aspect of this book. In the non-fiction segment the authors talk about "Encyclopaedia Brittanica", and "Guinness World Records" as well as Truman Capote's "In Cold Blood". If one is looking for a scholarly work, he might prefer to pick up Bloom's book instead, where he will read Bloom's comparison of Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights in such terms as:
"Jane Eyre, like Wuthering Heights, is after all a romance, however northern, and not a novel, properly speaking. Its standards of representation have more to do with Jacobean melodrama and Gothic fiction than with George Eliot and Thackeray, and more even with Byron's "Lara" and "Manfred" than with any other works. Rochester is no Heathcliff; he lives in a social reality in which Heathcliff would be an intruder even if Heathcliff cared for social realities except as fields in which to take revenge."

Bond & Sheedy write, instead, "Charlotte, inspired by her time in Brussels, penned 'The Professor'. Emily, influenced by the wilds of the moors, had written 'Wuthering Heights'. Anne had produced "'gnes Grey', a story based on her experiences as a governess." Bond & Sheedy's effort, less profound in subject and analysis, is nonetheless full of useful information that are usually found embedded in a mass of other less striking information in major biographies. They tell about Erich Remarque and his "All Quiet on the Western Front", concluding with information about the consequences of his fame - the loss of his German citizenship, the welcome of America, his purchase of a house in Switzerland, his marriages (twice to the same woman), and his affairs, which include the story of Marlene Dietrich. This book will be a nice companion for a lazy afternoon by the beach; or a warm cafe in ski resort; or in the bath; or wherever.

I like the trivia/gee whiz books that tell stories behind something. It is fun to learn about the stories behind some of the great books in our English Literature. I bought this book for my English teacher Daughter in Law who loves books more than I do. I did have to peek at the book before giving it away. It was great fun to learn the details behind the stories I have loved for years.

It gives us something more to talk about when talking about the books.

I love the idea of the story behind the story. I couldn't wait to get this book and even bumped it up my reading stack. However, I found it hard to get into. It takes the top 50 books written in the author's opinion and breaks them down. In the introduction, the author states what they are trying to accomplish. I found the book fell short of these goals. First, the book tells you about the author of the particular book. For instance, what is going on throughout their life and then tells you about the events in the world that are going on in that time period. Most of these sections of the chapters I enjoyed. Then it goes into why the author wrote the book. In most chapters, it's about 2 paragraphs long then the chapter will end about that particular book. I thought that the story behind the story would have more insider knowledge or more about why they wrote this particular book or even why it was so great. It doesn't. The chapters are extremely short...about 4-8 pages on average. I did like the other reading material section in the back and the book gave me information I didn't already know. I would recommend this to anyone looking for a quick read of facts about the world going on when these top books were written or a short biographical sketch about the author of these books.

The rules of syntax must be different in Australia. The authors of this book seem unaware of the rule that a participial phrase at the beginning of a sentence must refer to the subject of the sentence; the results are sometimes amusing but more often annoying, and rereading is frequently required to get the authors' intended meaning. There are dozens of such occurrences, as well as some novel uses of words (Tolstoy ostracized his family; Darwin's father was a reputed doctor), irregular punctuation, questionable arithmetic (Webster was born in 1758 and grew up during the American Revolution), and oddities of style (Darwin is referred to four times in three pages by his age rather than his name; Hawking began to begin postgraduate study). I hesitate to give this book even one star.

As the other reviewer has written, this book packs a lot into its ~300-page length. In an easy-to-read format, you get the historical as well as the biographical context behind 50 masterpieces. A highly recommended read.