Rating: 
Summary: What is with these readers
Review: I am enjoying The Stones of Summer immensely. I am nearly at the end, which I am prolonging because I don't want the book and its originality to end. I'm writing this because I can't believe the reactionary tone of some of these reviews. Weird.It is actually quite an easy story to read, even in the last part where the book fragments into a beautifully written, new journalism riff, certainly ahead of its time. By the way, some of the stuff quoted for the book here are brief sections from the main character's notebooks--a wannabe thinker and poet--and meant to be satiric. The book's language works to evoke a certain sensibility and is not always direct but that seems to give it the great power that everyone who likes it talks about. The story follows Dawes Williams, a boy with the soul of an artist through childhood and teenage years. The adults are far away from the narrative, and the boy's precociousness moves him to all sorts of rebellion, against his family, his trouble-making friends, and eventually society/America as it degenerates
into war and self-absorption during his early adulthood. But don't be misled, it is not a boy's book. It has a mature sensibility. Without a doubt, The Stones of Summer is the best look at the sixties I've ever come across in fiction, and the only one that has bridged the fifties as it morphed to the sixties. Yet, it does it in an artistic, observant fashion, with quite a bit of dialogue toward the end, a la Hemingway, a departure from the lyricism of Faulkner at the book's outset, where the boy's memories of childhood hold center stage. The grandmother and grandfather and their relationship is brilliantly conveyed and draws you in before you know it. As I said, this book may not be for everybody, but it is certainly a major work. I would have loved to have seen Faulkner's Hamlet-Town-Mansion trilogy in one volume reviewed here, or Pynchon's V when he was published, without a backbone of 50 years of critical support. What would these same readers have thought? Why do I like it so much? I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that The Stones of Summer is a wonderful departure from the current fast-as-movie novels that are so prevalent today. It is the first book I've read in a long time where I found myself stealing time to read more. And at other times putting the book aside after a few pages because it was so rich with character and place that I just wanted it to linger. As I said, it is more than diversionary fiction. This is a truly different kind of book that surprises the reader not just in its twists and turns, but in its language and humor, often Swiftian. The Stones of Summer is a very moving--not sentimental--tour-de-force, wrapping a whole generation's stories and social history into one big read. Especially at this price, don't miss it. Otherwise, you really may be missing the one outstanding book of youth that speaks to your heart today.
Rating: 
Summary: Summer Bummer
Review: This dense coming-of-age story follows Dawes Oldham Williams, a sensitive 8-year-old in 1950s Iowa who becomes a disillusioned adult in Mexico struggling to maintain his sanity. In 581 impenetrable pages, there's no shortage of lyrical exposition or monotonous pretension.
Rating: 
Summary: OVERWRITTEN!!!!!!!!!
Review: STONES OF SUMMER IS A REAL HOOT AND I DON'T THINK ITS MEANT TO BE. THIS BOOK HAS SOME OF THE WORST PROSE IN THE HISTORY OF LITERATURE. MY PERSONAL TOP 5 SUMMER STONERS: 1. HER BODY WAS AN INWARD FALL, A DEEP SPIRAL OF MUSKY SEAL LYING EASILY WITHIN ITSELF.
2. THE LURE OF IMAGINARY TOTALITY IS MOMENTARILY FROZEN BEFORE THE DIALECTIC OF DESIRE HASTENS ON WITHIN SYMBOLIC CHAINS.
3. SINCE THOUGHT IS SEEN TO BE RHIZOMATIC RATHER THAN ARBOREAL, THE MOVEMENT OF DIFFERENTIATION AND BECOMING IS ALREADY IMBUED WITH ITS OWN POSITIVE TRAJECTORY.
4. IT IS THE MOMENT OF NON-CONSTRUCTION, DISCLOSING THE ABSENTATION OF ACTUALITY FROM THE CONCEPT IN PART THROUGH ITS INVITATION TO EMPHASIZE, IN READING, THE HELPLESSNESS, RATHER THAN THE WILL, OF ITS FALL INTO CONCEPTUALITY.
