I have never read any of Michener's books. I was also warned that, "Mexico" is not one of his better books - not only by friends but from reviews I checked out here on Good reads.That said, I think this is a great book. Moreover, if this is one of his not-so-good reads then, I am definitely pic...
“The Source” by James Michener is one of my all-time favorites; it’s a book I go back to after years and years and it embraces me like an old friend who still has more tales to tell, despite my having visited it many times previously! It’s one of my personal bibles and stands up there with my abs...
Michener begins with the geologic formation of Hawaii and ends with its entry as the 50th state. Over the course of a thousand pages (and millions of years), we learn how many ethnic groups fought and learned to live in peace. “Hawaii” is a powerful novel, and the state is a symbol which exempl...
Michener has done it again. The master epic storyteller neatly traces the rise of the Texan state from its earliest beginnings as an 'outpost' of the Spanish/Mexican empire, through to its slow takeover by the norteamericanos/anglos.Along the way we read about the trials and tribulations of vario...
As is typical of Michener's work, one of the main strong points of this book is that it's hugely informative. I learned a great deal about the turbulent, often tragic history of the Caribbean. I found it interesting, as I've been to the region several times -- I'm even getting married there in ...
James Michener has a remarkable talent for introducing a setting and taking his readers on a journey, that will make one understand the area through it's history and it's people. In Chesapeake, he forms a novel around that area in Maryland that borders the Choptank River, a tributary of Chesapea...
I bought this book after loving Michener's Hawaii, hoping for a similarly wonderful reading experience. I was disappointed. The best I can say is that I learned some things--the book takes you around Afghanistan in the 1940s, introducing a variety of places and cultures and including pertinent hi...
James Michener built his reputation as a writer with his histories of contested lands: Israel ( The Source), Korea ( The Bridges at Toko-Ri), Hawaii, Mexico, Poland, Afghanistan ( Caravans), and so on. By examining the land from the first—often before men had even come into the country—he was ...
He was probably in his 60s when he wrote most of this, travelling with his wife, but he writes a bit like a little boy, discovering rules and lists like an effervescent, naive American, or German-style logician. He says writing is hard for him, but he manages to write these tremendously long and...
"There, high above the plains he had loved and the river he had so often followed, Lame Beaver, the man of many coups, found his rest. He died at the end of an epoch, the grandest the western Indians were to know." --Centennial (182)“My name is Pasquinel; I come to you unafraid.” I loved this gu...
Published 32 years ago, this entertaining and enlightening novel evidences Michener's high opinion of such science fiction writers as Clarke, Weinbaum and Leiber as well as reservations about some tendencies of this popular genre. He even indulges himself a bit in it by creating a fictional accou...
Wow, what a great read! Michener sets the stage with five strong characters: Lord Luton, Lord Luton's friend - Harry Carpenter, Luton's nephew - Philip Henslow, Philip's friend - Trevor Blythe, and an Irish blue collar worker - Tim Folgarty. Lord Luton and his friend are older, Philip and his f...
My history with James Michener has been hit or miss. Some of his other books seemed overly long, filled with too much description, shallow characters, or even shallower storylines. From some I gleaned knowledge of people, places, and things that I had known little of previously. However, The N...
Oh my god, you guys, this book is so bad! It's not the size- I love long, involved books. It's not the 100,000 year scope- I love a multi-generational epic. It's the writing, which is the only real epic here. Epic-ly terrible.Anyone would be far better off just reading a non-fiction history o...
Watching SOUTH PACIFIC the other evening got me in the mood to return to one of my favorite authors. James A. Michener is probably best-known for his multi-generational sagas such as HAWAII, THE SOURCE, and CENTENNIAL, but he also wrote a number of shorter works in the 1950s, before the blockbus...
Michener’s Poland: A Novel is primarily about three families in nine different ages. It was written during the height of the Solidarity movement in Poland and uses a fictional, but quite representative, conflict between Polish union organizers and Communist sympathizers as the bookends between wh...
This is the second Michener I've read. I hated 'Space' because in it Michener decided to fictionalize the space program. I found it an un-necessary gimmick. It seems like this is Michener's modus operandi. He does the same thing in 'The Drifters'. He takes the late '60s and then fictionalizes a c...
Miochener kicks off with a four page piece that characterizes the war in the South Pacific as mostly waiting around, and depicts a general in a sort of innocent humiliation that makes me think of Aphrodite and Ares trapped by Hephaestus in the Iliad - the gods as comic subjects. The next piece is...
Rascals in Paradise contains about seven short biographies of South Sea adventurers. Each sketch is packed with history, geography and little known facts about the Pacific Islands. Each person written about is an exceedingly interesting character who led fascinating lives upon the waves. Almost n...
I adopt James Michener as my grandfather for he has given me a rich inheritance in the things that matter most. I read Michener extensively from high school and throughout my twenties. Eventually, I developed a taste for the classics and was influenced by literary aesthetes who considered Michen...
He is a great novelist, but I am very much disappointed in this "Vision for America." Although he makes some profound points about our problems, his "solutions" are no more than statements about what he things should ideally happen. Moreover, he takes a generally liberal approach while admittedl...
A very short (215 pages, which includes the Constitution itself) work for Mr. Michener, which compresses the 200 years of our history into brief vignettes in the family of Norman Starr, who is about to testify regarding Nicaragua and the contras and Ollie north and all that (it WAS written in 198...
This book is the rambling, somewhat melodramatic rags to riches tale of a young man who grows up in a poorhouse and eventually becomes a professional writer. Along the way he finds somewhat dubious work in an amusement park, is anonymously sponsored with a scholarship to go to college and then w...
A friend loaned me this book because she knows I like James Michener. After witnessing a bullfight in Spain when I was young, I had to agree with Tom Lehrer that, “I hadn’t had so much fun since the day…that my brother’s dog Rover…got run over…” I suspected that there was more to bullfighting tha...
James Michener once again takes us to the South Pacific. This unusual collection comprises short essays about various Pacific islands with each one then followed by a fictional story set in the same locale.Michener's essays are OK, if a bit rambling. They offer some decent anthropological insig...
While reading this I wondered what other fictional accounts were out there about the Korean War. I searched Listopia and found one list about the Korean war. In contains 92 books and all are nonfiction. Only 22 people have added books to it. There’s a Korean War group; it has two members. It’s sa...