|
by: Richard Yates
List Price: $13.00Amazon.com's Price: $10.40 You Save: $2.60 (20%)Prices subject to change. Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN: 9780312420390
ISBN: 0312420390
Label: Picador
Manufacturer: Picador
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 192
Publication Date: December 07, 2001
Publisher: Picador
Sales Rank: 107077
Studio: Picador
Related Items:
Editorial Review:
Product Description:
Richard Yates, who died in 1992, is today ranked by many readers, scholars, and critics alongside such titans of modern American ficiton as Updike, Roth, Irving, Vonnegut, and Mailer.
In this work, he offers a spare and autumnal novel about a New England prep school. At once a meditation on the twilight of youth and an examination of America's entry into World War II, A Good School tells the stories of William Grove, the quiet boy who becomes an editor of the school newspaper; Jack Draper, a crippled chemistry teacher; and Edith Stone, the schoolmaster's young daughter, who falls in love with most celebrated boy in the class of 1943.
Customer Reviews
Average Rating: 
Rating:  - A Sweet Reminiscence
The story told here is a first-person-narrated acccount of a grown man's memories of his school days at a not-so-good or great private boys' school in Connecticut, the tuition for which was paid for by his divorced Dad who sacrificed to afford it. It is an episodic tale, covering three special and historical years, that ends in 1944 (midway between World War II), and a tale that garners the narrator, in the end, hard-won experience as a writer for the school newspaper, transient friendships, and, ... Read More
Rating:  - A Great Book
This rites of passage tale set in a failing prep school is so subtly written that its 160 pages engage and engross you so fully with its interwoven threads that it is as satisfying as an epic.
Yates inspires a genuine feeling for all the characters from the awkward Grove through to Teacher Driscoll, and even Mrs Hoopers 'cameo' appearence in the book isn't wasted and plays wonderfully.
In short, this is a very good book.
Rating: - The Master at Work
Richard Yates is simply a master of fiction. Although not as good as "Revolutionary Road" or his short stories, both of which are about as good as it gets, he still manages to take a microscope to the lives and interactions of many students and teachers at Dorset Academy, a small all-boys academy. Yates somehow manages to juggle dozens of characters and how they interact with one another in this small place, all with a war and a draft going on in a background. The book reads like "The Spoon River Anthology" ... Read More
Rating: - Reflection of a Time
Richard Yates' "A Good School" is a good book. It takes you through the last days of a declining prep school in the Northeast during World War II. It is less a book about one person than about the chorus of people who make up the community -- from the Coach to the French teacher to the foreign student to the daughter of the Headmaster to the regular students themselves.
I went to a prep school. There's a lot to remind me of that time -- the oddity of being alone in a place that spends so much ... Read More
Rating: - Unsung Yates
The late Richard Yates seems to have fallen through the cracks of 20th-century literature, but if you haven't read him, you owe yourself a look. REVOLUTIONARY ROAD is considered his masterpiece, but A GOOD SCHOOL is an accessible introduction to his oeuvre as well, especially if you are a fan of prep school books in the tradition of A SEPARATE PEACE and THE CATCHER IN THE RYE.
That said, readers should know that Yates' book is much more graphic than either Knowles' or Salinger's. No, it's not ... Read More
|
