- Hardcover: 275 pages
- Publisher: Farrar Straus & Giroux (T) (May 1974)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0374251274
- ISBN-13: 978-0374251277
- Product Dimensions: 20.6 x 13.7 x 3 cm
- Shipping Weight: 454 g
|
||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||
Product Details |
Tag this product(What's this?)Think of a tag as a keyword or label you consider is strongly related to this product.
Tags will help all customers organize and find favorite items. |
Customer Reviews
|
There are no customer reviews yet on Amazon.ca
|
||||||||||||||||||||
|
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
5.0 out of 5 stars (3 customer reviews)
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
Upbeat adventure tale of love and faith in gold rush days, July 14 1999
By A Customer - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: The Road to Many a Wonder: A Novel (Hardcover)
In his seventh novel, David Wagoner strikes gold in more ways than one. The Road to Many a Wonder has been called "one of the funniest books in English," and "an irresistible comic romance," but these accolades don't do the book justice. The story of 20-year-old Ike Bender's trek to the Denver area during the 1859 Pike's Peak Gold Rush is more a story of the triumph of optimism and faith over overwhelming odds. It's only incidental that the author uses witty, appealingly humorous Western-style backwoods-sounding dialogue and verbal sketches to paint an accurate picture of Ike, his 16-year-old bride Millie, their adopted mule Mr. Blue and the characters they meet up with on their journey.Through 500 miles of wild and perilous country, past fierce Indians and belligerent villains, Ike and Millie never stray from their upbeat, joyous goal: to be together, happy and prosperous-with gold or without it. With every step, the two young travelers face down the weary and spent faithless who are struggling to retreat.
Ike sums it up best as he describes his confrontation with an unfortunate fellow on the trail: "I didn't have no cause to fight and no time to spare for it, so I just left him behind, wasting his breath and not enjoying hisself or his surroundings, probably not even seeing the way the sun come wavering off and on across the sand and getting hisself all worked up worrying about somebody else getting the best of him. I vowed then and there I wasn't going to do nothing like that, but do my work and take my turn and prepare for the worst and hope for the best and manage with what come along."
This is a message young adults today should hear and ponder. In today's tough world where money means everything and the race is on for who can sprint up the ladder fastest and farthest, students need to be reminded that the joy is in the living, not in the getting.
David Wagoner's heart-warming, upbeat tale of strong faith and love in the face of despair is a top-notch teaching tool. The key to reaching kids today is to make them think they discovered a fabulous new road to take on their own. An invisible push from you and David Wagoner will surely help.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
Upbeat tale of strong faith and love during gold rush days, July 14 1999
By Suzanne Higginbotham (suz101@bellsouth.net) - Published on Amazon.com
In his seventh novel, David Wagoner strikes gold in more ways than one. The Road to Many a Wonder has been called "one of the funniest books in English," and "an irresistible comic romance," but these accolades don't do the book justice. The story of 20-year-old Ike Bender's trek to the Denver area during the 1859 Pike's Peak Gold Rush is more a story of the triumph of optimism and faith over overwhelming odds. It's only incidental that the author uses witty, appealingly humorous Western-style backwoods-sounding dialogue and verbal sketches to paint an accurate picture of Ike, his 16-year-old bride Millie, their adopted mule Mr. Blue and the characters they meet up with on their journey.Through 500 miles of wild and perilous country, past fierce Indians and belligerent villains, Ike and Millie never stray from their upbeat, joyous goal: to be together, happy and prosperous-with gold or without it. With every step, the two young travelers face down the weary and spent faithless who are struggling to retreat.
Ike sums it up best as he describes his confrontation with an unfortunate fellow on the trail: "I didn't have no cause to fight and no time to spare for it, so I just left him behind, wasting his breath and not enjoying hisself or his surroundings, probably not even seeing the way the sun come wavering off and on across the sand and getting hisself all worked up worrying about somebody else getting the best of him. I vowed then and there I wasn't going to do nothing like that, but do my work and take my turn and prepare for the worst and hope for the best and manage with what come along."
This is a message young adults today should hear and ponder. In today's tough world where money means everything and the race is on for who can sprint up the ladder fastest and farthest, students need to be reminded that the joy is in the living, not in the getting.
David Wagoner's heart-warming, upbeat tale of strong faith and love in the face of despair is a top-notch teaching tool. The key to reaching kids today is to make them think they discovered a fabulous new road to take on their own. An invisible push from you and David Wagoner will surely help.
5.0 out of 5 stars
My favorite book of all time, Feb 12 2010
By Gwen Roland - Published on Amazon.com
Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?)
This review is from: The Road to Many a Wonder: A Novel (Hardcover)
This is the book I will take if I can only bring one to the old folks home. I have read it so many times I can recite parts of it. I often choose passages from it for reading aloud to groups. Sure, it's hilarious and has the most endearing young couple you'll find in literature, but it's the first-person, late-Victorian vernacular that makes it stand out from even the best coming-of-age books. When it was first published, many reviewers compared it to Huckleberry Finn, but I find it much more entertaining than that. Mark Twain would have pounded Wagoner on the back and rolled on the floor laughing over it. After search engines made it possible to locate people, I found David Wagoner. It took me a year of staring at his email address to summon the nerve to tell him how much this book and another of his novels, Tracker, meant to me. He wrote a gracious reply thanking me but adding that he is primarily a poet and doesn't even recall why he wrote those two novels so long ago. That astounded me. He went on to say that, coincidentally, Roy Blount, Jr. had recently expressed the same things that I admired about those two books. When life is not going well, or if you just need a lift, join Ike and Millie and the donkey Mr. Blue for a great adventure. I will be mightily surprised if it doesn't become one of your favorite books.
Listmania!
Look for similar items by category
Look for similar items by subject
Feedback
Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
