Rating: 
Summary: glimmers of greatness
Review: Somewhere underneath the over ripe language and rambling three generational family saga is an incrediable story that manages to grip the reader through the excess. Despite its flaws, I must admit I found it impossible to put this one down. The writing somehow manages a seemingly impossible combination of being both boring and aborbing at the same time. I agree whole-heartedly with previous reviewers who stated that a competent editor and a little streamlining of the inumerable plot threads would have helped this book immensely. Conroy seems to suffer from same illness that afflicted the makers of "Forrest Gump", an overwhelming desire to hit upon all social issues of the twentieth century in the course of his extremely lengthy read. His intentions are good, but the end results border on the ridiculous. During Luke's multi-page impassioned anti-nuke speech, my frustration had hit an all time high and I was tempted to hurl the book across room. I mean, its sweet that Pat tries to squeeze a little social commentary into his work, but this particular plot is insane. Not to mention, after being emotionally wiped out from discovering the big family secret, this twist in events surrounding Luke's death were a little too much. Also, I found much of the dialouge to be totally unconvincing...even the most intellectual and pompous arent this contrived. For example, on almost every other page, "simple southern boy" Tom is passionately spewing forth his political values, calling himself a liberal, a feminist, an ecologist...the list goes on. Personally, I agree with most of his viewpoints, but Id gladly give anyone the right to smack me repeatedly if I was this self important. Admist all these bleeding heart sentiments, the bare bones of the story struggle to break out. Additionally, the countless subplots and lack subtely severely hamper the impact of the novel. I found myself swept up in the story but not convinced enough to be genuinely moved.
Rating: 
Summary: Banal, turgid tripe: a soap opera disguised as a novel.
Review: If this is what people now call literature, the English language is in dire state. Conroy's prose, though occasionally poetic, is all too trite. The novel's dismal plot is cinematically melodramatic. It is hard to imagine such a group of characters actually existing. In short, this book does little but satisfy the unintellectual reader's desire for entertaining escapism. The words literature and fiction must not be confused...
Rating: 
Summary: Ghastly yet endearing
Review: There are so many ways to be encaptured by a book, but this is the first book I have ever read that makes me return to it time and time again. There emotional rollercoaster that the you are taken on will change your life forever. The shear reality that touches home can only be described as riviting, and the box of tissues and punching bag are definately essential to relieve all of those pent up frustrations that you will most certainly succumb to. In the beginning there are two paragraphs that although sound like jibberish are reflected on throughout the book. I have given this book to many of my friends who did not generally read, yet now each time I see them they are on to a new book time and time again. This is for someone that has never been able to find a decent book before and thought reading was a mean thing that teacher's used to impose on us at school. This book will make you want to continue reading just to try and find something better, which I have found to be quite difficult.
Rating: 
Summary: One of the Richest Stories I Have Ever Read!
Review: I thoroughly enjoyed this book from the first page until the last. The book was hard to put down and very absorbing to say the least.You'll meet the Wingo family as you read of whom are the following: Lila Wingo is the beautiful matriarch of the family. Abused by her husband, she is the sweet and steely woman with social aspirations so great she is willing to sell her kids down the river to achieve them. Henry Wingo is the cruel father and husband. He is a shrimper, schemer and loser. He also beats his sons to teach them not to cry. Later in the story, and perhaps too late, he tries to make peace with his own family. Luke is the older son and a Vietnam veteran, a strong man of burning convictions who races toward a shocking fate while trying to save an entire town. Savannah is the famous poet, gifted yet troubled though she is. The beauty of her art and the cries of her illness are clues to the secret she holds in her heart. She has locked away the too-long-hidden story of her wounded family. Tom is Savannah's twin brother and the narrator of this story. He is an unemployed football coach and teacher with a loving wife who loves someone else. With his troubled sister and a perceptive psychiatrist Dr. Susan Lowenstein, he is forced to look backward to unravel a history of violence, abandonment, commitment and love.
