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Let the Great World Spin - Colum McCann
Let the Great World Spin
by: (author)
4.17 290
In the dawning light of a late-summer morning, the people of lower Manhattan stand hushed, staring up in disbelief at the Twin Towers. It is August 1974, and a mysterious tightrope walker is running, dancing, leaping between the towers, suspended a quarter mile above the ground. In the streets... show more
In the dawning light of a late-summer morning, the people of lower Manhattan stand hushed, staring up in disbelief at the Twin Towers. It is August 1974, and a mysterious tightrope walker is running, dancing, leaping between the towers, suspended a quarter mile above the ground. In the streets below, a slew of ordinary lives become extraordinary in bestselling novelist Colum McCann’s stunningly intricate portrait of a city and its people.Let the Great World Spin is the critically acclaimed author’s most ambitious novel yet: a dazzlingly rich vision of the pain, loveliness, mystery, and promise of New York City in the 1970s.Corrigan, a radical young Irish monk, struggles with his own demons as he lives among the prostitutes in the middle of the burning Bronx. A group of mothers gather in a Park Avenue apartment to mourn their sons who died in Vietnam, only to discover just how much divides them even in grief. A young artist finds herself at the scene of a hit-and-run that sends her own life careening sideways. Tillie, a thirty-eight-year-old grandmother, turns tricks alongside her teenage daughter, determined not only to take care of her family but to prove her own worth.Elegantly weaving together these and other seemingly disparate lives, McCann’s powerful allegory comes alive in the unforgettable voices of the city’s people, unexpectedly drawn together by hope, beauty, and the “artistic crime of the century.” A sweeping and radical social novel, Let the Great World Spin captures the spirit of America in a time of transition, extraordinary promise, and, in hindsight, heartbreaking innocence. Hailed as a “fiercely original talent” (San Francisco Chronicle), award-winning novelist McCann has delivered a triumphantly American masterpiece that awakens in us a sense of what the novel can achieve, confront, and even heal.
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Format: hardcover
ISBN: 9781400063734 (1400063736)
Publisher: Random House, Inc.
Pages no: 351
Edition language: English
Bookstores:
Community Reviews
moving under skies
moving under skies rated it
4.0 Let the Great World Spin
I just completely panned The Lacuna for being too much a Witness to History book, and I teetered for a moment towards feeling the same about this one, but in the end came out on the other side. The difference: in this book everyone is important because they are connected; in The Lacuna everything wa...
The Fault in Our Blogs
The Fault in Our Blogs rated it
4.0 Let the Great World Spin
This is a book that tells its story through multiple perspectives. I picked it up because the idea of a story revolving around the man who walked on a tightrope between the rooftops of the Twin Towers was too poetic and full of potential to pass up. What I found was slightly surprising, because the ...
Aerin
Aerin rated it
5.0 Review: Let the Great World Spin, by Colum McCann
The events we remember in stark relief, the events that change us or change our world, may be the closest we'll ever get to time travel. No matter how far away time takes us from them, we can always, always return.Most Americans who were cognizant on September 11, 2001, remember the day in elaborate...
silverneurotic
silverneurotic rated it
I gave this book five stars because I found this novel to be completely flawless. The writing, the characters, the pacing, setting…everything was completely perfect and I loved every second I spend reading this novel, even when it broke my heart.
The Bookchemist
The Bookchemist rated it
VideoReview! Yaay!https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mKMDx-UqiYg
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