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Good-Bye, Mr. Chips

Good-Bye, Mr. Chips

List Price: $5.99
Your Price: $5.39
Product Info Reviews

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Rating: 3 stars
Summary: Sad/Good/Boaring
Review: Good Bye Mr. Chips was one of those in between kinda books. It was very sad, but good and lots of romance. On the other hand it was boaring and it did take a while to get the story started. Lots of names that you wont remember cause it just gabs on about these school boys names. BUt it aws very sweet and sad and deserved at least 3 stars!

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: My opinion of Good-bye Mr. Chips
Review: Good-bye Mr. Chips was a good book for short, recreational reading.
Mr. Chips is an elderly man who tells about his life as a school teacher.
He also tells all about his wife, whom he loved very much, but whom died an early death.
Through out the book the stories of the past are told by Mr. Chips as he sits in his chair drinking tea. He is very kind and
he loves the boys at the school.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: A sober, beautifully crafted romance!
Review: Good-bye, Mr. Chips by James Hilton is a portrait of an aging man who has mostly good memories about life as a teacher. In a very simple way, the author creates a warm picture of Chips as a man who loved his wife, loved his job and loved his students. All good things must eventually come to an end. When Chips isn't needed in his job any longer because of his age, he focuses on remembering the good times. Mr. Chips is the kind of person who makes the most of situations and has no regrets.

Rating: 2 stars
Summary: Sadly disappointing
Review: I had hoped for very good things from this book, but the good things are just too thin, such as they are, and too far between. Chips has a narrow world-view and is completely out of touch with most everything. He is married briefly and his wife dies. He retires in 1913 but cannot bear to move away from the boys school where he has taught so many years. His life seems to be taken up by staring across at the school and reading detective novels. It is hardly enough to sustain a reader's interest.

During the World War he returns to the school temporarily, while the faculty is thinned out by army recruitment. During all this, he seems almost proud of his ignorance in such things as movies, popular music, etc. The only part I found interesting was Chips' tribute to a former teacher who taught German at the school, the man having been killed in the German army.

Hilton also wrote several short stories featuring Mr. Chips, but they are no better.

Rating: 2 stars
Summary: Sadly disappointing
Review: I had hoped for very good things from this book, but the good things are just too thin, such as they are, and too far between. Chips has a narrow world-view and is completely out of touch with most everything. He is married briefly and his wife dies. He retires in 1913 but cannot bear to move away from the boys school where he has taught so many years. His life seems to be taken up by staring across at the school and reading detective novels. It is hardly enough to sustain a reader's interest.

During the World War he returns to the school temporarily, while the faculty is thinned out by army recruitment. During all this, he seems almost proud of his ignorance in such things as movies, popular music, etc. The only part I found interesting was Chips' tribute to a former teacher who taught German at the school, the man having been killed in the German army.

Hilton also wrote several short stories featuring Mr. Chips, but they are no better.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: Good-Bye Mr. Chips
Review: I just read Good-Bye Mr.Chips and I thought that it was a decent book. It was about an older man who had been a schoolmaster at an all boys school. The school was very reputable. Everyone at the school knew and loved Mr. Chipping. They called him Mr. Chips. He was a humerous character and everyone laughed at his jokes. He would make the new boys feel welcome and he taught well. The story is about him recollecting his memories while working at Brookfield (the school). He worked there for about 60 years and expreienced many things and got to know many boys. Everyone liked him and hated to see him go.

Rating: 1 stars
Summary: It was better than functions and inverses, in any case.
Review: I picked this up because I figured it was something that I could read quick and then go onto something else. Which it was.

Mr. Chips is a teacher, and has been so for a long time. It is his passion, and when he finally retires he finds he can't bear to go very far away from the school that has consumed most of the years of his life (and most of the experiences therein). The book is a reflection on that life, the people that passed swiftly through it (such as his INSANELY LIBERAL college-girl wannabe wife)...and, that's it. Such a topic could be interesting in the right hands--but it wasn't.

Very lightly touched upon is Mr. Chips way of staying the same as everything around him changes, which is the most important component of his character, though the most obvious is his sense of humour (mebbe those old-school British boys have a different sense of humour than I do, because I was like, "OH HA HA," in a realistic-as-Nicolas-Cage's-acting kind of voice).

