World's Fair

Rating:
Summary: A great trip back to the '30s
Review: A great time travel experience. Doctorow shows the reader New York City in the '30s as seen by a young boy. Brings the reader into a part of America long past. The scene in which Edgar, the boy, watches the Hindenburg fly over the city is wonderful.

Rating:
Summary: A wistful novel of nostalgia
Review: E.L. Doctorow is probably New York's greatest literary nostalgia artist. While "Ragtime" recalls the city's colorful population explosion of immigrants at the beginning of the twentieth century and "Billy Bathgate" is a boy's Depression-era underworld fantasy, "World's Fair" evokes what it might have been like to grow up in the Bronx in the 1930's. The narrator, Doctorow's voice and presumed alter ego, is a Jewish boy named Edgar Altschuler who is about nine by the time the book ends, so it remains in a state of pre-pubescent innocence without entering into the turbulent years of adolescent awakening.

Edgar is an extremely observant child who is fascinated by the intricacies of the most mundane things and events. Normal kid routines like school, ball games, movies, comic books, and radio programs are described in loving detail as though he were eager to explain to his jaded adult readers what's so special about being a kid. Similarly, tragedies like the death of his grandmother, witnessing a woman getting hit by a car, and meeting terminally ill children in the hospital take on perceptively morbid new dimensions through Edgar's words.

The members of Edgar's immediate family are so realistic they seem like sepia-tinted photographs come to life. His father Dave co-owns a music store and, far from being the moral compass a father's role is traditionally given, is somewhat irresponsible and irreverent, a social activist about thirty years ahead of his time. Edgar's mother Rose is a bundle of anxiety, worrisome and contentious from living in a house full of men. His older brother, Donald, and uncle Willy are both musically inclined, one a failed bandleader, the other destined to be a failed bandleader.

That Edgar is Jewish is an indispensable part of the story, as it defines his upbringing and characterizes his family, friends, and the neighborhood. From his strictly observant maternal grandmother to his atheistic paternal grandfather, there is a wide range of piety among his family members, which makes for lively scenes at rituals such as the Passover Seder. Nothing, however, raises the little boy's Jewish consciousness so much as the appearances of swastika graffiti in the neighborhood, threats from antisemitic hooligans, and Hitler's menacing shadow looming across the ocean.

Edgar's bittersweet final taste of youthful innocence is his long-anticipated and enthusiastic first visit to the 1939 World's Fair, an ironic symbol of man's proud achievements in the technological advancements of civilization considering the world was getting ready to destroy itself in war. The book ends with Edgar burying a time capsule in a nearby park in imitation of the one buried at the Fair, and it becomes apparent that this novel is meant to be Doctorow's personal time capsule.

Things we experience as children can be confusing and difficult to understand in all their aspects, but as adults we are able to articulate our thoughts and feelings about our childhood experiences with fresh insights that we didn't have at the time. That Doctorow does this so delicately and poetically in "World's Fair" makes his novel an absolute success.

Rating:
Summary: Another winner by Doctorow
Review: For those of you who read Ragtime and were a little disappointed, then World's Fair is the book you should read. World's Fair is a great portrait of the 30s through the perspective of a young boy. Where Ragtime failed by not putting together a good story, World's Fair is successful. Not Doctorow's best book, but definitely close to it.

Rating:
Summary: Loved the "fair world" found in the pages of this book
Review: I don't think I have ever read a book that was so in tune with feelings I had as a child. Not meaning to be sexist, I had to question whether a woman might have written this book, and not a man. There were times I had to put the book down and just marvel at the beauty and insight of the words on the page. The ending came too soon! Praises, praises, praises to E.L. Doctorow! I will never give up my copy!

Rating:
Summary: Stupid
Review: Like a great painting, Doctorow choses his words carefully, depicting the 30s as the dark, mournful era that it was. Written well with the usual description that Doctorow is famous for, I have to say that the synopsis made the book sound more exciting.
The book details the experience that the protagonist and his family have while at the World's Fair in New York City. From the oddities to the fun, Doctorow did his research and what was there. Unlike his other books like Loon Lake or Welcome to Hard Times, I did not feel I was there, at the fair.
Displaying the 30s like it was, this book proves and depicts how far we have come since then. In the primitive times of tea-line-legged nylons and T&A was unheard of, historians and fans of Doctorow will be pleased. I applaud him for his historical essence and truthfulness . . . the excitement factor just was not there.

