Rating: 
Summary: If only for CATHEDRAL, plus the Birthday Boy,His Parents,&.
Review: ..the Old Baker...I read this collection a while back,and can remember these two tales now as clear as day,even if I forget the title of the latter tale, which is only mentioned briefly here in the reviews. Anyway, it's the story of a boy turning nine(ten?) who is getting ready for his upcoming birthday party when he falls on the street curb, and gets a bruised head,which is much worse than anyone thinks. Meanwhile his mother is busy at the local bakery giving the baker directions for the special cake. The family comes home, the boy's head aches and he passes out. At the hospital, the doctors' continually reassure his parents that the boy will be OK. Meanwhile, the Baker keeps calling the boy's mother,reminding her rather obnoxiously that the cake is ready...The hospital desciptions are harrowing, and so is the rest of the story,but,as in CATHEDRAL, there is redemption at the very end,when the Baker spills his guts out to the grieving parents..Very touching indeed! No wonder Mr. Carver's reputation has never waned! BTW, Mr. Carver's stories and characters are surely universal, with experiences not limited at all by the Oregon that one reviewer so clearly describes!
Rating:
Summary: Buy the Selected Stories instead for more value
Review: Although this is an excellent collection, including my favorite story (A Small, Good Thing), Where I'm Calling From and Selected Stories will get you far more stories for the same price, including some unpublished ones. The stories in Cathedral not included in the Selected Stories are not very impressive, so get the other collection instead.
Rating:
Summary: Glorious Cathedral
Review: It is a cruel, un-poetic injustice, that Raymond Carver's life was tragically cut short just when his stories began to take on glimmers of hope that were nowhere to be seen in his earlier collections. When this book first came out, I was eager to read new stories from my favorite "minimalist" (isn't there a better word these days than "minimalist"?) writer. Instead, I was reading stories about compassion, good-natured friendships, and even salvation and forgiveness. Sure there were still the choppy sentences, quick observations, and weighty silences. But it was different. Many of the stories, not all, ended with an unusual (for Carver) sense of closure, even understanding. As so many reviewers have noted, the title story is just glorious. The narrator, a sarcastic and distant husband, finds human contact in the strangest circumstance. And when he does, he simply states, "It was like nothing else in my life up to now." Simple, but it leaves a serious lump in my throat each time I read it.
Rating:
Summary: Will You Please Keep Reading, Please?
Review: Like Carver, I was born and raised in a small town in Oregon. Maybe life is different in the rest of the US; but when the characters in his story "Vitamins" complain that there's no work anywhere except Portland, I understand. When the characters in "Chef's House" are evicted because Chef's fat daughter needs a place to stay, I understand. If you haven't lived in a small town (and I'm not talking about a picturesque New England village; I'm talking about a run-down logging town, I'm talking about closed mills, all-night bars, and welfare lines a mile long) you might not understand what Carver's talking about. If you haven't clung desperately to a miserable job, where the boss knows he owns you because there's a line of people who would JUMP for your 30-hours a week at minimum wage, Carver might not radiate for you as potently as he does for others. So. Come on up to Oregon. Work in a diner, or at the video store, or part-time bagging machine-parts on an assembly line. Worry about your job. Drink too much. See your kid get busted for possession of grass. Spend 5 months out of the year in dense fog and rain. Lose hope that you'll ever be able to afford another moving truck to get you out of Oregon. Oh, and when you're done... pick up this amazing collection of short stories by Raymond Carver. I guarantee you'll think he's the most amazing writer that ever came down the pike.
Rating:
Summary: Pure Gravy.
Review: Not long ago, it was considered rebellious to express a preference for Carver's third major-press collection of stories. 'What We Talk About When We Talk About Love,' surely, was his greatest achievement, if his least typical. If you listen to a certain breed of reader talk, it becomes clear that this is the collection that sums up Carver for them - Carver is a 'minimalist', 'gloomy', etc. etc. One, surely, needn't read any further. Such people are mistaken. Cathedral for me is Carver's best collection because it is the most closelly modelled on its creator's personality. It is fair. It is clear-eyed. It is bleak, often. Yet it is also hopeful, and steeped in a great generosity. And this is what bathes this collection in its unique glow. The collection contains three of Carver's very best: 'Cathedral', 'A Small, Good Thing', and 'Where I'm Calling From'. The second story, I find, acts as a kind of allegory for the growth and change of Carver's art. Compare ASGT, the restored version (not rewritten, RESTORED) with its earlier incarnation 'The Bath', from WWTAWWTAL. I fail to see how anyone would believe the latter to be the better story. In ASGT see Carver's art expanding, becoming more expansive, open, and generous. It was indeed a small good thing that Carver broke out from underneath the jackboot of Gordon Lish to produce such work, changing editors to do so. As that Carver's life became more settled in the period that he wrote the stories. A lesser writer might well have been content to merely duplicate the previous book and reap the reward. Not Carver. Cathedral is the quintessential Carver, and is a watershed in his oeuvre and of the American short story. It should be your first port of call.
