- Paperback: 320 pages
- Publisher: Vintage Canada (Aug 22 2000)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0676972942
- ISBN-13: 978-0676972948
- Product Dimensions: 20.2 x 12.6 x 2.6 cm
- Shipping Weight: 381 g
- Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #216,154 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Product Details |
Product Description
Review
"An altogether remarkable, frequently funny, genuinely moving, and utterly original book."—Jan Morris
"I've just discovered The Danger Tree and am stunned. It is so good. [It's] about the best prose ever to come out of this country, for my money."—Alice Munro
"[David Macfarlane’s] Newfoundland memoir, The Danger Tree, is easily one of the most readable and beautifully written books to emerge from Canada in recent years." —Mordecai Richler, Saturday Night
"The Danger Tree is a masterpiece. David Macfarlane is an architect of the past, building extraordinary memory mansions in which the reader feels eerily at home." —Alberto Manguel
"The Danger Tree is absolutely riveting: an extraordinary mixture of history, memory, fiction, and technique that succeeds at every level. I was touched, I was exhilarated, and I was thrilled to read a book that has risen to the challenge of recording Canada’s past, the past in all our hearts." —Michael Ignatieff
"Macfarlane's debut is an auspicious one for a country that now, more than ever in its history, needs popular authors who can turn the past into stories that illuminate the present." —Maclean's
"Wry, informative, and deeply moving ... the literary tour de force of the year." —Philip Marchand, The Toronto Star
"Splendid!" —New York Times
Praise for Summer Gone:
"Summer Gone is a homage to our most excruciating and beautiful memories. Within this novel is the marvellous height of summer, perfect and fleeting, a place and time we can never get enough of." --The Globe and Mail
"Summer Gone is a novel about telling stories — one that merges fiction and truth, past and present, memory and action, into one dangerous and beautiful current." --The Calgary Herald
"Summer Gone is a summer vacation in the north woods, with all that implies to you the reader." --Winnipeg Free Press
"I've just discovered The Danger Tree and am stunned. It is so good. [It's] about the best prose ever to come out of this country, for my money."—Alice Munro
"[David Macfarlane’s] Newfoundland memoir, The Danger Tree, is easily one of the most readable and beautifully written books to emerge from Canada in recent years." —Mordecai Richler, Saturday Night
"The Danger Tree is a masterpiece. David Macfarlane is an architect of the past, building extraordinary memory mansions in which the reader feels eerily at home." —Alberto Manguel
"The Danger Tree is absolutely riveting: an extraordinary mixture of history, memory, fiction, and technique that succeeds at every level. I was touched, I was exhilarated, and I was thrilled to read a book that has risen to the challenge of recording Canada’s past, the past in all our hearts." —Michael Ignatieff
"Macfarlane's debut is an auspicious one for a country that now, more than ever in its history, needs popular authors who can turn the past into stories that illuminate the present." —Maclean's
"Wry, informative, and deeply moving ... the literary tour de force of the year." —Philip Marchand, The Toronto Star
"Splendid!" —New York Times
Praise for Summer Gone:
"Summer Gone is a homage to our most excruciating and beautiful memories. Within this novel is the marvellous height of summer, perfect and fleeting, a place and time we can never get enough of." --The Globe and Mail
"Summer Gone is a novel about telling stories — one that merges fiction and truth, past and present, memory and action, into one dangerous and beautiful current." --The Calgary Herald
"Summer Gone is a summer vacation in the north woods, with all that implies to you the reader." --Winnipeg Free Press
Book Description
Emulating the circuitous tales told by his mother's relatives, the Goodyears of Newfoundland, David Macfalane weaves the major events of the island's twentieth century--the ravages of tuberculosis; the great seal-hunt disaster; the bitter Confederation debate, and above all, the First World War--into his own tale of the ill-starred fortunes of his family. He brings to life a multi-generational cast of characters who are as colourful as only Newfoundlanders can be. With humour, insight, and genuine love for those heroes and charlatans, pirates and dreamers, he explores the meaning of family and the consequences of forgotten history.
Inside This Book
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Customer Reviews
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Most helpful customer reviews
5.0 out of 5 stars
Poignant and beautifully observed,
By A Customer
This review is from: The Danger Tree: Memory, War, And The Search For A Family's Past (Paperback)
I am ashamed to say that although I have lived in Canada for 37 years, I knew nothing about Newfoundland's history and consequently nothing about Newfoundland's participation in the First World War. A university lecturer recommended this book to me, and I heartily recommend it to anyone with an interest in the First World War (and in Newfoundland, more broadly). It is a beautifully written, poignant book which compares favourably with Robert Graves' Goodbye to All That and in some ways is better than Graves; it has none of Graves' cynicism.This book inspired me to visit Beaumont Hamel on the Somme, where so many men from Newfoundland lost their lives on 1 July 1916. In the rest of Canada, 1 July is considered a day for celebration, because the country came into being on that date in 1867. Now I understand why Newfoundlanders cannot and will not celebrate 1 July as a holiday. For them, it is a day of mourning. Ironically, for us on the west coast of Canada, Beaumont Hamel is easier to reach than Newfoundland. Having visited the former, I hope one day to visit the latter.
5.0 out of 5 stars
An amazing read,
By A Customer
This review is from: The Danger Tree: Memory War and the Search for a Family's Past (Paperback)
This is an amazing book: history, biography, auto-biograhy, philosphy all combined into a powerful tale of family character (and characters)that stays with you. In essence, a simple reflection on long past lives from a little corner of the world, Newfoundland, all wound up in the Great War, it becomes a haunting tour-de-force of the power of great events on everyday people.The chapter "Fire" is in itself a small masterpiece and one I find reading again and again even now two years after the first read. I picked this book up by sheer accident in a small bookstore in Banff and have been thankful for my good fortune of discovering this gem.
5.0 out of 5 stars
Its Subtitle Says It All,
By
This review is from: The Danger Tree: Memory War and the Search for a Family's Past (Paperback)
Pitifully few Americans are even aware of Canada's participation in World War I. Fewer still know Canada suffered horrible casualties which it honors on Rememberance Day, a deeply felt, painfully observed day of mourning.David MacFarlane's father was the only one of six brothers to survive World War I. Unlike them, he didn't go to France. One of his two sisters served as a nurse there, too. The Danger Tree traces the lives of these siblings from Newfoundland and the effects of the war on the survivors and the survivors' descendants. It is in part a memoir and in part a carefully researched work of journalism by a gifted "light" columnist for The Globe and Mail in Toronto. The ordinary deaths of these ordinary young men from a hard-working Scots family surviving in a very tough environment have found a memorial in MacFarlane's writing. But of greater significance is MacFarlane's insistance that the effects of their deaths, the effects of the First War, live today. It occurs to me that The Danger Tree is a book one should read immediately after Robert Graves' Goodby to All That. For MacFarlane adds dimensions of time and distance to the soldier's pain. MacFarlane is a fine writer, but Graves was a great one. Still, the two books sit comfortably together on my shelves. A brilliant book.
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