Rating:
Summary: Was sad when ended, like I was losing a friend.
Review: Mr Doctorow blew me away with Ragtime, which instantly became a favourite book and one of the best books i've ever read.

I had heard that his style changed quite a bit from book to book, so what was the chance, i wondered, of finding another Doctorow book which was as good?

But i underestimated the great Mr Doctorow.

His World's Fair is the first book since Roald Dahl's BFG, reading it as a boy about the age of Doctorow in this semi-autobiographical novel, that i genuinely was sad near the end, that it should soon be over. Just like with the BFG, and never since among the many novels i've read, from Dickens, Tolstoy, DH Lawrence, Henry James, name your giant, have i felt as i neared the book's end as if i were losing a friend.

To evoke this kind of impression with no-nonsense sentences is Doctorow's gift. Every sentence is a masterpiece of declarative communication which Hemingway would have been proud of. The amount of detail in the novel is astonishing - the little things no human could possibly remember, the impressions so vividly evoked, are why we have novelists like Doctorow.

I am grateful to Doctorow for inserting me so viscerally into his childhood - so that i almost felt I had experienced it myself. It felt, at the end, that it was my own father i was seeing for the last time.

Rating:
Summary: Mature and insightful
Review: My dad is the same age as E.L. Doctorow, and although he did not grow up in NYC (visited there at times) he says that this novel is a close description of his own experience. It is about a very peculiar ethnic sub-group, New York jews who are not particularly religious and having "modern" ideas and lifestyle. To me Doctorow's book is one well-preserved verbal photograph after another. Somehow he conveys the scenes in a pre-Ektrachrome feeling, where bright colors are rendered in endlessly subtle shades of grey.

I hope that when I am Doctorow's age I will be able to summon up the wealth of memory detail he does. The images are authentically pressed from a the mind of a child not yet 12 years old. There are things that a child notices that an adult would not, such as how he likes how a particular door latch works or details from favorite comic books.

From there the narrative effortlessly moves to other characters in the story, written in the form of letters to the author. Everything is in place, and all of it wonderful to read.

This should be standard reading for any high school.

Rating:
Summary: Stupid
Review: My title seems trite and immature, but I am only using a word the author likes to use to describe others. This shows his own ignorance, which is reflected again in his work.

Rating:
Summary: Such innocence!
Review: This book was very hard to put down once I stared to read it. It's a simple story about a boy growing up in Depression era NYC. There's no real excitement or climax (well, maybe Edgar finally going to the World's Fair) but it is simply a story about a boy and the time he lived in. Wonderfully written.

Rating:
Summary: A wonderful evocation of New York in the 1930's
Review: We expect that Doctorow will use some piece of New York City's past as the setting for each of his novels but we also expect that he will give us a story with drama, tragedy or some wry take on the human comedy. In World's Fair he only gives us the view of time past. There is precious little story in this book. It deals with a young boy and his family during the 1930's and concerns itself mostly with ordinary life and the ups and downs of family relations. The story is mostly told by the younger son (who is nine at book's end) as he recounts his earliest memories, preoccupations, dreams, friends, illnesses and enthusiasms, but other characters (his mother, older brother and aunt) all have chapters in which they 'remember' the story from their own point of view. Yet if the plot is thin, the sense of reality generated by the writing is substantial. Doctorow uses the ordinary life of his characters to reflect and represent the broader story of the Great Depression, the rise of Nazi Germany, the extreme political divisions of the time, the fear of impending war and the great hope in a bright and shiney future free of the dark menace of poverty and repression.

This book kept me focused from the first few sentences. It doesn't demand a lot from the reader but it delivers a great deal. I suspect that there is a great deal of Doctorow himself in his main character. He was born in 1931, so would have been about the right age to experience the music, radio shows, games and other experiences that make up his protagonist's world. He certainly feels strongly about these simple byegone experiences and manages to convey that to the reader. This is a very satisfying glimpse into the life of ordinary but interesting people and I highly recommend it.