Regular marked price: $22.95Discount Price: $12.81
Cost Savings: $10.14 (44%)Price fluctuation possible.
How soon does it ship: Normal ship time within one day
Shipping? Absolutely FREE if you qualify for Super Saver Shipping.
Type of bind: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN num: 9781844671229
ISBN number: 1844671224
Label: Verso
Manufacturer: Verso
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 138
Printing Date: May 28, 2007
Publishing house: Verso
Sale Popularity Level: 90985
Studio: Verso
Other books you might be interested in perusing:
Editor's Notes and Comments:
Product Description:
A revelatory exploration of the writer's art, by the bestselling author of the V. I. Warshawski novels.
In this powerful new book, Sara Paretsky explores the traditions of political and literary dissent that have informed her life and work, against the unparalleled repression of free speech and thought in the USA today. In tracing the writer's difficult journey from silence to speech, she turns to her childhood and youth in rural Kansas, and brilliantly evokes Chicago—the city with which she has become indelibly associated—from her arrival during the civil-rights struggle in the mid-1960s to her most extraordinary literary creation, the south-side detective V. I. Warshawski. Paretsky traces the emergence of V. I. Warshawski from the shadows of the loner detectives that stalk the mean streets of Dashiell Hammett's and Raymond Chandler's novels, and in the process explores American individualism, the failure of the American dream, and the resulting dystopia. Both memoir and meditation, Writing in an Age of Silence is a compelling exploration of the writer's art and daunting responsibility in the face of the assault on US civil liberties post-9/11.
User popularity level:
Rated by buyers 
-
Fascinating information on what's going on yesterday in the USA! Well written! A courageous book in this age of information control. A must read!
Rated by buyers 
-
Please....enough already with the bleeding and the political jabber...the world is ready for more V.I. adventures....
Rated by buyers 
-
There are many things I didn't know about one of my favorite mystery writers, Sara Paretsky. She is nearly the same age as I; her writing began as a way to find her voice in a family beset by violence; she has four brothers; her mother was a librarian. Some of these facts are strikingly similar to my own experiences, making the reading of this memoir, for me, like sitting down with a friend from long ago.
Paretsky's early years were influenced by the rise of feminism. She was told that if she wanted to go to college, she would have to attend the university where her father taught in the town where the family lived.
She vowed to spend her summers away from home. In 1966, she went to do community service work on the South Side of Chicago. Anyone who has read her V.I. Warshawsky novels will now see where and how the best-selling series began. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was organizing in Chicago during that same summer, and Paretsky was "on the periphery of his great work." The civil rights movement and Second Wave Feminism deeply influenced Paretsky's life as well as her writing.
She chose to invent a female private eye radically different from a previous American icon of the genre, Sam Spade. Unlike this male "loner," Warshawsky is intimately involved with her community.
In 2002, Paretsky began speaking to library associations on the curtailing of civil liberties by the Patriot Act. She delivered her lecture, "Truth, Lies and Duct Tape," the night before the U.S. attacked Iraq, at the Toledo, Ohio public library. She had been asked by the library not to deliver the controversial talk because people were turning in their tickets. "My upbringing has made me particularly vulnerable to angry criticism," she writes (and so has mine), "to the implied fear of being a bad daughter, not submissive enough...I gave this talk, but my knees were shaking so badly I had to grip the podium throughout." The five hundred people in the audience gave her an ovation.
As a librarian, writer and feminist, this memoir moved me and made me feel as though I had found a kindred spirit and sister. If you have any interest in American history in the past fifty years and in the writing life as it pertains to women, do yourself a favor: read this book.
by Linda Wisniewski
for Story Circle Book Reviews
reviewing books by, for, and about women
Rated by buyers -
I'm not much of a mystery fan, but I do love memoirs, and I am political. Paretsky's observations about the Patriot Act and FISA and other atrocities of the so-called War on Terror are actually conservative in the best sense of the word. These observations, made initially to those guardians of public trust, librarians, come at the conclusion of this book.
I found the very first part an interesting study in what produces an activist with strong opinions. Paretsky grew up with four brothers and a father who favored them. She wasn't even encouraged to go to college, although the family borrowed money for the boys' education. She was justly indignant and worked in the civil rights movement of the sixties and became an ardent feminist while in graduate school.
She eventually got a doctorate in U.S. history, but the mystery writing was harder, and that's really the crux of this memoir. What enables a person to write, to voice unspeakable concerns, whether they are personal or in the public sphere? Paretsky has struggled and she speaks out whether about the role of women in history or the neglect of women mystery writers (she was a founder of Sisters in Crime) or of our First Amendment rights.
I going to take a look at some of her mysteries now, because I know I won't be assaulted by a lot of sexist and racist presumptions. And I'm going to send this memoir to a social worker I know on the South Side of Chicago.
Rated by buyers -
It's rare that I'm impressed sufficiently by a book to contact the author, but "Writing in an Age of Silence" is such a book. As a Chicago native who lived in Kansas for many years, I was awed by Paretsky's ability to finely convey both areas so well, positioning both within her own formative experiences. Fans of V.I. Warshawski know that Paretsky has a wickedly sharp, funny pen, but here she turns that talent inward.
One caveat: those not familiar with Paretsy's other work might experience "Writing in an Age of Silence" differently, of course. In that case, I encourage you to read more of her work so that you can get a better sense of her voice. She's a remarkable writer, regardless of genre.
Find other books like this one:
