F. Scott Fitzgerald – This Side of Paradise

Posted by Tom Fasano on March 14, 2010 – 11:07 am -

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This Side of Paradise (Modern Library Classics)

Susan Orlean (Introduction). Modern Library 2001, Paperback, 352 pages, $0.82

4.0

Listen to the entire book by clicking the player below. To advance to the next chapter, click the double right arrow.

This Side of Paradise is the debut novel of F. Scott Fitzgerald. Published in 1920, and taking its title from a line of the Rupert Brooke poem Tiare Tahiti, the book examines the lives and morality of post-World War I youth. Its protagonist, Amory Blaine, is a wealthy and attractive Princeton University student who dabbles in literature and has a series of romances that eventually lead to his disillusionment. In his later novels, Fitzgerald would further develop the book’s theme of love warped by greed and status-seeking.

Amory Blaine grows up in a wealthy family and is given an Ivy League education. Without a need to learn a profession, he chiefly dabbles in literature and partying. His school chums are of the same ilk, and they act as foils for their ideas as Amory begins to think of himself as a character in the aforementioned Rupert Brooke poem.

World War I intervenes in this happy fog and brings focus to some, doubt to others.

In the rapidly changing technology of the war era, the financial underpinnings of the Blaine fortune begin to fall apart. The deaths of Amory’s parents leave the finances without a rudder and as Amory’s situation deteriorates he comes to realize he has only his interest in literature to fall back upon.

Meanwhile, a series of young women traipse through his life, attracted to his handsome face and bright wit like moths to a candle. But Amory can never master the role of being a real person… and, one by one, the young women traipse out.

 
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Ring Lardner and Baseball – You Know Me Al

Posted by Tom Fasano on March 8, 2010 – 2:41 pm -

Listen to the entire book by clicking the player below. To advance to the next chapter, click the double right arrow.

This time of year when many sports fans turn to baseball, my mind wanders to writers like Ring Lardner, who wrote about baseball during the game’s heyday. Oddly, I’ve never taught Ring Lardner, and now that I don’t teach American Literature, the odds are slim that I’ll be teaching him anytime soon. But the impulse remains: it’s time for a good baseball story, and what follows is one of the best — You Know Me Al.

Big, fat, dumb, lazy, vain, headstrong and cheap, Jack Keefe is a journeyman pitcher with the Chicago White Sox in the rowdy days of the Deadball Era, circa 1915, ruled by the likes of Ty Cobb and John McGraw. In You Know Me Al, we follow Jack Keefe’s life on-field and off, via the letters Jack writes to his old chum Al in his home town of Bedford, Indiana.

Ring Lardner was a Chicago sportswriter who covered the White Sox, and he brought an insider’s knowledge of clubhouse life together with his biting wit and gift for the vernacular to create a comic gem in You Know Me Al. The six Jack Keefe stories that compose this volume were originally written as individual magazine articles, but the epistolary format made it easy to collect them into a single running narrative covering Jack’s first two years in the Big Leagues.

It isn’t necessary to know baseball history to enjoy the book, which is as much about Jack’s troubles with girlfriends, wives and babies as it is about the Chicago White Sox. For the baseball fan, however, this glimpse into a bygone era adds an extra layer of fascination. In any case, Lardner’s portrait of the professional ballplayer as a dumb, drunken narcissist is as funny today as the day it was written. (Summary by Rick Rodstrom)

 
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