Rating:
Summary: A Classic
Review: Conroy's detractors rip into his wordy, flowery prose, and they take issue with what they consider emotional overkill in his plots and subplots. Indeed, "The Prince of Tides" is lengthy, intense and at times veers off course as this brilliant author goes to great pains to describe not only the multi-generation dysfunction of the Wingo clan, but his deep and abiding love for his native South Carolina. Yet "The Prince of Tides" succeeds on a remarkable scale in many ways. While Conroy's prose is lofty, it's never difficult to read, and the sheer beauty of his writing as he describes his stomping grounds is breaktaking. Likewise, all of the Wingo's--Tom, Luke, Savannah, the parents and even the grandparents--are as fully realized and intricate as any seven characters you could hope to find in any epic. The emotion wrung out from these people as they grow, change and deal (or refuse to deal) with their demons is relatable to almost any family beset with depression and dysfunction. Conroy makes Tom, Savannah and Luke Wingo so real you almost feel like part of the explosive Wingo household. Ask yourself how many characters you encounter in novels whom you wish you could hug and reassure. Sure, Conroy's descriptions of New York aren't quite as strong, although they're quite palatable. But Conroy brilliantly designs Savannah's psychiatrist Susan Lowenstein, and the scene in the apartment of Lowenstein and her husband, world-class violinist Herbert Woodruff, is priceless. Although a minor character, Woodruff is easy to hate as an elitist snob, and Conroy very effectively mocks the prejudice emanating from that culture even as Tom Wingo is being grilled in Woodruff's lavish Fifth Avenue apartment about his presumed (and non-existent) anti-Semitism as a southern white male. And like all Conroy novels, "The Prince of Tides" serves as a remarkable history lesson. Since the story is told in flashback from from Tom Wingo to Lowenstein, Tom recounts his 1950's childhood, the Vietnam years while in college and the feminist movement of his young adulthood. Again, some readers find his approach pretentious, but I find it fascinating. An absolutely fantastic read, "The Prince of Tides" will take you quite a while to finish and will stay with you a whole lot longer. Similar to "Beach Music" in that perhaps it could have been edited a bit more effectively, but that's a very minor complaint in the face of a truly staggering read. Strongly recommended, and one of the finest works of fiction I've ever read. For that matter, read anything of Conroy you can get your hands on.
Rating:
Summary: A Flawed Epic
Review: I read Pat Conroy's "The Prince of Tides" on the recommendation of a friend whose opinion I value highly. Well, I still value her opinion highly, and this book is the page-turner everyone has proclaimed it to be. As a popular novel, it delivers, and I would have given it five stars. Except....except.....Conroy's aspirations for this novel were obviously beyond the easily won praise given to serial novelists. What he has attempted with "The Prince of Tides" is to craft an epic saga of a Southern family. He comes close -- painfully close -- to his goal, but alas he falls short. The themes running throughout Conroy's novels are the dysfunctional family and the mental illness that acts as either a forboding harbinger or evidence of the damage wrought by said family. I have no qualms with that; "The Great Santini" -- a much better realisation of these themes -- spoke clearly and concisely to those themes. But Conroy the poet -- waxing so eloquently, with his pen alternately dipped in sugar and saccharine when conjuring up a Southland out of the Book of Eden -- gets carried away with the sound and the fury of his elephantine vocabulary that it borders on the ridiculous. Okay, I get the point: Pat Conroy is a walking thesaurus. So was H.L. Mencken. The difference is that Mencken used his typewriter like a bayonet, and hammered out his essays in a "reductio ad absurdum," satirical bent. Mencken's very intention in layering his pieces with multisyllabic words was ridicularity through an over-emphasised pomposity; Conroy's problem is he doesn't know he's being ridiculous. His flowery prose-poem style attempts to hearken to the era of Margaret Mitchell and William Faulkner, but comes of as incongruous at times with his subject matter. An example of this is his expertness with his impressionistic descriptions of the flora and fauna of the Carolina coastal marshes and lowwater country. He paints quite a pretty picture. But when he turns to descriptions of Manhattan and the social set that people that island, he almost telegraphs his superficial familiarity with the City That Never Sleeps. Almost before I read the scene in the French restaurant, how come I immediately knew that he and the psychiatrist would order a Chateau Margaux? An editor's merciless red fountain pen would have made this novel novel, and put Conroy in the front rank