Book : Take The Cannoli Stories From The New World - Vowell,

-Titulo Original : Take The Cannoli Stories From The New World

-Fabricante :

Simon & Schuster

-Descripcion Original:

A wickedly funny collection of personal essays from popular NPR personality Sarah Vowell.Hailed by Newsweek as a cranky stylist with talent to burn, Vowell has an irresistible voice -- caustic and sympathetic, insightful and double-edged -- that has attracted a loyal following for her magazine writing and radio monologues on This American Life. While tackling subjects such as identity, politics, religion, art, and history, these autobiographical tales are written with a biting humor, placing Vowell solidly in the tradition of Mark Twain and Dorothy Parker. Vowell searches the streets of Hoboken for traces of the towns favorite son, Frank Sinatra. She goes under cover of heavy makeup in an investigation of goth culture, blasts cannonballs into a hillside on a father-daughter outing, and maps her familys haunted history on a road trip down the Trail of Tears. Take the Cannoli is an eclectic tour of the New World, a collection of alternately hilarious and heartbreaking essays and autobiographical yarns. Review Susan Salter Reynolds Los Angeles Times Book Review Sarah Vowell is a madonna of Americana.People Wise, witty and refreshingly warm-hearted, Vowells essays on American history, pop culture and her own family reveal the bonds holding together a great, if occasionally weird, nation.Melanie Rehak Harpers Bazaar Sarah Vowells canny brand of humor, complaint, and cultural acuity will no doubt be heard for some time to come.Joanna Smith Rakoff San Francisco Chronicle Vowell is and will continue to be one of the more important voices of her generation. About the Author Sarah Vowell is a contributing editor for public radios This American Life and has written for Time, Esquire, GQ, Spin, Salon, McSweeneys, The Village Voice, and the Los Angeles Times. She is the author of Radio On, Take the Cannoli, and The Partly Cloudy Patriot. She lives in New York City. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Take the CannoliStories From the New WorldBy Sarah VowellSimon & SchusterCopyright ©2001 Sarah VowellAll right reserved.ISBN: 0743205405Take The CannoliThere comes a time halfway through any halfway decent liberal arts majors college career when she no longer has any idea what she believes. She flies violently through air polluted by conflicting ideas and theories, never stopping at one system of thought long enough to feel at home. All those books, all that talk, and, oh, the self-reflection. Am I an existentialist? A Taoist? A transcendentalist? A modernist, a postmodernist? A relativist-positivist-historicist-dadaist-deconstructionist? Was I Apollonian? Was I Dionysian (or just drunk)? Which was right and which was wrong, impressionism or expressionism? And while were at it, is there such a thing as right and wrong?Until I figured out that the flight between questions is itself a workable system, I craved answers, rules. A code. So by my junior year, I was spending part of every week, sometimes every day, watching The Godfather on videotape.The Godfather was an addiction. And like all self-respecting addicts, I did not want anyone to find out about my habit. Which was difficult considering that I shared a house with my boyfriend and two other roommates, all of whom probably thought my profound interest in their class schedules had to do with love and friendship. But I needed to know when the house would be empty so I could watch snippets of the film. Sometimes it took weeks to get through the whole thing. If I had a free hour between earth science lab and my work-study job, Id sneak home and get through the scene where Sonny Corleone is gunned down at the toll booth, his shirt polka-dotted with bullet holes. Or, if I finished writing a paper analyzing American mediocrity according to Alexis de Tocqueville, Id reward myself with a few minutes of Michael Corleone doing an excellent job of firing a pistol into a police captains face. But if the phone rang