Mr. Sammler's Planet (Penguin Classics)

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Who's afraid of Saul Bellow?

An Amazing Masterpiece of Jewish and American Literature

A New Planet Indeed

The Civilized Moralist Among the Dilipadated Hypocrites

Difficult, depressing, and entirely worthwhile. Highly recommended.

Mr. Sammler's Planet (Penguin Classics)
Saul Bellow
Manufacturer: Penguin Classics
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0142437832
Release Date: 2004-01-06

Book Description

Mr. Artur Sammler, Holocaust survivor, intellectual, and occasional lecturer at Columbia University in 1960s New York City, is a Â“registrar of madness,Â” a refined and civilized being caught among people crazy with the promises of the future (moon landings, endless possibilities). His Cyclopean gaze reflects on the degradations of city life while looking deep into the sufferings of the human soul. Â“Sorry for all and sore at heart,Â” he observes how greater luxury and leisure have only led to more human suffering. To Mr. SammlerÂ—who by the end of this ferociously unsentimental novel has found the compassionate consciousness necessary to bridge the gap between himself and his fellow beingsÂ—a good life is one in which a person does what is Â“required of him.Â” To know and to meet the Â“terms of the contractÂ” was as true a life as one could live. At its heart, this novel is quintessential Bellow: moral, urbane, sublimely humane.

Customer Reviews:

Who's afraid of Saul Bellow?.......2007-08-28

I'm a big fan of John Steinbeck, Hemingway and Falconer...
But over the years I've made three attempts to read this book.
My first impression was it was just a lot of mumbling prose
and not very interesting. My second impression was that it was deeply depressing.
My last impression is that it just isn't worth the effort
to sort through the depressing stuff to get to the interesting porn
of a black guy showing his privates to a half blind old Jewish man.
Something is pretty wrong in literature when this is given a prize?

An Amazing Masterpiece of Jewish and American Literature.......2007-08-19

Three days of the life of a seventy-odd-year-old Polish Jew in New York. He is going to witness everyday life in New York, recollect his life in England where he was a university professor up to 1939, remember his moving back to Poland in 1939 to solve some family inheritance, his being caught by the Germans with his wife and a great number of other Jews (one year after the Crystal Night, which makes it crazy of him to have gone back), being blinded in one eye by a German rifle butt, forced to dig their mass grave, lined up in front of it, shot and pushed into the grave, covered up with earth and then his crawling out of it, joining the partisans in some forest, escaping their anti-Jewish purification at the end of the war by surviving in a Polish vault in a cemetery, and finally his being sheltered in the Salzburg Displaced Persons Camp and recuperated from there by some cousin, a rich doctor in New York. With only one good eye he is going to live, see and observe life and become the gathering mind of western culture while filtering his vision through it. Thus he will refer to some one-hundred-and-sixty authors, philosophers, artists and works of art in these three days. One will emerge very strong, H.G. Wells whom he had known personally in the late 1930s and whose theories on the Moon he will reminisce and cross with the theories of an Indian scientist, Govinda Lal, who is technically thinking the migration of humanity towards other planets. He will observe the other members of his family. His daughter first who is a gatherer too, but of everything she can find in trashcans or public places, and she will manage to borrow, with the intention of not bringing it back, the only copy of the manuscript Govinda Lal used to deliver a lecture on the moon, in order to give it to her father in order to incite him to finish his essay on H.G. Wells. She is obviously spaced-out, particularly because she escaped the Nazis in Poland by being sheltered, half converted and educated by Polish nuns. Then we have the Gruners, the doctor who retrieved Mr Sammler and his daughter after the war, and his two children, Angela and Wallace, both spaced-out too because they were raised in a family that provided them with everything without having to make the slightest effort. Angela is described as a sex addict and Wallace as a dangerous half crazy squanderer. Finally another cousin, the widow Margotte Arkin, in whose flat he lives as a guest. The main two events of the novel are the aneurysm that will bring Dr Gruner to his death in three days, and the dishonest scavenging of Pr Lal's manuscript by Shula, Mr Sammler's daughter. Another character will give the opening event and one of the closing moments: the black pickpocket who will corner Mr Sammler, who has witnessed him in his picking pockets and purses, and exhibit his penis to assert his authority. This pickpocket will end up being severely wounded by Mr Sammler's son-in-law, an Israeli artist visiting New York, when the Columbia University Professor Feffer will take pictures of the pickpocket in his criminal activities which will bring up some kind of a fight. The whole book is a vision of the western world before and after the Second World War by a man who has only one valid eye and who is screening everything through the numerous cultural references he has accumulated in his mind over the years. His vision is thus warped by its one-eyed-ness. He is obsessed by death, which is coming in Dr Gruner and which he has survived by crawling out of his own grave in which he left his own wife. He is also obsessed by God though his references are mostly marginal Christians like Meister Eckhardt or agnostic thinkers like H.G. Wells or Nazi-inspired or -influenced thinkers like Schopenhauer. And this is the most fascinating aspect of the book. It is entirely animated by a fight between three musics that are built by the sounds, the words, and the syntax of Mr Sammler's language. The standard music of the Bible that becomes that of the world, a binary music built with choices between two elements or co-ordinations of two elements, or multiples of two. Then his intellectual, mental, abstract, conceptual constructions, always ternary because of Aristotle's dialectic, the mould of all western thinking, and Mr Sammler reminds us several times that the Jewish God and the Jewish religion is not European, not western but Asian. Mr Sammler constantly tries to bring together these two logics and he does it in the most biblical way, by using Solomon's number or David's star (a symbol all by itself after WW2), i.e. six but always decomposed in twice three or three times two. The book thus closes on Mr Sammler's prayer to God in front of Dr Gruner's body awaiting an autopsy. The last word is "know", the master word of a university intellectual, but entirely regenerated in a godly and divine direction by the subtle shifting from a conceptual "the terms [...] each man knows", to a personal "I know mine" and to the collective, Jewish, Israeli final sextuple vision in the collective "all know" followed by five "we know" centered on a direct address to God exactly before the last four "we know", hence making divinely Christian (eight is the symbol of Jesus's Second Coming, and four of his crucifixion) his very direct Jewish godly evocation. This novel is probably one of the most refined and best achievements by Saul bellow.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris Dauphine & University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne

