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Whistle Stopper - People of the Book: A Novel
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List Price: $25.95
Our Price: $14.03
Your Save: $ 11.92 ( 46% )
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Manufacturer: Viking Adult
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Average Customer Rating:  
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Binding: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 823.914
EAN: 9780670018215
ISBN: 067001821X
Label: Viking Adult
Manufacturer: Viking Adult
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 384
Publication Date: 2008-01-01
Publisher: Viking Adult
Studio: Viking Adult
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Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating:
Summary: Uneven and Anti-Catholic
Comment: I loved Brooks's Year of Wonders, but this book is only sometimes riveting, more often slow. Most unfortunately, this is the first anti-Catholic novel I've read since I tried PD James about 20 years ago. So it was amusing when the main character in People of the Book says on page 264, "Having read rather too many P. D. James novels, I'd decided . . . " Alas! You surely have, Ms Brooks! I'm not Catholic myself, but without balance this book teeters towards untruth.
Customer Rating:
Summary: An excellent book
Comment: This is one of the best books I have read in a long time. The author uses the real Sarajevo Haggadah as starting point for a fascinating fictional account of how it was so beautifully illustrated, how it came to be written, and how it was taken from place to place all over Europe over many centuries, and weaves that all together with the personal life of the book conservator who becomes involved with the Haggadah. The totally unexpected ending is amazing!
I liked the book so much that I bought the quite expensive taped version for a visually handicapped friend.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Fascinating!
Comment: I couldn't stop reading this book. It was like a jig-saw puzzle with each piece just fitting perfectly. The history combined with the fiction made a powerful story. Highly recommended!
Customer Rating:
Summary: vignettes in a book
Comment: I am still in the middle of the book but so far am not particularly inspired. It is ok but not as wonderful as it was touted to be in all its reviews. Moves slow and has pretty stock characters. Would have liked a bit more depth in each vignette.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Dan Brown Lite
Comment: Disappointing even for a fluff novel. The Wikipedia article on the Sarajevo Haggadah is a more interesting read. Historical fiction needs either a quality retelling of history or a quality story to get by, and this book offers neither. There's precious little known of the Sarajevo Haggadah's existence, so Brooks imagines a series of events throughout its existence interwoven with a bit of modern-day drama. But she apparently went for the Dan Brown approach by inventing physical details of the book itself, throwing off the balance between history and fiction. The pattern of revealing a detail and immediately following it with a chapter set in the past is too contrived and trite even for mindless beach reading. It's certainly interesting to wonder about this book's journey through the years, but Brooks' imagined history offers little to recommend it.
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Editorial Reviews:
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Amazon Best of the Month, January 2008: One of the earliest Jewish religious volumes to be illuminated with images, the Sarajevo Haggadah survived centuries of purges and wars thanks to people of all faiths who risked their lives to safeguard it. Geraldine Brooks, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of March, has turned the intriguing but sparely detailed history of this precious volume into an emotionally rich, thrilling fictionalization that retraces its turbulent journey. In the hands of Hanna Heath, an impassioned rare-book expert restoring the manuscript in 1996 Sarajevo, it yields clues to its guardians and whereabouts: an insect wing, a wine stain, salt crystals, and a white hair. While readers experience crucial moments in the book's history through a series of fascinating, fleshed-out short stories, Hanna pursues its secrets scientifically, and finds that some interests will still risk everything in the name of protecting this treasure. A complex love story, thrilling mystery, vivid history lesson, and celebration of the enduring power of ideas, People of the Book will surely be hailed as one of the best of 2008. --Mari Malcolm 
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