Join Amazon Prime and ship Two-Day for free and Overnight for $3.99. Already a member? Sign in.
The Air We Breathe: A Novel
and over 140,000 other books are available for Amazon Kindle – Amazon’s new wireless reading device. Learn more
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Show more editions and formats
Show fewer editions and formatsBetter Together
Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought
Bridge of Sighs by Richard Russo  (114)
$17.79
|
Run by Ann Patchett (182)
|
The Gathering (Man Booker Prize) by Anne Enright  (111)
$11.20
|
Away: A Novel by Amy Bloom (95)
$11.20
|
People of the Book: A Novel by Geraldine Brooks  (110)
$17.13
|
Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
Picking up connected characters from her 1996 National Book Award–winning story collection Ship Fever, the latest from Barrett follows her Pulitzer Prize finalist Servants of the Map. In the fall of 1916, as the U.S. involvement in WWI looms, the Adirondack town of Tamarack Lake houses a public sanitarium and private cure cottages for TB patients. Gossip about roommate changes, nurse visits, cliques and romantic connections dominate relations among the sick—mostly poor European immigrants—when they're not on their porches taking their rest cure. Intrigue increases with the arrival of Leo Marburg, an attractive former chemist from Odessa who has spent his years in New York slaving away at a sugar refinery, and of Miles Fairchild, a pompous and wealthy cure cottage resident who decides to start a discussion group, despite his inability to understand many of his fellow patients. As in Joshua Ferris's recent Then We Came to the End, Barrett narrates with a collective we, the voice of the crowd of convalescents. Details of New York tenements and of the sanitarium's regime are vivid and engrossing. The plot, which hinges on the coming of WWI, has a lock-step logic, but its transparency doesn't take away from the timeliness of its theme: how the tragedy, betrayal and heartbreak of war extend far beyond the battlefield. (Oct.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Bookmarks Magazine
The Air We Breathe brings back descendants of some of the characters introduced in Andrea Barrett’s National Book Awardâ€"winning Ship Fever (1996). Critics praise Barrett’s detailed exploration of the sanatorium’s claustrophobic quarters, patients’ ceaseless boredom, and fearâ€"all undercut by brewing nativism and public fear of tuberculosis. The characters represent different elements of society, and the sanatorium a microcosm for wartime allegiances and betrayals. A Greek chorus comprised of the poor, sick souls alienated some critics; a few others thought the major event anticlimactic and the formal discussions too pedantic. Though The Air We Breathe strikes a sharp allegorical note with civil liberty issues today, it is not Barrett’s strongest work.
Picking up connected characters from her 1996 National Book Award–winning story collection Ship Fever, the latest from Barrett follows her Pulitzer Prize finalist Servants of the Map. In the fall of 1916, as the U.S. involvement in WWI looms, the Adirondack town of Tamarack Lake houses a public sanitarium and private cure cottages for TB patients. Gossip about roommate changes, nurse visits, cliques and romantic connections dominate relations among the sick—mostly poor European immigrants—when they're not on their porches taking their rest cure. Intrigue increases with the arrival of Leo Marburg, an attractive former chemist from Odessa who has spent his years in New York slaving away at a sugar refinery, and of Miles Fairchild, a pompous and wealthy cure cottage resident who decides to start a discussion group, despite his inability to understand many of his fellow patients. As in Joshua Ferris's recent Then We Came to the End, Barrett narrates with a collective we, the voice of the crowd of convalescents. Details of New York tenements and of the sanitarium's regime are vivid and engrossing. The plot, which hinges on the coming of WWI, has a lock-step logic, but its transparency doesn't take away from the timeliness of its theme: how the tragedy, betrayal and heartbreak of war extend far beyond the battlefield. (Oct.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Bookmarks Magazine
The Air We Breathe brings back descendants of some of the characters introduced in Andrea Barrett’s National Book Awardâ€"winning Ship Fever (1996). Critics praise Barrett’s detailed exploration of the sanatorium’s claustrophobic quarters, patients’ ceaseless boredom, and fearâ€"all undercut by brewing nativism and public fear of tuberculosis. The characters represent different elements of society, and the sanatorium a microcosm for wartime allegiances and betrayals. A Greek chorus comprised of the poor, sick souls alienated some critics; a few others thought the major event anticlimactic and the formal discussions too pedantic. Though The Air We Breathe strikes a sharp allegorical note with civil liberty issues today, it is not Barrett’s strongest work.
Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.
See all Editorial Reviews
| Product Details |