A New Planet Indeed.......2007-01-31

In Mr. Sammler's Planet, Bellow uses Sammler as an unwitting witness to a cast of characters who border on the burlesque in their quirks and oddities. The device is clever, since we get the feeling that Sammler is perhaps a witness from another planet, or more to the point, the inhabitant of a new, transformed world. And this is apt: Sammler emerged from a pit of dead bodies in the Holocaust, a sort of rebirth to a new world. How does one live in this new, post-Holocaust world? Bellow gives few answers, but provides a series of interpretations of western civilization through Sammler as mouthpiece. In a sense, it is a novel about how we continue to live when our ideas about life prove themselves to be bankrupt.

The Civilized Moralist Among the Dilipadated Hypocrites.......2006-08-22

I can imagine few curses worse, historically speaking, than being born in Europe at the fin de sielce. Being born during this period afforded millions of individuals a front row seat, from the flowering youth into the onset of middle age's end, to this century's most colossal stupidities and unspeakable horrors. First industrialized warfare with its colossal waste during the First World War and then industrialized murder in the second. Artur Sammler, not thoroughly affected by the first war is, in every conceivable respect, a survivor of the second. Sammler exemplifies with his one eye, the other sacrificed to a Mauser rifle butt, what it means to see the world clearly, unmediated in its most extreme forms of viciousness and madness. He has lived life at its extremes.

There are many ways to read Mr. Sammler's Planet, and though it probably detracts from gaining some of the meaning of the work, I choose to read it as part historical document and part philosophical treatise. As a document of the 1960's and 70's, it is a lamentation by Bellow at seeing an environment of what he considers adolescent intellectual arrogance blossom up all around New York coupled with a hedonistic sexual revolution which, though not necessarily condemnable is certainly not commendable. Sammler's New York is a mad house of crime, vice, and utter-ridiculousness. For him, one who saw society fall apart at the seems with disastrous consequences for his life--Bellow's narrative reveals very early on that Sammler should in all actuality be dead--New York is very close to being a modernized Sodom or Gomorrah, but a long ways away from having fire and brimstone rained down upon it. It is only redeemed by being almost stupidly infantile.

The circles that Sammler travels in and his acquaintances are, and this is a great understatement, decidedly strange. The circle of survivors of World War II--camp survivors, veterans of the Red Army, or his daughter who was hidden in a Polish Catholic convent--are grotesqueries suffering from weird fetishes, capable of incredible violence, or simply incapable of being reasonable human beings. The young Americans who Sammler is forced to suffer could make lifetime studies for Freud, Jung, or Lacan. They are wild children borne of extravagance and wealth who have only redeeming qualities--two are hucksters, and one is described by her own father as a "sloppy c***." Sammler sees them as the product of a society that is going deeper and deeper into madness--all three are in fact being analyzed--and is incapable in its present state to live life in a way that accords with normal values. Since Sammler survived the greatest calamity of the twentieth century though, just watching the conduct of many of these people, many of whom is down right comical. Sammler's New York is a big stupid child that is unaware of itself.

