Reviews for Cours d'ťudes historiques

The average rating for Cours d'ťudes historiques based on 2 reviews is 5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2007-04-07 00:00:00 Hunter Brown written in exquisite detail, as everyone has noted, but a lot of the rest of what's been written in the more recent reviews i find sort of troubling and, frankly, misleading. recommended for 'women who like descriptive writing'? gross. this novel was given to me by a dude, and further recommended by a (male) writer i know-- a guy who counts earnest hemingway among his favorite writers-- as one of the best novels of the 20th century. this is not, as has been implied, some kind of lady-book. marilynne robinson's 'housekeeping', like all great literature, is a revelation. it's a revelation of lonliness in particular, and of transience (two subjects often, if stupidly, associated with male psyches and literary tastes). it resonates less, in my opinion, as a girl-comes-of-age story or as a tale of sisterly bonds than it does as just the story of a person trying to make it in a family trying to make it in a town trying to make it in this world. about the survival strategies of each. about how things just keep going, keep trying to make it (or stop trying), and why. albert camus wrote that "there is but one serious philosophical problem and that is suicide"--the problem of why we should and shouldn't go on living. robinson, of course, is a novelist, not a philosopher, and she's not in the business of telling us why we should or shouldn't go on, but of showing us how (and sometimes why) we do or don't. 'housekeeping' is nothing less than a narrative account of this most profound and universally relevant fact: the fact that we keep going, or that we don't, and how we do or don't (and sometimes why). *** "there was not a soul there but knew how shallow-rooted the whole town was. it flooded yearly, and had burned once. often enough the lumber mill shut down, or burned down. there were reports that things were otherwise elsewhere, and anyone, on a melancholy evening, might feel that fingerbone was a meager and difficult place. "so a diaspora threatened always. and there is no living creature, though the whims of eons had put its eyes on boggling stalks and clampled it in a carapace, dimished it to a pinpoint and given it a taste for mud and stuck it down a well or hid it under a stone, but that creature will live on if it can. so fingerbone, which despite all its difficultes sometimes seemed pleasant and ordinary, would value itelf, too, and live on if and as it could. so every wanderer whose presence suggested it might be as well to drift, or it could not matter much, was met with something that seemed at first sight a moral reaction, since morality is a check upon the strongest temptations." marilynne robinson 'housekeeping'

Review # 2 was written on 2017-07-28 00:00:00 Jim Casimiro I was craving a book like this...had wanted to read it forever. I can't express how much I appreciate this book. The story itself had me in the palm of my hands. The writing was so rich and breathtaking- I felt like I was being taken out to an expensive fine-dining experience-- savoring every bite. No POV alternating chapters - not a long-winded 500 page novel. This powerful novel with many themes: family, loss, death, abandonment, unconventional lifestyles, small towns, with memorable characters - and an ending I never saw coming was only 219 pages! A PERFECT FLAWLESS NOVEL!!!!