Reviews for Gillon American Experiment Volume Two Second Edition with Studentresearch Companion Plus Hol...

The average rating for Gillon American Experiment Volume Two Second Edition with Studentresearch Companion Plus Hol... based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2013-07-10 00:00:00 Robert Gabardy Welcome to Alfred Polly's mid-existence crisis. That's where we meet him, then we backtrack from his infancy through his life up to what might just be a fresh-starting point... "...filled him with a vague and mystical happiness that he had no words, even mispronounceable words, to express." (location 486) And this gentleman has a way with words, all right! "Time had removed the hair from the top of his head and distributed a small dividend to the plunder in little bunches carelessly and impartially over the rest of his features..." (location 684) "'I've seen a mort of undertakers.'" (location 761) "Mr. Polly, dear heart! firmly believed that things like that could and did happen--somewhere." (location 883) "she cooked because food had to be cooked and with a sound moralist's entire disregard of the quality of the consequences. The food came from her hands done rather than improved, and looking as uncomfortable as savages clothed under duress by the missionary with a stock of out-sizes." ("strong meat there" at location 1613) "Queer incommunicable joy it is, the joy of the vivid phrase that turns the statement of the horridest fact to beauty!" (location 1644) "emitting such words as everyone knows and nobody prints." (euphemizing at location 1845) "Then the public houses began to vomit forth the less desirable elements of Fishbourne society." (location 2026) "The air was full of a spirituous reek." (location 2556). "A novelist should present characters, not vivisect them publicly..." (location 2759) MR. POLLY was first published in England in 1909. If you like it, you might want to follow up with THE LATE MATTIA PASCAL by Luigi Pirandello, which was first published in Italy in 1923. Or maybe you've already met MATTIA; if so, you might enjoy meeting MR. POLLY. Thanks for reading. Now LIVE!

Review # 2 was written on 2013-11-04 00:00:00 roger jackson Everyone at some point in their lives will suddenly realise in their naive exuberance they made a colossal mistake that now has its python-like grip around their cowardly little necks, and that the only solution is to burn the shop and down and become a country hobo. Or maybe only the first part of that sentence. Life in the early 1900s was uniformly dreary for the working classes, but at least they were born and raised to expect nothing—nowadays we are taught from the womb to reach for the stars and dream big dreams and made to feel like failures if we haven’t achieved everything by the age of twenty-eight, when we are still young and sexy enough not to be worn down by bitterness and remorse to take some pleasure in our achievements. Mr. Polly is like you and me—witty but not witty enough and clever but not clever enough to escape the humdrum, drummed into a predetermined life of oafs, clots, lollygaggers, pissants, pipsqueaks, miscreants, toadies, bores, whiners, haters, tyrants and psychos. The only rebellion in this sprawling penitentiary we call civilisation used to be the pursuance of personal pleasure at all costs, so at least when you dropped dead at thirty you could do so with very happy memories, but nowadays such revolting self-interest is the reason our civilisation is quickly rotting from the inside and heading for a swift and painful annihilation by the time our grandchildren hit forty. Books like this one provide a necessary anatomisation of our repugnant species, and do so with a breathless passion for change.