Sammler is an extremely intellectual man, who during the two days in which in the narrative takes place lives what is rightfully called a life of the mind. Ideas are central to his existence, and he sees many of the problems with New York, which is extended into a microcosmical metaphor for the whole of America and the entire world. One of the reasons that Sammler so broods upon this is that the United States is about to launch humankind onto the moon, and seemingly bring about a new era of human civilization--i.e. transporting humanity with all its problems into frontiers unknown. Though space travel is only fleetingly mused about in the conversations that Sammler has with his highly intelligent and utterly sane friend, the Indian professor of Biophysics, V. Govinda Lal, any mention of it in the books publication year, 1970, would have invoked it. As one who looked death straight in the face and saw human bestiality at its most brutal, Sammler sees it, just as sees humanity with much skepticism. Sammler's planet is profoundly flawed and filled with people who seem incapable of even basic courtesy. His whole narrative begs the question: what business do they have in space?

One thing that I have always liked about Bellow's novels is central role that ideas play in his character's lives. Sammler is the best example of this that I have yet seen. Named for the great nineteenth century German thinker Arthur Schopenhauer and a great admirer of H.G. Wells, the self-described Polish-Oxonian anglophile is best described in the way that he himself described Wells: "simply a mass of intelligent views." Not only an intellectual though, he is also a severe critic the modern world. For him it is the values of his decidedly un-intellectual nephew and patron, Elya Gruber, which are most praiseworthy. He is a picture of generosity and familial loyalty even with his over-sexed daughter and huckster son--there is nothing about him that is not easily pardonable. Sammler knows though that Elya is atypical though. The world around him is frivolous, impatient and unwilling to look with even the slightest tolerance upon views that are not their own. He even goes so far as to extend the squalor of Spanish Harlem to Columbia University's intellectual demeanor. Both are squalid, but at least the first is only based economical impoverishment; the second's squalor is self-imposed stupidity and arrogance. Sammler sees the intellectual heroes of most of these young people, like Theodore Sorel, as celebrants of the kind of catastrophic violence that he just barely survived two decades before. This does not bode well for the future of human race.

The only major criticism that it seems possible to have of this work is that much of it seems the irascible lamentation of a man, namely Bellow not Sammler, who is disgusted with excesses of sixties cultural revolutions. A great deal of the narrative becomes bogged down in parodying theses excesses with the grotesque behavior of the characters which embody these extremes. When this occurs, the novel becomes almost a polemic against values that it views as contrary to civil society--i.e. Sammler employs the same level of intolerance he finds so abrasive he finds in those who look askance at his views. If that fault can be forgiven, and it is fairly easy fault to overlook even, the novel becomes exactly what it attempts be; an argument for decency, courtesy, and kindness. Values that are very difficult to oppose.

Difficult, depressing, and entirely worthwhile. Highly recommended........2006-07-23

After escaping death in World War II, Mr. Sammler lives out his days in New York City. He is an observer and a half-blind prophet in a time of social decay and moon exploration. This is the sort of book in which nothing world-changing happens and yet the world is changed: Sammler explores the cause of social decay and the apocalypse, humanity's chance for new life on the moon, and what it means to be human and participate in the human experience.

There are two ways to read this book: either to take it at the surface level, simply for what it says, or to try and unravel what is truth and what is error. Sammler the protagonist, observer, and prophet, is literally half blind, and his observations and theories are therefore skewed. The reader can chose to take this into account or to ignore it.

As it stands, without taking into account Sammler's blindness, the book is brilliant. The concepts raised by all characters make sense, and Sammler's final observations, no matter how pessimistic they may be, real a lot about our culture. The concept of the indistinguishable masses is in no way unique to Bellow, but the conclusion that follows--that men respond to the masses by attempting to create identities (through exaggeration and vocalization or normal human traits) both makes sense and explains a lot.

Unraveling the book proves to be much more difficult, and it is a big investment for any reader to make. I cannot, myself, pretend that I have completely unraveled the novel. I can say this, however: if Sammler's views seem too negative, the reader can remind himself that Sammler's views are also limited and skewed by his unique misperception. Sammler presents only one view of humanity. There are others out there, but the book is worth reading if only to see this one view. Mr. Sammler's Planet is engrossing, well written, bitingly satirical, and a worthwhile read for what it says about men, individuals, society, and the apocalypse.

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A book for the Penguin lover in you
Lucky to preview this book...

