Rating: 
Summary: Unimpressed
Review: I'm afraid I fail to understand what's so great about this book. I picked it up because I liked 'The Great Gatsby'. This book, however, was disappointing, to say the least. First of all the main character. A narcist, and not very likeable. He's allright in the beginning but as the novel progresses becomes rather insufferable. However, that was not the main problem, since I could relate to him a bit. The problem starts when he enters Princeton. Who cares about some silly college boys who think they're all destined to become philosophers and think the rest of the world is filled with idiots? It wasn't even real philosophy, it was quasi-that, quasi-[hot air]. Someone should have gotten their heads out of the clouds. They were boring. Also, the love-affairs were rather superficial, since Amory only loves those in whom he sees a mirror of himself. In the end he is as tiresome as he was in Princeton, though a little wiser. What a great coming-of-age book! Fitzgeralds prose is nice, but not nearly as beautiful as in 'The Great Gatsby'. Hardly a recommendable book.
P.S. The Catholic intellectual was an old bore.
Rating: 
Summary: A work of art
Review: The Great Gatsby is a very well written book, but when you get down to it, This Side of Paradise completely blows it away. Amory Blaine is an example of absolute perfection. This story follows a young man from birth through early adulthood, describing his interactions with others and ideas throughout. Absolutely anyone can relate to this book in some way, and I believe it would be beneficial to every man, woman and child in the world to read this story at least once. Excellent book, definitely the best I ever read.
Rating:
Summary: Youth, ambition, and romance!
Review: This book is perhaps my favorite of all Fitzgerald's works. Unlike Gatsby, with its high drama and giant archetypes, This Other Paradise is a book of subtlety. Amory Blaine is one of Fitzgerald's best drawn protagonists, perhaps because he is is Fitzgerald himself. Reading this book, you can't help but feel young, idealistic, and full of innocence.
Rating:
Summary: To be young is to grow and demand reforms
Review: Francis Scott Fitzgerald gives here a masterpiece. The building of the conscience of a young American man is explored in the finest and most intricate details through his training in a prep school and at Princeton. His influences from all kinds of writers and poets are also examined in the way they interlace one another into a very subtle and complex whole. This leads that young man to the experience of the First World War and what follows and he moves from what could be considered as a pose to a more conscious state of mind in which the social reality of his time becomes pregnant with meaning. That leads him to a socialist stand coming from his dissatisfaction with the establishment that does not propose reforms and change but is self-satisfied in its achievements. The second level of the novel is the sentimental pilgrimage that the hero follows from the sheer discovery of loveplay to the deepest passion that leads nowhere and is finally identified by him as nothing but a negation of his self in the titillation of his egotism. Love is nothing but a mirror of himself and there is none of the two-way altruism that builds real love as a dual-carriageway of emotions and personal involvement. Hence he moves from a pure egotistic personality to something that is identified as a personage that is able to take into account the outside world as a living being of itself. The final element of interest in this book is the way catholicism is an inspiration on that road and that his final starting point as an altruistic socialist is nothing but the development of Christian love that does not exist if the other is not one's equal, no matter where this other stands in the social order.Dr Jacques COULARDEAU
Rating: 
Summary: 3+ stars
Review: This is typical Fitzgerald. You either like him or you don't. It is a study in character, or, perhaps I should say lack of character. Amory Blaine is not very sympathetic. But, then many of us aren't when we are college aged and know everything. His girl friends are frivolous. His relationship with the old priest was interesting and more could be drawn from the priest's love for Amory. His mother is a dolt and hypochondriac. Depressing, but well written.
Rating:
Summary: Growth and peril at the climax of life in words...
Review: Banality without laughter and stoicism with epicurean delights are books to the soul. A riddle and a puzzle that combines the heart working with the mind to melt into an orgy of feelings and thought, it is bliss on paper.
This book I believe to be Mr. Fitzgerald's greatest, eclipsing the likes of The Great Gatsby more powerfully then the moon does to the sun. This piece being his first published novel offers a depth of understanding that is not normally seen in a first time novelist. It is an inspiration to all those who hope to one day have their names grace the cover of the printed page.
The book shows remarkable growth within its pages. The structure is easy flowing and offers glimpses into the life of a man, Amory Blaine. It shows his growth from a person to a personage. The triumphs, tragedies, and laughs of his life. If shows remarkable growth in the style choice by Mr. Fitzgerald and the discerning eye can see the change in his flow throughout the book. He grows in writing as Amory grows in a person.
