Overwritten. This book dragged like a slow motion Gregorian Chant.

Cut out 200 pages, keep 200 readers attention.

Moving on...gladly.

Written music is like nothing in the world—an index of time. The idea is so bizarre, it’s almost miraculous: fixed instructions on how to recreate the simultaneous. How to be a flow, both motion and instant, both stream and cross section.

I find it interesting that this tome remains so topical but then I recognize my naivety ----race will always already be at hand. Sorry for the metaphysical sleight of hand, but I suppose it is the human lot to go tribal, biology is likely to blame or bemused deity which doubts not only its own existence but ANY possible benefit as our creation as an homage.

Each year around this time I begin to think of the novels I'd love to reread. I usually don't.

It's thick. An interracial family in the 50-60s. I'm sure Powers solves all racial problems by the end.

My 'best read' of 2008 - and in my top ten of all time. The writing is wonderful, capturing something that is very difficult to write about well, namely the beauty of the human voice when singing classical music. Powers does this not once but many times in the book.

I thought I was well informed about race relations in the USA but this book brought it home to me in a way that was unexpected and painfully informative. We see the action of the story through the eyes of a young man who is of mixed race, with a black mother and a Jewish German émigré father. He has fled Hitler's Germany, she is seeking a possible future as a musician and singer. Yet it is their son Jonah, with his exquisite voice, who is the main focus even though the narrator is his (slightly) less talented brother, who becomes a pianist.

A 'Great American Novel'? I'll say.

This is an amazing book. It combines music, relativity, and the civil rights movement in a family story spanning 1939 to 2000. This may be my favorite book of all time, one of the few I've read more than once. Powers weaves so much into this story--each page has some great jewel on it.

They gather at the base of the Washington Monument. People pour in from wherever there is still hope of a coming country. They rumble up from the fields of Georgia on broken-down grain trucks. They ride down They drive over in long silver cars trom the Middle Atlantic suburbs. in one hundred busses an hour, streaming through the Baltimore tunnel.
They converge on two dozen chartered trains from Pittsburgh and De-troit. They fly in from Los Angeles, Phoenix, and Dallas. An eighty-two-year-old man bicycles from Ohio; another, half his age, from South Tomora. One man takes a wiek to roller-skate the eight hundred mut from Chicago, sporting a bright sash reading FREEDOM.
By midmorning, the crowd tops a quarter of a million: students, small businessmen, preachers, doctors, barbers, salesclerks, UAW members, management trainees, New York intellectuals, Kansas farmers, Gulf shrimpers. A "celebrity plane" airlifts in a load of movie stars—-Harry Belafonte, James Garner, Diahann Carroll, Marlon Brando. Longtime Freedom Riders, veterans of Birmingham, Montgomery, and Albany, join forces with timid first-timers, souls who want another nation but didn't know, until today, how to make it. They come pushing baby strollers and wheelchairs, waving flags and banners. They come straight from board meetings and fresh out of prison. They come for a quarter milion reasons. They come for a single thing.