Rating: 
Summary: It is what he doesn't say that makes the stories so unique
Review: Raymond Carver's short stories in the book "Cathedral" do tell perhaps of his life's stories but there is more here. It is what he doesn't say that makes the stories so unique. It is what is left when one finishes a story...the feelings, sad or dismayed or maybe even "I don't care" that come from the writings but are not of the writings It isn't what he writes but what he doesn't write. It is what he leaves you with and each reader can be left with something different. Carver is one writer who can be enjoyed by a man or a woman. His slices may be short stories but they are huge slices indeed. This is a book to read when you don't mind thinking a lot!.
Rating:
Summary: Essential
Review: There are a lot of people out there who want to tell you what to think about Raymond Carver. Shut the door on them, read CATHEDRAL and make up your own mind. This is a strong collection of stories; I think it bears comparison to Joyce's DUBLINERS. Each story is separate from another, but together they build a cohesive vision of the dusky corners of life in the later half of the 20th century. Sure his fiction is littered with alcoholics, divorces, and failure, but he finds the sympathetic quality that keeps you reading. In terms of structure, he creates a setting and exposition according to conventional rules of story construction, then subverts the climax into the protagonist's interior, so that the action is really about an invisible turning point in a life, when something goes out of it or lanes are switched, when self knowledge is made or lost. You would think that would mean so many characters stepping up to the plate and getting hit with the same ball, but each story is unique. The collection has variety and texture; it has heart without sentimentality. The prose is clean and undecorative, but never sterile. Carver gets it right; he should not be blamed for the plethora of boring contemporary literary fiction that has tried to ape him ever since he took the world's notice.
Rating:
Summary: Essential
Review: There are a lot of people out there who want to tell you what to think about Raymond Carver. Shut the door on them, read CATHEDRAL and make up your own mind. This is a strong collection of stories; I think it bears comparison to Joyce's DUBLINERS. Each story is separate from another, but together they build a cohesive vision of the dusky corners of life in the later half of the 20th century. Sure his fiction is littered with alcoholics, divorces, and failure, but he finds the sympathetic quality that keeps you reading. In terms of structure, he creates a setting and exposition according to conventional rules of story construction, then subverts the climax into the protagonist's interior, so that the action is really about an invisible turning point in a life, when something goes out of it or lanes are switched, when self knowledge is made or lost. You would think that would mean so many characters stepping up to the plate and getting hit with the same ball, but each story is unique. The collection has variety and texture; it has heart without sentimentality. The prose is clean and undecorative, but never sterile. Carver gets it right; he should not be blamed for the plethora of boring contemporary literary fiction that has tried to ape him ever since he took the world's notice.
Rating: 
Summary: Blah...So What??
Review: This collection of short stories is mildly interesting and compelling at parts, but as a whole it merely provides a bland and unsurprising read. There`s really nothing special or remarkable here, since Carver presents slices of life about lonely, depressed and lost american souls who haven`t much of a life. Some moments are intriguing (the short story "Cathedral", for instance, about a couple and a blind man), yet the overall result fails to rise above average, dull and bleak material. Certainly overrated, this book recieved more praise than it truly deserves. A letdown.
Rating:
Summary: Worthy of the highest praise.
Review: This is what we think about when we think about great writing. How can one person know so much about ourselves and everyone? Carver has been in all of our heads and has put us all down on paper, exposing us for who we are and what we really think about. Cathedral is the highlight of this collection. The images that are conjured up when a blind man help a man with perfect sight learn how to draw a cathedral he sees on televison is the most moving set of words I have ever read. These stories make you wonder what you are really like and then you realize that he's right, this is what you're like. A coaxing baker torments a family by hounding them about a cake they haven't picked up for their dead sons birthday. They confront him and he ends up being the grounding force for these grieving parents, the voice of reason and sensibility that brings them back to normal. These stories are wonderfully simple and simply perfect.
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