A Garden of Sand

Rating:
Summary: Powerful and captivating
Review: A Garden Of Sand is representative of Wichita and the area in which Earl Thompson grew up. In an alley between the 15 hundred block on North St.Francis and Santa Fe streets. The moral decay of the 1930's was evident and compounded by the depression. People did what they could and grappled with a way of life that had been unknown in the U.S. up until that time. The characters in A Garden Of Sand were based on actual people and merchants in that area of town. This is a telling portrait of those times, and as other readers have mentioned it raises fear in ones heart to read this masterpiece. It should do exactly that! The lessons of the past often slip by those in the near future. The times change, and those times will come again to America. It may be different people and different authors, but history repeats itself in an unrelenting way. This book speaks for a community and time that can only best be described as "shattered". With the money and food gone, life and it's seeming gentleness often changes into an all consuming monster. A time that shall revisit us all. I think that this book is the definative primer of those times. It may run only second to The Grapes Of Wrath as a benchmark of the dirty thirties. But, it tells a far better story that the reader becomes entangled with. Earl Thompson gave us a lot during his short stay on earth. Somewhere, the spark of energy that drove this man is thinking and reacting to the surroundings he is in today. If you read this book and are unmoved by the characters and description of the times. Please get some help!

Rating:
Summary: Life Is Not A Bowl of Cherries
Review: All of E. T. 's books are down to earth, real and not-often talked about subjects such as incest, bed bugs and what it's really like to be in the U.S. armed services.

Rating:
Summary: Thompson passed too soon
Review: He could have given us more books like Garden. Yes, the topics are a little off-kilter and the language a little rough, but the man could write! In my own opinion, Thompson belongs on the shelf next to Hemingway and Steinbeck as an American treasure.

Rating:
Summary: Earl Thompson
Review: Hi,
I love his work and am looking for any information on Earl Thompson, i.e., where he died and how, family, etc. Anyone out there with any info can contact me at [e-mail].
Thanks,
Donald Ray Pollock

Rating:
Summary: Earl Thompson
Review: Hi,
I love his work and am looking for any information on Earl Thompson, i.e., where he died and how, family, etc. Anyone out there with any info can contact me at [e-mail].
Thanks,
Donald Ray Pollock

Rating:
Summary: Powerful and captivating
Review: There are very few novels that have knocked me out of my chair as consistently as this one. Thompson's writing may seem crude to the uninitiated, but one cannot resist being swept up by his delightful tapestry of slang which peppers some of the most captivating prose I've ever read. It's about life in America, in it's underwear, up way past its bedtime, broke, beaten up, bombed out of its skull, with a tenacious hope running through it all like a river. No heterosexual American male in his right mind will be able to put this book down, and none should miss the chance to read it.

Rating:
Summary: If Breughel had directed The Wizard of Oz
Review: When the smoke of obscenity trials cleared in the 1960s, publishers were free to print well known novels like Joyce's Ulysses, Miller's Tropic of Cancer and Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover. The new freedom to write about sexually explicit topics subsequently led not only to a spate of sexploitaton novels such as Grace Metalious's Peyton Place and Harold Robbins's Carpetbaggers but also to a handful of honest, forthright novels that focused on men and women in their teens and twenties, including Thompson's Garden of Sand, Agnar Mykle's Lasso Round the Moon, and R. V. Cassill's Pretty Leslie. The sexual frankness of these novels so overshadowed their merit that they were doomed to a sniggering relegation to the back shelf. It is time to redeem them. I doubt any American writer, including Mark Twain and J. D. Salinger, has ever got inside the head of an adolescent young man more than Thompson in Garden of Sand and Tattoo. There is sex, yes, but also the ethos and the degradation of poverty and the wild hopes and expectant dreams of people without money, privilege, or an Ivy League education. Clearly, Thompson lovingly worked and reworked his writing, piling up detail upon detail, observation upon observation, all of which results in a novel much like a Breughel painting: having naturalistic characteristics but an elegaic tone. He reminds us of what growing up REALLY was like.