Penguin Planet
Kevin Schafer
Manufacturer: Creative Publishing international
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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ASIN: 1559717459

Book Description

- Written by Kevin Schafer, a well-known nature photographer and former seabird biologist and naturalist. - Species from Antarctica, Australia, New Zealand, Peru, Chile and Galapagos Islands.

Customer Reviews:

A book for the Penguin lover in you.......2006-01-11

This is a great book. The illustrations are wonderful and the literature is full of facts. I like this book for its variety and fun information. It's a good book for those begining to learn about penguins and for the penguin enthusiast alike. All around it is a book you will read over and over again.

Lucky to preview this book..........2000-08-23

I had the privilege of seeing the page proofs for this book, and some of the color photography in it. It is a wonderfully warm, yet scientifically accurate overview of penguin life with pictures to die for.

I've been watching this photographer's work since he first started to publish some twenty years ago. He has a great eye, and the technical know-how to convert a potential picture into a work of art. I still keep on my desk a copy of one of his first penguin pictures - which ended up by being published over and over again, even as a cover for International Wildlife.

Customer Reviews:

Non Fiction.......2007-09-03

The Six Million Dollar Man guy takes a crack at a coffee table book, this time about astronomy and Mars. The possibilities of organic compounds being found on the red planet were making news at the time, so I suppose this was part of that. Not a whole lot of substance here, but it is attractive enough for a quick flip through.

A very good book.......1999-06-08

All I have to say is that you should get this book if you have any interest in Mars at all.

Average customer rating:

GREAT BOOK
Excellent book to read aloud to kids - lots of fun!
Shields/Nash Socko Space Saga
I love it

Martian Rock
Carol Diggory Shields
Manufacturer: Candlewick
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

Action & Adventure | Literature | Children's Books | Subjects | Books

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ASIN: 0763605980
Release Date: 1999-11-03

Customer Reviews:

GREAT BOOK.......2003-11-20

I have been reading this to my pre-schooler boys for over a year and we love it. Now they ask me all the time to name the planets and remind them which one is the green slimy one. It has sparked a real interest in astrology for my boys and I highly recommend it.

Excellent book to read aloud to kids - lots of fun!.......2002-02-13

I read lots of books to my 2 preschool girls, but Martian Rock is at the top of the charts. The playful rhymes make it fun for me to read aloud, and my kids get such a kick out of the story and the illustrations.

As a bonus, there are 2 pages at the end of the book with interesting facts about each of the planets in the solar system (lots of info that many adults might not know). This is one of the few books I would run out and buy for a gift for any preschooler, boy or girl.

Shields/Nash Socko Space Saga.......1999-12-24

Every Martian, gazing out into the measureless heavens, has pondered the question "Is there anything out there?" "Martian Rock" answers this question for all time, and you'll love it even if you are Venusian, Plutonian, or Earthling. Four Martian astronauts take off in their shiny-red spacecar in search of intelligent life. It's a long and frustrating odyssey, as they flit from one visually-stunning but unpopulated planet to another. Exhausted and cranky and depleted of clean underwear, our heroes are ready to throw in the interstellar towel and head home, but they decide to make one last stop, and suddenly encounter life---maybe not spectacularly intelligent life, but indisputably genial. Carol Diggory Shields's clever story and charming rhyming text could captivate even the most cosmos-indifferent child, but it's Scott Nash's dazzlingly colorful and funny illustrations that would make "Martian Rock" a heavy-rotation item on any child's book-at-bedtime reading program. Parents will love it, too; it has the same transgenerational crossover appeal of "Toy Story".

I love it.......1999-05-18

I love all her books. Maybe that's just because she's my aunt. But no, they are entertaining. The kids I babysit for have them all. And the illustrations are good. Buy the books.

Planet in peril?: Man and the biosphere today, (Penguin education)

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Planet in peril?: Man and the biosphere today, (Penguin education)
Raymond Fredric Dasmann
Manufacturer: Penguin
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Unknown Binding

Human Geography | Social Sciences | Nonfiction | Subjects | Books

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ASIN: 0140807152

Planet of the Apes (Penguin Modern Classics)

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Fantastic Science Fiction Novel
WOW!
A Fantastic Read
A Great Read
A Worthwhile Mirror!

Planet of the Apes (Penguin Modern Classics)
Pierre; Fielding, Xan (translator) Boulle
Manufacturer: Penguin Books Ltd
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

Contemporary | General | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

ASIN: 014118681X

Amazon.com

If you've seen the progressively cheesier Planet of the Apes movies of 1968-1973, you may be shocked to learn the first movie was adapted from an intelligent, ironic, and literate novel. You'll be less surprised when you learn the original novel Planet of the Apes was written by Pierre Boulle, author of The Bridge over the River Kwai.

