The Prince of Tides

Rating:
Summary: UNFORGETTABLE....BUT HAS SOME WEAKNESSES
Review: An unforgettable saga of a Southern family. Rich in detail and description, it is a feast for novel buffs. Characters are highly developed and speak their own lines. Conroy provides sometimes the funniest anecdotes about life in the South. His use of language is highly artistic and he plays with words in a professional manner. However, the plot sometimes is just unconvincing. The book is long and it got boring around the middle when all he talked about was the Grandparents of the Wingo family which was really off-point. This left him with the Lowenstein character undeveloped for the part she played. Readers have to make out for themselves how Tom and Lowenstein fall in love, since before they sleep with each other they did not appear together except in few superficial incidents. They also have to make up why Tom and Savannah reconcile with their father who abused them all along, and refuse to forgive their mother, who was kinder to them. It becomes a page-turner in the last quarter where things finally develop in a fast pace and more concentration is made on the main characters. The movie is utterly beautiful and I am really sorry to say that it is indeed much better than the novel.

Rating:
Summary: Most excellent
Review: I've read The Prince of Tides twice and intend to read it again. I loved it completely and felt like the Wingo siblings were my family. Pat Conroy is so very Southern. He captures what it was like to grow up in the south with Southern parents. Most excellent reading.

Rating:
Summary: Good book when you need to see the other side of life
Review: Pat has wrote some very good books, this is one of the better ones.

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Summary: Beware of any writing called "beautiful"
Review: Pat Conroy's lumbering, clumsy soap opera is the nineties potboiler: thick, affecting, so sensitive it sheds tears when you open it too far and break its spine. One of Conroy's many similarities with seminal tear-jerk-off, er, jerker, Sidney Sheldon is his ability to grasp the reader, and this was a terminally gripping read, holding me until two a.m. and my eyes kept sliding off the page. Conroy is anything but boring, and in his attempt to stay that way, he injects ferocious tigers, Navy SEALS, a SNAG football coach, Southern Gothic family sagas, and smarmy New Yorkers, all dubbed (except for the tiger, of course) with some of the worst dialogue I've read. Fortunately, the events move so quickly (maybe it was my reading) and the action is so blindingly, garishly colorful that the book never loses steam. Another similarity with Sheldon, a competitor I suspect Conroy as attempting for the serious read would disdain, is Conroy's label fetishism. That a southern boy, his suicidal sister, and their SEAL brother would know to dine at the Essex House their first night out in NYC is enough, but to have Tom Wingo disingenuously recognize ST Dupont pens, Philips Exeter, and all the rest as trappings of the preternaturally New York existence is contrived -- but a sop to narrators and readers overfond of their comfortable existences. At worst, Conroy's sensitivity is exploitative: the luridity of Tom's rape scene, complete with his naked mother and brains on the wall, stands out as the premier example of this sell-out to the page-turner, and to have it brushed over into solace in the next passages is an insult to therapists, therapy, and anyone, male or female, who has suffered similar experiences. But Conroy deals in easily handled archetypes, as the pablum which makes his prose easy to swallow. Hence, we have over-sophisticated Jew New Yorkers, effete and hopeless, and violent Southern white trash, both striving to exit the corners into which Conroy has written them. Stirringly, despite his shortcomings, we do identify with Tom Wingo as the southern everyman who bridges all of these cloistered corners, until, of course, he does not, and returns back to his Southern life in the New South, with a New outlook and New York experiences: after all, he's a Sensitive New Age Guy

Rating:
Summary: Excellent, excellent, excellent
Review: This is absolutely one of THE best books I have ever read. I have loaned, rebought, and loaned this book so many times I should get a commission. It is such a fabulously rich, in-depth story I felt truly sad when it was over. (Though the ending was excellent and struck such a nerve that even the movie didn't have to change it.) The Wingo tale is one that needed to be told and I only wish I could hear more of it (perhaps Tom's daughters now grown? Not a bad idea eh?). All I can say is READ THIS BOOK. (Do I hear ahearty "amen" out there?

Rating:
Summary: excellent! moving story of family love
Review: this is my favorite book of all time. This is a book about the crimes parents inflict upon their children unknowingly, yet it is mostly about forgiveness. It is also a story about finding your own definition of yourself & no longer the definition one's parents wanted or needed of you.This story helped me to understand that bad childhoods spill over from one generation to the next and that the after-effects of dysfunction in one's childhood must be dealt with to avoid passing them on to one's own children & to be able to find your own peace

Rating:
Summary: Touching,gripping, a masterpeice
Review: Conroy has done it again! The Prince of Tides is a superb book that brings you into the lives of three southern children living lives of poverty, abuse, and humiliation. As you uncover the reason for Savanha's attempted suicide and Tom's sarcasim and distrust, you see what it's like to live in fear, always on your gaurd, and always a step behind everyone else. While you hear the tales of the Wingo childrens young life of fear you also see what Tom has to get through to really be able to put his marrage back together. Not only will you love this book, you will feel the pain, share in the triumphs and feel anger towards those who prejudge the children. You wil not want the book to end. With a suprise around evry corner and an intruiging plot, The Prince of Tides is an example of perfection.You'll witness the pride of the south as the family never excepts less than what everyone else gets. They never let their faces show their pain and they don't dwell on the things they can't get. You'll laugh, you'll cry, you'll feel loss and joy. You'll hate pride and principles, and at the same time admire the Wingo's for never giving in

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Summary: try not cry with the Wingo's family...just try but you can't
Review: If you search for love that live with hate,friends that can be the enemies,fathers and sons,mothers and daughters, dreams,poems,madness,courage,ideal, that resist the violence that make we all know that a family is the theater when we learn to survive after.try not cry for this three brothers, try to understand what kind of disturb can make with the child hearts...it's all in Pat Conroy's Prince of Tides.

Rating:
Summary: an intense wonderful experience
Review: one of the top 20 books i have ever had the pleasure of experiencing.and an experience it is! you are there-in the heart and soul of these protagonists.a truly moving read.you leave this book with the same sense of despair that one feels having to leave a loving trusted friend

Rating:
Summary: Interesting but not sensational weekend-reader
Review: I enjoyed reading The Prince of Tides for an english project. I found it to be an interesting book, though no literary feat by any standards. However, Mr. Conroy does catch the reader's interest with complex webs of fantastic tales. Unfortunately, the descriptions can get a bit silly and many of his stories are completely unrealistic (like a Bengal tiger ripping the faces off of 3 escaped convicts) But it is a good vacation/weekend fun read