5. DAWES STRODE THROUGH THE DARK NIGHT, HIS WAY LIT BY TWINKLING STARS AS IF THE GODS AT SOME CELESTIAL CONCERT WERE ALL FLICKING THEIR LIGHTERS AT THE SAME TIME IN APPRECIATION OF THE DRUM SOLO-LIKE BEAT OF HIS BOOT HEELS AGAINST THE PAVEMENT, OCCASIONALLY ACCOMPANIED BY THE STEEL-BRUSH-ON-A-CYMBAL SOUND OF A SPLASH AS HE KICKED THROUGH A PUDDLE, THE PLIP-PLOP OF WATER DRIPPING FROM LEAVES LIKE SOMEONE PLAYING STACCATO ON A TWO-NOTE PIANO GONE FLAT, AND THE WIND BLOWING A BLUESY TISSUE-PAPER-ON-COMB HARMONICA THROUGH THE TREES.
Rating:
Summary: The Literary Hoax of 2003
Review: Barnes and Nobles is perpetrating the greatest literary hoax in years and all at the expense of a very ordinary novel that should have stayed forgotten. I tried to cut through the thicket of verbiage, but the writing was so self-indulgent and adolescent that I stopped at page 75. Previous reviewers were on target about this book's mean, anti-woman slant. All the women are hideous caricatures: saints or street-walkers and often both. The author has the insights and prejudices of an unelightened 14 year old boy.
Rating:
Summary: An extraordinary work saved from the ashes
Review: I came to the AOL site for The Stones of Summer in order to write a review. I have published 2 reviews on The Stones of Summer in other periodicals and wished to offer on AOL my comments at length, but having read the reviews published prior to mine on this site, I wished to respond. As a reader, a reviewer and a writer, I know well how rare the occasion that I've composed or come across a review which begins with the edict: "If you read nothing else this year..." and yet, here is such a time The Stones of Summer is a literary force of nature so rare in creation and scope that it simply should not be missed. The Stones of Summer is a brilliant find, a definitive and remarkable work of art brought back for a whole new generation to read. To suggest that this novel is "a graduate students exercise in excess" or "not an accurate representation of Iowa" is to miss the point entirely. The Stones of Summer is a work of such immense breath and depth that the read is not always easy, I admit, and it is possible to miss the full scope of its brilliance. At once lyrical and comical, phrased with a narrative that is like a postmodern Faulkner, the story unfolds like a dream. A bit of history: In 1972 Dow Mossman published The Stones of Summer, his first -and only - novel. The book met with strong early reviews, and had enough hardcover sales to warrant a paperback printing. Yet, as is often the case with literary fiction, the novel soon disappeared from the American consciousness. So, too, did Dow Mossman. At 29, three years removed from earning his MFA at the Iowa Writer's Workshop, Dow vanished, and for the next 30 years no one in the publishing world heard a word from him. In 1998 the filmmaker Mark Moskowitz revisited The Stones of Summer - first purchased when he was 18 - and captivated by the book, took it upon himself to search for Dow, and in the process wound up returning The Stones of Summer to the public eye. (Moskowitz' hunt for Dow is chronicled in the magnificent film 'Stone Reader.') The Stones of Summer is clearly a work of genius. The writing is akin to a postmodern Faulkner, at once comical and transcendent. Divided into three parts, each section has a distinct narrative and compelling tone. The first section deals with Dawes Williams as an adolescent coming of age in Rapid City, Iowa during the nineteen-fiftees. Over the course of some 600 pages, the novel follows Dawes into the turbulent sixties where he struggles to adapt to an ever changing America. Throughout the first section, we are introduced to Dawes' family - parents Leone and Simpson, grandfather Arthur, and wildman friend Ronnie Colman - and taken on a magical trip as Dawes goes with his parents to Arthur's farm, converted several years ago to the raising of greyhounds. The prose is eloquent and uncompromising. ("The afternoon, smooth and even, was beginning to tail into evening like a river flowing into a glass of dead light.") There is a dreamlike quality to the first portion of the novel, a slow poetic journey which unravels itself in the hours after first being read. The pace of the second section is much different as Dawes enters his teenage years, and along with Ronnie, revels in the wonders of his youth. There are a myriad of adventures along with a steady recognition on the part of Dawes of the future awaiting him and the changes to come, both personally and for the country as a whole. The final section of The Stones of Summer is more closely related in tone to the start of the novel; the narrative voice at once elliptical and mystical. Issues regarding the social climate at the time in America and Dawes own life as a young man offer a reflection of the 60s so insightful and staggering as to shake the very foundations of the reader's soul. There are journal entries and a mixed narrative voice which keeps the reader intrigued in a way a great work by Auden causes one to cock their head and anticipate distant voices. The Stones of Summer is a rare find, a definitive and remarkable work of art brought back for a whole new generation to read as a treat not to be missed!