In the novel Planet of the Apes, the three Frenchmen making the first interstellar journey discover a remarkably Earth-like world orbiting Betelgeuse--Earth-like, with one crucial difference: The humans are dumb beasts, and the apes are intelligent. Captured during a terrifying manhunt, locked in a cage, and ignorant of the simian language, Ulysse Merou struggles to convince the apes that he possesses intelligence and reason. But if he proves he is not an animal, he may seal his own doom.

Like the first movie, the novel Planet of the Apes has a twist ending, but a twist of a different--yet equally shocking--sort. --Cynthia Ward

Customer Reviews:

Fantastic Science Fiction Novel.......2007-09-13

I am a kid, and many who read the reviews for this book are most likely adults and will probably skip this review. Hear me out! This book is an extraordinary leap in science fiction even for a book written this long ago. The plot is great, and the book is filled with suspense and mystery that keeps you glued to your seat, turning page after page after page after page... Anyway, I highly reccommend this book to all science fiction lovers and those who simply like a good, interesting book. However, with this book's great plot and wonderful page-turning excitement, there is a surprise ending that's not much like the original film. Read the book and find out!

WOW!.......2007-04-30

I simply cannot find the words worth of this book. I really appreciated the original film version, not being in a situation to read the book, but when I did, I was blown out of the room! Layers upon layers of social and philossophical statements really delighted me, and were layed in such a form that would not stand in a way of lightness of reading. Brilliant!

A Fantastic Read.......2007-03-26

It begins when three humans from earth land on a distant planet called Soror which revolves around the star Betelguese. They find it to be inhabited by a race of apes with human mental capabilities and by humans that have no intellect. They are captured by the apes and Ulysse is put in a cage and treated like an animal. He eventually proves his ability to reason to some of the apes. But he is in great danger of being killed, so he is forced to flee the planet. He returns to earth where discovers the unimaginable.

A Great Read.......2007-03-23

I picked up this book and read it in a few hours. It was surprisingly good, complete with moral and ethical implications thrown in. It was interesting the way the book made me examine my own views towards regular unintelligent apes by seeing how intelligent apes in the book treated unitelligent humans. While I was annoyed by a couple minor aspects of the plot, I have no real complaints, and I highly recommend this book to anyone looking for a good example of science fiction.

A Worthwhile Mirror!.......2006-11-06

Sadly, this imaginative book has been overshadowed by the movies and TV series. Overall, this is a solidly written sci-fi novel. It starts with a couple finding Mr. Merou's manuscript in a bottle. Fine, a cliched begining. But, the pace soon picks up. In 2500 professor Antelle and doctor Levain set off on a spaceship journey. They reach their destination to an earthlike planet. They run into mute humans and than the sky figuratively falls. They are captured by talking Apes-military class, who rule the planet with Chimpanzees-middle class, Orangutans-ruling class who live as 20th century humans. This reverse world is riveting for it holds a mirror to the reader of how awful humans can be. Merou wins some simians over, but he is a threat to the established order. Finally, Merou flees and returns to earth, where he gets a jolting surprise. Despite, some oversimplifications the action and premise are very compelling.

The Planets: Portraits of New Worlds (Penguin Science)

Average customer rating:

Very detailed - this book is more for advanced readers.

The Planets: Portraits of New Worlds (Penguin Science)
Nigel Henbest
Manufacturer: Penguin (Non-Classics)
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 014013414X

Customer Reviews:

Very detailed - this book is more for advanced readers........1998-12-04

This book has vivid pictures which make it worth buying just for that. The information is extreemly useful and some of it can be hard to find in other place.

Poverty and the Planet (Penguin Politics)

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Poverty and the Planet (Penguin Politics)
Ben Jackson
Manufacturer: Penguin UK
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

Economic Policy & Development | Economics | Business & Investing | Subjects | Books

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THE PLANET SELECTS NEW PENGUIN COMPUTING SERVER LINE. : An article from: Mainframe Computing

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THE PLANET SELECTS NEW PENGUIN COMPUTING SERVER LINE. : An article from: Mainframe Computing

Manufacturer: Thomson Gale
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Digital
ASIN: B000FFJEFM
Release Date: 2006-04-18

Book Description

This digital document is an article from Mainframe Computing, published by Thomson Gale on May 1, 2006. The length of the article is 629 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: THE PLANET SELECTS NEW PENGUIN COMPUTING SERVER LINE.
Publication: Mainframe Computing (Newsletter)
Date: May 1, 2006
Publisher: Thomson Gale
Volume: 19 Issue: 5 Page: NA

Distributed by Thomson Gale

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