Ode's Den

Rating:
Summary: Young genius life in mid-century Harvard
Review: Ode's Den is an entrancing read about young genius life in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Highly recommended as a vivid recollection of mid-century intellectual and cultural bohemian experience surrounding America's greatest university. This reviewer's admiring response is that he couldn't put it down.

Rating:
Summary: Odyssey of a New England Woman's Life
Review: The pace of this narrative is terrific. If a reader lingers here and there,allowing imagination to enter an episode, there waits a mellow and strange light cast on human experience--the distance between youth, when a person is invulnerably unreal, and maturity when "you begin to find out how to fulfill yourself". This New England woman wanders through a long impractical search for the best of everything in everyone everywhere.The death of a valuable friend, the uncertainties about her marriage, the fear of losing her fragile son, the feeling of futility that has accompanied her struggle-- all are illuminated by revelations from a stranger on an airplane,possibly a Pan figure, showing that some of the wrongs she thinks she has been doing turn out to be exactly right. The author's command of language should be noted. It is plain refreshing to come by a book without a single error, a use of "correct" English which always manages to sound completely natural at the same time as offering from time to time engaging phraseology which strikes the ear as musical, the inner eye as completely apt.