Amazon.com: I Would Have Saved Them If I Could (9780374174118): Leonard Michaels: Books

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I Would Have Saved Them If I Could [Hardcover]

Leonard Michaels (Author)
4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)


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Product Details

  • Hardcover: 187 pages
  • Publisher: Farrar Straus & Giroux; 1st edition (1975)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 0374174113
  • ISBN-13: 978-0374174118
  • Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.4 x 0.9 inches
  • Shipping Weight: 14.4 ounces
  • Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
  • Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,809,788 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

2 Reviews
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Average Customer Review
4.5 out of 5 stars (2 customer reviews)
 
 
 
 
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13 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars ebb and flow, February 5, 2000
Leonard Michaels has, in the last six months, become one of my literary heroes. "I Would Have Saved Them If I Could" features his talent at writing extremely short stories as well as more fleshed out pieces. It's a shame this book is out of print, try finding it at your local libraries. "Murderers" is perhaps one of the best short stories by an American writer I have ever read. Do yourself a favor, read this book.
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars Fast and furious, January 5, 2008
This review is from: I Would Have Saved Them If I Could (Hardcover)
I wanted to like these stories more than I in fact did. I knew of Leonard Michaels as esteemed if not prolific short- story writer.This was my chance to get to know his work. This book is his second collection after the perhaps more well- known 'Going Places'.

Michaels is a writer of the quick punch and the fast word. His writing is clipped, and sharp. He often throws in intellectual references and ideas from what is clearly a wide reading.

The stories arouse initial interest but do not follow through as narratives, but rather take the form of cut- up comments, digressions, sequenced reflection.

They also do not go deep emotionally.

The feelings here are quick hungers and lusts, sharp angers and violent misperceptions.

Michaels has a real talent for compressed utterance, poetic epigram. So the best part of the title - story is I think, the title itself. It truly aroused my curiosity but after reading the story I still was not sure what it was about.

"When you are hungry and poor you grab at what you can get" This line summarizes what I take to be the spirit of Michaels' work.

I can be wrong. And I may not get it.

I also know Michaels had a good knowledge of Yiddish, had a sense of the Lower East Side world, also of the Shoah. A Jewish writer in a way though it is difficult to see any special message in that regard coming from this work.

When alienation was the fashion he was alienated. And yet still not fashionable.
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