of America's novelists. The children's book-within-a-book could have been excised entirely; It's almost as long as the John Galt speech from Ayn Rand's "Atlas Shrugged," and just as gratuitous in sabotaging the novel as a whole. Mr. Conroy should learn that a novel's genius lies as much in what is left implied and unsaid as it does in didactic explication. That aside, there's an excellent story underneath the overstuffed comforter of Conroy's excessive imagination. Three generations of the Wingo family will leave you entertained and enlightened on family dynamics, eccentric characters and integrity. The novel centers around Tom Wingo, a somewhat deflated middle-ager who's resigned himself to unhappiness. When his sister, the tortured poet Savannah attempts suicide, he rushes off to Manhattan to be at her side. The MacGuffin is that Savannah has forbidden Tom from visiting her at the mental ward, so this sends Tom careening into the office and arms of Dr. Susan Lowenstein, Savannah's psychiatrist (fortunately, I've never seen the movie version, so in my mind's eye, she's played by Lorraine Bracco, not Babs Streisand). This pairing is very fortuitous, for it allows Tom to spill the entire family history across three generations to Lowenstein in an obvious, but forgivable, literary device. It also brings up some great subplots of Tom becoming the private football coach of Susan's sissified and alienated teenaged son, Bernard, and a rather juicy subplot in which they share the same bed after Tom rebuffs Susan's snobbish husband, a world-class violinist, for his anti-Southern bigotry. Finally, at the end of the novel, the reader finds out to whom the title refers, none other than Tom's big brother Luke, an amalgam of Francis Marion (the Swamp Fox) and Captain Planet, a rather unlikely combination, but one that jibes with Conroy's baby-boomer idealism and also one that explains both Tom's nervous breakdown and Savannah's suicide attempts (that, and the Deep, Dark, Family Secret, which Conroy uses sledgehammer-subtle foreshadowing to hint at with the denouement of each chapter, rather much as in a comic-book serial). Nonetheless, the Great Story is in the tales of the eccentric Wingo clan. From the alcoholic father, the social-climbing mother and their equally offbeat forebears and offspring, this is one heckuva book. It's too bad that Conroy didn't have enough faith in his well thought-out characters not to have burdened them with a preposterous, overreaching romance-novel plot.
Rating:
Summary: conroy is one of great southern writters of our time
Review: the prince of tides is simply one of the most splendid books written in the last 40 years. its poetic writting and magnificent story are simply engulfing. this is a book that you will not want to put down. reserve a weekend just for it!
Rating: 
Summary: So very overwrought!
Review: Mr. Conroy has never met an adjective he didn't like. I had seen and disliked the movie years ago, but came upon the book recently and thought I'd give it a try, knowing that Babs could easily have ruined it. Well, it was better than the movie, but not so great as the breathless reviews here suggest. The plot careens out of control (domestic abuse, insanity, class warfare, football, Jewish psychiatrist-temptress, neurotic violinist, twins, Vietnam, the atom bomb--oh Lord, it just never lets up for a second), the dialogue is hilariously unrealistic, and the author is one of those self-indulgent types who just loves every word that pours forth from his brain and is in dire need of a good editor. There are some good short stories buried here, and the bones of a decent book, but it boggles my mind that anyone would call this overwritten tome a life-changing experience!
Rating:
Summary: Withstands the tests of time
Review: PRINCE OF TIDES was a brilliant novel when it first was published decades ago and, with the passage of time, it has become a classic. Pat Conroy tells a elaborate story which he weaves into a rich tapestry by using an abundance of detailed characters who stay with the reader, and by writing with one of the best senses of place in modern literature. Anyone who had read this book and liked it at the first time round will like it just as well on a re-read. And anyone who has not yet read THE PRINCE OF TIDES will be well-served by starting it now. This novel has withstood the tests of time.
Rating:
Summary: A Modern Classic About Broken People
Review: Mr. Conroy obviously had a domineering father and draws from this in all of his novels. In this one, we get an in-depth look at his family with all their foibles and tragedies. There is redemption and greatness in the people that transcends the sadness, but this is not a fun book. It is a wrenching book, but a real 20th century classic about families, relationships, and destiny. Mr. Conroy writes with a woman's sensibilities, and still carries the narrative along in a crisp manner. A truly incredible journey.
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