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The Great Gatsby

The Great Gatsby

List Price: $12.95
Your Price: $9.71
Product Info Reviews

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Rating: 5 stars
Summary: He captures everything
Review: All I can say is, WOW. I was simply amazed by the way he described even the rain coming down in sheets. He captured a generation, a feeling, a need, a way of life- he captured America, he captured Americana. All this, in how many pages? Again- WOW.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Gasby is the best summary of the Roaring 20s around today.
Review: I am a senior in high school and was assigned The Great Gatsy to read for english class. There was nothing quite like sitting down and thinking about what the true meanings in this book really are. There are stories of triumph, sacrifice; love and hate; rich and poor, and many others. Each character has their own story, and each intertwines with another. The Great Gatsby is an amazing work of art with incredible stories clashing different types of people to give the essence of a great era in our history. I highly recommend it to anyone.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: My favorite book written!
Review: This book is great! I couldn't keep it down! It is romantic, suspenseful, and mysterious. I definately give it a perfect 10!

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: A wholistic sleigh ride through the banal roaring 20's.
Review: Much like Demian, by Herman Hesse, the Great Gatsby offers a very human story about a Man torn between the various pressures of life: conformity and individualism, facade and substance. Nick is a silent narrator, he watches, but he's not completely quiet. This novel may appear convoluted and confusing, but it is truly pure and honest. It makes no judgement of morality, grace and sin, nor does it favor idealism or cynicism. The main character wades through an insane and typical world, and outsider and a member. A paradoxical romp, The Great Gatsby explodes a realm of utter humanity, a thing few novels accomplish, although many try.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: on my list of favorites
Review: This is one of my favorite books, and I have read it over and over. It's sad how Gatsby appeared to have everything he wanted, but in reality, the one thing he wanted (Daisy) was just out of his reach. To me, Gatsby was an intensly lonely man who spent his whole life trying to fill his life. It really makes you think. END

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: Great Book
Review: This book agrandized our lives after completing this masterpiece. At first, the book was slow, but after it picked up momentum, it never slowed. F. Scott Fitzgerald is one of the most coveted authors in all american literature. He is a mastermind in all of art's history. He uses ordinary situations and makes them come to life.

Rating: 2 stars
Summary: haven't we seen this before?
Review: We read this book in hope of enjoying, it but what is there to like when you have read it before. It starts out interesting but the characters are boring and don't seem real. The ending is just plain bad.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: the greatest of the American novels
Review: During my college years, I was forced to read The Great Gatsby, and I must say that I'm glad my professor chose to force this masterpiece on me. It is my all time favorite book. Fitzgerald's last three final paragraphs could stand alone by themselves and they would still be considered a masterpiece.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Gatsby captures the emptiness of the American Dream.
Review: I am now reading F.Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby for the fifth time. Each time that I read the work, it yields more gold. In many ways this novel is a metaphor for a failed American Dream; however, it is only one possible dream. I am not so cynical(yet) to believe that there is only one dream. Martin Luther King's dream of service to humanity is certainly a viable one that remains. Gatsby's only flaw was that he loved his mental projection of Daisy--his ideal woman. But the Daisy he loved and the real life Daisy were as different as night and day. The real Daisy was shallow,self-centered, and materialistic. Daisy could not love because Daisy was not really a person. Instead, she was a one-dimensional imitiation of a human being; her husband Tom is her male counter-part; neither one is a whole person. Yet, as Nick tells us "They could always retreat into their money."

In many ways, Gatsby has as much relevance today as it did for the twenties. In our super-materialistic, name brand society peolpe are brain-washed into pursuing Daisy-dreams of designer clothes, prestige cars and bigger, better houses.

Maybe, Gatsby even has moral and ethical implications: To pursue the empty god of materialism(Daisy) is to choose death. "Gatsby turned out alright in the end." At least, he found a reason to live and a reason to die(even if it was misguided).The Great Gatsby captures the emptiness of an American Dream.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary:

The Great Gatsby -- The First Techno Novel
Review:

The story is a trifle, the characters are waxworks, the ideas are second-hand -- so why is Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby the most stunning, the most precious, the most indispensable of all novels? One word -- beauty. The Great Gatsby is like a gorgeous, glittering dream that evaporates upon waking. Its slipperiness leaves you frustrated yet somehow content, aware you've just tasted of an alien world -- an unrecapturable vision all the more inspiring for its transience. What separates Gatsby from other great novels is Fitzgerald's selflessness -- unlike Joyce, Faulkner, Proust, or almost any other author you care to mention, he isn't just out to strut his stuff: he wants to GIVE you something. The grandeur of the world as seen through a child's eyes, and then lost, is all restored in 170 slim pages, through imagery painted with a fairy's wand, and sentences that seem lit up in celestial neon.

I'm being hyperbolic with my praise here because, for once, my inborn cynicism has met its Waterloo. The Great Gatsby is one of a very few treasures whose charms have not shrivelled up with age -- not just the book's age, but my own. The sad truth is, back in junior high when I first read Gatsby, I thought it was simple-minded, decidedly modest in scope and ambition, and woefully inferior to its reputation. I then went on to prostrate myself before the temples of Shakespeare, Doestoevsky, Martin Amis, Celine, and other authors who met my demand for what I thought was sophistication. But something has been stripped away. While all those old idols are now musty and faint, The Great Gatsby, simple and unpretentious, continues to grow.

What astonishes me most about the book is its futuristic imagery, so far ahead of its time that Gatsby may very well be the definitive end-of-the-millenium novel every modern author is scurrying to write. The pulsing green light across the Sound, the islands in the shape of eggs, and, especially, the looming, sinister eyes of Dr. T.J. Eckleburg -- these are mythic, unforgettable images that Fitzgerald tattoos across the back of your eyelids. They transcend literature, transcend even film, to become like a fantasy of a film playing in a great director's head, but which the camera is just too clumsy to capture ( the 1974 film of The Great Gatsby is certainly painful proof of this, though Jack Clayton is no great director -- this book deserves nothing less than the Jean-Luc Godard who made Pierrot Le Fou ).

I still agree with my teenage self that Fitzgerald is a shallow thinker -- but I'm smart enough now to realize shallow thinkers often make the best artists. The world may always be with us, and heavily, but transfigured through Fitzgerald's eyes, that same world is slight, measureless, and, despite all our best efforts to grasp it, ever so slightly out of reach -- a low-flying cloud.


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