Hearts in Atlantis (Audio)
Stephen King, whose first novel, Carrie, was published in 1974, the year before the last U.S. troops withdrew from Vietnam, is the first hugely popular writer of the TV generation. Images from that war -- and the protests against it -- had flooded America's living rooms for a decade. Hearts In...
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Stephen King, whose first novel, Carrie, was published in 1974, the year before the last U.S. troops withdrew from Vietnam, is the first hugely popular writer of the TV generation. Images from that war -- and the protests against it -- had flooded America's living rooms for a decade. Hearts In Atlantis is composed of five interconnected, sequential narratives set in the years from 1960 to 1999. Each story is deeply rooted in the sixties, and each is haunted by the Vietnam War. In "Low Men in Yellow Coats," eleven-year-old Bobby Garfield discovers a world of predatory malice in his own neighborhood and that adults are sometimes not rescuers but at the heart of the terror. In the title story, a bunch of college kids get hooked on a card game, discover the possibility of protest...and confront their own collective heart of darkness, where laughter may be no more than the thinly disguised cry of the beast. In "Blind Willie" and "Why We're in Vietnam," two men who grew up with Bobby in suburban Connecticut try to fill the emptiness of the post-Vietnam era in an America which sometimes seems as hollow and haunted as their own lives. And in "Heavenly Shades of Night Are Falling," Bobby returns to his hometown where one final secret, and his heart's desire may await him. Full of danger, suspense, and full of heart, Hearts In Atlantis takes some listeners to a place they have never been...and others to a place they have never been able to completely leave.
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Format: audiobook
ISBN:
9780743509862 (0743509862)
Publish date: September 1st 2001
Publisher: Simon & Schuster Audio
Edition language: English
Damned tearjerker. To paraphrase Bobby's mom "life is unfair". And boy, do I have mixed feelings about her character. Most of my screaming-at-the-page moments came thanks to her. Anyway, the first story ripped my heart out, and I loved it. The second was a mix. Kinda' like the characters, their a...
★★★★★Hearts in Atlantis by Stephen KingHearts in Atlantis by Stephen King was a great book, in my opinion. It contains 5 short stories, from different period in Bobby's life. The first is Low Men in Yellow Coats. In this one we learn Bobby's dad died young, of a heart attack, and loved to gamble. An...
So... This is not one of my favorite King books. The first time I ever read it, I did so without realizing that it was a collection of inter-related short stories, and not having read The Dark Tower series (though, Ted wouldn't have made an appearance in that series way back when anyway, so...), but...
No one has ever written the joys of boyhood better than Stephen King. That's not what people talk about when they talk about him, but it's true. It's a subject that needs to be written about entirely without pretense and absolutely free of language too large for ball games and playing in the mud. ...
Hearts in Atlantis is a series of 5 short stories that interconnect to make one long story. It’s the first time I’ve read a book set out in this format. While I liked the formatting, I sort of had a love/hate relationship with the book. There were some stories that I enjoyed like Bobby’s and Blind ...