Ironwood

The second book in the bestselling 'Ironwood',series follows the odyssey and meteoric rise to,power of James, the narrator and headmaster of,Ironwood, a unique girls' boarding school where,submissive young girls are rigourously trained in,the arts of love.

"This is an account of the lives of a small band of cattle herders, the Himba, who live in and around the settlement of Otutati in northwestern Namibia. The narrative chronicles the events of a single year, though within that year are found the events of a lifetime: birth, maturation, aging, death; generosity, meanness, accomplishment, failure." "The author draws the reader into a human world that appears so utterly different from our own in the first decade of the twenty-first century. However, as the leading characters' lives and personal qualities, their joys, hopes, and anxieties unfold, the exoticism of their world fades and the experience of life rings strangely familiar."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

OLS-N conf. May/04.

The beloved Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, basis of the film starring Jack Nicholson and Meryl Streep. Francis Phelan, ex-big-leaguer, part-time gravedigger, full-time bum with the gift of gab, is back in town. He left Albany twenty-two years earlier after he dropped his infant son accidentally, and the boy died. Now he's on the way back to the wife and home he abandoned, haunted at every corner by the ghosts of his violent life. Francis; his wino ladyfriend of nine years, Helen; and his stumblebum pal, Rudy, shuffle their ragtag way through the city's bleakest streets, surviving on gumption, muscatel, and black wit. estiny is not their business. 'The premise of Ironweed was so unpromising, that in marketing terms the writer still to this day finds it funny: the story of a bunch of itinerant alcoholics, knocking around Kennedy's hometown, falling out, having visions, trying to pass for sober to cadge a bed for the night in the homeless shelter.' Guardian 'But for all the rich variety of prose and event, from hallucination to bedrock realism to slapstick and to blessed quotidian peace, ''Ironweed'' is more austere than its predecessors. It is more fierce, but also more forgiving.' Quoted from the classic New York Times review of Ironweed, which made it an overnight sensation.

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