Reviews for Hallo Canada

The average rating for Hallo Canada based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2014-04-23 00:00:00 Peter Cole It is too bad that our generation has not produced an equal to Ambrose Bierce. In these varied writings'some profound, some with archaic language that have not aged well'one gets a good overview of Bierce. I wouldn't recommend this for people new to his writings, but if you are familiar with and like them, this collection helps round out a fuller picture of the man. It is remarkable that so many of his observations are as relevant today as they were when he wrote them more than 100 years ago. The highlight for me is "The Land Beyond the Blow." It is equal parts Jonathan Swift (the format is based on Gulliver's Travels), Jules Verne, William S. Burroughs and Leonardo Da Vinci'if he were a social critic. The piece is a the chronicle of a future traveler who, in his observations of weird, otherworldly cultures, creates wonderful critiques of late-19th Century America. From descriptions of civilizations in which labor is the highest good and the wealthy are the lowest forms of life to cannibals who "deny the immortality of the soul" (the only believer in immortality being one who "in early youth...had been struck by a flying stone from a volcano and had lost a considerable part of his brain") to a place where soldiers are put to death at the end of a war ("There is among our people a strong and instinctive distrust of standing armies."), the journey of the future traveler is never dull. "Ashes of the Beacon" and "The Fall of the Republic" are clever commentaries that expose Bierce's disdain for the political extremes of right and left as well as conventional wisdom in his times. Bierce shows himself to be a student of his times, delving into commentaries on Darwin and Marx. A humorous view of evolution by a commentator living centuries from now, for example, comments on how humans have developed the capacity to survive the falling debris of earthquakes rather than need earthquake-proof structures. One of the concluding paragraphs of "The Fall of the Republic" sums up how Bierce's views, like the music of Duke Ellington, is beyond category. Consider his thoughts on economics: "In reviewing the history of those turbulent times one cannot help thinking how different it all might have been if the 'law of supply and demand' and the 'purely commercial relation' had remained undiscovered, or had perished unexpounded with their discoverer when he was hanged; if in ancient America, as under the benign sway of the our most gracious and ever-blessed sovereign, the employer had studied, not how little he could get his labor for, but how much he could afford to give for it, and if the employee, instead of calculating how badly he could do his work and keep his place, had considered how well he could do it and keep his health." As with The Devil's Dictionary, sometimes one has to plod through Bierce's writing with determination, but gems are worth the effort.

Review # 2 was written on 2012-09-25 00:00:00 David Nelson For those of you who want to explore more of the critical essays of Ambrose Bierce, this is the book for you. My favorite quote from this book is: "There is thunder in Europe, but it is in America that the lightning will fall." As always, I love this man's writings. For Americans, there is Twain and then there is Bierce. And that's really it. Faulkner I don't really hold to their candles because he tried to out wit his readers. You were either with him or you weren't. And if you weren't, you were the joke. While Twain held the light up to expose injustices, Bierce eviscerated his foes through eloquent prose and put them firmly under the lens of his microscope to expose them as individuals, and all their frailties, before the world. Bierce, in his essays, proves that he was a giant in that he took on Giants, and ran them through. This was a great book.