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1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
july july, 11 Oct 2002
JULY, JULY -Tim O ' Brien July 1969.With a man about to walk on the moon in front of their very eyes and the whift of revolution permeating the air; For the graduates of Darton Hall College it must have seemed as if no achievement was beyond their reach. As the class of '69 reconvene in the summer of 2000 with a new era of possibility beckoning, thirty years of hopes and failures, dreams and disappointments, births and deaths are revealed in the stories they have to tell. The class reunion scenario is hardly the most innovative theme for a novel and, in all honesty, Tim O ' Brien does nothing too radical with the format. Yet, this is a great piece of work, unassuming and unsensational maybe, but one of the novels of the year nonetheless. In effect, a portmanteau of stories revealing our innate and often undignified desire to be loved what drives 'July, July' are O' Brien's ear for conversation. This is a listener's novel, the result of a lifelong devotion to the minutia of everyday speech. Insidiously, effortlessly, O'brien's baby-boomers talk their way under of skin. Whether it's Spook Spinelli with her harem of husbands, Karen Burns and her fateful inability to separate fact from fiction or Marv Bortel's big, big lie, these tales of American lives reverberate with truth, wisdom and disarming honesty. So there we have it-another month, another major work from an American author.
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