Reviews for A Passionate Pilgrim

The average rating for A Passionate Pilgrim based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2011-05-11 00:00:00 Fitatsd Linas 3.5 Stars - Good book As you might expect with a short-story collection, some are winners and some are losers. The winners were fantastic, and the losers... well, they're they made the reading experience less enjoyable. The rating is an average of the ratings of every individual story and then divided by the number of stories in the book - 44 to be exact. My favorite story in the collection is one quite early-on and one of the shorter one's in the book - Sailor off the Bremen by Irwin Shaw. The story was originally published in The New Yorker on February 25, 1939. This one tells the story of Ernest, who received a brutal beating from a pro-Nazi aboard the Bremen after a Communist demonstration. Ernest's brother and sister-in-law take revenge into their own hands after hearing his story. This one is my favorite because it is beautifully and simply written. Shaw effectively tells the story that Fascism, Nazism, is disgusting on an individual scale. He also was able to humanize the villain, which not every writer can successfully do. I also appreciate how Shaw didn't portray the Communist's as perfect or the ideal opposition to Fascism. From my understanding, Shaw was left-leaning but I thought this particular story was more centrist - perhaps slightly left leaning. My least favorite story is The Whore of Mensa by Woody Allen. I mean, he's despicable. Do I need to say more? My runner-up for favorite is A Sentimental Journey by Peter Taylor. Do I recommend this? Probably yeah. I'd advise to at least skim through it to see if any stories or authors peak your interest.

Review # 2 was written on 2012-08-21 00:00:00 Ryan Yokota Maybe the New Yorker fiction section is not for me. Too many of the stories were of the John Cheever Saul Bellow Philip Roth John Updike kind, in which a middle aged man puts on his raincoat and leaves his office and gets on the train to Scarsdale and reminisces about an affair he had, and then gets off the train. Maybe its good that I don't get these stories, because maybe that means I don't share their life of middle aged desperation. Maybe. On the other hand, there's the always funny Sj Perelman.