|
|
The History Connection - Fight Club
|
List Price: $23.95
Our Price: $14.27
Your Save: $ 9.68 ( 40% )
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Manufacturer: W. W. Norton & Company
|
Average Customer Rating:  
|
|
Binding: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN: 9780393039764
ISBN: 0393039765
Label: W. W. Norton & Company
Manufacturer: W. W. Norton & Company
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 208
Publication Date: 1996-08
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Studio: W. W. Norton & Company
|
|
|
|
|
|
Spotlight customer reviews:
|
Customer Rating:
Summary: A sacred, unique snowflake of special unique specialness.
Comment: Here's a word to describe the pervasive resonance this story has enjoyed.
Confrontational.
Fight Club is a pugnacious challenge to examine your life, in the form of a blunt instrument. If you want to get peoples attention these days, best be prepared to bludgeon them upside the head. We the ADD generations have no time for study and meditation. You have 5 seconds to deliver the message in an original and exciting way. Check and check.
Take a massively concentrated answer to the existential dilemma, throw in a couple themes of timely relevence, a sense of urgency, twisted humor and wrap up the whole enchilada in a transgressional tortilla and voila! A quintessential 90's literary masterpiece. Fight Club is the successor to Clockwork Orange.
"This is your life, and it's ending one minute at a time"
Consider yourself challenged.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Every teenager needs to read this novel!
Comment: Fight Club: Self-Improvement, Self-Realization, and Self-Destruction
Growing up, no matter if I succeeded or failed, I received a big hug from my mom and a little-league trophy from my dad. I grew up in a school district that continued to bash the bell curve and inflate grades until we were all winners. We learned through reward and we liked it; we were raised to win and we strove for perfection.
Unfortunately, we were raised wrong. I realized this when I read Fight Club for the first time at age sixteen. I am writing this review because of this experience; I am writing this review because I believe every teenager in the country should read this book.
Keep reading and I'll tell you why.
I reviewed Fight Club by asking two distinct questions: How did the novel change me? And, why did it change me? While I am reviewing this novel for teenagers and their parents, many of my claims are built off other Amazon.com reviews not always written for the same audience. This might sound corny, but just as Fight Club`s protagonist is attempting to crack society's shell; I am attempting to crack to the novel's core.
You see, Fight Club is not just the bloody mess its title indicates, but the story of a man finding his place in a society that does not suit him. The author, Chuck Palahniuk, uses this character to critique the hypocrisy of a culture in which ordinary people are tormented by the drudgery of their modern, daily routines. Tortured by monotony, men are driven to violence in order to escape.
Palahniuk uses this violence to get his readers to question their own lives--to question how they were raised. As the narrator struggles to find a balance between himself, a "rag doll of society", and Tyler Durden, his schizophrenic alter ego, he concludes that if "self-improvement isn't the answer... Maybe self-destruction is" (Palahniuk 49). This kind of teen self-reflection is "extremely important" to development explains Dr. Bernard Golden in his book Healthy Anger. At the same time the narrator becomes involved with an underground fight club, leaving the reader to question the legitimacy their own role in society.
As the fight club quickly becomes a method of therapy for the protagonist, it also becomes an addiction for the reader. As reviewer Kevin Joseph points out, Palahniuk's characters fight for that second of self-realization, a psychological balance that day-to-day life cannot supply. Do we not do the same thing when we are teenagers? Are we not the "all-singing, all-dancing crap of this world" searching for our own place to fit in (169)? You see Palahniuk's characters go to these fight clubs not to impose pain upon others, but to have it imposed upon them. They need to find out what is really real, to temporarily get away from reality--something we all do as we grow up.
This is exactly why every teenager in our country should read Fight Club. It changes a young reader by getting him or her to explore what we as often take for granted. It gets teenagers to question ideals that their parents, their society and sometimes even their common sense enforce. It turns a sixteen year old learner into a sixteen year old thinking.