For anyone who read The Great Gatsby in high school and enjoyed even a morsel of it will love this book.
Rating:
Summary: Early Days of Romantic Scott
Review: Like everything Fitzgerald wrote this has that burnished by the morning sun feel to it. Certainly there are real themes in it that make this a substantial first novel but the lasting appeal is that romanticism that Fitzgerald himself seemed to have created with his own hands. Forged in that prep school fire though that romanticism isn't made of the toughest stuff and perhaps since Scott never really had any difficulties along the way to becoming a young succesful novelist he was never really forced to become more than that, a young success. His great theme is romance itself, he brings it to everything from football to war to young ladies to writing, he just has the gift to touch and make golden. Not many people will be immune to the contagion of such a disease. Amory is the perfect name for this amourous and ardent young east coaster, a character who was immediately embraced with the publication of this book as the spokesmen for the new up and coming generation, not yet named the lost generation. This book was full of promise and that feeling was infectious and equally attractive was the rather free libertine approach to sex. With Fitzgerald the twenties were born. Amory's affairs are just that, his romances mere flirtations, but he has the ability to make all seem of utter importance because all outcomes effect the state of our heros grace. An egotist, yes! But at that age, college age, what else is there to be. His egotism fuels his romantic ideas about life, and the fire builds and builds slow and burns as bright as life can burn in youth.....at least on this side of paradise.
Rating:
Summary: utterly pointless
Review: I suppose it's supposed to be intentional that no character in this book is very well-drawn. I suppose it's supposed to be intentional that not even Armory is very interesting. I suppose it's supposed to be intentional that you can't remember a single thing about a chapter two chapters later. But is it intentional that this book is supposed to be so dull? Armory goes through life, makes friends, gets girlfriends, breaks up with girlfriends. But you don't remember any of them because they are all reflections of Armory himself. Yet he's dull. So a reflection of a rock is not much to take home. It would be nice if just ONE character held your interest. If just ONE episode was expanded so we got to know these people a little more, but the main character is off doing other things instead. Autobiographical novels are fairly popular, however when the author has no insights into his own life, they are very useless in the long run.
Rating:
Summary: A young Gatsby
Review: Many people consider The great Gatsby to be Fitzgerald's greatest work. In doing this they are shortchanging him from all his other novels, and his short stories (which are also gems of craftsmanship). This side of paradise is a work that I consider equal to the Catcher of the Rye by Salinger. It evokes a setting and a time, captured beautifully, that has been past and never to come again. However, we of the 2000s can still relate to the protagonist because what he goes through in college: the inadequacies, the romance, the questions, is something that we all feel, are torn by, and befuddled with. The work makes you laugh at it's antics mainly because we can place ourselves in those setting and making the same mistakes. The prose is so beautiful because Fitzgerald was a careful craftsman and left nothing to chance. This is a coming=of=age story every young person need to read, and every young-at-heart person, for that matter. So sit back with this book, and be ready to be taken to an era that will never be again, but will always live on in Amory Blaine (the protagonist) and everyone who has a little Amory in them.
Rating:
Summary: Fitzgerald's primer on dating and relationships
Review: Other reviewers and critiques have pointed to Fitzgerald's criticism of the Catholic church and his frustration with capitalism in 'This Side of Paradise'. Yet there is another poignant theme'Fitzgerald's frustration with women'that will resonate deeply with men who are currently dating. Amory, the main character in the novel who is, of course, Fitzgerald himself, complains that women are quick to jettison real love for a man with real money. Moreover, he complains of those glittering beauties, their callousness toward men, and the heartbreak they cause. Of one character he writes 'She is one of those girls who never make the slightest effort to have men fall in love with them. Two types seldom do: dull men are usually afraid of her cleverness'intellectual men are usually afraid of her beauty.' The same character is said to ''[she] treats men terribly. She abuses them and cuts them and breaks dates with them and yawns in their faces---and they come back for more'. Of course, as a male reader we know both of these ideas to be absolutely true of so many girls and men's behavior too. Writing of his broken relationships and his failure to find a proper muse, Fitzgerland writes 'Women'of whom he had expected so much; whose beauty he had hoped to transmute into modes of art; whose unfathomable instincts...were all removed by their very beauty, around which men swarmed, from the possibility of contributing anything but a sick heart and a page of puzzled words to write.' The emotional upheaval from broken relations could be the cause of much writer's block. The careful reader need not walk away from this lyric prose a misogynist. Rather Fitzgerald's first novel can be considered a primer on dating for the college-aged man or the divorcee recently reentering the dating market.
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