Book
Hearts in Atlantis.
Record details
- ISBN: 9780671024246
- ISBN: 0671024248
- Physical Description: 672 p ; cm.
- Publisher: New York : Signet Books, 1999.
Available copies
- 0 of 1 copy available at BC Interlibrary Connect.
- 0 of 1 copy available at Salmo Public Library. (Show)
Holds
- 1 current hold with 1 total copy.
Other Formats and Editions
Show Only Available Copies
| Location | Call Number / Copy Notes | Barcode | Shelving Location | Holdable? | Status | Due Date |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Salmo Public Library | PBK FIC KIN (Text) | SPL17619 | Paperback Fiction | Volume hold | In transit | - |
- Booklist Reviews : Booklist Monthly Selections - #1 July 1999
/*Starred Review*/ Sixth-graders Bobby, Carol, and Sully-John are best friends in 1960, when Bobby's mistrustful mother takes a boarder, sixtyish Ted Brautigan. A friendship blossoms between Bobby, a reader, and Ted, who guides the boy into serious literature with Lord of the Flies and its rueful message about group behavior destroying individual goodness. That summer, Bobby comes upon an instance of that message when he discovers Carol after she has been badly beaten by three older boys, one of whom had always been nice to her before. Although no bigger than she, Bobby carries Carol to Ted, who fixes her dislocated shoulder before he flees from "Low Men in Yellow Coats." Not long after, Bobby moves away and into a troubled adolescence. End of story--at least of the first of the five stories that make up King's strongest book since Delores Claiborne (1992). In the other four, Carol, Sully-John, and Bobby reappear, sometimes only tangentially, years down the pike. In "Hearts in Atlantis," Carol saves a male fellow freshman at the University of Maine from his own entrapment in group craziness. "Blind Willie" presents the curious adulthood of the conscience-stricken one of Carol's three attackers, who has since saved Sully-John's life in Vietnam. "Why We're in Vietnam" shows how Sully-John's life actually ends in 1999, and in "Heavenly Shades of Night Are Falling," Bobby and Carol meet after their friend's funeral. A sprinkling of supernatural elements, involving Ted and those low men, link this novel-in-stories to the world of King's ongoing series, The Dark Tower. Primarily, however, this is a rich, engaging, deeply moving generational epic, something of a baby boomers' equivalent to Vance Bourjaily's great Korean War^-generation novel, The Violated (1958). ((Reviewed July 1999)) Copyright 2000 Booklist Reviews - BookPage Reviews : BookPage Reviews 1999 September
Where were you during the '60s? Whether you served, marched, or missed it all, something in this major new work by Stephen King will put a lump in your throat. Known as the King of Horror, the author's real talent has always been describing the horror people perpetrate on each other. He may use the supernatural as a catalyst, but King's best work is about people who remind us of ourselves because they sound like us and think like us, even when at their worst.Structured as two novellas and three short stories, Hearts in Atlantis is nevertheless a novel in which some strangeness - what King refers to as "the Ray Bradbury kind of childhood" - makes an appearance and leaves its mark, but cannot rival what the '60s wrought on an entire generation.
Bobby, Carol, and Sully-John grow up and grow apart in startling ways during the summer of 1960, helped along toward their destinies by a trio of bullies, an eerie older man, and the "Low Men in Yellow Coats" who hunt him. Hearts in Atlantis begins with hearts you can break, moves on to a ruthlessly destructive card game which turns its obsessed players into sheep, and finally wraps around again to flesh-and-blood broken hearts. Pete Riley tells how knowing Carol for a short time changes him from a kid with a Goldwater bumper sticker to a gassed-out peacenik - and what it does to Carol the activist, whom he loves and loses in a few short weeks during this time of social upheaval. These two novellas form both the bulk of the book and its emotional center.
In "Blind Willie," one of the bullies - now a Vietnam-haunted vet - finds a certain penance in his bizarre daily ritual that both embraces and overturns '80s greed. "Why We're in Vietnam" follows Sully-John through the dark remains of the war, to his death in the present day. And the funeral in "Heavenly Shades of Night Are Falling" brings the book full-circle, with an understated emotion that will take you by surprise and wring out your heart with its sad yet redeeming inevitability. You will see Stephen King in a new light. Read this moving, heartfelt modern tragedy and weep - weep for our lost conscience.
