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   Book Info

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Ragtime  
Author: E. L. Doctorow
ISBN: 0452279070
Format: Handover
Publish Date: June, 2005
 
     
     
   Book Review


From School Library Journal
Grade 10 Up-Written by scholars or literary experts, these essays discuss Doctorow's use of illusion and mirrors, music as a metaphor, the American dream, the boy narrator, the book's autobiographical elements, Ragtime as a tale of race and property, its historical figures and fictional characters, women's roles, the use of foreshadowing, and many other topics. Authors of individual chapters pick apart Ragtime for underlying meanings and facts, and it is interesting to see how several critics view it from different perspectives. This is the type of novel that is open to interpretation and students will gain a better understanding from reading all of the discussion. Doctorow is quoted in several chapters. Students looking for criticism and analysis of literary works will find it easy to use this title rather than searching endlessly for the journals in which these articles may have originally appeared. A valuable resource for literature collections.Pat Bender, The Shipley School, Bryn Mawr, PACopyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.


From AudioFile
Doctorow does a fairly nice job reading his justly celebrated portrait of 1906 America. He has a sandy, pleasant, lightly accented voice and a fine sense of the dramatic--though he strangely mispronounces words, as, for instance, "lau-DEN-um" instead of "LAU-de-num." Neither has he the comic touch as a performer to match his comic touch as a writer. More importantly, this tape suffers from the same inevitable flaw of the film and musical versions. They cannot reproduce the original's principal achievement: the stunning conjuration of ragtime music. To hear that, one must read the book silently to oneself. Y.R. (c)AudioFile, Portland, Maine




Ragtime

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Published in 1975, Ragtime changed our very concept of what a novel could be. An extraordinary tapestry, Ragtime captures the spirit of America in the era between the turn of the century and the First World War.
The story opens in 1906 in New Rochelle, New York, at the home
of an affluent American family.
One lazy Sunday afternoon, the famous escape artist Harry Houdini swerves his car into a telephone pole outside their house. And almost magically, the line between fantasy and historical fact, between real and imaginary characters, disap-
pears. Henry Ford, Emma Goldman, J. P. Morgan, Evelyn Nesbit, Sig- mund Freud, and Emiliano Zapata slip in and out of the tale, crossing paths with Doctorow's imagined family and other fictional characters, including an immigrant peddler and a ragtime musician from Harlem whose insistence on a point of justice drives him to revolutionary violence.
The Modern Library has played a significant role in American cultural life for the better part of a century. The series was founded in 1917 by the publishers Boni and Liveright and eight years later acquired by Bennett Cerf and Donald Klopfer. It provided the foundation for their next publishing venture, Random House. The Modern Library has been a staple of the American book trade, providing readers with afford-
able hardbound editions of impor-
tant works of literature and thought. For the Modern Library's seventy-
fifth anniversary, Random House redesigned the series, restoring
as its emblem the running torch-
bearer created by Lucian Bernhard in 1925 and refurbishing jackets, bindings, and type, as well as inau-
gurating a new program of selecting titles. TheModern Library continues to provide the world's best books, at the best prices.

SYNOPSIS

This classic novel, published in 1975, chronicles the lives of three families in early twentieth-century New York. Three tales are relayed as separate stories initially, then are interwoven gradually.

The families' stories: that of rich white people, blacks from Harlem, and immigrant Jews, capture the spirit of the country in this era (1906-1915), and examine the shimmering, shattering forces that converged, evoking wonder as well as terror, in an age when everything seemed possible. Doctorow reminds readers that our life is not one "story." Rather, we are who we are because of the combination of our experiences.

FROM THE CRITICS

Charles McGrath

....Ragtime re-creates pre-World War I America. -- The New York Times Books of the Century

George Stade

"...(It) is in this excellent novel, whose silhouettes and rags not only make fiction out of history but also reveal the fictions out of which history is made. It incorporates the fictions and realities of the era of ragtime while it rags our fictions about it. It is an anti-nostalgic novel that incorporates our nostalgia about its subject. It is cool, hard, controlled, utterly unsentimental, an art of sharp outlines and clipped phrases. yet it implies all we could ask for in the way of texture, mood, character and despair." Books of the Century, The New York Times, July, 1975

     



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