Reviews for Manual of dissection

The average rating for Manual of dissection based on 2 reviews is 5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2016-09-17 00:00:00 Earl Jenkins This is both for The 1930's and for The Final Years. I agree these are wonderfully researched and very good reads. I'm in the middle of a reassessment of Hemingway anyway and have gone back to re-read and read all his work. I never thought much of his style in the few books I read when I was young because I wasn't after straightforward, to the point prose but was more into sentences two paragraphs long and lyrical to boot. As I've gotten older I appreciate more the boiling down of prose to it's essence as few writers can do. Among women, there is so much hostility towards Hemingway because of the way he treated women and people in general and for his obvious extreme machismo, which today seems so boorish. These books explain better his cyclical mood swings and depression and near hysteria between books and these symptoms are more more understood today than 30 years ago. He only had extremes and those were either as a grandiose asshole or as the most fascinating and powerful personality ever. I decided to stick to his words. The intensity and driven behavior towards writing which he displayed all his life leave me breathless. His writing was his life. His adventures and loves were fodder for his books. His writing made him and saved him and propelled him and overwhelmed him. To be able to write For Whom The Bell Tolls, and The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms puts him among other literary geniuses.

Review # 2 was written on 2018-09-03 00:00:00 Robert Fornwalt The fifth and final volume in this still definitive study of the life and inspirations of Hemingway is the hardest to read. Not because the writing suffers as Hemingway's did in the final decade of his life, but rather because this section deals with the slow descent of Papa into premature senility, fragility, and madness. Beginning with the stunning success of For Whom the Bell Tolls, the writer's life begins to take a deluded descending spiral as he convinces himself that he can help the World War II effort by patrolling Key West for U Boats (discovered by Reynolds for the first time). He follows his own self defeating cycle of leaving his wife for another woman but this time the cycle leads to diminishing results. Despite his success with The Old Man and the Sea and achieving the pinnacle successes of the Nobel and Pulitzer Prizes, Hemingway can only write intermittently and never self-contentedly. Coupled with a number of instances of his penchant for suffering significant injuries, Hemingway's brain pays the price. In the final years, he is a tragic shell of himself left with only one option, the only thing he still knows how to do well. Brilliant and essential for all literary history buffs and Hemingway enthusiasts.