Bill Gagliani is a librarian and writer in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Copyright 1999 BookPage Reviews
- Kirkus Reviews : Kirkus Reviews 1999 July #1
King's fat new work impressively follows his general literary upgrading begun with Bag of Bones (1998) and settles readers onto the seabottom of one of his most satisfying ideas ever. Set in fictional Harwich and semifictional Bridgeport, the story weaves five Vietnam-haunted small-town New England stories into a deeply moving overall vision. The five are: ``Low Men in Yellow Coats,'' set in 1960 and at about 250 pages the longest; ``Hearts in Atlantis,'' set in 1966; ``Blind Willie,'' set in 1983; ``Why We're in Vietnam'' and ``Heavenly Shades of Night Are Failing,'' both set in 1999. The umbrella title fits well, with King showing us the lost, time-sunken continent of the late Eisenhower era, as hearts from the deep sea of that Hopperesque time slowly rise to the tormented surface of the present-day. Whether his characters are stock or not, it s impossible not to enjoy King s gentle ways of fleshing them out, all the old bad habits and mannerisms gone as he draws you into the most richly serious work of his career. Elderly Ted Brautigan, who may seem a bit like Max von Sydow, moves into a house occupied by Bobby Garfield, age 11, and his hard-bitten mother, Liz, a secretary for real-estate agent Don Biderman, with whom she s having an unhappy affair. Brautigan hires Bobby to read the paper aloud, gives him Lord of the Flies and also strange warnings about low men in yellow coats and posters about lost dogs. Report any sighting of these! Ted also has attacks of parrot pupilitis, the pupils opening and closing as he stares at other worlds. Although some characters wander in from King's inferior occult Western Dark Tower series, their cartoony, computer-graphic effects making them seem in the wrong novel, this minor lapse fades before King's memory-symphony of America during Vietnam. Page after page, a truly mature King does everything right and deserves some kind of literary rosette. His masterpiece.(Book- of-the-Month Club main selection; Quality Paperback Book Club alternate selection) Copyright 1999 Kirkus Reviews - Library Journal Reviews : LJ Reviews 1999 August #1
How to describe King? He is obviously a devoted genre writer, but lately he's become wildly unpredictable. Hearts in Atlantis isn't anything like his previous work; here, King is covering new territory in terms of both style and content. Composed of five different sequential and interconnected narratives, all involving the Vietnam War, the book unfolds over 40 haunting years. New characters become old friends as the reader struggles with them through each test and trial (some of which are classically Kingian), hoping ultimately to survive in the end. This is a spellbinding piece of literature. Highly recommended. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 5/15/99.]AStacey Reasor, ITT Technical Inst. Lib., Tampa, FL Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information. - Library Journal Reviews : LJ Reviews 1999 May #2
A King of a different sort weighs in with some short fictionAfour pieces drawing on the U.S. experience in Vietnam: "Low Men in Yellow Coats," "Hearts in Atlantis," "Blind Willie," and "Why We're in Vietnam." A BOMC main selection. Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information. - Publishers Weekly Reviews : PW Reviews 1999 July #4
By "Atlantis," King means the 1960s, that otherworldly decade that, like the fabled continent, has sunk into myth. By "hearts," he means not just the seat of love but the card game, which figures prominently in the second of the five scarcely linked narratives in this full-bodied but disjointed omnibus, King's third (after Different Seasons and Four Past Midnight). The stories proceed chronologically, from 1960 to 1999. The first, the novel-length "Low Men in Yellow Coats," is the most traditionally King: an alienated youth, Bobby Garfield, is befriended by a new neighbor, the elderly Ted Brautigan, who introduces him to literature and turns out to be on the run from villainous creatures from another time/dimension. A potent coming-of-age tale, the story connects to King's Dark Tower saga. The novella-length title entry, set in 1966 and distinguished by a bevy of finely etched characters, concerns a college dorm whose inhabitants grow dangerously addicted to hearts. The last three pieces are short stories. "Blind Willie," set in 1983, details the penance paid by a Vietnam vet for a wartime sin, as does "Why We're in Vietnam." The concluding tale, "Heavenly Shades of Night Falling," revives Bobby and provides closure. Sometimes the stories feel like experiments, even exercises, and they can wear their craft on their sleeves in the way the game of hearts symbolizes the quagmire of Vietnam, for instance, or in how each narrative employs a different prose style, from the loose-limbed third-person of "Low Men" to the tighter first-person of "Hearts," and so on. With about ten million published words and counting, King probably can write a seductive story in his sleep and none of these artful tales are less; but only the title story rivals his best work and, overall, the volume has a patchy feel, and exudes a bittersweet obsession with the past that will please the author's fellow babyboomers King nails the `60s and its legacy but may make others grind their teeth. (Sept.) Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information. - School Library Journal Reviews : SLJ Reviews 2000 April
YA-An intricate and compelling tapestry of the `60s and those who came of age during that turbulent decade. Readers first meet 11-year-old Bobby Garfield in suburban Connecticut in 1960. He and his friends, Sully John and Carol, come to the end of their collective childhood during that summer when violence, rage, guilt, shame, and heroism break up their close-knit relationship. The second story begins six years later on the University of Maine campus. A card game, Hearts, threatens the college future of a group of freshmen. Outside, the Vietnam War and its concurrent rebellion are raging. Pete, the protagonist, offers a firsthand view of the craziness of the time. The link to the first story is Carol, Bobby's childhood friend, with whom Pete falls in love. The next two stories each follow another figure from the summer of 1960: Bobby's friend Sully John and a member of a trio that assaulted Carol. Both young men are Vietnam vets, each one crippled in his own way from his war experience. The final story finds middle-aged Bobby returning to Connecticut, coming full circle with the events of his life. This is a very long book; however, after reading a few pages, most teens will be hard-pressed to put it down. The characters are compelling and well drawn, the action is ingeniously interwoven from story to story, and the feel of the 60s, and the baggage carried into later decades, is vivid, harsh, and absolutely true.-Carol DeAngelo, Kings Park Library, Burke, VA Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.
