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Summary: I loved this book from the very start!!!!!!!!!!!1
Review: This has got to be one of the best books that I have read in my life. It gave me a whole new idea of what life is like through the eyes of Tobias Wolf. I would recomend this book to anyone who liks books that talk about people and their troublesome lives.
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Summary: This Boy's Life a hit with the mature age group
Review: This Boy's Life touched my in a way hardly any other book has done before. It's appeal to the mature age group springs from the fact that Tobia Wolff writes and talks about his life in all detail, outlining his true feelings and inner thoughts. In 'This Boy's Life', Wolff seems to be a pubescent teenager struggling with the difficulties of puberty and a divorced family. It's concept of reality is what appeals to us the most. I am in Year 11 reading this book for English. The entire class loves it and after watching the movie, appreciate the book even more. I'd recommend it to anyone interested in someone with a disturbed childhood but an unrelenting determination to suceed in whatever he decides to do.
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Summary: loved it
Review: Tobias Wolff's memoir about his quirky childhood helps me understand the home lives that many of my students probably have. It is a tale that shows how intelligence is the ticket to survival.
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Summary: A Life on the Wild Side
Review: If ever you've wondered what it's like to be an adolescent boy caught between an irresponsible father and an abusive stepfather, here's your chance. In reading this book you become the boy and see life through his eyes. You live the consequences of a well-meaning mother who makes predictably poor choices in the men in her life. These choices leave her son adrift, confused and rebellious, unsure of where he belongs. He sets out to be a wise guy; a tough masking the uncertainty he feels. His stepfather, Dwight, masking his own demons and insecurities, also sets out on a mission--to drive Toby (alias Jack) down to his level. It's to Toby/Jack's credit that he doesn't want to stay down and that's enough of an edge. Instinctively using the creative license of his absent father, he finds a tenuous way out--enough of a break to set him on a better path. Most boys in this situation don't make it. I know. My brother didn't make it. This story is an honest picture of the lives of too many divorced women and their children. (I also recommend you read Geoffrey Wolff's "The Duke of Deception" for the other half of this family saga.)
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Summary: A Flawed Memory
Review: While This Boy's Life has many of the strengths of The Duke of Deception (its companion piece by brother Arthur), it also suffers from the same flaws. Geoffrey here tells the story of his life with his mother while The Duke of Deception focuses on Arthur and his father. Everything about the family was dysfunctional, and reading about their scams is not elevating nor inspirational. It is satisfying that both boys managed to transcend their heritage, but such wallowing seems more appropriate to Oprah than to true literature. Is this the way Biff and Happy Loman wind up? Sad, sad commentary
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Summary: A perfect book
Review: Having just read the book, I have been describing Tobias Wolff's _This Boy's Life_ to my friends as perfect. This is not simply my way of lauding the memoir, though it does deserve the highest praise. Instead, I use the word "perfect" because the book, in style and execution, is perfect.
A major part of the book's success (literary and commercially) is the wonderful and wonderfully human story that unfolds as we page our way through the memoir. However, what makes the book what it is derives from Wolff's stripped down, economical prose style. This is a book in which each page, each paragraph and every moment is so well crafted, so well constructed that the reader's movement through the autobiography seems effortless.
In this, in this seemingly effortless style with which he brings to us an enormous range of human emotions and childhood experiences, Tobias Wolff achieves a type of literary realism formalized and perfected by Flaubert. Each of Wolff's chapters, as the writer Jayne Anne Phillips has commented, is a small story in itself. Each paragraph is a gem, each page the greatest of accomplishments. To express everything that this book expresses with this simplicity of style is nothing short of magical.
As with many good writers, Wolff tricks us into thinking that language can be a simple thing to use, that writing is as easy as thinking. But, as a great American songwriter once put it, "Between thought and expression is a lifetime." _This Boy's Life_, in its ability to tell a story so simply and beautifully, so seemingly effortless and yet so well-crafted, is perfect.
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Summary: beautifully written & unsentimental reminicense
Review: A wonderfully, clearly, and well written rememberance of Wolff's growing up with his mother. It has the ability to both see clearly but without undue sentiment at the inner struggles of being a young adult in the 50's.
Be sure to read his brother Geoffrey's account of growing up with their father "The Duke of Deception"
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Summary: A sad story so well told that it uplifts and entertains.
Review: Having read "This Boy's Life" I now will read everything else that Tobias Wolff has written. A powerful tale of a young boy's life as he goes down the rough path that has been experienced by many a boy victimized by divorce and subsequent poor choices that parents and ex-parents make. Mr. Wolff's clarity of recall of the events of this story and his understanding of his and other's actions and motives combine to put us firmly in his shoes and to experience many of his tales as if we were there. I highly recommend this book to all, particularly if you as a young man experienced the negative effects of your parents divorce and their subsequent poor choices with carreers and/or relationships.
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Summary: Tolstoy was right
Review: For those who like the Tolstoy addage about "unhappy families," you'll want to read this stellar Tobias Wolff novel. Jack Wolff is a boy who has one unusual life. He smokes, drinks, vandalizes, and steals. That is, however, until he is forced to move from Seattle to Chinook, with his new step-father, Dwight. Dwight turns out to be an abusive drunk, who will change Jack's life forever. Full of twists and turns, this is one fascinating read and should not be overlooked. Would also recommend another great book I've come across: "The Bark of the Dogwood." Equally as entertaining
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Summary: ACCURATE TRUTH
Review: <br />(...)<br />This is an accurately told book regarding the hard life that some children must go through. The lack of actually having a normal childhood. This is a great book, very emotional<br />Also recommending: Nightmares Echo,Bastard Out Of Carolina,Running With Scissors<br /><br />
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