If it had taken me more than half an hour to read, I would have railed against it as a waste of time.

Rating: 1 stars
Summary: I shouldn't even give the book that much credit!
Review: Mr. Chips was such a bore! The timezones are all mixed up, ad Mr. Chips' life is all mixed up between the chapters. I had to read it for a report in 8th grade! IEIEIEIEI! AWFUL! Mr. Chips dies at the end of the book with no point, don't read this book. Maybe I should have given it a quarter of a star

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: A lesson in characterisation
Review: Short but sweet, this virtue is a rarity.

It is a treat to observe how the author has described Mr Chips in such a subtle manner while telling a story that the reader does not notice it, unless he or she consciously pays attention to Hilton's masterful characterisation.

The best part about the length of this book is that one can read and reread it many times to fully appreciate its underlying quality.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: unabashedly sentimental
Review: When we were kids, our grandparents used to take us to Radio City Music Hall for the movie and Christmas Pageant every year. The year I was 12, the movie was a remake of Lost Horizon--my most graphic memory from that night is my horror when the woman suddenly aged after leaving Shangri-La. As it turns out, that version of the movie is pretty dreadful, while Frank Capra's 1937 original is widely considered to be a classic. At any rate, I liked the film enough to read the book and also Hilton's other classic, Goodbye, Mr. Chips, and I loved them both. Recently, our library got a restored edition of the Capra film and we enjoyed it thoroughly. So I went back & reread the books.

I assume most folks know at least the rough outlines of the stories. In Lost Horizon, Hugh Conway, a British diplomat, is skyjacked and he & his traveling companions end up in the Himalayas. Eventually they are lead to the hidden Valley of the Blue Moon and the city of Shangri-La, where folks do not age and the powers that be are collecting all of the world's knowledge and greatest artworks, so that it will be safe from the turbulent political storms of the outside world. Eventually, the high lama reveals to the diplomat that he has been chosen to take over leadership of Shangri-La and after an abortive attempt to leave (at the insistence of one of his fellow travelers), Conway returns to assume his destined place in Shangri-La.

Good-bye, Mr. Chips, on the other hand, is about an eccentric but lovable British schoolmaster, Arthur Chipping (Mr. Chips). Seemingly destined to be a bachelor for life, he meets and marries a young woman who loosens him up quite a bit, before dying in childbirth. Chips is left alone, except that is for the succeeding generations of boys who pass through Brookfield School. After decades at the school, he retires, telling the assembled alumni, "I have thousands of faces in my mind. ... I remember you as you are. That's the point. In my mind you never grow old at all", only to be called back during WWI, at which point he becomes acting headmaster. One of his duties is to read the list of the school's war dead; for everyone else they are just names, but for Chips, each name has a face attached. After the War he reretires, after 42 years teaching Roman History and Latin at Brookfield.

On the surface, these two stories couldn't be more different, but reading them now I realize how similar they actually are. Shangri-La is an oasis of civilzation in a world that was after all between two World Wars. It is a place where the great achievements of our culture will be preserved, even if war consumes the rest of the World, which for much of this Century seemed like a possibility. Mr. Chips, meanwhile, is the living embodiment of institutional memory. The classes of boys, the teachers and headmasters, even the subjects and teaching methods, come and go, but Chips has remained throughout. He "still had those ideas of dignity and generosity that a frantic world was forgetting." He embodies the pre-War world and its values. In his book Mr. Bligh's Bad Language, Greg Dening says that: "Institutions require memory. A memory creates precedent and order." In the very midst of an epoch that was witnessing an unfettered attack on all of the West's institutions and values, Hilton created Shangri-La and Mr. Chips; both represent the conservative ideal--providing a bridge of memory to all that is beautiful and good and decent in our past, lest, in our zeal to create a perfect world, we forget the qualities and accomplishments which bequeathed us the pretty good world in which we live.

These books are unabashedly sentimental and I'm sure some would even find them mawkish. But I love them and I appreciate the subtley non-political way in which they make the most important of political points: even as we move forward we must always preserve those things and ideas of value in our past.

Mr. Chips GRADE: A+

Lost Horizon GRADE: A


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