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About This Book
ISBN13: 9780553378498 |
Powells.com Staff Pick
As a Northwesterner (or recovering Southerner) and a baseball fanatic, I highly recommend The Brothers K. From laugh out loud funny to tear in your eye sad, this book does everything you hope a novel will. It's a love letter to everything that's great about living. Recommended by John McMahon
A family drama of the highest order, in The Brothers K Duncan creates an intricate web of relationships and events that is fraught with upheaval, yet feels organic. I fell in love with every single character over the course of the novel, and by the end felt wonderfully drained (both emotionally and intellectually) from the sheer empathic powers Duncan has on display here. One of the few 500-plus page books that I wish could have gone on longer, even though I know it didn't need to. Look no further for some of the most fallible, lovable, and utterly absorbing characters in modern literature.
Recommended by Nathan W., Powells.com
Synopses & Reviews
Publisher Comments:
In The Brothers K, Duncan amplifies the considerable accomplishment of his first book as he centers this tender and powerful story around a Pacific Northwest family in the early '60s. The Chance family is wild about baseball and cantankerous about religion. Papa is a gifted but luckless minor-league pitcher whose big-league hopes are fading. Mama is a devout Seventh Day Adventist, constantly in motion to save her wayward sons. When a mill accident crushes Papa's thumb, and Mama's inexplicable fanaticism threatens to shred what little the family has in common, parents and children find themselves embattled over the ideals represented by baseball and religion. It is young Kincaid, the easygoing middle child, who chronicles the humor and spiritual beliefs that alternately sustain and confound this family in a small Washington mill town. And it is in his maturing voice, as his brothers leave town to enter one of the country's most bewildering decades, that we hear the inescapable tensions wrought from one American generation testing another's vulnerabilities. Through the Chances, David James Duncan asks sublime questions about life, self-sacrifice, and enduring love in an ever changing world.
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About the Author
Duncan has read and lectured all over the United States on wilderness, the writing life, the nonmonastic contemplative life, the fly fishing life, and nonreligious literature of faith. His work has appeared in Harper's, Outside, Orion, The Sun, Sierra, Big Sky Journal, Northern Lights, Gray's Sporting Journal, and many other publications. He lives with his family on a Montana trout stream.
What Our Readers Are Saying
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Average customer rating based on 5 comments:
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loriwatson98, November 3, 2007 (view all comments by loriwatson98)
This is such a fun book to read. The characters are all extreme, almost stereotypes, but bound by being a family. Each character has a main admirable trait that makes them lovable despite all their failings and the story is great. A must read.
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Michelleyevshky, July 3, 2007 (view all comments by Michelleyevshky)
After more or less bitterly mocking my conservative Adventist upbringing with my very Catholic best friend 7 years ago, he laughingly recommended this book to me, saying it might help me "deal" with that upbringing to soothe away the bitter. Ohmymymymy.
I checked this out at 9 in the evening and by 4 in the morning had finished this...this...this...the word book, from this book-lover, does not do this book justice. This is the monster of books, the God of all books, it's been given a little book-sceptre and rules over all the rest of the book-ette proletariat. It's bourgeois book and beastie book. Even better, instead of pompously lording it over all the rest of the lesser books, it quotes them, loves them, welcomes them in for one big book party.
I have two copies of this book. One copy is signed and is missing three pages, and is ripped in two from reading it too many times. The other is yellowed and sits on top of my bedstand. I have parts of it committed to memory, and re-read over and over and over.
The thing that strikes me most about Duncan's style is his underlying foundation, his ability to find love in the most crazed places: from the Adventist church to Vietnam to Canada to the village dotted desert outside Pune. There is a certain naivete in looking for unmitigated love in these places, but while various of his characters embody that Dostoyevskyan naivete, I get the feeling that Duncan is an incredibly down-to-earth guy and that down-to-earthness meshed with mysticism, Adventism gone fanatical, non-violent violence, etc. leaves a lasting impression.
I would say his main foundation is that love is an uncontrollable force, it takes on faces we might never expect of it. We see that over and over again as we watch this family's epic story unfold so heartbreakingly and terribly.
As for my old friend's comment that "The Brothers K" might help me "deal?" Yes. And then some. I felt like someone had hit me over the head with a frying pan after reading this book. Maybe it was the staunchly Adventist Mama Chance who stepped out of the pages and gave me a good iron whack. Duncan called The Brothers K (and I might be misquoting him a bit) his 700-some page attempt at coming to terms with his own Adventist/Presbyterian upbringing.
Having been raised solely Adventist I find it necessary to point out that some of the theology he attributes to Adventism is incorrect, particularly that Adventists don't believe in a literal hell. The culture, which is ultimately what matters in a book like this, he has portrayed amazingly well, right down to the children's rooms being in the church basement. I understand, from an interview he had with Dan Lamberton of Walla Walla Adventist College, that he was originally trying to write about Baptists, which is bigger and more mainstream and therefore more meaningful to readers, but found himself always returning to his Adventist upbringing, finally switching over altogether.
This book was amazing. While I'm not sure that Duncan would like that I felt hit over the head by a frying pan wielding Mama Chance, it turned out for me, and it keeps turning out. This book "holds multitudes." I can read it and come out crying and laughing and head-achey and glowy and furious and excited depending on which page I'm turning to and which character I'm reading about.
So. Should you buy this book?
Dear friend, buy two copies of this one, for one will fall apart on you for all that page turning.
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ronbaugh, June 18, 2007 (view all comments by ronbaugh)
A great book that is almost too good. It is a tough read because the author draws the reader into caring about the people in the story. This makes for an emotional roller coaster ride as you travel through the story. Overall a great book that requires mulitple readings to fully grasp.
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Product Details
- ISBN:
- 9780553378498
- Author:
- Publisher:
- Dial Press
- Author:
- Location:
- New York :
- Subject:
- General
- Subject:
- Fiction
- Subject:
- Family
- Subject:
- Washington (state)
- Subject:
- Brothers
- Subject:
- Domestic fiction
- Subject:
- Washington
- Subject:
- Washington (State) Fiction.
- Subject:
- Bildungsromane.
- Subject:
- Bildungsromans
- Series Volume:
- no. 6-7.
- Publication Date:
- June 1996
- Binding:
- Paperback
- Language:
- English
- Illustrations:
- Y
- Pages:
- 656
- Dimensions:
- 8.36x5.32x1.37 in. 1.10 lbs.