While there are critics like reviewer Justine1212, who claim that Palahniuk's themes of nihilism and his harsh criticism of consumerism damage the minds of young readers, they ignore the value of self-exploration. In fact, Palahniuk's bitterness towards materialism provides the reader with the dark humor that reviewer CapLeoGem and reviewer Czombie find to be the "bitterly sarcastic" essence of the book:
I think this excerpt from Fight Club kind of sums up my feelings about the book: "[Before,] it used to be enough that when I came home angry and knowing that my life wasn't toeing my five-year plan, I could clean my condominium or detail my car" (49). What does one do when having a nice condominium and car is not enough? Personally, I would not think to start a fight club, but it is these absurdities and incongruities that flood the book, allowing Palahniuk to reveal the dark side of American culture that reviewer Theodore Burke finds "essential."
After all, "`It's only after you've lost everything,'" Tyler says, "`that you're free to do anything.'" While I cannot say I've read Fight Club five times in two months like reviewer Dan Seitz "cinnatusc," I can say that reading Fight Club has, indeed, changed me.
Everyday for one hundred and eighty days of the past fifteen years of my life I have woken up, gone to school and come home only to do it again the next day. Before I read Fight Club, I never really questioned this schedule--my life.
Overall, Fight Club is a book definitely worth reading and has a very accurate customer-rating of four and half stars (even though I gave it five stars). So be a good parent, buy your children a copy this holiday season and break their materialistic obsession or be a good teenager, beg your parents for a copy this holiday season and question authority.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Fight Club - Palahnuik can do no wrong
Comment: This book is awesome! The ending is not as great as the movies', but it gives the reader a lot to think about. At least, this is one simple girl's opinion... One for the record books.
Customer Rating:
Summary: a thought-provoking book
Comment: For those of you who have never seen the movie, this book is a disturbing portrait of a narrator who begins to express his natural instincts and, before he realizes it, is terrified by what he has become a part of, leading up to a twist that you never saw coming.
For those of you that have seen the movie, yes, it does translate well into book form. There is much more psychological introspection and more recurrence of themes (such as the line "look up into the stars and you're gone"). There is also a bit of an extended ending that wraps things up nicely.
Overall, the book is a challenging read, but ultimately very satisfying. As far as contemporary literature goes, this is one of the best in my opinion.
Customer Rating:
Summary: This book is still a beautiful and unique snowflake.
Comment: I saw the movie "Fight Club" a couple years before I heard who Chuck Palahniuk was, and the film was a fantastic guy movie, and a pretty phenomenal flick all around. After I learned who Palahniuk was and read several of his other stories, I figured it was time to get to his first and probably most popular novel, "Fight Club." I was not disappointed.
From the introduction, Palahniuk sums up his goal with "Fight Club": to write a story where you get just the kernel of the story, the core bit, and to stack those one after another without any fluff, and he does this remarkably well. Each chapter starts with a premise bordering on ridiculous, then morphs into something grotesque or absurd yet believable, and ends before you have a chance to think about putting the book down, only to begin another chapter with the same structure but different ideas and actions. The things that flash through your mind in an instant, the things you have probably thought about but would never in a million years actually take seriously or attempt, this book is filled with those things, and suprisingly it draws you in even more than it grosses you out.
My one complaint, which isn't even really a complaint, is that if you've seen the movie you know exactly what's going to happen in the book. The sequence of events, the characters, the quotes, everything; the film mirrored them in stunning detail and made them all work together to produce an incredible movie. But the book came first, and it was so completely Palahniuk's story on screen more than most other novel adapations that he deserves the credit for the phenomenon it has become. And yet, even knowing exactly what would happen at every turn, the raw language and action of the book makes it an incredible enjoyable read that's easily worth the couple of hours it takes to breeze through the story. It's still a beautiful and unique snowflake, no matter what Tyler Durden says.
|
|
|
Editorial Reviews:
|
In a confusing world poised on the brink of mayhem, Tyler Durden, a projectionist, waiter, and anarchic genius, comes up with an idea to create clubs in which young men can escape their humdrum existence and prove themselves in barehanded fights. A first novel. First serial, Story Magazine. Tour.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