Steven Gillis is the author of WALTER FALLS... --This text refers to the Hardcover edition
Rating:
Summary: another glorified graduate school project
Review: when i was in graduate school, we had two phrases for this genre of "experimental" american novel: bloated and showoffy. in those days all you had to do was write down all the adjectives you could think of before noon and pass it off as avant-garde literature. stones of summer might have been fun to read for the sheer preening self-loathing of it all if not for the fact that it takes itself so seriously. lighten up mr. mossman! and grow up. every female character is a demeaning sixties cliche. i can't believe any woman would traul through this labored adolescent boy's fantasy.
Rating:
Summary: A Rocky Read
Review: The Stones of Summer was first published in 1972 and garnered some remarkably favorable reviews in the New York Times, the Washington Post and elsewhere. It failed to find favor in the literary marketplace, however, and was soon out of print.
Enter filmmaker Mark Moskowitz, who had been impressed by the review in the Times and bought the book when it came out, but didn't read it until years later. Whereupon he concluded it was a masterpiece and wondered what had happened to the author.
His search for Mossman's whereabouts is the subject of The Stone Reader. The film inspired Steve Riggio, CEO of Barnes & Noble, to buy one of the copies of the book still available and republish it under Barnes & Noble's imprint.
Obviously, some people think this book is great. The Times reviewer, John Seelye, is evidently fond of jazzy verbal riffs unencumbered by common logic. In the introduction he has written for this new edition of Stones, he extols the virtues of " 'galactical' reviews, which [surround] the book in question with digressively spiraling nebulae." Heavens.
Nothing wrong with stylistic innovation. But it should illuminate, not obfuscate. I found Mossman's particular stylistic high jinks irritating and distracting. When I finally managed to keep the language from getting in my way, I realized that the story and characters hardly rubbed elbows with reality. Arthur and his wife arguing in the farmhouse kitchen sound like the Ralph Kramdens on crack.
OK. Maybe Mossman never intended to provide a realistic portrayal of life in Iowa. But neither does he provide a plausible substitute. His novel is set in his own private Iowa. Definitely not a pleasant state.
Rating:
Summary: Overhyped
Review: I too expected big things out of this book after seeing the movie Stoned Reader. But the book never lived up to the hype. It was quit dull, actually and about 400 page too long
Rating:
Summary: A Must Have!
Review: I was blown away by this book. I heard the buzz and leafed through it in the store and saw right off it had a wit and deepness that is rare. It is about a boy growing up, but unlike many books done that way, captures it from inside-out in a way I have never encountered. Dawes Williams and his friends are full of trouble-making romantic escapades. The book is very funny and at turns tragic. The last part finds the rebellion of youth turned into the alienation of adulthood amidst the turbulent but inward-turning '60s. The 3 parts are all distinct but all of one great mind-bending saga. The story flashes back and forward and weaves and builds and turns back on itself a generation later in a post-modern style. An incredible feat that is like Faulkner, Joyce, even Twain. The comparisons in the media don't exaggerate. I haven't read as funny and moving a book since Eggers' Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius and few Big Books of the current school even approach The Stones of Summer. No wonder it is from 1972. I am much younger than that generation but The Stones of Summer captures it better than anything else I have read. How was this book out of print and not heard of for so long? I guess I'll have to get the movie to find out, but it is so great to have a book like this NOW when so much fiction is straight linear toss-offs headed for movie options.
No wonder I've turned lately to nonfiction for brilliant writing. Stones is not for everybody, I realize, but for many, many of us, this is a book, in all its character and roller-coaster excess that will live on. If you want to return to the days when books completely enveloped you in a completely expansive way and weren't just commuter diversions like I guess this last reviewer was expecting, this is a must have.
Rating:
Summary: A book that's denser than it's page count
Review: I'll try to keep this short. This is not a typical novel. If you're a fan of your average, run-of-the-mill fodder that populates the shelves of bookstores (John Grisham et al) then you probably won't like this book. If you want to whip through this book with ease and understanding, without pause to think, then pass. This is a challenging novel; yes it's big, but the language is rich (curses and all - maybe Mossman used them for a reason?!*GASP*) and it's ultimately rewarding for those with the courage to stay with it. Don't trust the nay-sayers. This is a terrific novel.
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