Selected Product:
| The Liars' Club: A Memoir
Paperback
Author: Mary Karr
Publisher: Penguin (Non-Classics)
Release Date: 2005-05-31
ISBN-10: 0143035746
ISBN-13: 9780143035749
List Price: $15.00
Average Customer Rating:
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Summaries and Customer Reviews are supplied by Amazon.com
When it was published in 1995, Mary Karr’s The Liars’ Club took the world by storm and raised the art of the memoir to an entirely new level, as well as bringing about a dramatic revival of the form. Karr’s comic childhood in an east Texas oil town brings us characters as darkly hilarious as any of J. D. Salinger’s—a hard-drinking daddy, a sister who can talk down the sheriff at twelve, and an oft-married mother whose accumulated secrets threaten to destroy them all. Now with a new introduction that discusses her memoir’s impact on her family, this unsentimental and profoundly moving account of an apocalyptic childhood is as “funny, lively, and un-put-downable” (USA Today) today as it ever was.
This Book is Brilliant
| Customer Rating: | Mary Karr's writing is beautifully poetic, simple, yet amazingly eloquent. This book is a treasure. Not only because it's so well-written, but because of the personal nature of it.
Karr doesn't allow me to feel like I'm imposing on her private memories. She is only being open and true to those memories. This approach only draws respect from the reader.
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subject matter is just too disturbing
| Customer Rating:  | If you are a fan of child rape then this is the book for you. Otherwise you may want to try something a little lighter. Briged Jones Diary is good for a few laughs. Anything by Terry Pratchett is amusing.
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Liar to be sure
| Customer Rating: | | Mary Karr shhots from the hip, creating a superficial narrative that expounds a kind of confession. People like this-- that is, average readers. Set out in the world she claims, in Book World(2008) Bill Matthews beat brain cancer by having a heart atack-- (lie) She also misspeaks regarding Keats(Book World 2008)-(liar) As I said, she shoots from the hip-- in no way is an academic, does not check her sources, writes anything she wants, because, perhaps, she has branded herself a liar already. Her work is, frankly, weak, poems and prose. Those of you who "love" it should reach higher in regrd to your reading. Or not. Stay on the low plain of writing like Mary Karr's.From what Kevin saio |
Wonderful example of the genre - well written, entertaining, and meaningful
| Customer Rating: | I just finished reading this book, and it is one of the most un-put-downable memoirs I have ever read. Karr grew up in the lower middle class of a depressing town in Texas. The story revolves around her family life as a very young girl - ages 6 to 9 or so. What first strikes you is Karr's voice. Tomboyish, able to hold a grudge, thirsty for love, stubborn as a mule, Karr unflinchingly admits her own foibles and those of others, but also cuts through the novel's events to the beating, loving heart of her family.
Her alcoholic/manic depressive mother is beautiful and educated in a town where neither attribute was common. Her father, a working man with a talent for bombast, dotes on both his children, but particularly on Karr, whom he dubs "Pokey." After her mother leaves her father, Karr and her sister choose to live with her mother, more out of a sense of feeling obligated to protect her from herself than anything else.
Eventually, the family finds its way back together again, and the story is satisfyingly whole. Though few doubt that at least some of a memoirist's work must be imagination (Who among us can remember such detail about their life as a 7-year-old?), Karr has a knack for taking down some of her more relatable thoughts and experiences. The people she writes about, their conversations, their weaknesses, have the ring of universality.
Worth reading, and one of the best examples of the genre I've come across in a while. |
Is it any wonder?
| Customer Rating: | | I read this book when it was first published; and re-read it this week for a book club discussion of "reader's choice." Mary Karr is a poet with a hard-knock childhood. Is it any wonder she wrote a memoir that is beyond belief in every sense? The sentences jump off the page. Oh, that I could write like this. |
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