Books : Crossing to Safety (Modern Library Classics)
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by: Wallace Earle Stegner
List Price: $14.95Amazon.com's Price: $10.17 You Save: $4.78 (32%)Prices subject to change. Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.52
EAN: 9780375759314
ISBN: 037575931X
Label: Modern Library
Manufacturer: Modern Library
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 368
Publication Date: April 09, 2002
Publisher: Modern Library
Release Date: April 09, 2002
Sales Rank: 10044
Studio: Modern Library
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Editorial Review:
Product Description:
Called a “magnificently crafted story . . . brimming with wisdom” by Howard Frank Mosher in The Washington Post Book World, Crossing to Safety has, since its publication in 1987, established itself as one of the greatest and most cherished American novels of the twentieth century. Tracing the lives, loves, and aspirations of two couples who move between Vermont and Wisconsin, it is a work of quiet majesty, deep compassion, and powerful insight into the alchemy of friendship and marriage.
Amazon.com Review:
It's deceptively simple: two bright young couples meet during the Depression and form an instant and lifelong friendship. 'How do you make a book that anyone will read out of lives as quiet as these?' Larry Morgan, a successful novelist and the narrator of the story, poses that question many years after he and his wife, Sally, have befriended the vibrant, wealthy, and often troubled Sid and Charity Lang. 'Where is the high life, the conspicuous waste, the violence, the kinky sex, the death wish?' It's not here. What is here is just as fascinating, just as compelling, as touching, and as tragic.
Crossing to Safety is about loyalty and survival in its most everyday form--the need to create bonds and the urge to tear them apart. Thirty-four years after their first meeting, when Larry and Sally are called back to the Langs' summer home in Vermont, it's as if for a final showdown. How has this friendship defined them? What is its legacy? Stegner offer answers in those small, perfectly rendered moments that make up lives 'as quiet as these'--and as familiar as our own. --Sara Nickerson
Customer Reviews
Average Rating: 
Rating:  - Crossing to Safety by Wallace Stegner
Our book club of 8 discussed "Crossing" last night. We unanimously felt that it was one of the best books read in a long time. It is literate, erudite, interesting, and has so many levels you could discuss it for weeks. The use of language, and of time itself is astounding.
Rating: - A Keeper
I don't have a library but if I did, this is one that'd be there for sure. I LOVE this book. I love Stegner anyway but this one touched something in my heart and made it explode. I cried, couldn't help it, I was just reading along and found these tears dropping on the page. The characters are so vivid and true. This is life in middle class America, this is what happens when you're just trying to live and love and work and be a good person. Stegner writes so beautifully and he is sorely missed. ... Read More
Rating: - A story that touched me
I can see how some people would not be excited about this story because it in not overly dramatic. To me it was simple and beautiful. The best stories capture the realness of experience...a story that feels like we can be inside. It is beautifully written and poetic in so many ways. This book is meant to be read slow and chewed on. I read a lot of books but this one is on my "to read again list" because of it's ability to make me look at my own life and question the depth of my relationships.
Rating:  - No pain, no gain
`How do you make a book that anyone will read out of lives as quiet as these?' asks the author of his own characters, about two thirds through Crossing to Safety; that seems to be the challenge Stegner set himself.
The novel, running from the 1930s to the 70s, revolves around the friendship between two couples, the Langs and the Morgans, in which the men are both literature professors. The Langs are rich and endowed with extended families and the Morgans are self-made and orphans. They all ... Read More
Rating: - Fabulous!
Beautifully written, provocative, and enduring. Hated for it to end. Wanted to reread it immediately.
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